Miscellaneous Outrage

It’s Like the other Tuesdays, but Different

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

Hey y’all,

So . . . it’s Tuesday. And on this Tuesday, unlike most Tuesdays, the fate of humanity rests in your hands. Fortunately it’s super easy to stave off damnation for another four years – all you gotta do is vote.

And I know. Voting is hard. You have to take time out of your busy day to go all the way to a special place, and wait in a line, and answer a bunch of questions. It’s like going to Chipotle at rush hour only you’re still hungry after. And it probably doesn’t even make a difference, right? The lizard people call all the shots anyway.

Wrong! Sad!

It’s really pretty easy to come up with excuses not to vote, and so I’m going to go ahead and try to head a few of the popular ones off here:

  • They both stink! It doesn’t make a difference. – Ok so this is just demonstrably untrue. But there’s been a ton of lip service about the staggering differences between our main party candidates this year, and at this point nothing you read here is likely to change your mind. If you really believe that the candidates are indistinguishable, then sure – leave that bubble blank.

    Because here’s the thing – Google Analytics tells me that the vast majority of you, My Dear Readers, reside in Montana, California, and Illinois. That means that the presidential races in your state is probably pretty well buttoned up.

    You’re still not off the hook for voting.Down ballot races are way more important than the one at the top (especially if you don’t live in Florida, or Michigan, or North Carolina or something). Feel strongly about Planned Parenthood funding? I wonder how your state legislators feel about that. Fond of public land access? Jeez, maybe there’s a state supreme court or Gubernatorial candidate on the ballot who could really change how that works.And then there’s the initiatives. Legal marijuana! Weird shady tax things! A new school playground! This stuff is up to you! Remember Brexit? The Columbian peace deal falling apart? That shit wasn’t decided by elected officials.

    So yeah, even if you really can’t tell the difference between the two options for president, you still need to vote.

  • I don’t have time. – I know we’re all busy in these crazy days, but come on. You’ve got time. Americans watch between four and five hours of TV per day. We spend about 90 minutes gazing at our phones. We spend 42 hours a year sitting in traffic, and we spend at least a couple hours each day screwing off at work. If for just one day, you woke up in the morning and were perfectly efficient, you would have a brand new 8 hours to fill with whatever you’d like to do. Maybe preserving our democratic process could make the list?
  • What do you mean vote? I thought American Idol got cancelled? – You are correct! And I know you’re just jonesing to get all that vote mojo out. May I suggest National and Local elections? Warning – You cannot text your vote.

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  • Eh, fuck black people. And Hispanics. And women. And Muslims. And the disabled. And the 1st, 4th, 5th, 8th, 13th, and 19th Amendments. And the Geneva Accords.  And the fabric of democracy. – I mean, I guess if that’s how you really feel it’s actually pretty hard to argue with.
  • I don’t know where I’m registered. – It’s cool. We have a tool for that. Click right here to see where and when you can vote!
  • There are armed white men standing outside of my polling place. – Yes. The “poll observers.” We were worried about those guys, especially after the Malheur Farce. The best thing you can do is call a local hotline to report voter intimidation. In the meantime, you can probably lure them away by telling them that you just saw a Bad Hombre trying to sneak into a voting booth around the corner.
  • I am still an undecided voter. – I get it. This election is tricky. It’s like being in a pizza place where the only options for toppings are anchovies and shattered light bulbs. You’re torn between, “ew, I can see its eyeball,” and “it’s possible I won’t die.” I guess my only advice would be to order the actual food, even if it’s not your favorite.
  • Shouldn’t we just be able to text our votes in? – Still no.
  • I am actually dead. – It never stopped Mayor Daley from getting elected in Chicago! Just kidding. Voter fraud isn’t really a thing. Unless you consider voter suppression and contortionist congressional redistricting fraud, in which case, yeah I guess.

So that’s it. You just wasted another 4 minutes of your day reading this post. Put your phone away and go to the damn polls. If you ride your bike there you won’t even waste all that time in traffic.

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Entropy at Work

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

Those of us who were born recently enough to only have followed the last several national elections may be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that our democracy is in the throes of unraveling, and that the Great American Experiment is, at last, a failure.

2000 found us stating that we were faced with the worst candidates in history. In 2004, we took it all back and declared that no, in fact, these were the worst candidates we’d ever been forced to elect. In 2008 the ascendancy of our country’s first black president gave rise to latent white nationalism from coast to coast, and was the most polarizing election in memory. The most polarizing election in memory, of course, until 2012, when the TEA party hijacked the Republican party and talking heads spoke exclusively in superlatives for like eight months. That shit was wild.

But then we have 2016. Holy crap. The world, it seems, is on the cusp of demise.

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This election cycle has seen the most inflammatory language we’ve ever heard on the presidential stage, and it has incubated the ugliest in all of us. The last debate nearly came to blows, the candidates finally resorted only to libel. The Republican party is actually imploding before our eyes, and zealots across the political spectrum are openly calling for revolution if they don’t get their way.

Isn’t it great?

See, our body politic is reeling right now, but there isn’t really any better way for it to unfold. What we’re seeing here is entropy at work. Entropy, remember, is that pesky tenet of thermodynamics that you heard about in college and forgot about as soon as f’ing possible. That tendency in a closed system to err toward disorder.

Physicists deal with it all the time in a candid way, but entropy is a constant in all of our lives. You ever notice how it’s a full time job to keep the kitchen clean? Or the bedroom picked up? How a clean house will apparently descend into chaos over the course of a week if it’s allowed? That’s entropy. And it’s at work right now in our body of representatives.

It takes an outside force to restore order. It takes effort. The Trump campaign is, like he promises (one of the few things he’s right about), well positioned to fix a broken system. He really is poised to Make America Great Again, the same way that months’ worth of moldy pizza boxes under the couch are poised to get you to clean the living room.

Partisan inflexibility has gridlocked Congress for more than a decade. It’s that ineffectiveness that’s given rise to a candidate like Trump. People are sick of that shit, and this is what we’ve come up with: a big, orange cudgel brandished at our representatives that they’d better get their damn affairs in order or we’ll give ’em more of this whack job.

I hope that the Trump candidacy is simply an indication that our national politics have reached a state of squalor unparalleled outside of Shel Silverstein poems (a garbage fire, in other terms). That it’s time, now, to clean our bedroom. To put away those dishes. To wash and fold those piles of dirty clothes. Unchecked, the state of things will always tend toward disorder and chaos. I hope that we can agree that it is time, now, for a reset. It’s physics, after all.

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Letter to the Editor

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

Dear Editor of My Local Newspaper [readership: affluent, white],

I’m writing now to say that I saw something the other day, and I didn’t like it. You see, when I moved here seven years ago [from Portland, or San Diego or something], I liked the way things were. They suited me. That was back when this place was like it used to be, before, when things were new and exciting for me personally. It was back when many of my local experiences conformed to and validated my worldview. Back when it was great. Not like now. This place is terrible now. Just look at that thing I saw the other day!

You see, after I moved here, other people [younger/ethnic, possibly both] moved here too. Where do they get off, anyway!? When I first got here this was my own personal playground. I had the whole place to myself to pursue my favorite esoteric hobby, but now every time I go outside other people are outside too. Do you believe that? All those other people should do what I did, and find their own place to go. We need to stop all these people from moving here now that I’ve finally built my dream home [in the urban-forest interface].

Really, it comes to to respect. Kids these days just don’t get it. It used to be that we stood for something. Like free love, and Jerry Garcia, and spitting on soldiers returning from war. Now these kids just want free jobs that they don’t even want to work for! Do you believe that? All this whining is just getting old. If they really wanted jobs, they’d make them for themselves. Like I did. But I digress.

The main issue at hand here is that many of the things I occasionally see make me uncomfortable, and I hate being uncomfortable.

This is why I’m advocating for this sweeping policy change. Things are changing and I don’t like it. People are moving here, and their interests are different from mine. It hurts my feelings, and my feelings are the most important thing to me. They should be equally important to you. I base most of my decisions on my feelings, and I feel like the city council should too. Instead they’ll probably just raise taxes again, so that poor people can move here and live on my hard work. Where does it stop!?!

If we don’t act now, people might keep moving here even though I already like it the way it is. Or rather, the way it was.

Reliably,

A Baby Boomer

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Donald Trump is Actually Just a Dumb Henry VIII

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 2 Comments

In an election year, things can start to feel pretty familiar. We all know the drill. Non-political TV commercials will be come a thing of the past. The phone rings off the hook at dinner time. You assume a persistent state of anxiety.

This year promises to be more of the same. Really, this year promises to be much more of the same as the campaigning inevitably turns more and more negative. “But wait!” you say. “This election in unprecedented! We’ve never seen anyone the likes of Donald Trump before!”

And that’s just not true. See, because Donald Trump is really just a dumber, modern version of Henry VIII (King of England 1509-1547).

henry
Photo Source

Donald Trump is just Henry VIII with Twitter (update: Henry VIII is on Twitter), kind of like how Avatar was really just Ferngully in 3D. And full disclosure: some of this stuff seems kind of petty. The thing is, petty personal stuff is fair game because of comparison #1.

Comparison #1 – Donald Trump and Henry VIII were both extremely petty. Historians generally use words like “reactionary,” “harsh,” and “insecure” to describe the later years of Henry’s reign. Does any of that sound familiar? The monarch was more or less continually at war with France, pretty much entirely as a result of personal beefs with Francis I. Also with Scotland. And Rome. And Spain.

Comparison #2 – Both guys got in a huge fight with the Pope (over some childish bullshit). Donald Trump managed to spat with basically the best Pope we’ve ever had because the guy described un-Christian foreign policy suggestions as un-Christian. Henry took it one step further. He decided he didn’t really want his wife anymore, and since divorce was pretty taboo in 1527 he decided to just quit Catholicism, which pretty much meant that everyone else had to quit Catholicism too.

Comparison #3 – So speaking of divorce, both guys got married. Like, a lot. Of course at press time Mr. Trump has been married three times. Henry managed to rack up six wives in his 55 year life, which is pretty impressive for a time when divorce was a no-no. How’d he do it, you ask? Two annulments, two natural deaths, and two executions. I wonder what The Donald would do without a good divorce attorney and gobs of money?

Comparison #4 – And it’s those gobs of money that bring us to comparison #4. Both guys were born loaded and then spent their adult lives blowing it on an indulgent lifestyle. Both men were born into a picture of privilege, and both men turned out to be pretty lousy businessmen. In Henry’s case this led to the ruination of a personal fortune and healthy English economy. Trump hasn’t been given the keys to the economy yet, but his record shows that he’s really an average businessman at best, and I suspect that he’s actually broke. In both cases a huge inheritance eventually fell victim to extravagance and lots and lots of gold (because gold is classy).

Comparison #5 – Both guys expressed interest in spending an insane amount of money defending the southern border (and Henry actually did it). In fairness, in Henry’s case it kind of made sense because he made a career of pissing off all of Continental Europe.

The comparisons keep going. Both men had a penchant for gambling. Both men advocated strongly for a paranoid insulation of the border. Both men were obsessed with shiny stuff.

But there’s one really striking difference: Henry VIII was pretty damn smart.

Henry was a renaissance man. He was an accomplished musician, a talented composer, and a poet. He was an avid reader and an author. He revolutionized military theory. He cherished knowledge and took pride in being a thinker. On the other hand, we’ve got this guy:

And that’s really the most compelling difference. The personality profiles are essentially identical. They’re both megalomaniacal sociopaths born into wealth and who take power for granted. They’re womanizing narcissists who’ve made their own petty disagreements matters of national security. They’re both men who were attractive and charming in their young lives, and who’s unrelenting vanity plummeted them into paranoid insecurity in their later years.

Of course another (important) difference is that Donald Trump isn’t actually in charge of anything yet. (Celebrity Apprentice doesn’t count). Henry VIII reigned for nearly four decades. A quick look at his record sheds a bit of light on what four years of Trump might look like.

  • Henry made dramatic changes to the English Constitution, primarily to greatly expand executive power. I recommend getting out today to exercise some of those constitutional rights while you’ve still got ’em. Hell, maybe four years of Trump turns into four decades.
  • Henry preferred a military-forward approach to diplomacy. For instance, to encourage James I of Scotland to marry his infant daughter to Henry’s son Edward, the English monarch went to a decade long war with Scotland; a truce sealed by matrimony was the only path to peace. I sure hope President Trump doesn’t decide he wants a new Canadian wife!
  • Henry quashed dissent with more executions than any other English Monarch. Trump has already exhibited a distaste for being questioned by blacklisting an unprecedented number of news agencies from his campaign events.
  • He ran the economy into the ground. Henry VIII inherited, in addition to a large personal fortune, a thriving English economy. It only took a few years of an extravagant lifestyle, hasty military conflicts, and the construction of elaborate royal palaces to burn through cash reserves and tank the economy. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar. Don’t worry though, Henry did manage to pay for it all (through loans from Parliament and the seizure of church property).

And so all this talk about the Trump candidacy being unprecedented isn’t quite right. We’ve seen this guy before, albeit as a disgraced 16th century monarch who’s fallen on the wrong side of history. I wonder what Henry would have done with a nuke?

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Dirtbag Economics

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

With 98 days to go until the election [President, United States], it’s going to become very difficult to think or hear about much else over the next three months. We’ll be reminded continually that our lives are terrible (in case you forgot), that a man in a turban is definitely going to murder you some time in the next 36 hours, and that the only possible way to improve the economy looks a lot like the beginning of Ferngully.

And it’s all true. Especially about the economy. Just look at Texas, that shining example of how government regulation just stands in the way of unfettered economic prosperity for all [natural born, white] Americans. I’m sorry I didn’t hear you, what’s that about the oil market? Oh, shit. I meant Utah. Let’s look at Utah. It’s a shining example of . . .

There’s going to be a lot of back and forth, in this next quarter year, about the economy and how best to fix it. Many of you probably feel strongly about that conversation which is interesting because many of you probably don’t really understand it. I sure as hell don’t. And so I’m not going to spend these thousand words on getting into treasonous ideas like suggesting that sustainable energy production can avoid the boom/bust cycle that ravages rural America, or that the War on Drugs hasn’t actually failed at all because it was never about drugs in the first place, or that neo-conservative foreign policy over the last several decades can go a long way to explaining the whole “ISIS” thing, or that the strongest proxy for economic growth is investment in education and not lax regulations at all, or that (and stay with me here) one popular candidate didn’t know that Russia invaded Ukraine like a year and a half ago (and, like, let that last one sink in for a minute).

Instead I’d like to spend a few minutes discussing a different set of economic principles that are a bit more tangible for folks who’s biggest uncertainty in life is whether to go fishing or mountain biking this weekend.

Tenets of a Dirtbag Economy

On Beer – Beer is the common currency of a dirtbag economy. A six pack is legal tender for early rides to the airport, borrowing a trad rack, or putting a huge core shot in your roommate’s brand new DPS Wailers. But remember that not all beer is created equal.

There are two suitable avenues for beer-as-remuneration. You may purchase semi-ironic macro produced swill (Pabst, Hamm’s, Schlitz), or you may support a local brewery. Here in Montana, it would be considered bad form to show up with a case of Sierra Nevada or New Belgium. Those guys make fine beer, sure, but keep it local, yokel.

The Growler Problem: A growler is the worst way to transport beer (except for maybe in your cupped hands). A growler goes flat in like 4 hours and is a half inch too tall for every refrigerator shelf. On the bright side, a growler encourages revelry on delivery and so it’s a great way to drink a portion of the gift.

Depreciable Assets – Skiing powder is about the best thing a human being can do. Now, I’ve never skydived from space, or received total consciousness or anything, but I’ve seen some shit and skiing pow is at the top of the list. And it’s well documented that you cannot ski powder without this year’s skis, so you’re going to need to unload those sticks from last season.

Of course everyone trying to sell their skis every year creates a market surplus, which combined with the fact that no one wants your clapped out shit, leads to 80% or more depreciation of skis in the first year. You thought motorhomes lose their value fast? Try selling a pair of Soul 7s with last year’s topsheet art.

A similar phenomenon exists with mountain bikes, stand up paddleboards, and devil sticks, but nothing depreciates like skis. Of course everything depreciates, so we can’t that bent out of shape if the curve is a bit steeper for the best toys.

The Toyota Paradox – Everything depreciates except, by definition, investments. And to hell with gold and Apple stock, I’ve never seen a better investment than an old Toyota. I have a friend who bought a Toyota Tacoma, drove the shit out of it for four years, and then sold it for a profit. That’s a true story. No blogger creative license necessary. And that wasn’t even a classic. 

You know that the pre-’86s had a solid front axle, right? That’s so sick for four wheeling and for looking rad in the Whole Foods parking lot. The 22re engine is well documented to run for infinity miles. All you have to do is change the oil and I heard you don’t even have to do that. Seriously. Look it up. It’s on Expedition Portal’s Instagram.

yota
116k miles (or 216k? 316k?), only kind of rusty. 90th percentile of quality, I swear. $5k. Won’t last long. Solid front axle perfect for picking up chicks at the farmer’s market.

As a dirtbag economics certified financial adviser I recommend that you cash in your 401k immediately and go buy this truck (this deal won’t last long).

This extends to pre-1992 Volkswagen vans, bonus points for a Westy. If you have a Syncro just retire now.

The Nalgene Proletariat – You have never purchased a Nalgene bottle. You are incredulous, but it’s true. It’s just not how dirtbag economics work. You can’t, like, own, a Nalgene bottle, man. What you really purchased was a share in a global Nalgene bottle co-op. They come, they go, we don’t get all teary eyed about it. It’s beautiful.

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