There was controversy in the Writer’s Section before the first pot of Chock Full O Nuts coffee was gone. Should we duck the big stories and talk about something that happened more than eighty years ago? Well, if it means avoiding actual honest labor on a Friday, naturally we are inclined to do so.

War Alert in the Tropical Dawn at Pearl

It is an attempt to correct some misinformation put out in another- and frankly hostile- review of a nice piece of historic research by a pal. It also appears in the last issue of the Naval Historical Society. We won’t recount the travails of that matter, but our best wishes to those who published it as a service to those interested in the history of the trade we followed for much of our lives. And one in which honor and integrity used to mean something.

It doesn’t any more. Everything seems to appear with falsehood as an integral component. It is all bass-ackwards now, like the matters our elected Congress is wrestling with today. There seems to have been some progress on the staggering National Defense Authorization Act, a bill that includes not only the budget for the armed forces but a bunch of last-minute good and bad ideas jammed into the Service budgets and passed without much consideration.

On top of that $857 Billion dollars, or said in the real terms, “857 thousand Million dollars.” That conveys the enormity of things. There is a total, by some accounts, of $1.5 Trillion bucks on the table for other good and bad stuff. We won’t even try to say that in real terms, not to mention that the whole pile of good and bad ideas that amounts to a total of $4.5 Trillion to keep our nation chugging along.

As to that last part, we will see if there is a momentary pause in the spending while our representatives argue about the strange kabuki dance of the last day. We like a little discussion about these things, since the process is now like the title for the various laws being passed without actually having been read. We saw one of them this morning that was touching: The “Manhattan Justice Opportunities.” It provides those opportunities by ensuring criminals do not have to serve jail time for their offenses. So, everything is backwards.

There are much bigger ones, of course. We liked the 2022 “Inflation Reduction Act.” It may actually do something about the inflation situation in America. Which is to make it bigger. We are already doing some of that. Some say that if we calculated it the way we did back in the 1970s, the inflation rate would not be the painful 7.1% that was reported this week. The money people in government changed some of the key elements in reporting the official numbers. By so doing, they made what would have been 20% seem much lower. You can see how it works- we just dropped inflation 13% since breakfast.

The bill that claims to be about inflation actually drops a huge amount of money into some green transition, so much so that the title of the bill should have been more accurately titled as “Increasing Our Green Crony Contribution.” Here in Virginia, we just authorized a wind farm to be constructed, or sunk, 25 miles off Virginia Beach. Apparently, that is a means to avoid anyone being able to see them except for the fishermen and the Right Whales over whom the blades will whirl.

But accuracy is not part of how we do ordinary business these days. We have adopted a simple test for new legislation. We read the titles of the Bills and assume they do the opposite of what they are called. Splash had a proposal after the second cup of coffee. He rose and made a broad gesture with his mug. “We should just assume it is all bass ackward, then wait to see what our government is doing to us while saying they are actually doing something else.”

There was some general nodding on the balcony above the asphalt of the parking lot west of our tower in Big Pink’s east end. Whatever legislation is passed today to keep things lurching along will still have to go over to the White House for a signature. That is another part of the change, since we think it is wildly unlikely that anyone had read the provisions of the new laws until they actually have the force of Justice behind them.

The three years living down at The Farm surrounded some significant social change. We don’t claim to understand all of it. It was nice to be a couple miles off the main road since it reduced contact with everyone. Add a detour through a medical adventure that might have had something to do with the various vaxx hysterias and it was like withdrawal.

A lot changed with the other hysterias attendant to current life. Some are plain, others more subtle. It is a little hard to keep track of, so we are just going to go with the assumption that the titles of the law mean the opposite of what they actually do. If we take a bass ackward approach, we are confident we will at least have a glimmer of what they intend to do to us, you know?

Forward!

Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com