They are apparently incensed that Joe Rogan has bucked the system, hunts his own meat, has eaten Ivermectin and beaten Covid, has a wildly popular podcast, and discussed all of these things out loud. And also because he smoked weed with Elon Musk on the air. Or something. It’s hard to know, except that the battle against irrelevance is on-going, and as a figure in The Madness of King George once pointed out: Character is required to endure the rigors of indolence.
Cinderella Liberty
These days I’m reduced to taking coffee at a place where the coffee is actually good, but the ambiance feels like a hospital waiting-room. Another reason I don’t love the place is that I frequently see a lunatic woman there who I know to a moral certainty burgled my home during an HOA meeting.
Honoring the Fallen, by Dan Zappa
On a beautiful November day John Maloney delivered a sweet, brilliant eulogy for his friend Frenchy, voicing the admiration we all felt. Marines shed uncontrollable tears, duty bound to serve in Iraq and resolved to stay tight and honor this sacrifice. My unit prepared for Iraq and an instructor noted one unit that performed better than mine. It was John’s.
The Highly Exalted
Remember back in January, before we sent SWAT Teams into restaurants after diners and before we jailed hairdressers or governors outlawed vegetable seeds? If those things don’t disturb every fiber in your body…well, they just should that’s all.
Radio Free Figure 8
One benefit of this Covid Spring is that we all get the chance to reexamine our priorities, which can become wildly skewed in lengthy periods of prosperity. We’ve been prosperous for a very long time, most of us entirely unscathed by our various wars and rumors of wars, and on the macro level we may have forgotten that our extraordinary wealth is historically unusual, requires vigilance and constant maintenance, and is also an addiction.
The Man Who Came to Breakfast
In February, 1944, Lt. Ed Charles was a Navigator in the 336th Squadron, 95th Bomb Group out of Horham, England. One night he was sleeping in the barracks when the door flew open and the C.Q. (Charge of Quarters) went probing through the darkness with a flashlight. “Is there an empty bunk in there? We have a new arrival and he needs a place to sleep.” Ed told the CQ the bunk next to his was vacant. He sat up. He offered to help the new guy unpack his gear and get squared away.
Tickling the Wire
I let the dogs out late the other night and looked up in the sky to see a train of satellites — forty, fifty, sixty of them — racing through the stars. It is a testament to effective quarantine — and a purpose-built informational firewall — that I didn’t know what I was seeing, and so had one of those increasingly rare moments in life where everything was startlingly new, and fresh, and even exciting.
The Daily Briefing
In response to wildly irresponsible remarks made by the artist David Hockney, who told the NY Post that smokers are immune to the coronavirus, the Figure 8 Ranch assembled our emergency response team for a counter-briefing. Here is an unclassified transcript of the briefing for widest dissemination…
A 72 Hour Hold
I am now 72 hours into a self-imposed news blackout and the results have been marvelous. The decision to quarantine my mind, and spare it the slings and arrows of fear-based journalism and morale-sucking stupidity, was actually compelled by a mistake.
Stonefish
Shakespeare was right, of course. We come sliding into the world and, drawing our first breath in it, seem to somehow intuit life’s pre-eminent lesson: we are entitled to precisely nothing — not food, not water, not toilet paper, and certainly not surgical masks and ventilators. And so it is that in our first few moments in the arena we give a great angry cry in protest — until someone sticks a tit in our mouths.
The Plague Diaries
It’s worth noting the possibility that a novel coronavirus, the result of some communist party jackass French-kissing a bat at a food court in Wuhan, China, will accomplish what Chairman Xi and Bernie never could have: turning America into a socialist paradise. That’s a story for the ages if there ever was one.
Rope Swing Blues
Enjoying the pandemic much? That’s a fair question because so far, from my little combat outpost where I sit and dream of a former life — when I thought I was Con Conagher — we seem to be collectively overdoing the doom. Don’t get me wrong, I take this virus very seriously, as I would any kind of worldwide illness, but there is a noticeable absence of optimism in the air.
