Tag: Fred Reed

Guest Post by Fred Reed

What happened was, I came to the Yankee Capital from where I growed up in East Needle, Tennessee, that’s so far back in the mountains that the sun don’t hardly shine and we don’t get too much news about what they do in the flatlands. Mostly people in East Needle just stays where they are. But I weren’t too normal, or anyways that’s what Miss Maisie Stovelid, the teacher lady in the county school said. She said I was smarter than the other kids and she hoped I’d go far, though I reckon she would have settled for the next county over. Most folk just thought there was something wrong with my head.

Continue reading “Communing with Rastus”

Guest Post by Fred Reed

I am communing in my office with a sufficiency of Wild Turkey, the whiskey of the great Hunter Thompson. With its help I think curmudgeonly thoughts about America, which is over, done, surrounded by feeding leeches, ticks, hag fish, lampreys, and corporations. And Joe Biden. I find this deeply satisfying.

Here you have to understand curmudgeonry. We in our ashen-souled trade are misunderstood. We do not enjoy undeserved suffering. If you fall off a motorcycle while doing wheelies, or contract malaria in the jungles of Africa, you will have our sympathy. But self-inflicted and avoidable catastrophe, ah, this warms the cockles of our hearts. Whatever a cockle is. When an entire country voluntarily disintegrates in a maelstrom of pointless rot, for curmudgeons it is better than box seats at the Superbowl.

Continue reading “We, the Blood Bladder: America as Feeding Trough for Lampreys”

Guest Post by Fred Reed

I confess that I am a bad American. Yes, I pay little attention to Congress. why? Because it seems to me little more than a storefront operation for the powers that count in America:  Big Pharma, military industry, Wall Street and so on. They make policy.  Congress just announces it. Nor do I much read the Constitution, a document in tatters that has little obvious connection to American life.

Recently however I found Senator Marco Rubio, a pseudo-Cuban from Miami, inveighing without detectable comprehension against RISC V and how we need to forbid American firms to collaborate with the Chinese in its development. Marco inveighs against Washington’s budgetary-pretextual  enemies du jour with the predictability of gravitation.

Anyway, here a unavoidable bit of tedhnoglop: RISC V is a sort of language, more correctly an Instruction Set Architecture, necessary to “write” semiconductor chips, just as English is a language for writing books.

Continue reading “Nuts, Fruits and Flakes: Objective Analysis of a Granola Congress”

Guest Post by Fred Reed

“Consider America today. By comparison with Japan, China, Korea, it is a barbarity, a dumpster, an asylum, an abattoir, an astonishment”

As the sentient have presumably noticed, the United States is in crisis, the country’s problems are profound, intrinsic, without solution, and worsening. When a population reaches the point of despair, even desperation, when it sees a darkening future for itself and its children, people yearn for a strong man who will forcibly put things right. Yet it is unlikely that helicopters of Marines from Quantico will descend on the White House and announce the dictatorship of some general. Military officers are too well paid and comfortable to worry about the country. It is hard to imagine an American Mussolini. Trump is a caricature and no one else comes to mind. Yet “unrest” –less euphemistically, “chaos” on the order of Mr. Floyd’s massive riots, is possible. We have seen it. We can see it again.

Continue reading “She’s Gonna blow: It’s Weimar, But Where Is Our Adolf?”

Guest Post by Fred Reed

We—I, and my spousal unit, Violeta—pulled into DC after a conventionally miserable flight from Guadalajara in seats apparently designed for dwarves with our feet almost in our pockets and Delta trying to sell us beer at seven dollars a can. I didn’t get it. If you can sell watery brew at seven balloonishly inflating greenbacks a can, why do you need an airline?

The occasion was a visit to a woman with whom I immediately became involved, though with Violeta’s permission. She weighs seven and a half pounds and has a smile that would make a dead man weep. This may have little geopolitical importance, though.

Anyway, the proud father celebrated having produced, or coproduced, a baby who probably deserves a world run by psychiatrically less fascinating adults, by taking about a dozen of us to Fogo da Something, a Brazilian restaurant on Pennsylvania across from the Trump Hotel. This costs $64 a head for all the meat and salad bar you could eat, desserts and drinks extra, so with tip you can crawl out, stuffed and economically depleted, for about $90. Salad bar good, desserts swell, meat tasteless. You can do better for a sixth the price at La Carreta, down the lake from us in Mexico.

Continue reading “China to Make Electric Tumbrils”

Guest Post by Fred Reed

It is strange: Jews have been disliked everywhere and in all times. The dislike  appears in odd places. I was astonished to find that my Nepalese trekking guides were intensely hostile to Jews. They said that Jews (actually Israelis in most cases I think, but the Nepalese do not seem to make the distinction) were loud, demanding, and always trying to force down the guides’ fees. Historically the hostility has often been powerful and, not infrequently, murderous.  Jews have been expelled from country after country, excluded from polite society, subjected to quotas,and required to live in certain regions. Why?

How much anti-Jewish hostility is there today in America? . A lot? A little? Is it negligible? Potentially explosive? It is hard to tell because disliking Jews is often a firing offense, and a controlled press makes discussion impossible. A clue can perhaps be found in the  comments sections of political websites  whee, protected by anonymity, commenters are often bitterly anti-Jewish. But then, these comments may, or may not, be the work of a  few cranks.

Continue reading “The Future of the Jews: More of the Past?”

Guest Post by Fred Reed

Today I must ask the reader’s pardon. I do not usually write about the intimate details of my life. They would embarrass me and bore everyone else. But in this case I am obligated, as will shortly be apparent.

We have all heard of Twelve-Step Programs. Alcoholics Anonymous was the first and remains the best known. There are others, notably Narcotics Anonymous but also groups to help people control anger and even narcissism.

In all of these, one of the steps is to publicly acknowledge one’s culpability. This is psychologically necessary. Otherwise the tendency is overpowering to tell oneself that one wasn’t really all that guilty. (“I’m not an alcoholic. Sure, I get a snootful once in a while, but so does everybody….”) This is behind the requirement that at, for example, a meeting of Narconon one must begin by saying, “My name is Bob, and I am an addict.”

Continue reading “A Sort of Remorse: Notes of a Poor Sinner”

Guest Post by Fred Reed

The  Atlantic waters off Snead’s Ferry in North Carolina are shallow, maybe 125 feet to the continental shelf. Several  wrecks lie on the bottom, mostly in advanced stages of disintegration, sunk by U-boats in the early years of the war. I know them well as for years I was a member of Capital Divers, out of DC, of which there is now no trace on the web. We often rented boats and dived the remains.

Cap Divers was a cowboy outfit. The members were engineers, bureaucrats from State, employees of Beltway Bandit operations like CACI, maybe a third women, but all were experienced divers and possessed of what might be called strong personalities. They didn’t follow rules, such as never dive in waves over two feet high. Yo  pays yo money and takes yo chances. But it was a hoot.

Continue reading “Diving Days: No vast political importance”

Guest Post by Fred Reed

A Truth Not Welcome: People do not like being with those different from themselves . Sometimes, briefly, we find it interesting, as in traveling, but for extended periods, no. This distaste pervades society, often unnoticed, with consequences.

Instances of untogetherness:

People cluster by intelligence. With high consistency, we choose mates of intelligence close to our own. Likewise with friends: If you have an IQ of 100, or 150, you are unlikely to have friends of 150, or 100. Bright people join Mensa not from snobbery but because they want to be around people like themselves. On the internet this takes the form of distributed cognitive stratification in which people from around the globe congregate by intelligence.

A woman I knew while living in the Heart of Darkness once said, “In Washington, you assume that everyone is in the ninety-ninth percentile.” She herself was, and her friends were chemists, high-end journalists, authors, and so on.  She meant her remark as shorthand for a common sort of clustering.

Continue reading “Anti-togetherness: The Virtues of Disunity”