Adaptive Curmudgeon

[A collection of random thoughts gathered during my Independence Day weekend.]

First of all: AMERICA ROCKS! I fuckin’ love Independence Day!

I didn’t do anything particularly exiting. I mostly hung around the homestead drinking beer, doing routine maintenance, and being free. Then again freedom is pretty damn exciting when you think about it.

Someone told me the US Women’s Soccer Team just won the Women’s World Cup/Superbowl/World Series/Master’s Cup. Sounds like they won hard. I care not one little bit about “metric football” but was inclined to salute their hard work.

Any sane athlete, at such a juncture, would be blasting “We Are The Champions” by Queen and dancing drunk on a table. Instead, someone got all political and bitched about Trump. What a self defeating move! Your greatest lifetime achievement is a chance to whine about an election result? It’s a juvenile way to rob yourself of your own joy. Sit home and weep in your pillow if you must, but don’t drag your teammates down. Nobody smart cares about the geopolitical ideals of a person who plays a game as an adult job.

Bad mosquito season this year. I suppose I could blame global warming, demand a Federal program, and sit in the house pouting. But I don’t roll that way. I geared up with Permethrin, DEET, and Thermacells. That shit works! Better living though chemistry! I have treated clothes and I highly recommend them. Used as a system it’s damn near a suit of armor. (Also it’s much lighter on the “chemistry” that the old days of 100% DEET and nothing else.)

In a second round of irrelevant sportsballers, some dude who’s (I think?) no longer a quarterback got bitchy about the original 13 star flag on a sneaker. This is news? It’s the opinion of an unemployed dude (?) about a fucking sticker on a sneaker.

Can you imagine how awesome we are? We’re so prosperous and fortunate the press  invents issues about sneaker adornment to have something to be upset over. First world problems indeed!

Further rumination: This is a classic example of the hive mind acting like a school of fish. Fish make ostensibly independent decisions but school fish make decisions almost entirely based on their relationship to their spatially adjacent peers. They do this very well. Most fish wont break the pattern unless hard pressed (for example by a solid wall of coral in their space or a shark bludgeoning into the school). However, when one fish makes a change in direction the “choice” (i.e. “swim left”) cascades through the populace. Every other fish tries to move exactly in “the new direction we’re all swimming now”. It appears as if the entire school all jointly chose to “swim left” at once, but that’s not what happened. What really happened is one fish made a motion and the rest followed unquestioningly and instantaneously; puppets with scales.

How is the flag kerfluffle du jour like a school of fish? Easy! One unemployed sportsballer made one choice and it cascaded through like minded thinkers very fast. In days or even fractions of days a 243 year old flag went from “patriotic” to “racist”. That’s not people making personal decisions, it’s fish in a school.

Additional rumination: I submit that the hive mind is changing their opinion so fast and so unthinkingly that virtually anything that is “common sense” today is likely to be racists/sexist/oppressive/triggering sometime in the future. Anything you believe now… even if you’re a goddamn saint… is likely be used against you in the future.

One way to track it is to watch things change in 4-8 year cycles of presidencies. It wasn’t racist when Obama used the “Betsy Ross flag” at his inauguration in 2012 but it’s “triggering” on a sneaker in 2019. Seven year window to make the opening, one weekend for a sneaker salesman to “swim left”. (Read the Snopes analysis, they really go out of their way stretch that 7 year window into a voyage of navel gazing justifications. I miss Snopes but they’re woke as shit now.)

Other examples? Obama was opposed to same sex marriage right until he changed his mind. A grown ass man is allowed to change his mind. More power to him. However, the millisecond he changed his mind, everyone who held the common view just a few days before (opposing same sex marriage) went from “mainstream” to “raging homophobic douchenozzle”.

One of my favorite examples was when folks went on a tear in 2016 over “America first”. Then candidate Trump said he’d represent “American’s First”. This didn’t surprise me. I’m from earth, where the sky is blue and the sun rises in the east. I’ve always assumed that the Prime Minister of Lithuania represents Lithuanians, the Prime Minister of India represents Indians, and the President of the US represents Americans. This idea would’ve been unremarkable in pretty much anytime in history. It was no big deal from Ancient Greece until 2016 when it Trump was “unspeakably crass”. He suggested the dude elected by American citizens to lead the country of America should represent Americans and all the fish swam left.

Then again, I wear leather boots and not sneakers. No little stickers on my footwear. So what do I know?

Not all thoughts involve sportsballers and the people that inexplicably listen to them. This weekend I stacked another face-cord of wood. (Can’t wear sneakers for that kind of work!) One face-cord is all I could manage but all progress is some progress. I’m pleased.

Conditions weren’t great. It was hotter than hell. I was downing two bottles of Gatorade per tank of saw gas. There’s smoke in the air from a minor nearby forest fire and that didn’t help. I did what I could and now I’m up to about 5 face cords (1 2/3 full cords for those of you keeping score). Big win for the day was field testing my “anti-tick clothes” and finding out the the Thermacell range covered most of my chainsaw work. I worked in a damn cloud of the blood sucking bastards (mosquitoes) and only got a few bites. Also, no ticks at all!

The wood’s good stuff, it’ll be bone dry for the winter. Stacked firewood is money in the bank!

My lawnmower is still broke. The lawn hasn’t been mowed in 2 weeks. This shouldn’t matter but it does look pretty ugly. I’m working on a solution. That said, I chose preparing firewood for the winter over enjoying pretty landscaping now.

The world is offering a lesson: “To which purpose will you expend your labors?” Keeping in mind there will be a final exam sometime around January, I believe I chose right. It’s hardly the end of the world if my lawn looks like shit.

These are the sorts of decisions folks had to make in the “good old days”. These are also the sorts of choices one can’t make in a city.

I packed my little sailboat and drove to the lake but the wind wasn’t right. I bailed on my plans. Shit happens. More camp / boat adventures will be posted soon… I hope.

Independence Day was awesome. Fireworks and beer… and I didn’t give a shit if my lawn got a little scorched either. Freedom is wonderful!

From the news this weekend:

Wednesday: “Trump wants an Independence Day parade and a tank. He’s politicizing everything and the tanks are just like Tienanmen Square. This could be the end!”

Thursday: Huge party, people love the parade. Trump gives a speech that has nothing about him. (Which surprises even me.) The tanks (Bradley Fighting Vehicles?) parade and then go home.

Friday: The Curmudgeon asks “Um… since it was ‘just like Tienanmen Square’ how many dissident students did Trump’s tanks kill… just give me a round number. Two hundred?”

Saturday: The Press reports: “Forget what we said Wednesday. Wednesday never happened. We have more real news now; the Betsy Ross flag is a symbol a of slave-holding elite cretins and sneaker decorations are important.”

Also, why don’t we have an Independence Day parade in DC every year? Why not?

The milkweed are coming along OK. A bit late due to the cold spring? No monarch caterpillars sighted yet.

I rode my motorcycle 100 miles to get an ice cream cone. It was nice! Last winter kicked my ass and I’m very very very very very very happy to have summer.

If they invented motorcycles in 2019 the DMV would never “allow” us deplorable idiots to put that newfangled deathtrap on the road. Like many joys, motorcycle are old ideas that got grandfathered past the sourpusses. FREEDOM!

My neighbor was touching off Tannerite over the weekend. MORE FREEDOM!

Earlier, I said the Warren G. Harding administration was corrupt. It happened 98 years ago so nobody called me a Nazi or banned me from Facebook. Most Americans think history started about the time they were eight (which is true of many generations) so nobody gives a rat’s ass when I blog about “dusty musty” Harding. Nobody who voted for Harding is sending me comments; “before you bitch about Harding you should really look into Taft who was even worse”.

The whole thing was hashed out and digested. The people went through the experience and then forgot about it.

Except they didn’t forget about it, we forgot about it. For them it was traumatic. It was a series of nasty revelations. Ugly facts were discovered, discussed, dissected and debated. Favoritism was unearthed, money was followed, some rich dudes got embarrassed, etc… Testimony was read, depositions were typed up, speeches were made, congressmen harrumphed, moralists clutched pearls, and newspapers complained. I’m sure friends and family bitched about it over Thanksgiving dinners.

The whole deal sucked for them but means nothing to us. We, the people of the future, don’t react because it’s “from long ago”. Take a leap with me and imagine a time in our future; a time as far from now as we are from Harding (who took office in 1921). Imagine the year 2117.

Do you suppose some history lecture in 2117 will sound like this?

“In the early parts of the 21^st century, despite a good standard of living and promising developments in what would be the ultimate game changer of sexbots delivered by drone, the populace was not at ease. Governance in the United States was mired in corruption or at least allegations of it. The people tried distracting themselves with many things: movies about superheroes, memes with cats, lawsuits about cake bakeries, boycotts of chicken sandwiches, debates about healthy diets, recycling, rearranging bathrooms in public spaces, elaborate decision matrices about which kind of gun is more dangerous than some other kind of gun, the colorful antics of what folklore researchers have dubbed “Florida Man”, and so forth. Someone (for reasons we still don’t understand) even launched a car into space! (We’ll be visiting that strange artifact on our next field trip.) Some of the issues of the early 21^st century remain ill understood. For example, we’re not sure why there was alarm about an opioid epidemic simultaneous with the multi-state decriminalization of marijuana. The “Ted Nugent Theorem” seems inadequate to address this matter. (If you check your footnotes you’ll see ‘marijuana’ is the historic term for the herb we now add to our morning coffee under the brand name “California Sanka”.)

Regardless, circular debates weren’t entertaining enough to calm an increasingly alarmed citizenry and everyone was running around complaining about how terrible things were. Historians suspect an underlying malaise was compounded by the psychosis inducing effects of social media. We now understand the ill effects of social media can be ameliorated by “getting a life” but this was not well understood at the time.

Turning back to governance; of course, we know now that the corruption of the time was largely related to…”

I’d like to hear the rest of that lecture, wouldn’t you? It might be an eye opener.

Look around yourself in 2019 and think about what it’ll look like to someone from 2117. Among other things we’re probably in a time of corruption. Such a simple answer, yet it feels vaguely unreal.

We’re up to our armpits in information that hints at the situation but it’s hard to digest. We cling to the normalcy bias that this current era isn’t a time of stupidity. Who wants to be in a time of corruption and stupidity? That sucks! More comforting to assume it’s a one-off thing and and all the bad shit definitely has a lot to do with the others anyway.

But the unease we feel is a real thing. It tells us the easy answer isn’t sufficient to explain away events that don’t seem… right. We find ourselves conflicted between what we expect and what we experience. It’s because we’re too close to the situation to stand back and say “yep, that’s a standard generic case of cyclic asshattery, they happen from time to time.”

Before I let this idea drop, ask yourself to whom you’re applying my blanket word “corruption”. You’re likely a fan of one team and you might think it’s the other team that’s the entire problem. Maybe that’s true. Or maybe not. I don’t have a time machine so I don’t know. I do know that for every person that breathes a sigh of relief Hillary Clinton didn’t win in 2016, there’s an equal and opposite person who wakes each day pissed that Donald Trump is alive and breathing. Doesn’t that seem at least a little… odd?

If I had a time machine, I could go to the future and see how it all pans out. Alas all I’ve got right now is the feeling that nobody in America is simultaneously happy with both parties. Is there a person who’s happy with the content of debate? Is there a single voting citizen who thinks Trump and Hillary were both morally square? Did anyone have the idea that both sides were simultaneously “honorable” when they voted in 2016? Most of us can, at best, extend our sympathies to half the equation. If I were playing poker I’d say that’s a “tell”.

While damn near nobody thinks both sides are clean, a growing percentage of us are thinking “a pox on both their houses”. That sounds like a populace starting to accept they’re in a time of corruption. Perhaps we’re starting the long slog of working through it.

I think today is what it felt like in 1921. They didn’t know future historians would say “of course that was a very corrupt situation” but they knew weird shit was afoot. (It also occurs to me the people of 1921 were just starting the interesting journey of prohibition. It was the first few years of a time when damn near everyone broke a clear and unambiguous law. Why? Perhaps they no longer felt bound by a law that was “dumb”? Is there the whiff of “consent of the governed” at play in way prohibition made so many citizens act like criminals in the roaring twenties?)

The folks in 1921, and most of us over a certain age in 2019, know things don’t always suck. Maybe that’s the key? One must recognize what’s right before your eyes: “This situation is not average but rather the part of a cycle. It’s unpleasant but not unprecedented. It’s a low ebb but it’s not forever. Like that one time I ate bad guacamole, this too will pass. The manner of the passing will be just like the guacamole. Time to process some political corruption. Hand me a roll of toilet paper and let’s get this over.”

(Forgive the metaphor but FFS look at politics both in America and elsewhere. What metaphor would be better?)

In my life I’ve seen things work more rationally. I’ve seen, elections that were resolved without rancor. There was a time before hanging chads (Al Gore versus Bush Jr.). Before there was “voter intent” and “lets sue” there were times of “we counted this shit and even though we don’t like it, here’s the number”. (There was a time when even the folks on NPR acknowledged a president they didn’t like as legitimate!) Looking around now, you almost need to have seen those times yourself to know it’s possible. Rationality can (and likely will) happen again.

Sure, there’s always pockets of corruption (I’m looking at you Chicago) but that’s a different story. I’m talking about the saner world which I’ve been fortunate enough to experience.

There was a time when folks might vote for Person A without calling all of Person A’s opponents racist shitheads or lying bastards. When Person B gets elected, the ones who preferred A could shrug their shoulders and think “oh well, maybe next time”. No shit… I’ve seen it with my own eyes! Going into hysterics isn’t the way every election necessarily plays out. It’s just the way they play out recently.

Governance is the same. I’ve seen laws that were sorta popular on one side and sorta popular on the other side and congress muddled through in a generic mushy unsatisfying middle ground and it wasn’t quite so nutty. There would be whole years without one group or another dressing strangely and marching around the streets.

I’ve also seen politicians try to do something that “will change things in a big way” and then decide to not crush their opposition in hopes of getting their brass ring. I’ve seen them back off when it’s viciously opposed by a large portion of the electorate. There was this feeling that the opponents, even if they weren’t the guy’s core voters, were still citizens. Occasionally a politician could squeeze out enough votes to make their signature thing into law but they didn’t want to create an unhealthy level of butthurt. Perhaps, in those times, the American people had fewer mutually exclusive demands?

Call 2019 what you want but not every political era is a series of scorched earth, knife fight, cage matches where the winner dances with glee at the humiliation of their mortal enemy. A congressmen didn’t always act as if their opponent was from hated alien territory of Tennessee or New Hampshire and therefore should not jut be outvoted but righteously hated and if possible completely destroyed. I’ve even seen presidents that we’re widely accepted as “clean” by basically everyone. It can, and has, happened, perhaps even a majority of elections but not in all times. Not in the time of Harding (which we don’t care about) and not recently (which has us acting like fools).

I propose that right now, when people are shrieking as if this politician or that is lurking in the bushes by their back door and might kidnap the dog or pee in the mailbox… it’s a time of corruption. More importantly it’s a time of corruption as experienced by a people not yet ready to fully grasp it but who are getting there. I think the time is approaching soon. I don’t know how long it’ll take. 98 years is enough to opine about Warren G. Harding without getting sued or fired. Hopefully, it’ll be faster than that.

Dan Carlin (who is awesome) went into detail describing how we, the people from the future, cannot properly evaluate the actions of people in the past because we’re not in the same mental state. Often, the folks back then were pants shittingly terrified. Maybe justifiably so. Maybe not justifiably so. They acted according to the madness of their time and with the information they had.

In the case of the Red Scare of the 1950’s (and lingering much longer), we’re not terrified in the modern time so running around like your head’s on fire in 1950 seems a bit silly. Reasons why we’re not currently flipping out:

• We know the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 because we watched it on cable TV. Nobody in 1970 knew that was going to happen. (They didn’t even know cable TV was going to happen.)
• We know the Soviets fizzled from economic rot in 1991 without firing a single shot.
• We know what the people of the past didn’t (and couldn’t) know.

I was there. I was then. I was in a society that had recently lost its goddamned mind. Sure, JKF wasn’t going full retard at the Bay of Pigs in the mid-1970’s but crazy was still in the air. The press shrieked that dumbass cowboy Reagan was gonna’ make the cold war go hot and we’d all die. It was a guy named Dan Rather that did that on CBS. How were we to know Dan Rather was a fucking liar? In the 1970’s we didn’t know Rather would flame out in 2004 with false evidence (forgeries!) against President George W. Bush. The people then can’t know what hasn’t yet happened. (Keep Rather’s fate in mind. Did I not already mention my theory that chickens usually come home to roost?)

Surprising everyone (including the FBI which apparently never gets anything right), the USSR flaked out. Peace happened. No shit! We still have commies but they’re no longer terrifying. They’ve wrecked Venezuela which kinda’ sucks, but none of us hang out there anyway. We were on the edge of our seats waiting for the Mighty Soviet Bear to nuke Pasadena (which is exactly what cold war ICBMs were built to do!) and it fizzled. Recent Commies are a little less “James Bond Supervillain”. They do tame stuff like bitch about health care. When Bernie Sanders whines about how many Ferraris an arrogant CEO has compared to your uncool but completely adequate Honda Civic (which is a hoot coming from a dude who owns multiple houses) it’s a much lower level of FEAR. (Instead it’s envy. Envy is an equally powerful tool which seems the choice of politicians this decade.)

Commies don’t blow shit up anymore so we’re a bit more chill about them running things in certain cities and states. (There are new groups that like explosives and maiming and death. There was a tall building in NYC that comes to mind. Folks are trying to forget/never forget that memorable event according to their favorite team… but that wasn’t commies.) Commies recently just wave free college tuition under the noses of kids so young and dumb they can’t comprehend a 401(k). Not the same. Less FEAR. Mutually assured destruction doesn’t resonate like a geezer from Vermont like “reallocating” shit he didn’t pay for. For one thing, it lacks the photogenic radioactive blast patterns of earlier concerns.

Now here’s the funny part; Dan Carlin recorded Hardcore History #40 on October 12, 2011. Half a decade later we had a new improved third red scare. This is the smallest, weakest, and silliest red scare yet. Regardless, it happened (and is happening). Part of why it’s happening is we (as a people) were still primed to associate “Russia” and “we’re fucked”. The experiences of the older generations that still remember Fear #2 (if not Fear #1) are receptive to that pitch.

After a long bitter and ugly cold war, the press shrieking “Russia, Russia, Russia” resonated. Would a made-up unverified bullshit story about pissing hookers have gotten traction if they’d been bitching about “Italian Collusion”? Would “Lithuanian Meddling in Elections” create the same talk of impeachment? Suppose there’d been a two-year investigation into President Hillary Clinton that discovered a complete absence of “French Collusion”? What if we found absolutely no serious “Finnish Election Meddling”? Do any of them have the same emoptional punch? I submit that folks who don’t have our best interests at heart knowingly tapped into the last lingering terror of a fading Red Scare. They tried to get the band back together for a farewell tour and it almost worked. J. Edgar Hoover is probably smiling from his current residence in hell.

My next post wraps it all up.

[Forgive the long post, the soap opera-like mess of American history is a story that draws me in.]

Last week, my truck’s audio hosted Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History #40: Radical Thoughts. (Dan Carlin is a colorful story teller and I highly recommend him. I don’t get a dime if you buy from Dan Carlin.)

Episode #40 was a rumination on the Red Scare. Carlin began by apologizing that the ensuing half century from the events is not enough distance. It puts his analysis “dangerously close” to the present. It’s still recent enough that raw emotions echo through our populace.

I agree. I grew up being told to be fearful. I heard it from sources I trusted. (I was once a kid and actually trusted people… can you believe it? How quaint.) I was told the Russkies were itching to “push the button”. Everyone I loved, my nation, my bicycle, myself, and my dog were all at risk. I grew up perpetually an inch from getting blasted. Mutually assured destruction was no laughing matter.

For those of you who are wondering (and have an American public school graduate’s lack of historical knowledge) there was no nuclear war in the 1980’s. I’m pretty damn happy it didn’t happen but I sure didn’t see it coming. Who expected peace to just sorta’ break out in the 1980’s & 1990’s? It was practically an accident! The fact that a crazy politician or general (on either side) didn’t turn me into a glowing skeleton on a melting Schwinn is something to be savored.

If you’re younger than a certain age, you can’t know the feeling. It was a thing. This is why I break out in hives when folks dance near the edge of Communism. A college student younger than most of my power tools might dig his Che Guevara t-shirt and high five Bernie Sanders over free college tuition but I’ve an urge to hit both of them with a shovel. I know too much about Stalin, or Venezuela or Mao’s China. I’ve seen things man. I cannot step lightly into a cage. A person of a younger age is already in the cage; apparently they like it.

Back to the lectures; as expected, the discussion centered on the “red scare”. It really got rolling in the early 1950’s. Then it slowly petered out and is even now ebbing as geezers like me give up the ghost. We’re being replaced by young kids who believe rosy scenarios about Cuban health care, or Venezuela’s promise, or equivocations about Sweden. They don’t fear ICBMs like I did.

What intrigued me was the “first red scare”. I was only dimly aware of that one. The first red scare that went fever pitch in post WW1 and the run up to the roaring twenties. Then it collapsed fast when the Kool Aid drinkers picked a hard date for Armageddon (May 1, 1920).

For those of you who are wondering (and know only the history taught in public schools), the “reds” did not overthrow the USA on May 1, 1920.

It’s news to me that total all out revolution was publicly predicted by United States Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. He predicted the very specific day of May 1st and he really meant it. I don’t think he was trying to blow smoke up anyone’s ass. Likely he was rock solid in his belief. (Cut the man some slack, just one year before, on May 1, 1919, his house was among 35 targets of anarchist’s mailbomb attacks. This was also only 18 years after President McKinley was shot to death by the same anarchist movement. How many presidential assassinations and bombs arriving at your house would you need to get nervous?)

Anyway the deal didn’t go down. Nothing happened on May 1, 1920 and Palmer got nutkicked by popular opinion. Everyone had a good laugh and then smoked a pack of unfiltered cigarettes. Thus, the first red scare ended nice and clean and all at once.

Here’s a hint that’s true of all ages, when you predict imminent looming total destruction, avoid dates that can be written down on a piece of paper. (Got that Al Gore?) (I note that AOC is already backtracking on her statement of 12 years to doom. Twelve years is too short. You need predictions to be a good 20-30 years in the future or your career may be long enough for you to be mocked when nothing happens. Let’s call that nebulous length of time the “Al Gore prediction horizon”.)

Here’s where the story gets really interesting. Palmer’s best source for the “intelligence” that created first red scare was the General Intelligence Division (GID), headed by J. Edgar Hoover. Yes… that Hoover.

Just to repeat… the looming May 1, 1920 violent domestic uprising had everyone shitting a brick. People believed it.

But it didn’t happen. Fake news bitches!

Why’d everyone buy the story? Part of the reason was the obnoxious fucknut Hoover who industriously fanned the flames.

Good thing we didn’t repeat our mistakes. We corrected course, kicked bad information sources to the side, and… ha ha ha… Oh man, just typing that makes me laugh! Given the chance to be stupid of course that’s what we did. America gave Hoover a promotion!

Go ahead and savor this factoid because it’s why history is one long inside joke: When they formed the brand new Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) they looked long and hard to find the most reliable person to be director. J Edgar Hoover, had been so wrong he cratered the career of the Attorney General. Thus, he was perfect for the job.

A monkey with a dartboard would have a better track record. I can only assume Washington D.C. was out of monkeys. Hoover, who had been wrong before, learned absolutely nothing. He went into rut. He “served” with an increasingly corrupt and iron fist and was a huge driving force in the second red scare.

Folks that’s funny shit right there! The political arc of accuracy is proof God likes humor and/or people are dumbasses. When you’re spectacularly wrong and everybody sees your failure, the solution is to freak people out about the same damn thing all over again; but do it even harder!

Hoover finally released power when… Ha ha ha… That’s funny too. Corrupt jackwads never quit. They die or you kill them. (See my earlier references to Stalin.)

Like any proper psychotic dickhead, Hoover continued prancing around DC with his magic ring of power while breaking every rule. Let’s repeat that because it’s key: Hoover didn’t accidentally bend a rule or two, he broke every rule about everything all the time.

The son of a bitch finally died in office in 1972! Everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief the day that immoral spying cretin was planted. He’d been fucking up and abusing power for 48 years! People who cling to power until their last breath are a reason I’m glad humans are mortal.

Let’s review:

• The guy was completely fucking wrong in 1920.
• Therefore, he was put in charge of a new and powerful secret spying apparatus.
• He went full retard and freebased power like a crackhead.
• He stayed that way for 48 years.

Moral of the story? When you’ve got wrong information, feed it to the Attorney General and let him take it in the shorts. Then blackmail senators until you’re fuckin untouchable.

Hoover proves to me that it’s not possible to be wrong or corrupt enough to get kicked out of the FBI. That Hoover played Attorney General Palmer like a puppet doesn’t fill me with respect for the office of Attorney General either.

Now think of my “history clarity through distance thesis”. Nearly everyone who knows the name Hoover agrees he was a deceitful, backstabbing, shithead. He might have a few fans here and there but not many. Nor is it skating on thin ice to say that Attorney General Palmer fucked up big time. This isn’t news. It’s not controversial. Nobody is going to try to demonetize my YouTube channel (assuming I had one) because I “dissed” Hoover. Nobody will accuse me of “hate speech” for calling Palmer a dumbass. These are facts; mellowed by distance and eventually accepted by damn near everyone.

What about recent situations? I just ripped a new one on Palmer and Hoover, can I utter the same opinions about folks who recently or currently fill the same jobs? No way! Dis a recent FBI Director or recent Attorney General and half the establishment goes apeshit. Whichever party benefits will circle the wagons to protect “their guy”. So long as he’s bitch slapping “the other team” he’s doing God’s work. Even if the dude is a class five human train-wreck he’ll have supporters cheering for him.

I’d be like “I just saw him stuff a kazoo up his ass while barbecuing a kitten! The dude’s not firing on all cylinders.” Sure as shit some supporter will explain it “The kazoo represents oppression and the kitten was rabid. He had to do it. He wants to save orphans from the secret kazoo/kitten cabal of Walla Walla Washington. Also, you’re a a racist douche-bag and your face is hate speech!”

Translation: He’s on our team… therefore he’s awesome. If you oppose this saintly figure of goodness they’ll double down on it too. The internet will crawl up your ass, your mom will unfriend you on Facebook, Alexa will sell your stuff on Craigslist, and your kid will get a wedgie in school. Eventually your boss will subtly hint that you should stay the hell away from him/her/zit until it blows over. It can get worse, those are just the things that’ll happen if you’re lucky.

The reason is simple. If it happens now, we can’t reason it out. Folks back then can be calmly assessed in light of their achievements and failures. Folks right now are assessed based on the team jersey they’re wearing.

Please forgive my ramblings about the FBI and why they’re off the leash literally more often than when they’re aboveboard and effective. I’m sure the guys right now are super moral, high ground, paragons of dignity. In fact, I want it on the record that the NSA is covertly recording that I’m perfectly pleased with everything that every domestic spying agency is doing for the last 40 years. Good job guys!

Tomorrow I’ll talk about another part of moldy old history: FEAR.

[Before I begin, please understand I’m not a historian and the specific historic details aren’t important.  I’m not trying to talk about the events in history so much as to explain how they make me think differently about the events of today.]

Years ago, my truck’s audio hosted The Skeptic’s Guide to American History (Professor Mark A. Stoler, Ph.D.). (It’s a 24-lecture series on Great Courses, and I don’t get a single dime if you buy it.) Stoler was examining a topic; I can’t recall what it was. While setting the stage for a point he was trying to make, he mentioned in passing a time of relative corruption in American governance.

He mentioned, only as a minor detail, the vast corruption within the Warren G. Harding administration. It was a fact, like any other fact. Simply a thing to know about that era; like that it was the time of the Model T (1908-1927), and the Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand (1914) led to World War I (1914-1918).

This is where history is invaluable, it was a long time ago and I could listen without having any opinion at all. Talk about Obama, Reagan, Bush, or Clinton and I have a pre-conceived notion. More emotional folks will lose their goddamn minds. History lets you use your mind because you’re looking “far away”.

It’s my blog and I roll with the esoteric, so I’ll describe it to you: Harding was sworn in as president in 1921. Harding was popular at the time. He was also corrupt. Then the shit hit the fan (as it usually does in such situations).

Harding, for his part, had the good sense to die in office. Good move! He was planted and pushing up daisies before the depths of his failures came to light among the nation at large. In his aftermath, a lot of work went into uncovering his activities. With time and reflection, people tended to conclude “that guy was a hoser”.

Notice the advantage of time? Nobody is calling me a Nazi. Nobody is threatening to kick me off Facebook. Nobody knows if Harding was a Republican or a Democrat (unless they check Wikipedia). Having no opinion of Harding allows us to absorb a fact without taking sides. We don’t have the knee jerk impulse to form up teams and post slogans about how people with contrary opinions on Harding are baby killing, redneck, shitweasels and/or vegan, posers with limp dicks.

I can’t remember exactly what the lecturer said but it was something like this:

“This came after the Harding administration, which was, of course, incredibly corrupt.”

That was it. Harding was “incredibly corrupt”. Just a fact. A fact so widely known we get an “of course” thrown in. I wasn’t listening to a lecture on the Teapot Dome scandal so it was merely a backdrop for other action.

I’ve since sniffed around the issue and verified the sentence. Pretty much everyone who knows anything says he was a lousy president. He appears to have fomented corruption and spread scandal like a monkey with a firehose. Not a lot of handwringing about it. It’s simply a fact. It’s known. It’s all been aired out. It’s old news. Nobody bats an eye when you say Harding and his cronies were corrupt.

I took that thought into my head and spent a long time examining it; looking at it from all angles. Eventually, I realized that all things ebb and flow. One shouldn’t be surprised by eras of corruption. In any nation, be it the Roman Empire, the United States of America, or a suburban HOA, there will be times of increased corruption and times of “cleaner” governance. This is simply a fact.

For some reason, we’re primed, pumped, and propagandized that we must, are, and should be living in a “clean” era. Why? Because we’re more advanced than turn of the 20^th century dipshits that didn’t yet have smartphones? Really? ‘Cause when people talk like that I start to laugh.

Harding was popular. He was corrupt. This is a fact.

Here’s the other part; in the end Harding’s manifold shortcomings came out. Congress faffed about, various laws were passed to keep shit like that from happening again, a few people went to jail, etc… In general, the dirty laundry was necessarily aired. This is good.

With time and further reading about many eras in many societies I’m starting to get the feeling that most of the time the truth comes out. Dirty laundry tends to get aired. It’s not a hard and fast rule but more of a general trend. Chickens really do come home to roost; they shit all over the place when they arrive but it allows society to understand what went down and to promise (almost always ineffectually) they won’t do that dumb crap next time. I’m not much of an optimist but I find this is heartening.

The other thing I’m noticing is that (usually and in general) the “trip to truth town” takes longer than one would hope. It’s never a concise 30-minute made for TV morality play where Perry Mason tricks the bad guy into confessing under oath. It’s more often a few years gathering public knowledge and a bunch of boring semi-inconclusive Congressional testimony. There might be a few books nobody reads, various audits, a lawsuit or two, some laws and regulations that don’t work, possibly speeches are made, and then eventually you get to the place where some historian says “of course that guy was horribly corrupt” and nobody raises an eyebrow.

With time, everyone sees it in a new way. They agree that guy back then was a jerk. It takes time to get there because folks aren’t ready to deal with malfeasance from this guy right now. Often, at least in the case of Harding (and Hoover an idiot I’ll talk about later), things play out after the main character is safely planted in the ground. This makes sense. For example, Stalin was an asshat. This is a fact and there isn’t a person on earth who would disagree; now. Back then he had a habit of genociding people who showed even a hint of disagreement. It’s simply safer for everyone if you discuss Stalin’s proclivities after the monster is dead.

Harding’s fall from grace is a lesson. It was ugly and I’m sure for the people of the time were very upset. People of the future (like me) don’t fret. It’s just a fact.

Stay tuned for more…

[I’ve been trying to focus on happy fun time topics. I hope you’ve been enjoying it. For the greater good of American society, I’ve deliberately ignored politics (with exceptions and caveats) for a few years now. That said, in 2019 it’s hard to ignore the elephant in the room. I’ve got some ideas that need to be released from my pointy little head. Forgive me as I touch the third rail.]

One needs audio distraction for long road trips. I don’t do payments so satellite is out. FM music programming sucks donkey balls and I don’t like the fidelity of AM music. The shrillness of AM talk radio is mildly embarrassing and FM talk is limited to boring sportsball meatheads. America’s Pravda (NPR) merits special mention. NPR is the Godzilla of domestic American radio propaganda. It dominates the airwaves on virtually every square inch of our vast nation. They’ve got FCC licenses that blanket the continent. In addition to being the loudest clearest station everywhere they never stop “the narrative”. They could talk about the weather or play Jimmi Hendrix or discuss soil composting methods but that doesn’t serve their “mission”. 24/7 they ooze elitist signaling groupthink that only sounds deep to a stoned 19-year-old freshman. (In particular, Terry Gross says “have a discussion” in ways that indicate sentient beings can’t have alternate viewpoints.) I hate NPR’s propaganda because it’s sloppy and obvious. People trying to manipulate me should at least try subtlety. Hear that NPR? Before you grab my ass, I expect dinner and a movie!

My solution to radio’s suckitude is an MP3 player laden with history lectures.

History  has the “clarity of distance”. In 2019, folks who benefit from a populace that’s freaked out have done an excellent job of freaking us out. We’re so deep in the weeds it’s hard to think (which is probably the point). History reminds us that everything has happened before. Today’s hyperventilation is not the end of the world; it’s just a time of flux. I’ve heard it called a “transition”, “interregnum”, or “shitstorm”. Choose your vocabulary at will.

With distance can one dial down the hype, engage the thinking cap, and see the forest for the trees. I listen to and (given an equally nerdy counterpart) engage in reasoned discourse about the pros and cons of Diocletian’s reforms to the Roman Empire in the third century. Nobody will care. If I have the same level discussion about a recent event, folks go ape. Only “that thing from long ago” won’t ruffle feathers. (This is probably why competing political interests try so hard to act like history started in 1965, or 1776, or 2016.)

Mention events that happened recently and reason is gone. Much of the populace starts braying like farm animals and the rest run for cover. Collectively we don’t weigh results so much as claim victory. Talking heads don’t assess costs or consider alternatives; they assign blame and decide which horse is winning today’s race. The media emits sounds that resemble thoughts but they’re just mantras for their team’s faithful to repeat on Facebook. Wandering amid a populace driven just shy of madness, most of what I hear are programmed responses to expected stimuli

For now (and perhaps many years in the future), Americans are (and will be) frantic. We’re only human. We had limits. We’ve been misled, mistreated, harangued, harassed, indoctrinated, coaxed, crushed, forced, and fucked. Most of us are chained to a perpetual motion machine of polarized nothingness. Ford versus Chevy, Coke versus Pepsi, Packers versus Vikings; my team is awesome and your team sucks.

It’s enough to convince a guy to build a little boat and sail around a lake.

That said, I’d like to mention some thoughts derived from history lectures and autodidactic rumination. I see hints of the iceberg under the seas. Stay tuned and see if you have experienced what I’m trying to describe…

Frank is back!!!!!

I was idly sifting through Craigslist when I bumped into the same ad I’d seen in 2014. It’s “Frank” selling bridge mats as firewood! After a few year’s absence (at least on Craigslist) the ads re-appeared. Frank will probably rule the world someday.

His odd little universe is one of my favorite stories. It looks like he’s doing the very same pitch as in 2014. The Craigslist photo is framed just so. You can’t tell what’s up. Holy shit, the man’s a crooked, lying, force of nature… but I can’t help but be impressed by his Moxie.

If you don’t know the story of Jake, Julie, and Frank and their “bridge mats of deceit” you should read my story from 2014. (Linked below.)

A.C.

P.S. I’m not bitter. The adventure of the bridge mats of ’14 was hilarious and strange but it really did work out for me. I did get a decent deal from Frank (though I was probably the first customer to do so). Also, the material had plenty of BTUs too. I’d love to see if Julie has finally learned to operate the phone and/or destroyed her car yet. Maybe Frank has built himself a throne and castle to go with his strange little empire in the forest? Unfortunately, “Frank’s” business model is to bend you over the hood of your own truck and have his way. There’s no way a snake like that will me get away with an honest purchase twice. He probably frets knowing one customer in hundreds (thousands?) I got a fair deal half a decade ago. My fondest wishes go to Frank’s crooked heart and his inept and oppressed crew. Best of luck to them all but I’m keeping my distance from the whole mess.

Scoring Firewood On The Gray Market: Onion Sandwiches and Bridge Mats

• Firewood Saga: Part 0
• Firewood Saga: Part 1: Units
• Firewood Saga: Part 2: Cold Calling
• Firewood Saga: Part 3: The Art Of The Deal
• Firewood Saga: Part 4: Jake and Julie
• Firewood Saga: Part 5: Bridge Mats
• Firewood Saga: Part 6: Frank Tries To Screw Me
• Firewood Saga: Part 7: Mission Accomplished / Math Works

“Sadly, I ran out of steam for stacking. Muscles don’t come back in a day (or a weekend). I estimate I’ve got 2/3 cord sitting on the utility trailer I’ve been using to haul my little sailboat. I guess I’ll have to unload and stack it before I can sail again.“

I wanted to free my trailer for another sail/camp trip so I set to work. It’s hard work lifting stove bolts off a trailer and stacking them. But I was pretty diligent and just over an hour later the trailer was empty.

After I’d stacked everything I checked it with a tape measure. I expected 2/3 cord but it measured out at only 1/3 cord. Huh?

That’s weird. I’m usually good at judging such things. But it is what it is. Clearly I made mistakes in my estimation and must accept that I’ve amassed less firewood than I’d hoped. After all, it’s right there in front of me and tape measures don’t lie. In fact…

RUSSIAN COLLUSION! THE GODDAMN RUSSIAN SECRET AGENTS CAME AND STOLE MY FIREWOOD. THEY INFLUENCED ME THROUGH FACEBOOK ADS. THEY MADE THE WOOD VANISH!

I’M GONNA’ GET TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS. I’LL INVESTIGATE THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF IT AND EVEN IF A 400 PAGE REPORT HAS NO SOLID EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER THAT RUSSIANS ARE STEALING FIREWOOD… I DON’T CARE. IT CERTAINLY DOESN’T PROVE THEY’RE NOT STEALING MY FIREWOOD. AFTER ALL, THE ONLY OTHER OPTION IS THAT REALITY DOESN’T MATCH MY PROJECTIONS AND THAT’S TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE!

…is a maddening unit of measure. Technically it’s the volume of wood one can stack in a 4′ x 4′ x 8′ pile.  This is bullshit because a buyer patiently stacking uniform, small diameter, gently tapered, logs can cram a shitton of wood into the same space a busy (and mechanized) seller will occupy with a smaller amount of lightly tossed, poorly stacked, scraggly, tapered and forked, large diameter, junk… in a pyramidal heap. Not to mention that no sane human will stack 8′ bolts of anything. An 8′ bolt is just too unwieldy. Thus, cords ostensibly made of 8′ bolts manifest as 128 cubic feet of dead tree in 24 linear feet of 16″ stovebolts stacked 4′ high; if the work is done by a man’s own labors. (Not withstanding my neighbor who likes to burn 20″ bolts in his external wood boiler.)

The whole 8′ thing is nutty. It’s a tradition springing from industrial processes that came sometime after Paul Bunyan was sledging shit around Maine with a blue ox and and slightly before this morning when someone in British Columbia fired up a whole tree chipper with self leveling cab. It’s enough to make a man go metric!

But I digress.

A cord of wood is so much more that a vague way to specify 128 cubic feet that’s (to a lesser or greater extent) occupied by chopped up tree. It’s more dammit! Especially firewood. Here’s a Curmudgeonly rant:

Firewood isn’t money in the bank, it’s gold in your pocket! It’s a solid fuck you to big oil AND a simultaneous kiss my ass to dweebs with subsidized solar panels. It’s the manliest way to heat your house and the easiest way to work a man to death. It’s the ability to live off grid in ball freezing climates that no rational person would expect of homo sapiens. It’s the brutally hard construction of a personal biomass mountain that you’ll happily torch to ash in your living room: because that’s how you roll! Firewood is about the freest damn thing you can do. If you can harness it, firewood is an endless fountain of tax free, unregulated, privately owned, hand hewn, BTUs of freedom!

It’s also hard fucking work!

Firewood is proof that shit that’s so cheap it literally grows on trees can also be priceless and sometimes unobtainable. It’s pretty damn hard to amass “so cheap it grows on trees” shit when you progress from theory to reality. Life is hard but vivid when you start wandering around the woods armed with nothing but a chainsaw and great clanging balls.

So yeah, I stacked firewood this week. And I’m pretty damn happy about it.

Why am I happy? Because I’ve been taken out of the game for a while. Injury, then illness, then time constraints, then a thousand other little deaths. Lather, rinse, repeat. The world conspires to make us weak.

Also caution held me back. Which is a good thing. A chainsaw will kill you dead. You shouldn’t mess with one unless you feel like you’re firing on all cylinders. Lately, I haven’t often felt healthy enough to mess with beastly forces like a chainsaw.

Until a few days ago. I was leaving the firewood game to studlier people than me. Instead, I had a camp out planned. I was going to deploy my supertent and sail my microboat (pretty good plan eh?). Alas, the weather sucked. Not quite rain but definitely cloudy, neither warm nor cold, winds ranging from mild to none. I paced the house like a caged animal, getting increasingly frustrated, until I set out to see if my body was ready to mess with raw tonnage. My Stihl started readily. My rebuilt and over-engineered wood splitter coughed to life. The only thing that could fail was… me.

Working in cautious 2-3 hour chunks (with ample rest and lots of hydration) I managed to lay up a 16′ long stack of 16″ stovebolts that’s 6′ high. Do the math and that’s one cord.

Then I dropped an old dead tree that’s been trying to fall and block my driveway. Not a big tree but a good chance to see if my directional felling skills had atrophied. They haven’t; that bitch landed on target like I’d typed the coordinates into a GPS. Nice!

Accepting that age implies both limits AND privileges, I didn’t do the tree entirely on my own. Eventually, I pressed a teenager into service to help with splitting and swamping. He did his duty with the minimum required eye rolling and only minor complaints… which is pretty good nowadays. Millennials have potential… or at least this one does. The hard target was to get the shit cleared off the driveway before Mrs. Curmudgeon came home to find her dipshit husband had gone into some sort of logger flashback and blocked the driveway. We made the deadline!

Sadly, I ran out of steam for stacking. Muscles don’t come back in a day (or a weekend). I estimate I’ve got 2/3 cord sitting on the utility trailer I’ve been using to haul my little sailboat. I guess I’ll have to unload and stack it before I can sail again. I can live with that, though I’ll probably let my back rest a day or two before I’m back at it. By the time the next cord is stacked and ready for winter I’ll have earned my sail/camp trip. Earnin’ shit feels good!

Here’s how I felt after doing a little chainsaw therapy: