A Conspiracy Theory

This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids (who exist), and my great-grandkids (who don't) — the Stickies — to haunt them after they become grups or I'm deleted.

                                -Image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay- 

                  
Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, and/or grups may result in a debilitating intersectional triggering

                                                  Glossary  

                                                    About

Erratically Appearing Hallucinatory Guest Star: Dana — A Gentlerreader

"The growth in ethanol and biodiesel is something that I have worked on since I was secretary of agriculture in Kansas. I would like to see a lot more progress, because I think there is a real score to be made on this." -Sam Brownback 


Dear (eventual) Grandstickies & Great-Grandstickies (& Gentlereaders),

Since I'm running for king via a write-in campaign, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I should run the country if elected. After all, look at how effective the never-ending conspiracies of the Deep State have been at messing with the Donald.

As you can no doubt well imagine, this is a daunting task requiring much in-depth pondering.

[Almost too much for one mere mortal I would think.]

Too true, Dana, too true.

But since no one with a clue would want to be the king, or even president, of a republic that's in the middle of a cold civil war (so far anyways, fingers crossed...) and facing a future of financial and epidemiological uncertainty, who's more qualified than me?

[Exactly!... No, wait a second, are you saying that...]

I'm saying this would be the perfect time to insert an Uncle Joe/Daffy Donald joke but I'm above that sort of thing so I won't.


The Original Persons (OPs), aka the Founding Fathers, having read the classics, set up a republic because they knew that the fly in the democracy ointment was that democracies tended to devolve into rival factions competing for power and goodies (sound familiar?) and tyrannies (fingers on the other hand crossed).

This would be the perfect time to insert a joke about all those folks who are still waiting for the Donald to declare himself Lord High Muckety-Muck and start locking people up in all those FEMA built concentration camps. It's almost as if most of them never really believed what they were saying in the first place.

I believe that conscious conspiracies, that is to say, secret evil plots designed and implemented by an evil genius/family/organization/etceteration, are, at best, mostly crap.

[Mostly?]

Wiggle room, Dana, wiggle room. Anything's possible, although many things are unlikely.

However, I'm a firm believer in conspiracies of convenience.

[And what exactly are...]

Read on, my imaginary friend.


A conspiracy of convenience is one that doesn't require a Dr. Evil or even a Simon Bar Sinister to concoct and control.

A group of people who just so happen to benefit from particular policies or Rules&Regs can find themselves involved in the same conspiracy without ever having met most, if any, of their fellow conspirators.

The pursuit of riches and/or power creates conspiracies out of thin air.

[This would be a great time for an example.]

For example, ethanol.


Let the game begin!

In 2005, The Fedrl Gummit gifted the republic with the Energy Policy Act. Like all big honkin' laws created by the Leviathan, dissecting which senator, congressperson, lawyer, or lobbyist is responsible for what provision is virtually impossible.

Not a conspiracy, just a whole lot of people chasing money, power, and reelection. This is how a nationwide game of You Scratch My Back and I'll Scratch Yours gets started spontaneously.

The act, among many other provisions that provide subsidies from Uncle Sugar, mandated blending ethanol with gasoline via the Renewable Fuel Standard.

The Renewable Fuel Standard is a sprawling mess that's been a very effective jobs program. As for cleaning up the environment, not so much.

I found an excellent article in Reason from 2014 that tells the whole awful story. The following paragraph from the article sums things up nicely.

"America's ethanol requirement destroys the environment, damages car engines, increases gas prices, and contributes to the starvation of the global poor. It's an unmitigated disaster on nearly every level." 

[What?...why?...I mean...] 

Simple, so many people are feeding at the corn trough that ethanol is now an industry.


Meet the Renewable Fuels Association. "We are the leading trade association for America's ethanol industry, working to expand demand for American-made renewable fuels and bio-products worldwide." 

Check out their website: They are literal flag wavers. 

Mission statement translation: We're the leading cabal (there's so much money to be made it takes more than one) in a conspiracy of convenience. Unleash the lobbyists!  


Jim Doti and Laurence Iannaccone conveniently published an article in the Wall Street Journal just as I was trying to figure out how to end this column. Thanks, guys. You can access it via my Facebook page without having a WSJ subscription. 

Bottom line? We're swimming in ethanol because so much is being produced, but "...fuel producers can’t use it, since adding any more to gasoline will damage car engines."

Poppa loves you,
Have an OK day

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Cranky don't tweet. 




We are the leading trade association for America’s ethanol industry, working to drive expanded demand for American-made renewable fuels and bio-products worldwide.







 


 


 

A Day Late and a Dollar Short

This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandchildren (who exist), and my great-grandchildren (who don't) — the Stickies — to haunt them after they become grups or I'm deleted.

                                -Image from dracomania.org-

                  
Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, and/or grups may result in a debilitating intersectional triggering

                                                  Glossary  

                                                    About

Erratically Appearing Hallucinatory Guest Star: Dana — A Gentlerreader

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." -Thomas Edison


Dear (eventual) Grandstickies & Great-Grandstickies (& Gentlereaders),

I've been thinking about karma lately and it's occurred to me that perhaps bad karma explains the fact that the phrase a day late and a dollar short neatly encapsulates a recurring theme in my life. 

I've also been thinking about the fact that a pair of large corporate entities, at whose hands I suffered, have gone out of business.

Are these two phenomena related?

Nah... Right?


Once upon a time, In Youngstown, Ohio, a man named Harry Burt, who owned a candy shop, invented what is now the world-famous Good Humor bar. Mr. Burt was a little known business genius who died when he was only 51 years old leaving his widow to fight his (patent) battles.

In the spring of 1981, a hippie with a job quit and became a Good Humor man on a whim. Like almost everyone who ever drove an ice cream truck of some sort, I stumbled into the business. I needed the cash.

The bad news is the business had already peaked and a long, slow slide had begun.

I loved the work, the money was good, and I was in and out of the business over the course of the next several years. However, I was involved in a business of slowly diminishing returns.

I was a day late and had accidentally entered the field when I was a dollar short.


Not long after my first foray into popsicle peddling, I found myself working for Kmart as an overworked, underpaid stockroom boss and then, briefly, a store manager trainee.

This was all about "getting straight" (which didn't mean then what it does now) to qualify for getting married to a blond girl next door type and making a baby, maybe two.

Neither I nor the Kmart corporation knew that they had peaked and were about to be destroyed by WallyWorld.

First, Kmart broke my heart, and then she did. I was training to become a computer programmer (the getting married thing again) when she started using my testicles as a trapeze.

This was just the first time Kmart would break my heart (more on that anon), it was the second time a woman did — there had been this hippie chick with a job...


Fast forward to our hero attempting to heal his broken heart via a geographic cure. When I came to I was managing a fleet of ice cream trucks in Austin, Texas.

As my dear Stickies know, I hired the woman who would shortly be my wife. She came pre-equipped with a ten-year-old who grew up to be their mom. Lured to Ohio by my late wife to meet her family, I got stuck and took up temporary residence.

We were supposed to return to Texas but 35 years later I'm still living here
temporarily. But the mountains of North Carolina are calling out to me in my dreams...

[Are they yodeling?]


Anyways, being an allegedly full-fledged grown up with a wife and daughter, I became an assistant warehouse manager for Toys Were Us. They eventually discovered that they had also peaked and would, in short order, also be destroyed by WallyWorld.

Toys etc. treated me even worse than Kmart had.

BIG BUT
There was a management buyout eventually and I had gone to a great deal of trouble (I had been tipped off) to be one of the folks invited to leave while not getting fired while waiting for the ax to fall.

This enabled me to buy an ice cream truck — almost an exact copy of the one pictured above — and start dreaming about becoming a goody bar mini-mogul.

ANOTHER BIG BUT
Life happened to me while I was making other plans and when I came to this time I found myself a widower managing a crew of 18 for a commercial cleaning contractor. We cleaned a hooge warehouse.

It was a distribution center owned by a much diminished Kmart.

Once again, I (and 18 other victims) were screwed over by Kmart Inc. and I found myself a fifty-something white, cisgender male without privilege at the height of the Great (so far, stay tuned...) Recession.

Hilarity ensued.

I limped — literally, I had what turned out to be a busted hip — to early retirement and was appropriately punished for my crime by the Social Security Administration.

I derive no joy from the fact Kmart and We Were Toys (effectively) are history. All those lost jobs... Nothing to do with me, right?

Poppa loves you,
Have an OK day

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Your friendly neighborhood crank is not crazy about social media (I am a crank after all) but if you must, you can like me/follow me on Facebook. 

Cranky don't tweet.




 

Make America Polite Again

This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandchildren (who exist), and my great-grandchildren (who don't) — the Stickies — to haunt them after they become grups or I'm deleted.

                        -Image by MorningbirdPhoto from Pixabay-

                  
Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, and/or grups may result in a debilitating intersectional triggering

                                                  Glossary  

                                                    About

Erratically Appearing Hallucinatory Guest Star: Dana — A Gentlerreader

"The only rules: be charming, be humane, be smart, and never take yourself too seriously." -Jeffrey A. Tucker


Dear (eventual) Grandstickies & Great-Grandstickies (& Gentlereaders),

Spread the word, King Crank has decided on his campaign slogan, Make America Polite Again (MAPA).

Uncle Joe and Uncle Bernie were more or less shunted aside when folks became preoccupied with surviving the plague. Uncle Joe is still shunted but apparently has secured the nomination as long as Tara Reade's charges don't stick, he doesn't drop dead, or isn't benched for dementia prior to the general election

Meanwhile, the Orange One canned the guy whose job it is (make that was) to keep an eye on how the $2,200,000,000 was spent.

Not to worry though, Aunt Nancy is creating a congressional committee to keep an eye on the checkbook while she's busy printing more money.


Not content to have spent all the money, and then some, and then some more, my fellow Boomers refuse to get off the field/leave the stage. OK, Boomer, retire for God's sake, if you can afford to.

There are three generations lined up behind you waiting for a turn. We need 'em to make babies and keep Social Security and Medicare afloat.   


At least we can take comfort from the fact that all right-thinking Citizens of the Republic have signed on to a provisional ceasefire, putting the culture war on hold...

Dana, what's with the cynical chortling?

[Sorry.]

And since the ravenous pack of professional pols at all levels of gummit, for the time being, are placing what's best for the citizenry ahead of what's best for the career of a given pol...

Dana, please!

[Sorry.]

Even though I'm running for king I shall remain remarkably restrained and not take advantage of the current crisis to attack my opponents for their world-class ball dropping.   

[Their what?]

I won't make much of the fact that the Donald and his minions have had three years to "restock the shelves," cleverly and simultaneously heaping scorn on both the present and the last administration (in which Uncle Joe played a minor role).

[Oh. Why?]

In times of trouble, we must all pull together as a team because when the going gets tough the tough get going, and as Winston Churchill said, "When you're going through hell keep going."

Etcetera.

[Oh. Absolutely. Right.]


Instead, I thought this might be a good time to introduce my campaign slogan, Make America Polite Again (MAPA), given that I've consciously decided to set a good example and not exploit the current situation.

I wrote a column or two now gone missing somewhere in the mists of time about STEM, no, not that STEM. STEM, in this case, is an acronym for strategic good taste, etiquette, and modesty.

In order to MAPA we must implement STEM.

[Impressive. First, a high ground maneuver and then you insert two acronyms into the same sentence, perhaps you're more of a politician than I thought. Pray continue your weaselness.]


I define being polite as an acknowledgment that since we have to share the playground with other kids we need to minimize friction to maximize everyone's fun.

Strategic good taste refers to the fact that what constitutes good taste depends on a given situation and what other kids you're sharing the playground with at any given moment.

Example: A good fart joke, while sharing a drink or two with a like-minded fellow sophisticate, may be just the thing.

Telling the same joke to the minister after congratulating him/her/them on a great sermon may not.


Etiquette has little or nothing to do with extending your pinkie while sipping your tea as demurely as possible. It's simply trying not to irritate/repulse others.

Examples: Chewing with your mouth open is repulsive. Setting your phone on speaker and holding it a foot from your mouth and yelling at it so that anyone within hearing can share in your fascinating conversation is irritating.

It may also result in injury or death — yours.


And finally, modesty. Everyone knows why, or should, that braggadocio is usually tacky and uncalled for. If you don't, ask your mum to explain it to you. Example: Forming a chorus line to celebrate scoring a touchdown.

Also, although the awokened have awakened us all to the fact that males reacting like feral, horny dogs to even the slightest visual provocation, intentional or otherwise by females isn't basic biology, it's toxic masculinity, there are limits.

You may (or not) be hot, but believe it or not, we don't all want to see your _______. We especially don't want our kids to see your _______.

Poppa loves you,
Have an OK day

Please scroll down to react, comment, or share. If my work pleases you I wouldn't be offended if you offered to buy me some cheap coffee.  

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Your friendly neighborhood crank is not crazy about social media (I am a crank after all) but if you must, you can like me/follow me on Facebook. 

Cranky don't tweet.