The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Nothing I like much more than a good intra-denominational dogfight. The Southern Baptists are squabbling down at their convention in Nashville, mostly over abortion strategies. The Catholics are drawing up papers to ban politicians who vote for abortion rights from receiving the Eucharist. If that seems like religion is crossing over into Caeser’s territory, you’re probably on the money. Biden is Catholic and Biden is pro-abortion rights. In the eyes of a majority of the church’s bishops, he’s just right of a spawn of Satan. Or a pawn. Or … well, you know what they mean.

Churches and their doctrines, man oh man, they just dig their heels in and resist anything that might seem Enlightened to a secular yahoo like myself. Women priests? How long did that take em? And some religions, well, God made Man first and then took a rib to make Woman and if that doesn’t prove superiority over the fairer sex, what does? Gays are a thorny subject for most of them. Love thy neighbor, love your fellow man, but whoa, don’t take it literally, buddy, that’s Abomination and a one way ticket to Hell. The rest of society seems to have moved on, but the Bible Thumpers are still parsing Leviticus, maybe skipping the injunctions not to wear dissimilar fabrics or eat certain foods. And that part about stoning to death those who lay man with man, thou shalt not kill doesn’t apply apparently.

The ban on communion seems okay to me. Ex-communication is fine too. My question really is why would folks want to be in a religion that is exclusionary, especially based on the politics of the day. You folks gonna deny the Eucharist for the Senators who support the death penalty? Unless, of course, it’s for homosexual abominations. In which case, pick your rock and have at it. So when all these good and righteous folks demand to have church back in the schools or the courtroom or the government, we need to ask them, which church you want to let in. And if the answer is none of the others, just ours, well … maybe you see the problem. If you don’t, wait til the Supreme Court decides Roe v Wade one more time now that most of them are Catholics who would probably prefer to take communion, not be banned from it.

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.

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.

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!