TRANSCRIPT:
[panel #1] “Hey”
[panel #2] “I… um…”
[panel #3] “I’m… a little… concerned…”
[panel #4] “that I look like a wang, Dave.”
[panel #5] OFF-PANEL VOICE: “You aren’t a wang! You’re a little ghost in a cape, and if I call it…”
[panel #6] OFF-PANEL VOICE: “… Little Ghost, then everything will be fine, so you shouldn’t worry.”
Once again it’s that very special
time of year when I remind you that it’s hella easy to make your own booze, appropriate for gift-giving or general drunkification. (That link goes to my time-tested E-Z DIY Limoncello recipe; make it now, give it during Xmas/Xanukah week, get super-popular in the Dark Days of the Unconquered Son/Sun)
Continue reading “Rule the Season: Make Fancy Booze to Give to Your Friends!”
My alt-reality horses-and-highways serial sci-fi story is rounding the home stretch over at Motor1.com! You can now read the entire story in one go; enjoy this FREE READ for your Friday!
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said, ‘Faster horses!'”—attributed to Henry Ford
Fist fights, affable drunks, and belligerent horses! Check it out: “The Faster Horse” (part four of four)
Listen: Basically all consumer goods are imported. Go through your things now and look for labels: your phone, tv, and computer are Chinese; your shirts are Bangladeshi and Cambodian, your pants Mexican and Nicaraguan. There is exactly one U.S. factory making men’s underwear; those undies are awesome, and cost ~$28 each.
If Trump places a 35% tariff on foreign goods, you’ll need a $6,000/year raise in order to keep treading water (in that your spending on imported manufactured goods—about 38% of the average American household budget—will go up by 35%). Alternately, you can spend $28 for each pair of Made in the USA underwear, $12 for every pair of socks, and I guess not have an iPhone or TV or vitamin supplements or anything with a rare-earth magnet in it (i.e., a computer, a hybrid car, many power tools, many car covers…the list goes on).
The only reason that most Americans haven’t noticed that our real (inflation-adjusted) household incomes have been flat since 1965 is because we’ve enjoyed the enormous savings on manufactured goods that comes with globalization. I’m foggy on why anyone wants to give that up—even if, by some crippled miracle, a huge tariff leads to t-shirt and underwear manufacturing returning to U.S. soil, we don’t have the capacity to produce those things at volume any more. I think there’s only a single jersey cotton weaving mill left in the U.S. It would take years to get factories retooled (or, hell, built; many of those old factories are now lofts, open-plan offices, and unoccupiable attractive nuisances). In the meantime you have the same crappy job you did in October, and you’re paying 35% more for the same shoes and kids pajamas and phone chargers and disposable razors.
So what were Trump voters voting for if it wasn’t the economy, stupid? I really can’t imagine; I didn’t vote for him.
Here’s a tiny excerpt of the big excerpt:
Chico and the portal guy were waiting for me outside FDA Annex D. Chico was smoking a cigarette. If this was a screenplay, his entire character description would read “sinister Mexican.” The portal guy was just standing there, hands in pockets, staring up at the stars and whistling that “Yakkety Sax” song from Benny Hill. He abruptly cut off as I climbed out of my car.
“This is your New Guy?” he asked Chico. The portal guy was one of those cheap-blue-oxford-&-khaki-pants cubicle drones, but younger and skinnier than the stock character. He looked pretty damn rumpled—not just “it’s three a.m.” tired, although it was three a.m. It was more the “I’m tired of my whole stupid life” kind of tired. Chico blew twin streams of smoke out his nose, flicking away his cigarette butt without acknowledging the portal guy’s question.
“New guy?” I mugged like a vaudevillian, joining them at the glass door, “What happened to the old guy?”
“Gal,” the portal guy answered as he waved us in through the glass doors of FDA Annex D. “She got burned as a witch.” . . .
If you dig actors, gastropubs, meth dealers, heists, Early American Material Culture, academia, mobsters, or Mexican food then this is the novella for you!!! Read more: “Where There Is Nothing, There Is God” by David Erik Nelson
@SquiDaveo !!! pic.twitter.com/jo7jdUorao
— David Helder (@dhelder) December 7, 2016
For those with a taste for “inside baseball”: The original working title of this novella was “Colonial Meth.” That is an awful title—but still an improvement over “Time-Portal Crystal Meth Missionaries,” which is what I scrawled at the top of the first index card. If you squint, you can see that the first legal-pad draft is already titled “Where There is Nothing, There is God”—a title I cribbed from William Butler Yeats by way of my old pal Fritz Swanson.
I’m not sure when I started the index cards for this story (these tend to get carried around in my pocket and taped to the bathroom mirror for a few months while I mull a story over) or the long-hand legal-pad draft, but I’ve got typed draft pages with creation dates as old as November 2013. My submissions log indicates I first sent this out in November 2014—so I guess it took a year to write/revise—and then basically another year-and-a-half to sell (the story was actually accepted in March of 2016), and several more months to revise to everyone’s satisfaction, proof, etc.
“The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.”
—That Guy in that Musical Everyone is Nuts Over
It seems like we finally have an excellent test as to whether or not the Electoral College is worth the inequality it introduces to an already highly unequal system[1]:
On the one hand, we have a popularly elected candidate with an enormous margin of victory (roughly 2.5 million votes?) who is highly qualified, thoroughly vetted, and has spent so many decades as a public servant that she is a very thoroughly known quantity. On the other we have a historically unpopular candidate who has continued to behave in alarmingly erratic fashion since his election—for example, threatening to dismantle the First Amendment and strip individuals of their natural-born citizenship, as well as questioning the legitimacy of the election he won—who keeps himself cloaked in secrecy, is drowning in conflicts of interest, and eked out electoral victory on a technicality almost certainly because of the concerted effort of a foreign power antagonistic to US interests.
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016
Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag – if they do, there must be consequences – perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 29, 2016
(DISCLOSURE: The first clause of the top tweet is untrue—see graph below—and the second clause entirely unsubstantiated. The lower tweet ignores two decades of judicial precedence and sorta suggests that the PotUS should be able to jail people at will; both overstep the bounds of the Executive Branch.)
I’ve previously envied against the Electoral College (see, for example, footnote #1 below), but Lawrence Lessig is making a compelling counter argument in defense of the much-maligned Electoral College:
“Instead, if the electoral college is to control who becomes our president, we should take it seriously by understanding its purpose precisely. It is not meant to deny a reasonable judgment by the people. It is meant to be a circuit breaker — just in case the people go crazy.”
Or, as in the case this year, that the system itself seems to have been substantially short-circuited (or, perhaps more chillingly, to have become so well understood that it is now a completely deterministic game, like checkers—see also “The Book“—and thus will evermore be owned by folks with the talent for low intrigue, the little arts of popularity, and the technology to leverage radical uncertainty in a cognitively exhausted populace).
Others think differently from Lessig—Orin Kerr being the standout example—but I don’t know that I’m persuaded by Kerr’s thinking, which seems extremely obtuse, mostly because it treats an actual matter of life and death (think I’m being hyperbolic? Tell that to 100,000 dead Iraqis and Afghans, courtesy of President G.W. Bush) as though it’s a damned game of groundies. If you’re more into fantasy fiction, this novel Electoral College solution strikes me as simultaneously both more realistic and more far-fetched than anything else I’ve seen—which is kinda par for the course this year, right? Shit, given how 2016 has gone, I wouldn’t be shocked if we ended up with a Romney/Stein inauguration come January.
At any rate, taken at face value, we now will finally know: If Trump is inaugurated next January—contrary to the will of a clear majority of Americans who cast votes which were counted (a number that is itself a subset of the total votes cast, and a sadly small subset of the total adult American population) and despite serious flaws in character and qualification—then the Electoral College has certainly outlived its usefulness, and it’s time to make a big change.
If someone else—hell, almost anyone else—is inaugurated in 44 days, then we’ll finally really and truly know what the Electoral College is for in the 21st Century.
Installment three of my alt-reality horses-and-highways serial story for Motor1.com pounding headlong toward destruction! DISASTER TIME!!!
In Part 3 of our alternate reality, everything goes to shit.
Blood on the highway! “The Faster Horse” (part three of four)
If you see tweets like this:
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016
and your gut drops with the sort of ice-water dread usually reserved for hearing phrases like “metastatic cancer,” then you are not alone.
Nicholas Kristof has some suggestions which I think are a super-duper solid starting place: “Are you traumatized by the election of Donald Trump? Here’s the program for you.“
Here are a few additions/refinements:
Just trying to get this all in one place, ’cause shit is kind of accelerating:
how close it was and how aggressive voter-suppression has been in the last 4 years, it sure could have been.
spent weeks saying that election results contradicting polling results—which is exactly what we have right now—would mean “a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government”). . .
We live in interesting times, mutherfuckers!🇺🇸🔥