The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

‘The kettle is black’, said the pot accusingly.

“It’s truly incredible that shows like Saturday Night Live, not funny/no talent, can spend all of their time knocking the same person (me), over & over, without so much of a mention of ‘the other side.’ Like an advertisement without consequences. Same with Late Night Shows……” POTUS. See? Even Donald has had enough. And where is the investigation into Hillary and the Russians? Where are those investigations about SNL colluding with the Democrats? How about Benghazi?? Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi. Why did we quit investigating Benghazi???

Those damn commies writing for NBC, they think they can get away with undermining American confidence in their president week after week by satirizing everything he says, everything he stands for, everything he tweets. Writers? C’mon, Donald writes the script nearly verbatim for them. They shouldn’t be paid, they should be locked up as subversives, same as Colbert, same as Noah Trevor, same as most of those left-leaning smug comedians and their sneering Hollywood pals.

The secret to a good Presidency is to attack when attacked. Sure, that article came out last week in the New Yorker by Jane Mayer, pretty much connecting Fox News with this administration in damning detail, so rather than make a spirited defense, take a spirited offense. Find a scapegoat, spin the news, punch somebody in the face. Roy Cohn taught him well. The ghost of Eugene McCarthy is smiling from the gates of Hell every tweet. Great student, Trump!

This morning he went after Saturday Night Live AND John McCain. When the going gets tough, double down, two punches are always better than one. Now McCain is the one who needs to be investigated. McCain was no hero; in fact, he might have been a traitor, the guy who gave that Steele report to the Enemy. You need to sink pretty low to punch a man in the face who’s already down in the grave. But low has become the new standard the past few years. Never apologize, never admit to wrongdoing, blame the press, blame the dead, blame the lady in the porn star dress.

‘The pot is black’, said the kettle, defending itself. Meanwhile the stew is burning.

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Light the candles, haul out the cake, open the presents! The Web is 30 years old. Remember when we all thought this would free the oppressed, topple authoritarian regimes, democratize information and liberate us all? Barely ten years later Google opened up shop and every bit and byte of data was available to anyone who owned a computer at the touch of a keystroke. Nine years after Google the I-phone made computers mobile and Apple rich. This was 2007, a mere 12 years ago. Time flies when you’re revolutionizing the world!

Thirty years. You probably remember the first personal computer you owned. Not that long ago. They were introduced in 1975. The mizzus had one probably about 1985. I got one about turn of the century. The one I’m using now is probably the 4th generation. Karen’s is probably double that. I remember sitting at the kitchen table with her and a friend, arguing whether a computer was just a tool or whether it was a revolution. That conversation has morphed into whether the revolution is beneficial or malevolent. Future Shock is behind us now. Future Fear is here.

The Tech magnates rule the world. They own the data for every keystroke you make on the internet, every purchase you make online, every biographical reveal you put up on Facebook, every route you take, every step you make. They analyze it, they use it, they sell it, they watch you day and night. Zuckerberg believes in an open society, one without secrets, one where you cannot hide. He made it so.

The democratization of information turned out to be only half the story. The dissemination of false news is the other half. Turns out we don’t have the wits to check our facts so we’re suckers for every hate monger, political dirty trickster, government intrusion, crooked scammer and the 500 pound kid on the bed in his parents’ basement. We mumble about monitoring Facebook or Google, we pound our chest about loss of privacy, we make speeches in the legislatures about clamping Pandora’s Box partway down. Give me a break.

The genie is out of the box and howling now. Artificial Intelligence is just around the corner. We can no longer imagine the world before the Web any more than we could imagine one before the steam engine. No one pines for the horse drawn carriage, no one wants to be tethered to a land line phone, no one wants to live without their Facebook friends. I had a fire down at my electrical panel box yesterday and my neighbor, the one I’d run across the road to have call the fire department, seemed to gloat when he asked me after the fire had been put out, if I still thought I was smart not owning a cellphone. I told him there was no way I was buying a $#@&^ cellphone. It doesn’t make me smart, but I’m digging some heels against the winds that blow me toward a future I don’t trust any more.

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Brain Flu Pandemic (You Can Fool Half of the People All of the Time)

The latest polls that came out this week show that for the first time most Americans think the Mueller investigation is a witch hunt, more than those who don’t by 4 percentage points. This is after a dozen indictments of associates, some already convicted, some of the others pleading guilty, plus the President’s personal attorney testifying that he’s a crook, a fraud, a womanizer and worse.

It would be easy to blame Fox News and Breitbart. Easy to blame the Russian bots. Easy to blame Facebook. But … what I think we got here is some kind of bio-engineered flu that short circuits the cognitive paths of the human brain. It’s the only explanation that makes any sense. So it must be true. All of you who took the brain flu shot and avoided the malady must be thinking: how is this possible? How is that over 50% of my fellow Americans have decided that the investigation into collusion with the Russians is nothing but a witch hunt? When day after day another link pops up implicating the Trumps, all of them, with inappropriate contacts with Russians, all hoping to get their greedy little fingers into that borsht called the Trump Tower Moscow. They and their operatives have repeatedly lied about meetings with the Moscovites, some are now in jail even. But the investigation is a witch hunt???

Add to that the obvious attempt to impede, interfere with and obstruct the investigation. Trump fired Comey and bragged to the Russians that he’d taken care of that little ‘problem’. He raged at Sessions, hammered Rosenstein, dictated false accounts for his son, aw, on and on, it just becomes obvious to any but the brain flu impaired. Does this add up to impeachment? Will that man go to jail? Let’s skip that for now. It does add up to more than mild proof that the Mueller investigation has got its witches lined up. Whether we drown them in the pond or burn them at the stake, that’s coming later.

They say a country gets the Leader it deserves. I guess if the brain flu has destroyed the minds of most of the nation, they must deserve a Leader whose own brain is defective. But it doesn’t seem fair, does it? I mean, it has to be some sort of disease, maybe a bio-attack by those pesky Chinese or those idolatrous Moslems, turning us into virulent viral emailers, alt-right enthusiasts and white supremacists. They’ve even turned the religious into fanatic haters. It’s like a political rabies, horrible, maybe irreversible.

Short of a vaccine to protect the 48% who still have frontal lobe activity, the truth is that a majority of us citizens now don’t really care what crimes Trump may have committed. They’re not going to fire him, they wouldn’t care if he shoots a few folks on 5th Avenue with an automatic assault rifle. Probably immigrants anyway. Rapists, drug peddlers, gang members. Good riddance. Fascism has come to the Land of the Free. More than Trump are guilty of obstruction of justice.

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You do-it-yerselfers pay attention. This is a cautionary tale, like most of what I put out here for the edification of fellow imbeciles. I believe I just wrote a sermon on Knowing Yer Limitations, so maybe this is just insult to injury or maybe a double dose of Be Careful, What You Don’t Know Might Just Kill You!!

I’ve been having electrical problems down at the old house, now my glass shack. Lights flicker, then the line goes dead. The breaker doesn’t break, but I turn it off anyway, then in a few hours it’s okay again. For a few minutes, a few days, no telling. I’ve rewired outlets and switches but nothing works. A couple days ago the well pump quit. I tried changing gizmos in the control box, then finally called in the well driller crew who installed this submersible a decade and a half ago. They discovered only half the power was reaching the well house so back to the panel box we went and sure enough the 60 watt breaker was only working on one side, not enough to power the pump.

They tried removing the breaker but it wouldn’t budge. Add to this that this old circuit panel has no way to cut off power from the street so we’re dealing here with enough voltage to fry myself and a 20 pound turkey. That makes two turkeys. Okay, I get a replacement 60 amp breaker, then stand on an old truck tire to (hopefully) keep from grounding myself if I touch the wrong places. I’m nervous as a cat in a roomful of Dobermans but here I go. The breaker just won’t release. Parts of it shatter, the panel box wants to pull off the exterior wall, I try a bigger pliers and a screwdriver, no go, so finally I grab a small pry tool and try not to touch the live buss bar but I know I’m dangerously close to the live feed … and of course I touch it.

Sparks fly out at me like the ending to a sci-fi movie where the monster is climbing the power line towers and gets his alien ass electrocuted. The panel box is now shooting sparks up and down the line, first up top, then a shower of sparks down at the bottom, then up to the middle. The pry bar is shorting the whole thing so I grab a hammer and knock it back out. The sparks mercifully stop.

Then the smoke starts roiling slowly out from behind the box. I check inside the shack and yeah, smoke is coming out from inside the walls. I grab a fire extinguisher and hit the panel box with a blast of yellow powdery chemicals. I wonder if this is what it’s supposed to look like or it’s so old they’ve turned into this weird stuff. I hit it again. And again. Smoke keeps coming so I run over to the neighbors and ask them to call 9-1-1. Back I go and grab two more extinguishers from the shop back in the woods. I know what’s in those walls where it’s smoldering is 100 year old wood, tinder dry siding, crumbling tarpaper and once it gets going, nothing will stop the inferno that will jump up into the upstairs so fast I’ll just have to stand out of the way and let it roar.

Fire engines finally show up, only about six or seven, gleaming red beauties. I think maybe they can at least keep the fire from spreading, lose a wall, save the shack. They ask if I have any buckets of water at the ready. I tell em no, the pump doesn’t run, why I’m in that panel box in the first place. Traffic on the highway can barely get through, neighbors show up to watch the excitement, I’m inside with one of the firemen tearing barn boards off the wall and smashing out drywall to make it possible to get to where the smoke is coming from. They’re doing the same thing from the outside. Huge hoses from the pump truck are ready to spray down the wall.

It’s a day later. The shack is standing. The power has been turned off at the road. The electrical box is fried. The old house is dark. The pumphouse too. I’m trying to find an electrician who will return a call. My days of do it yourself electrical have come to an end. In some ways I feel extremely lucky to be here to tell the tale. If I’ve learned any lessons, it’s that I don’t learn lessons easily. This one was learned the hard way. My advice: don’t try this at home! At least not a home you love….

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