Summer Reruns

The original column was published in July of 2015.

Image by JamesDeMers from Pixabay

This weekly column consists of letters written to my perspicacious progeny — the Stickies — to advise 'em now and haunt them after I'm deleted.

Trigger Warning: This column is rated SSC-65: Sexy Seasoned Citizens   

About 

Glossary 

Featuring {Dana}: Persistent auditory hallucination and charming literary device 

“Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country” -John F. Kenedy

Dear Stickies (and gentlereaders),  

Greetings and Salutations from the South of France!

Very long story short, a friend of mine, who just happens to be an absurdly wealthy business mogul whose identity I've promised to not reveal...

{Does his last name rhyme with tusk?}

When he discovered that the executive staff of The Flyoverland Crank, Inc. was enjoying a most expenses paid retreat on the shores of Lake Erie to work out the details of a significant change of company policy (stay tuned) and that we would be publishing reruns of beloved columns for the next month or so...

Well, he suggested I borrow his villa in the South of France for a much-needed break and induced a... um, friend of his, Collette, to be my personal tour guide to help make the most of the experience since I've never been out of North America. 

Another long story short (forgive me) concerns the fact that when I started to "lightly edit" old columns for republication I discovered that while basic narratives generally held up, facts and my personal opinions had often changed. 

Most importantly, my writing style has changed so much that what follows is a heavily edited version of the original that's essentially a new column. Looks like my vacation is going to be a working vacation but it's better than no vacation. 

With apologies to JFK, I ask not why The Fedrl Gummit is so jacked up — I ask (all things considered) why it works as well as it does. 

I'm no wild-eyed campus-crashing Wokie. I'm merely a sorta/kinda libertarian with strong conservative impulses and undeniable leftover old-school liberal notions as I'm very concerned about what should be done to aid those left behind by the global economy.

I believe we need rules on the playground, as well as an intelligently designed safety net. But I would like the rules to be as few in number as possible and rationally conceived so as to maximize our fun and minimize our stepping on each other's toes. 

And I can't help but wonder if our ever-growing debt is going to blow up the economy because we're not willing to do what it's going to take to truly slay the inflation dragon.

{Those left behind? You ain't seen nothin' yet. Wait till white-collar jobs start being "disrupted" out of existence by AI in significant enough numbers to begin generating scary headlines and stories — written by AI! Look on the bright side, with any luck, you'll be dead before the economy collapses.}

I wonder if the arrogant, dismissive phrase "learn to code" will be replaced by learn to weld, or plumb, or build? But I've gotta stay focused on rewriting the original version of this column, Dana, my new friend Collette has made dinner reservations for us at Auberge du Vieux Puit in the Corbières Hills this evening. 

{Right. Good thing staying focussed is one of your strong points.}

Our national debt is 57,000 103,000 bucks each as this is being written, and steadily increasing as you read this. While cutting spending is always occasionally on the agenda, both parties define "cuts" as spending a little less on planned increases over a ten-year period, to make the numbers bigger.

Think about that. 

Congressperson Stumblebum looks into the camera and with steely resolve states that if re-elected she'll battle to get government spending under control. How? Simply, increase spending by slightly less than planned over the next decade, and call it a spending cut. 

She won't put it like that though. She'll tell us that under her plan spending at the Department of Bonkercockie will be reduced by a billion dollars a year. 

With a little luck, Congressperson Stumblebum will be a lobbyist long before the decade is up and she'll no longer have to dirty her hands running for office in order to get her dirty little hands on other people's money.

She, and most likely the media source that provides you with this information won't bother to remind you that we don't have ten-year budgets. We have one-year budgets, at least in theory, we haven't actually operated under one since 2010 I don't know when. 

{Ah-ha! So the number you used back in 2015 was...}

I confess I can't remember where I got it, and when I went a-googlin' to see if it was accurate I got so lost I gave up and had to take a nap. The Worldwide Web of Contradictory Knowledge (WWCK) supplied multiple answers 

{AI is going to fix that!}  

"Back in the day," President Obama created the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles Commission (2010) to study and make recommendations for fixing our financial problems. 

You may have noticed The Fedrl Gummit long ago maxed out its credit cards, but the issuer (themselves) keeps sending out new ones (to themselves).

The commission was originally a provision of a bipartisan law that would require Congress to vote only up or down on the commission's recommendations since Congress long ago lost its ability to compromise on virtually anything. 

The law was never actually passed, in fact, some of the original co-sponsors voted against it. Mr. Obama decided to set up the commission by executive order. 

The commission figured out that if we were to plug enough loopholes and eliminate enough special favors and social engineering from the tax code we could lower everyone's taxes. Toss in some real spending cuts and entitlement reform and now you're getting somewhere!

Mr. Obama, and Congress, stuck the report in a drawer and returned to Job-1, getting/staying elected.   

Mismanaging our money is not the only task The Fedrl Gummit excels in. No private entity can hope to match the government when it comes to creating rules and regulations. 

The Federal Register is the official record of all the Rules&Regs you're supposed to follow if you have the good fortune to live in the USA.

If there was a board game about the USA called, Life In a Free Country? in addition to the instructions on how to play the game you'd need an app to keep track of all the Rules&Regs you need to follow in order to remain on the straight and narrow as prescribed by Congress and the 2,711,000 2,950,000 civilian employees of The Fedrl Gummit.

I got the new number from USAFacts — "The federal government employs almost three million people and is larger than some industries in the US." However, if you go a-googlin you will discover different numbers reported by different sources so feel free to choose the one you prefer.

Incidentally, USAFacts was founded by Steve Ballmer, a former Microsoft CEO with more money than God who picks up the tab. 

It's not a registered (tax dodging) non-profit, it doesn't run ads, and nothing's for sale. He put it together, and maintains it, because "...unlike businesses, US governments are not mandated to compile reports on their expenditures...Americans need access to government data to understand the state of the nation."

Oh, I almost forgot, The Federal Register has  80,000 90,402 pages.

How on Earth did Congress find the time to write so many Rules & Regs? That's where the 2,711,000 2,950,000 bureaucrats come in. 

Realizing that writing all those Rules&Regs themselves would be inefficient and detract from time spent on Job-1, Congress passes thousand-page laws without reading them that authorize bureaucrats to create the Rules&Regs needed to put the brilliant ideas of their overlords into effect.

That's right fellow citizens, America has 2,711,000 2,950,000 potential rule writers on the Swamp's payroll.

The good news is the Supremes are currently contemplating doing away or at least placing limits on rule by bureaucracy. Fingers crossed. 

Poppa loves you,

Have an OK day

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The Elites

Image by Jo Wiggijo from Pixabay

NEWS RELEASE

For immediate dissemination

Planet Earth, Milky Way Galaxy — The planet Earth Inc. has announced that the battle of the New Millenium is underway. 

On the undercard: Normies vs. LGBTQ+++ 

Main event: Pasty patriarchal hegemonistic Euro-imperialists vs. Womyn and People of Various Hues 

Proudly promoted by the Purple Press: Down in power, but not out, baby!

This weekly column consists of letters written to my perspicacious progeny — the Stickies — to advise 'em now and haunt them after I'm deleted.

Trigger Warning: This column is rated SSC-65: Sexy Seasoned Citizens   

About 

Glossary 

Featuring {Dana}: Persistent auditory hallucination and charming literary device 

"I worked with these liberal elites for 28 years at CBS News, and they were always throwing around the term 'white trash,' by which they meant poor southerners who didn't go to Harvard. I'm not sure why that makes them trash." -Bernard Goldberg

Dear Stickies (and gentlereaders),  

The real fight, the elites of America vs. the rest of us, ain't even listed on the undercard. Let me begin by defining some terms and providing a bit of background. 

There was a more or less widely reported news story back in January that lasted about a minute before sinking in the Dizzinformation Ocean.

{I can't imagine why, but then again you're just now writing about this, who's paying you off, Sparky?}

Do you remember the Occupy Wall Street protest of 2011 that lasted for 59 days? Let's send the 1% to the guillotine? 

Till relatively recently I've personally thought that a sub-class of the 1%, people like Bezos, Gates, Cook, Zuckerberg, the Google Gang, and a relative handful of mega-billionaire businessmenpersons — infected with the Woke Mind Virus (WMV) or willing to fake it — were the sort we should all be worried about and keeping an eye on.

{Not to mention no shortage of spoiled progeny, ex-wives, and awokened foundations that have turned on the evil capitalist who started them.}

This is true, Dana, but there are people with money bins bigger than anything Scrooge McDuck could even dream of who have plenty of money and power because of the companies they run and/or control. 

They're not only gazillionaires, they're titans with global reach and the power to shape what information (and propaganda) we have access to and the ability (and willingness) to "disrupt" entire industries for fun and profit.

And here comes AI. 

Big BUT, over the years a new class has evolved, the elites. 

At the behest of an organization called The Committee to Unleash Prosperity, the Rasmussen people conducted a survey that divided respondents into two groups, the general public and the elites. Then they issued a report based on the results. 

Elites are defined as people w/at least one post-graduate degree, who've graduated from a handful of prestigious universities, earn more than 150k a year, and who live in zip codes with more than 10,000 people per square mile.

They also are often either infected with WMV, or at least claim to be, to shield themselves from the rest of us and/or justify/rationalize their power and privilege. 

{That wasn't in the report!}

No, it wasn't, but this was, "In a time when most Americans have suffered a loss of real take-home pay, 74% of elites say they are financially better off today than in the past...." 

You might think that a survey that revealed the opinions and viewpoints of these people would go viral instead of sinking to the bottom of the Dizzinformation Ocean in short order, particularly given the results. 

But these are the people who have control of and/or work for the Un-huh! Nuh-uh! machine (the internet), media of all sorts, academia, Hollywood, woke HR departments, etc.

"While 40% of Americans say their financial situation is worsening, just 20% say it’s improving."

One of the happy side effects of the American experiment was the development of a hooge middle class, our largest population cohort. It's so large we divide it into three sectors: lower-middle, middle-middle, and upper-middle.

The rich, of course, have always punched above their weight. Money = power, but the middle classes traditionally have had plenty of power of their own. 

Many of the rich started out there, or even at the bottom, and retain middle-class common sense and sensibilities. It's still possible for the poor to claw their way up the food chain but it's much harder than it used to be.

Despite the hollowing out of America's industrial base, which used to finance the masses in the middle, there are still plenty of jobs around, at least at the moment. But even the ones that pay relatively decently require too many hours and/or two incomes for everyone in the house to keep their heads above water.

{Well, maybe, but... Wait, who's raising the kids?}

A century or so of slow but steady currency debasement, systemic inflation, and now living off the national credit card is catching up with our republic. 

The average Joe, Joan, or J. Bagadonuts technically lives in the same America as the elites but inhabits a different reality.

The full report is well worth reading, but I know how busy most of you are. Since this is a full-service column, here are some of the highlights of the report listed in its executive summary. 

"Below, we highlight some of the profound attitudinal differences between elites and average Americans:

- Nearly six in ten say there is too much individual freedom in America...

- More than two-thirds (67%) favor rationing of vital energy and food sources to combat the threat of climate change.

- ...70% of the Elites trust the government to 'do the right thing.'

- Two-thirds (67%) say teachers and other educational professionals should decide what children are taught rather than letting parents decide.

- Somewhere between half and two-thirds favor banning things like SUVs, gas stoves, air conditioning, and non-essential air travel to protect the environment.

- About six of ten elites have a favorable opinion of the so-called talking professions — lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, and journalists."

- 81% report never missing one of The Flyoverland Crank's weekly columns. 

{You made that last one up!}

Poppa loves you,

Have an OK day

Scroll down if you wish to share my work or access my golden oldies.   

I post links to my columns (and other stuff) on Facebook so that you can love me, hate me, or lobby to have me publicly flogged.  

Snifftoss and the Reluctant Guest

A sort of short short story

Image by tenario1 from Pixabay

This weekly column consists of letters written to my perspicacious progeny — the Stickies — to advise 'em now and haunt them after I'm deleted.

Trigger Warning: This column is rated SSC-65: Sexy Seasoned Citizens   

About 

Glossary 

Featuring {Dana}: Persistent auditory hallucination and charming literary device

"Deep breaths are very helpful at shallow parties." -Barbra Walters  

Dear Stickies (and gentlereaders),

Your humble correspondent has written a sort of short short story (short, short story? short short-story? a short... never mind). 

The speaker (mentally) executes a sniff and a toss of their head to one side. 

While the guest, technically speaking, can't hear the sniff or see the speaker's hair being tossed with thinly disguised contempt, the speaker's attitude is crystal clear.

The reluctant guest, a reasonably well-adjusted man of a certain age, comfortable with his introverted nature and whose social anxieties have declined in power with each passing year, had made the mistake of initiating the encounter in the first place, 

He was reluctantly attending a social function that he would've much preferred to avoid but there were more reasons to be there there than there were to stay home. Finding himself caught in a situation with the head-tossing dismissive sniffer that required small talk had led to him commenting on a television show currently enjoying quite a bit of favorable notoriety. 

Given that, nowadays idiot boxes are ubiquitous and range in size from square inches to square feet with thousands of entertainment choices on offer if you're willing/able to subscribe to enough content providers...

And that, he was old enough to remember that when there were only a handful of choices (available on a handful of devices that were fairly limited in both size, choice, and functionality) which made it possible to find common ground for discussion...  

He thought, he was on secure ground since even if the speaker thought the show in question was stupid they would have something to discuss. In fact, Snifftoss might even enjoy pointing out exactly why no H. sapin in their right mind would waste their time on such a cultural travesty. 

He thought, he was safe because he rarely watched anything that included commercials and was very picky about what he did watch, which were usually shows offered by one streaming service or another that he thought was of higher quality than the average rubbish on the menu. 

However, being smart enough, and having lived long enough to realize what he thought was a quality show would be considered rubbish by no shortage of other people had taught him to be both cautious and diplomatic about such things. To avoid hurting people's feelings when possible, but to hold his ground when it wasn't. 

Most importantly, he had learned to try and avoid feeding his ego by demonstrating his superiority to anyone, about anything. He had been paying attention long enough to have learned that it was possible to do this accidentally, that many of his fellow H. sapiens psyches, as well as his own, were veritable emotional minefields sown with an easily triggered this or that or even that other thing.

"Well, personally, I find it watchable. And obviously, they dot all the Is and cross all the Ts, but there's just no there, there" said Snifftoss. 

RED ALERT! ALL HANDS ON DECK! SHIELDS UP! MAY THE FORCE BE WITH US!

The guest, instantly grasping that Snifftoss was eager, and would be delighted, to explain themselves politely (but cautiously) replied, "Oh yeah?" 

"People of color? Check."

"LGBT plus? Check." 

"Powerful, non-stereotypical characters presenting as females? Check."

"But what's the point? It's yet another drama that hits all the typical high points that've been around forever. Love, sex, angst, adventure, sex, violence, revenge, God and/or the gods, more sex, occasional humor for a pallet cleanser, good guys v. bad guys, etc, etc, etc."

As I said, what's the point?"

At this point, Snifftoss stops and is obviously waiting for a reply. The guest was still on high alert, but only because he was slightly worried that escaping from this encounter could get ugly. Who was this guy anyway? Crap rolls downhill. What if he was in a position to somehow take it out on the listener's host, a personal friend of the reluctant guest, if he felt he had been slighted?

"Um..., well I suppose it's possible the point is just decent entertainment. In fact, I've wondered about this sort of thing for years. Why do we like stories so much, point or no point, beyond the fact we find a given story to just be a damn good story, well told? 

He was hoping to change the direction of the subject, fearing where he thought Snifftoss was headed, but he wasn't optimistic. 

"I see where you're going," replied Snifftoss, "I guess I'm just jaded. And after all, the postmodernists have freed us from the need for meaning and/or narrative."

The guest swallowed a groan and wondered if it showed on his face. He hoped that Snifftoss would next unknowingly contradict himself and start spinning meanings and/or narratives, which might prove to be interesting.

However, he thought it more likely that he would take the trail to Nihilismberg, oblivious to the fact that this was also a narrative — a dull, dark, boring one with a dead end. Inspiration dawned and he thought he'd try cutting 'em off at the pass and lay a didactic booby trap.   

"I've settled on the notion that all meaningful fiction is a form of distilled reality that contains fundamental lessons each new generation needs to learn, just packaged in a more palatable way than say religion, philosophy, or the like. Not an original idea on my part obviously, but it works for me, and my grandkids confirm it as far as I'm concerned" he replied. 

But I think I've learned all those sorts of lessons, so I don't understand why I still enjoy good stories so much. I must admit I'm also a bit jaded but I'm hoping to live long enough to meet a great-grandkid or two, that'll help get me through to the end. In the meantime, I'm trying to learn how to play the harmonica.

Any thoughts?" 

He smiled and politely waited for a response.

Poppa loves you,

Have an OK day

Scroll down if you wish to share my work or access my golden oldies.   

I post links to my columns (and other stuff) on Facebook so that you can love me, hate me, or lobby to have me publicly flogged.