Category: American wilderness

How stupid are we? (he asked, rhetorically)

When I was in high school, I worked afternoons in a grocery store, Albertson’s. In those days stores would buy a full two page newspaper ad each Thursday highlighting sale prices, and people would buy sale items, often in quantity. One day I noticed our assistant manager going around and marking up various items – I asked him “John, what’s this about?”

He said that they had to make up for money they lost on advertised sale items, so that part of his job was to go around and mark up enough stuff so that the store would break even on their “sale”.  It was a good life lesson on how things really worked. There were no computers in those days, so that the process was not foolproof, but was at least carefully calculated.

This morning on entering our local Kings Sooper I encountered this sign. It says that shopping carts will stop rolling if they leave the parking lot.

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Wagging the Moondoggie, the clip show

I would not be doing this were it not so much fun reading McGowan. He does have a nice sense of humor. I originally did this in reaction to Petra’s challenge, to find one scrap of evidence in McGowan’s 14 essays that in any way gives strength to the argument that we never went to the moon. Petra, if she can be believed this time, has now bailed. After one presentation!

Somewhere, in one of my moon essays, I showed photos of the supposed moon buggy used by the astronauts compared to a Willies Jeep. The guy did good work, getting hold of actual dimensions and then overlaying them over a buggy.

I thought I had written a post about this matter, but no luck finding it. I did search for the words “willies jeep” in our archives, and found that phrase was used in this post, in which I described every one of the 14 McGowan essays, so that the work I intended to do here was already done!  The clip show is over – just go to the link.

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Book talk

Anna Karenina

‘I shall get angry with Ivan the coachman in the same way, shall dispute in the same way, shall inopportunely express my thoughts; there will still be a wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people; even my wife I shall blame for my own fears and shall repent it. My reason will still not understand why I pray, but I shall pray, and my life, my whole life, independently of anything that may happen to me, is every moment of it no longer meaningless as it was before but has an unquestionable meaning of goodness with which I have the power to invest it.’

I decided going into ankle surgery and a period of disability that I would attempt to read what is considered one of the greatest works of fiction of all time, Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy. How would I know if it is the greatest? I cannot know any such thing, as I have not read enough of the classics. I should have more periods of disability, as a friend of ours in Bozeman, a wonderfully serene man and a Jewish physician, not only read Don Quixote, but when we knew him, was rereading it. There is something there. We have a copy upstairs, and I am tempted to give it a go.

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Wokism and other stuff

This is just a compendium of small matters that together amount to … a small matter.

Are you alive?

I am 72. I cannot believe how much time has passed, how my childhood is now so far away, and how various events in my life which I thought significant are now ‘distant’. I am not yet old in any sense other than the body does not keep up with the mind. When I went under the knife for surgery on my ankle, they gathered information on me, other surgeries, personal habits, all that stuff, and most importantly, what drugs am I taking? The answer: None. I take an occasional sleeping pill, but that is rare and mostly I don’t even think of it as I fall asleep at night. Other than that … nada. The reaction I got from the young lady at the orthopedic center, who does this for a living and whose clientele are mostly older folks like me … “amazing!”

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A beautiful scam by Viasat

We take satellite TV from Viasat, our only choice. No one else can deliver a signal to us, and our former TV carrier, Centurylink, went to hell on us, claiming its equipment is too old to adequately serve rural customers. This is a situation that has affected customers all over its Western base.

By and large, Viasat is just adequate. Relying as it does on satellites in geosynchronous orbit (and I know, some say satellites do not exist – I remain unconvinced) at 22,236 miles above the planet, there is a natural signal delay. We first noticed this as our phone signal, which we had connected to the Viasat router, was unusable because of a talk over delay. Same with our cell phones, so we 1) had to go back to Centurylink for land line service, adding $50 monthly to our cost of service from Viasat, and 2) had to turn off our cell phone reliance on the Viasat signal too, using T-Mobile and its weak signal to the house for cell service. In the end we were overpaying Viasat for services they could not deliver. But we had no choice other than to go bare or return to DirectTV and their overpriced service, wanting us to purchase 60+ channels when we only watch one or two. That business model is either dead or dying but they refuse to let it go.

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Unexpected wisdom

I enjoy the works of C.J. Box, a writer who lives in Wyoming and has given us the character Joe Pickett.

Pickett is a game warden, and has never wanted to do anything else. He is also a man who, knowingly or not, thrives on the idea that people automatically underestimate him. He does not look for trouble, but trouble finds him, and in Box’s world, this trouble manifests in an endless assortment of villains that find their way to the wilderness of northern Wyoming. Pickett is not Rambo, and does not automatically come out on top of his engagements with these assorted bad guys. He suffers, gets lost, makes mistakes, gets shot and loses one truck and horse after another, only surviving by some sort of native intelligence that pushes him to do something that allows him to, in the end, survive and to be with his wife, Marybeth, and daughters Sheridan and Lucy.

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Resolution for 2023: Decolonize, de-imperialize, and restore sovereignty

As a child of the 1950s and ‘60s I cannot help but see flashes of Vietnam in Empire’s latest – hopefully its final – military expedition(s).  Social media platforms and television propaganda maintain a persistent numbness.  Institutional and individual indifference breeds a hunger for bread and circuses, football, Disneyland, talk shows and star-spangled “influencers,” who excrete toxic slime from every crack and crevice.  The system now occupies every square inch of terrain.  Bureaucrats, bored out of their minds, nevertheless read the latest memo from Washington directing street operations programmed to steer the “hive mind” hither and yon, round and round, to a place called nowhere. 

It’s hard aimless work averting eyeballs — already robbed of their gaze — day in, day out, away from the wretched, inhumane global slave quarters and killing zones where pillage of the last untrammeled forests, grasslands, and scenic vistas produce commodities and emerging, synthetic  “Green” markets needed to keep the insatiable machines, financial schemes and meaningless political simulations from totally melting down.  Down this road is one logical end: suicide. 

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Underpinnings of revulsion

The year was 1996. I was quite full of myself, newly divorced and feeling a sense of freedom, intellectually and personally, that was quite new to me. I had written an op-ed piece in the local newspaper in which I stated that our Democratic Senator, Max Baucus, was a “faux bonhomme, or false friend. In those days the editorial page manager for that paper had a certain amount of leash extended, and pieces like mine could break through. He would, of course, later be canned. Independent streaks in journalists usually result in them doing something else for a living, and indeed that was his fate. He died in 2019, I just learned. His name was Gary Svee.

As result of that editorial, I was approached by Chet Blaylock, who himself was running for governor, a quixotic mission in facing Marc Racicot, immensely popular. Blaylock suffered a heart attack during his campaign and died. He was a nice man. On his persuasion, I elected to run for state legislature. I might as well have had a heart attack, so slim were my chances against Peggy Arnott, who was endorsed by Racicot, and who was a far superior campaigner than I. She won handily, and I bear her no ill will for my lesson, well learned. I was no politician. I vowed never again to run for office. (Peggy herself would shortly thereafter marry her sweetheart and exit politics.)

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A little help

I wrote a post called “Gaslit Nation” this morning, and while proof checking it on my iPad, accidentally deleted it. I then attempted a “restore” and hit “Delete permanently” instead. It is gone gone gone. (Those button commands are very close together and very sensitive.)

This is a long shot, but if you opened the post and left it open, you can copy the whole thing and send it to me – mark at mpthct dot com.

If you only opened the opening with the “read more” button not clicked, it is unrecoverable.

I will write it again later, but am hoping for a quicker fix.

MT

How to commit election fraud: Maricopa County example

My background is in accounting, though thankfully I am retired now for several years. A trait accounting shares with many other professions is a system of control that weeds out corruption and shady players. In accounting, it is called “internal control.”

The election in Maricopa County, Arizona, was chaos. The problem, we are told, is with the machines, not the people.

In school I learned that any accounting system that depends on the integrity of the people who run it is an ineffective system. That is not a slam on humanity, even as it sounds like one. The idea behind effective accounting administration is to devise a self-regulating system, and to audit it often, at least yearly. One means by which self-regulation is achieved (imperfectly, of course) is by means to separation of duties. The person who opens the mail does not record checks, and yet another person deposits those checks. The idea is that it is far less likely to achieve fraud if more than one person is involved.

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