The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

If you’re a savvy investor like myself, no doubt you’ve been sniffing around the cryptocurrency phenomenon, wondering if it’s time to plunk down some of those 20th Century dollars and trade em in on bitcoins. You might even be wondering what exactly cryptocurrency is, possibly googled it, and undoubtedly come away realizing you haven’t got a clue. But then, what is an Andrew Jackson, really? Just cloth with dyes and inks and watermarks. Worth what it says on the bill if everyone keeps believing it’s real even if no gold is sitting in Ft. Knox to back it up. Economics, a faith based religion?

Cryptocurrency, forget about the gold standard. What you got is blockchain. Okay, I know, you don’t actually understand blockchaining. That’s fine, neither do I and neither do most people who own bitcoins or any other cryptomoney. You just know some economists think this is the future of monetary transactions, safer than greenbacks in your bank account some lowlife hacker can empty faster than you can say Bad Password. Bitcoins, well, their password is unhackable, but … if you forget it, no way can you or the hackers get at it, sorry.

But what you do notice is that bitcoins and their brethren virtual cash move up and down in value the way Apple stocks do, a breathtaking hedge against minimum interest rates on your savings. Now, you could ask yourself, before, hopefully, you convert your life investments and 401-K and the pension to bitcoin, what kind of currency can change value 20% in a day, up, down, you just never know. Would you put your money in a bank that offered the potential to drop in value half overnight?

Well obviously some people would. If it looks like a pyramid scheme and smells like a pyramid scheme and acts like a pyramid scheme, I think you and I know it probably isn’t a real smart investment, it’s just a high tech form of gambling cloaked in crypto-babble. Me, I’d rather bury money out in the yard. Just so long as I don’t lose the map showing where I put it.

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I love Texas as much as the next yahoo. They want to tighten up their voting laws, build walls on the border, maybe even secede from the Union. Ted Cruz is their Senator and if there’s anyone I’d like to see more than Ted seceding from the country, I can only think of one or two. Texas, the state that celebrates the Alamo. Sort of like Montana celebrating Custer’s Last Stand.

Rep. Louis Gohmert recently asked the deputy chief of the Forest Service if she could think of some way, since she was interested in global warming mitigation, to alter the orbit of the moon. I know what you’re thinking, must be some phony baloney news story put out by those pesky liberals to make another Texas legislator look like a complete moron. Even for Texas, a state I dearly love, this is a synapse too far. Only a braindead Qanon whackjob would entertain for even one Dallas minute the idiotic notion that the Forest Service could manage to nudge the moon out of earth orbit just enough to slow down global warming. Not even a Texan legislator, even one who thinks the assault on the Capitol in January was nothing more than over exuberant tourists, would ask Smokey the Bear to figure out a way to spin the moon. He’d ask NASA or the Army Corps of Engineers, but c’mon, Smokey? He’s a bear, Louis. A dead bear actually. I visited his grave a couple years back. No way is that dead bear going to figure out a way to snap the gravitational pull of the earth and save the planet.

Louis, of course, probably doesn’t think Smokey can stop global warming. Louis doesn’t believe global warming is real. Or that there was an insurrection at the Capitol where he was escorted to shelter in a panic on January 6th. He may not even believe the moon orbits the earth and if he does, he probably thinks it orbits Texas, a state, maybe I mentioned this already, I dearly love. All I can figure, the Lone Star state must have something in its water, all these strange legislators with quirky ideas. Fracking oil maybe or pesticides in the Ogallala Aquifer that’s concentrating the toxins. We could maybe have Smokey look into that too.

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When you run out of good ideas, I guess it’s time to throw rocks. The No to Everything Party ran out of ideas long before Donald J. Trump emerged from the swamps of reality TV. No to Obamacare, no to same sex marriage, no to women in the military, no to abortion, no to Planned Parenthood, no to progressive taxation, no to election reform, no no no, by god, NO! Mitch McConnell put up roadblocks for decades, first with Obama, then preventing the Mueller investigation from leading to impeachment, then again after Trump instigated the assault on the Capitol, now with obstruction of anything Biden might try to slide by him.

Now we’re going to see some rock throwing and mudslinging. Bipartisanship on this infrastructure bill? Who’s kidding who? When you see every GOP senator vote down every bill that comes before them, I ask you, who’s kidding whom? Not me. So what is an idea-less party to do if they’ve abandoned all pretense of policy? Wedgies! Wedge issues. Guns, they’re taking our guns! Statues, they’re saying Stonewall Jackson wasn’t a hero! Black Lives Matter, they’re trying to start a race war! Abortion, they’re murdering babies! Corporate tax increases, they’re torturing the rich! Immigration, they’re flooding the country with non-whites! Transgenders, boys will be in the girls’ lockerroom! Global warming, they want to take away your gas powered Cadillac! Religion, they’re waging war on Jesus!

Socialists, pedophiles, commies, libtards, revisionists, Moslems, they’re all coming to take away your Bible, your guns, your money, your Confederate heroes, your freedom! They’re evil! They’re part of a satanic cabal that does unspeakable things to your children. Then … oh my god … then they eat them! They have to be stopped. At any cost! Donald Trump couldn’t stop them. At least not yet. Mitch McConnell couldn’t stop them, not really. Revelations is at hand, Armageddon is on the calendar, the End Days are nigh, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are riding toward Bethlehem.

I don’t know about Armageddon, but I do know the Crazy Times are upon us. The population of America, fed on the pablum of social media and not very reality TV, open to every crackpot conspiracy theory you can think up and splatter on websites across the internet the gullible soak up like addicts, well, maybe it’s time to put lithium in the municipal water system. Or, wait! Maybe that’s what the Deep State has been doing all along!

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Lately there’s been some internet buzz rejecting the strategy of NASA to hurl signals into outer space, maybe make contact with some advanced species beyond our solar system. Decades ago we launched a craft full of a time capsule’s worth of stuff, everything from da Vinci sketches to Chuck Berry singing Johnny B. Goode, figuring, I guess that if the data dump of scientific memorabilia didn’t attract extraterrestrial tourists, the rock n roll might do the trick. Swell, it’s a little like the Wampanoag tribe sending out flyers to would be Pilgrims to come visit. Oh, and bring some of those smallpox blankets to trade, why don’tcha?

Maybe it’s the congressional investigations into UFO’s the past few months that got folks thinking about space visitors. That, or the Qanon folks suspect the Lizard People running the government are actually Chuck Berry aficionados. Either way, some of us terrestrials are rethinking the idea that visitors from outer space might really enjoy Disneyland and our reality TV shows. They might not agree with our humanoid tastes in art and entertainment, but they might really enjoy our taste. Barbecued homo sapien, mmm mmm, finger lickin’ good. The thought has occurred to a few folks that any alien capable of navigating across the galaxies might be far more advanced than the citizens of Earth who think landing on Mars was pretty special and who still can’t figure out what to do with spent nuclear fuel rods. I seriously doubt any galactic immigrants will bow down to the folks who binge watch the Kardashians.

The assumption must be, these people who look forward to First Contact, that an advanced alien species would naturally be not only intelligent but kind and even caring. Maybe bring us the recipes for happiness and time travel. Oh sure, we’d have to be super careful about space bugs and viruses and who knows what else we’d have no immunity for, but the good visitors would help us with that. Right? And no, don’t get going on Covid being some virus developed in a lab on Pluto, bad enough we got conspiracies about Wuhan vs wet meat markets, last thing we need is a trans-species mutation, forget about vaccines.

No, maybe we should just put a sign up, out by the moon maybe, that reads No Trespassing, This Means You! Let them know we’re not inviting anybody to our Thanksgiving Dinner. The last thing we need are some interstellar Pilgrims singing hymns, not Johnny B Goode. Go ask the Wampanoags how that worked out.

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