Monday, November 14, 2016

A Too-Frequent Conversation

We are sitting on our double recliner, reading books. Suddenly, the hair on my neck stands up. I look to my right and see Debbie glaring at me.

"What? I swear I didn't fart!"

"Notice anything different?"

My eyes dart around the room as I break into a panic sweat.



"It... uh... it is different. Did you get it cut today?"


"Oh. I like it. It looks nice."

"You suck."

"Yea... but I love you."

"Shut up and read your book."

This scene plays out several times a year.

Thursday, November 10, 2016


In spite of a clearly rigged process, The Donald will be our next Bad Hair Piece in Chief. The liberals, in their typical fashion, are being sore losers. It's been entertaining to watch all the MSM's turning themselves inside out trying to explain how they could have been so wrong in all their predictions. They seem to be settling into a "we would have won if all those deplorables would have stayed home like they were supposed to" line of rhetoric. My favorite explanation for Trump's win comes not from anyplace mainstream of course, but from Cracked magazine:

"Nothing that happens outside the city matters!" they say at their cocktail parties, blissfully unaware of where their food is grown. Hey, remember when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Kind of weird that a big hurricane hundreds of miles across managed to snipe one specific city and avoid everything else. To watch the news (or the multiple movies and TV shows about it), you'd barely hear about how the storm utterly steamrolled rural Mississippi, killing 238 people and doing an astounding $125 billion in damage.

But who cares about those people, right? What's newsworthy about a bunch of toothless hillbillies crying over a flattened trailer? New Orleans is culturally important. It matters.

To those ignored, suffering people, Donald Trump is a brick chucked through the window of the elites. "Are you assholes listening now?"

The assholes are probably not listening quite yet, but they will be. After decades of feeling powerless and irrelevant, the rural working poor seem to have found their voice. I've been saying for over a year, what comes after Trump will be far more momentous than Trump.

The view from the liberal side of the universe (at least the thinking liberals that were against Hill&Bill from day one) is similar:


It's been a given for a couple decades among us deplorables that the sort of white, hipster, latte-sipping, I-only-use-minority-shaded-emoticons liberals were nothing more than a bunch of self-righteous hypocrites. Nice to see other people are finally catching on.

John Michael Greer's post-election essay zeroes in on the new habit in America of focusing exclusively on a candidate's personality while rarely if ever considering just what sort of policies a candidate at least claims to support:


Exactly. I'm not sure when being nice became a prerequisite for the Oval Office. I'd much rather have a president who would walk down the steps of Air Force One and would instead of bowing to some foreign asshat like Kim Jong-un, haul off and kick him in the balls (diplomatically, of course). I'm certain I am not the only person who is sick of watching our president get pushed around by tin pot despots.

My personal view is that it really doesn't matter who is sitting in the White House as the US economy is already heading down the drain. All Trump has won is the privilege of taking the blame for whatever happens between now and sometime in early 2017. Frankly, I'm astonished that the economy hasn't already blown itself apart. I fully expected a big crunch sometime in the August-through-October time frame. It look like it will hold off until early next year. We'll see. One thing the bastards in Washington have perfected is keeping all the economic plates spinning.

Well, I should probably try to get a bit of outside work done while the sun is shining.

[Edited to add a nice bit from HuffPo:

In the face of Trump’s willingness to boldly proclaim without facts or evidence that he would bring the good times back, we offered a tepid gallows logic. Well, those jobs are actually gone for good, we knowingly told them. And we offered a fantastical non-solution. We will retrain you for good jobs! Never mind that these “good jobs” didn’t exist in East Kentucky or Cleveland. And as a final insult, we lectured a struggling people watching their kids die of drug overdoses about their white privilege. Can you blame them for calling bullshit?

Off course, HuffPo being HuffPo, they do work in a few redneck jokes.

Obviously not outside working yet. I'll get there at some point.]