In a short story a few years ago, my husband coined the term Feffers as a short hand for all the sad mouths who yell “Fix Earth First” every time anyone tries to escape the crab bucket this our native rock.
It is the perfect term, since without the first F it’s a pejorative anyway. And heaven knows, I start using it, in a tone like a spitting cat, when I’m following some cool event or development on X and find myself mired in comment after comment of “We could eliminate poverty” (Spoiler: Poverty always wins wars on poverty.) Or “We have so many problems here on Earth” or similar stupidity.
They are wrong. No, I can’t absolutely prove it for the reason that sociological experiments are really hard to run on an entire society. This could be solved by having a portal that allows us to observe parallel worlds that took alternate paths, but younger son refuses to invent the technology. Out of contrarianess I’m sure.
However we have a similar thing, called history.
The truth is that human societies that don’t move out of their space and colonize and change become stagnant and become stagnant in peculiar ways.
Take Africa — oh, please, for the love of Bob, take Africa. No one sane wants it, as China is finding out. — it’s a collection of the most successful, stable, environment adapted cultures. Not saying they didn’t have inside-continent colonization: Zulus. But by and large, the people who remain in Africa, as natives, (to the extent that they’re not mixed by virtue of colonization from elsewhere) are the descendants of those strong enough and fitting in enough not to be chased, pushed or coventry-ed out.
Those who got pushed out, starting in pre-neolithic days, populated the Earth and came up with endless variations on culture, some of which were so successful they returned to colonize Africa.
The ones who stayed? They were perfectly suited to the environment and strong tribal culture. You could say they were optimized evolutionarily, by pushing out all who don’t fit. And the result is…
Well, you can survive in Africa at a relatively low level of productivity and organization. Which is good, because it is what Africa always devolves to. In the words of my friend Lawdog “Africa always wins.”
How do I know this is cultural and not racial? Well, pre- weaponization of race by shitty Marxists, the Africans who got away voluntarily tended to do very well. Even some of the involuntary ones, once pulled away from the general tribal culture, adapted and were high achieving. But in locus, the culture that never left? “Africa wins” is the saddest term I can think of.
Or if you want to pick on another extreme of culture, by a people that even racists can’t claim suffer from some deficiency in that imperfect (and weird) measurement of “IQ” , let’s take the Chinese. One on one, test on test, the Chinese are the highest scoring humans when it comes to IQ tests.
On the more important side, because IQ is a fickle measurement, Chinese who leave China tend to do very well indeed, particularly if they are ISOLATED and on their own. I.e. away from the culture.
But you can’t read a Chinese history book without getting the impression of a movie stuck on repeat. Great flourishing and advances, then erase it all from history and start again, forever. And the culture has certain limiting blind spots of legalism and worship of the written word that make the whole thing unable to get very far. The result? China has been marinading in tears and wasted potential for thousands of years and imports all important advances from abroad.
I firmly believe this is the result of failing to colonize: Failing to go elsewhere and be challenged by different environments, different interactions, different challenges. Humans, like all animals tend to get too well adapted to their environment, too comfortable in their sameness and routine. And then it becomes codified and an iron crab bucket you cannot break.
Our culture (Western culture in this case, not specifically American) is showing some signs of trying to enter into exactly those cycles of destruction and restarting.
We need to break the bonds. We need to go elsewhere, reach further, challenge ourselves, and let those ideas come back to challenge those who stay at home.
Because comfort and safety are not survival-enhancing characteristics for cultures (or humans) in the long run.
As for fixing all the problems on Earth first, most of those problems are only problems as defined by crazy people.
Stuff like inequality is just a sign of freedom. Free humans are inherently unequal because they value and work towards different things. It’s only slaves who are held to complete equality.
Even poverty is not exactly a problem to be solved. First it depends on what you define as poverty. And second, poverty has been the condition of humanity for most of its existence. Trying to overcome it has propelled some of our greatest triumphs. And trying to fix it for other people has never worked. Never.
Whatever problems we have are more likely to be fixed by going out of the Earth: higher, further, more risky. As far as we can go. To the distant stars.
Because it is there that we’ll find the solution to problems we don’t even know we have. And also from there that will come the leavening and innovation that will renew all of humanity and cause us to survive longer and reach further than we think possible.
Shut up Feffers. The rest of us are going to the stars.
According To Hoyt 
In general, I’m against just about any “We have to do X before we can do Y,” with the obvious exceptions of things with clear cause and effect. “We have invent something that can get us out of Earth orbit before we go to Mars,” yes, “We have to get the entire world to sing in perfect harmony before anyone is allowed to play the violin,” no.
I actually ran across this at church this weekend. My pastor (who’s normally pretty sensible, maybe this thought just sounded better in her head) was talking about how the people within the church needed to learn to love each other and resolve our own conflicts before we could go out and try to love our enemies. I couldn’t help thinking, “A church that’s not going to take on any outside problems until every single one of its members gets along with every single other one is a church that’s never going to do anything!”
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Yep.
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we have to provide upper middle class lifestyles to all the HR ladies by paying them large amounts of money for very little work all paid for by the taxpayer, who is never to know about it. That’s “our democracy”
getting to space can take the money that’s left after the thousands of consultants are paid, the environmental impact studies are replicated and paid for, and the lawyers in The inevitable lawsuits run out of billable hours, which means never.
It’s been a bit of an adjustment to realize that it’s all just a rice bowl. I gave some on the left — and right — credit for being sincere in their beliefs, insane, but sincere, but no, it’s all a grift.
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Yep.
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The SPLC, USAid and…. sigh.
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Even if it starts sincere it becomes a racket.
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I watched the Apollo 11 launch from my father’s lap. I’ve been reading science fiction since I could read. I’ve been space happy at least that long.
Humans are explorers. We have an inherent need to “explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before!”
In the future, I believe the human race will be divided into two groups. Those who went to the stars and progressed, and those who stayed behind and regressed.
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The meek shall inherit the Earth; the bold will take the stars.
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“The meek may inherit the earth, but in small plots, about six feet by three” — Lazarus Long.
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But but…
We shouldn’t take our EVIL off Earth! [Sarcastic Grin]
Seriously, I get the idea that some of the Feffers actually believe the above statement. [Frown]
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I talked to one of them like that. Until humans get our act together and behave like sand grown-ups and take care of each other and restore the planet, we have no, 0, business going other places and ruining them too.
The lady was kind, very well meaning, and sounded a little sad. I’m not sure if it was an act (the sad part), or if she really was interested in space stuff, but felt that “taking care of the planet” came first as a duty. I suspect she was sincere, since we’d been talking sci-fi, and she was very up on space science and science fiction things.
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She’s been sold a bill of goods and BOUGHT it. G-d bless your Odds and Stuborn cusses who will not be shamed! Please and Amen.
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We’re bought and sold, for English gold
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation.
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The people who would be happiest if the entire planet were a designated Primitive Nature Preserve should want people and industry to leave as fast as possible.
Those who throw up obstacles to expansion into space are similar to “environmentalists” who argue against nuclear power – they don’t want solutions, they really just want punishment imposed.
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C.S. Lewis believed we’re in spiritual quarantine. Out of the Silent Planet has a debate between the “imperialist/scientific,” men who kidnapped Ransom and Ransom, held before the guiding angel (eldil) of Mars, and it’s a perfect encapsulation of, “We ruin everything we touch.”
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He had theological reasons for taking that position. The Space Trilogy is less scientific extrapolation than parables about the Fall.
OTOH, in his final years he was deeply against actual space exploration, and I’ve sometimes thought he would’ve approved of humanity’s fifty-plus-year retreat to Low Earth Orbit as returning to humanity’s proper scope of activity — and that he would be very sad about the Artemis II mission.
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Anti-colonization – as in complaints about what Europe did to less developed countries in order to obtain their raw materials – talk has been extended by some to future Mars colonies. This is despite the fact that there’s no indigenous Martian population to exploit.
(Marvin and J’onn J’onnz could not be reached for comment)
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Besides how do they know we won’t find something out there that makes life on earth better?
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In every nonwestern story or history or supposition I have read, the ones who explore and invent and strive….are justly beaten down, reviled, and otherwise held up as a bad example. Moses and Jesus and all in between those two were treated like that because they were destroying the status quo.
People hate that. I hate that the home town I loved and grew up in…..is gone in most of the details that matter. I hate that the area where we raised our kids is now a haven for low trust rentoids and the shopping malls and cinema complexes are figuratively (and literally in one case) ghost towns.
No good restaurants or fast food, new cars suck except they are better than ever (Pinto anyone?), and our govt subsidized old poor person apartment is the best and most comfortable home we ever lived in. I hate change. I hate new…but I read the old and remember what was, where men my age(66) were broken and in horrible health, their wives little better.
We are so rich that our Civilization, our country, has been looted and undermined to drag the rest of the world up to levels they never dreamed…..and we can still beat them senseless with one hand bound and the other semiparalyzed.
They hate us and want us to make a better crab bucket for them all at the same time.
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If we start to move mining and refining operations out into space, we can stop digging huge holes in the ground and spreading pollution around down here. The sun provides a near-infinite source of free energy; just concentrate it with mirrors and you can melt whole asteroids.
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Ahhhh, but then how could the Marxists use “climate change” to try and beat us into submission? ;)
(Of course, that is beginning to fail bigly, and even some marxists have begun to notice.)
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They always find something. Asimov had a short story in which a politician rose to power by claiming that rocket launches, which in the story relied heavily on water, were taking all of Earth’s water into outer space. The fact that nearly all of the water then fell back to Earth (as noted by another politician, who realized that pointing it out would be career suicide) was irrelevant. As a result, the politician claims that all of the spacers (working asteroids in the inner solar system) need to be brought home, and rocket launches curtailed.
The spacers respond by quietly heading out to Saturn, finding a *massive* chunk of ice, and bringing it back to Earth Orbit, where they offer to sell Earth any water it might need.
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IIRC it was titled “The Martian Way”.
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And this story is at least semi-dated, as far as “Mars is short of water” — because there are now strong indications (ground-penetrating orbital radar) there are entire glaciers of water ice on Mars, once you get outside the immediate “topics” around the equator. (And also lots of glacial-looking terrain there too, but we won’t know “for sure” until we get there and drill into the buried glaciers.)
People are already talking about using “Rodriguez wells” like at the South Pole (and North Pole ice once upon a time). Drill a hole, send down hot water, get back up (more) cold water, recycle as needed up to your desire or supply of “waste” heat (which is not often a waste).
Of course, as usual, the “mainstream” media are the very last to know.
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Unless you have a modular nuke reactor to cool.
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Yeah, but with the updated information, the story wouldn’t be as amusing as it is. :P
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And if the Earth Pigs continue to annoy us, we’ll deliver the water to them for free. All at once. At terminal velocity.
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And there are so many resources in space that you could effectively devalue every single non-orgamic raw material we’ve found to date.
There’s a game in Early Access on Steam called Solar Expanse that I’ve been messing around with. It’s about building up a solar system wide infrastructure and logistics. One of the things players do is take parts of Jupiter’s atmosphere to terraform other planets, such as Mars.
There’s just an insane amount of material out there compared to what we have now.
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E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith did that in Subspace Explorers (1965) — the heroes discovered a planet extremely rich in copper, set up a vast automated copper mining and smelting operation, and started shipping copper at 1/20 the price of copper mined on Earth. They put every copper mine out of business and ruined the rapacious and abusive copper miners union.
Then they set up similar operations to supply other metals at near-giveaway prices. They practically had a war with the corrupt Earth government.
There’s a near-Earth asteroid, (6178) 1986 DA, that contains an estimated 10,000 tons of gold, 100,000 tons of platinum, and billions of tons of iron and nickel. It’s worth trillions of dollars if we can get there and mine it.
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And back in 2002, some ecoLuddite wrote an article that we MUST be BANNED, BANNED I SAY, from mining the Moon because that would throw it out of orbit and we would all DIEEEEEE under super-high tides!
It was so absurd that I wrote a filk based on Hope Eyrie that even Ms Fish approved of.
Hope’s Weary
TTTO: Hope Eyrie, by Leslie Fish
Kids grow old
And brains grow cold
And dumb we never can doubt.
Hard cold facts
just won’t go away.
No matter how much we hope and pray,
All too soon, the truth comes out!
Chorus:
And the lumber has landed!
Tell these idiots that
We’re going to smack them with a baseball bat!
….
For Moons are large,
And men are small,
And even our largest machines
Can’t move enough Lunar rocks and soil
To shift the Moon in its’ orbital coil
And cause the tides to change.
Cho.
But we who know
the weight of the throw,
the mass that our rockets can hurl
Can only smile and roll our eyes
at the babbling oddballs who theorize
and keep us chained to our world!
Cho.
We know well what the old owl tells,
If you can’t talk sense then hush,
But those who deal in newsprint and ink
So very rarely stop to think,
“Does the smell test pass this slush?”
Cho
For we who try to turn idiocy’s tide,
There’s just one thing to thank,
The clue by four is but metaphor,
and no new trees have to die therefore,
Just our hair pulled with a yank!
Let the lumber keep landing
until these idiots see
We’re going to space because it’s the place to be!
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In Alexis Gilleland’s “Long Shot for Rosinante”, they used a “Dragon Scale Mirror” from an unfinished O’Neill colony as a weapon. The mirror was 125km in diameter, made up of millions of independently-steerable smaller mirrors, so it had infinite focal range and multiple focal points.
That not being considered sufficient of itself, they used it to pump a gas laser 14.7 meters in diameter and 10km long.
When in operation the whole laser cylinder glowed, causing the engineers to call it the “Purple Shaft.”
I always liked that weapon; it sounded like something EE Smith or Isaac Asimov might have come up with.
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“Perfection is the enemy of the good.”
Because perfection cannot be achieved in this life, and trying to force it leads, as you so eloquently put it, to stagnation in bizarre ways. Not to mention mass atrocities…
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Yes. Which is much of the source of my irritation with a certain group of Feffer-adjacent space non-advocates. They’re not against space per se, not Fix Earth Firsters; they “only” want to make sure that we’ve Solved Everything (Perfectly) First, before going Out There in any numbers. As a leading (and probably, best-case) example, see the “space bastards” (their own term, mind you!) who wrote the still-highly-promoted “A City On Mars?” — the “Wienersmiths.”
Seffers, maybe?
It’s annoying not just because this sort of spotlighted pessimism (“anything needs to be proved do-able before we try it”) sounds subversively more reasonable than an outright “no!” — it’s also because at least the better class of them (unlike many/most Fix Earth Firsters) have the analysis and research skills to look at such things in considerable objective detail.
And they do — through a lens of pessimism and “have we thought this through” — which might be a useful alternative to the go-go boosters who don’t sweat the details at all, except so much of this stuff is promoted as a “be realistic” bucketful of cold water on any idea of really doing anything, “just wait another generation or two and then…”
To the tune of a certain well-known show tune: “Tomorrow! Tomorrow! It’s always tomorrow, it’s always a day away!” (Or a year or a generation or a century or…) Pfui. ‘Nuff of that, already.
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“Have we thought this through?”
Asking this question is much of why NCOs exist.
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E-6 on Moon, looking at image on screen: “Europa?”
E-4 Space Mafia: “Well, Sarge, you see, Jackson had this idea, and we had those spare modules and launcher lying around and it worked. Him and Perkins and Roosevelt found some really cool stuff there, and …”
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Define “perfection”.
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It’s not wrong to want the new heaven and new earth, but the timing on that is not up to humanity.
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Earth first! We can strip mine the rest of the planets later!
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”Oh Noes! Think of the environmental impact on the Moon! And pristine Ceres! Waaaah!”
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NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection, “protecting lifeless worlds from life for fifty years”, could not be reached for comment on this rant.
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🤣
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🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
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Saw that as a bumper sticker on a rural truck in Flyover Falls. The second sentence was in much smaller print, and as I got close enough to read it, the owner came from the store. We had a chuckle…
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Somehow something tells me “Effin’ Feffers!” is about to join the company of go-to pejorative epithets (colorful phrases a-la Star Trek).
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or ‘M-Feffers!’ 😛
They can go join the Flerfers for all I care.
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Wasn’t it Larry Niven that wrote “A close Earth approach by a comet or asteroid is natures way of asking “How’s that space program coming along”?
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Insty asks that question for every notable close approach of the kinetic kind.
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On the Chinese Choice, notably the Mongols, after conquering China, continued on their merry way and conquered pretty much everyone else they could ride over until they finally ran into some particularly obstinate Europeans (note they tried Japan as well but a Typhoon intervened, divine wind v1.0 – the one that worked). This proves it was possible for the Chinese who subsequently overthrew the Mongols to similarly proceed along the same lines if they chose to be expansionist.
And other more ancient societies had similar potential. It’s an open question how far Alexander would have gone with the resources of Persia and then the Indian kingdoms at his disposal had he not had such an enormous drinking problem.
And Gaius Iulius, when Senator Brutus and Colleagues got all stabby on him, was about a day away from leaving with his legions to go start in on the Parthians, with an acknowledged eye toward Alexander’s campaigns continuing further east. One wonders why the conspirators didn’t just let him leave town.
And the argument is defensible that Rome really started it’s fall just a few years later when, after the Teutoburg disaster, they collectively decided the Rhine was far enough for the Imperial border forever – Rome was structurally configured to be expansionist, and once it stopped there were inherent flaws that only grew.
In modern times look at the place where Great Britain used to be – deciding “good enough” and giving up expansion seems to guarantee decline into whatever the heck is going on over there today.
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Well if people start living on other bodies in space how is anyone left here going to collect the taxes?
It’s hard enough to gouge, I mean, tax people who have skedadled off to Florida and Texas from points communist. How do you expect the IRS to be able to be force space goers to pay their Fair Share if they manage to “slip the surly bonds of earth”?
Think of all the Deputy Assistants to the Second Under-Secretary of Paperwork Fullfillment Offices who may have to get real jobs at minimum wage if the revenue syream dries up!
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I never did understand why anyone in “Farmer’s in the Sky”, who emigrated from Earth to Titan, didn’t spend all the money they had left (after the selection process), for the, er, “benefit” of the colony. I mean seriously. They had to pay to use the equipment, get supplies, why not “bank” prepaid, like proving land, for items the colony needed? Not like they could use the money on Titan itself. Nor were they returning (in general). Etc.
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Innapropriate perhaps, but I’ve had the old bugs bunny hasenpfeffer episode stuck in my head since I read this along with the recipe instruction: “first, catch your rabbit.”
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If I didn’t know this was Hasenpfeffer, I’d sweat it was carrots.
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First thing I looked for on seeing this post was a quick clip of the King(?) declaring “Hassenpfeffer!?**”, but could only find extended clips.
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LOL! I’m late to the party on reading this one. I was busy typing this post. I do love Dan’s term, Feffers. Ad astra per aspera!
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I left a comment on your blog. It is in moderation (Go figure! Right?)
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Sorry, I get so few comments that the first comment from someone always goes to moderation. After a couple of years of posting, I have to get used to seeing some actual readers I guess. :)
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I figured. Still fun to blame WP …
Hey. Link it here. I’ll probably go read it!
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It’s https://frank-hood.com. If you click on my name, it takes you to my Gravatar profile that has links to my blog and my Amazon author’s page.
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I read your tech stuff. Bought the book. I even understood it all. Even though some of it was before my time (in IT/software development). As in, “Yea. Um. No.” (Teletype Basic was too much for me in ’77. Let alone anything before. OTOH Basic, RPG, COBOL, Fortran, etc. (C/C++/C#), on Apple IIe, or even mainframes (I hate mainframes), with screens, in ’83 and beyond, no problem.)
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I only used a mainframe in school at SDSU. It was a Cyber mainframe IIRC. I hear it was even water-cooled, not that we lowly TAs were ever allowed to see it. But I did use the infamous 300 baud dial-up modem. For a long time my programming was on so-called mini-compters. A little later the Apple Lisa came out. Did have a teletype that I had to interface with for the Navy. I forget which ship had it. The simulator also had a literal wall of switches, the big toggle ones like you see in the Frankenstein movie.
Glad you enjoyed the book, a relic from a bygone era–like me. :)
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LOL
I, too, am old enough to predate the Stone Age, er, pre-internet over cable. I’ve used the 300 baud dial-up too. Not regular work from home or remote, usually. Mostly email. But did have to tend one remote site occasionally from base office.
I’ve worked on the mini-computers too. Nothing military.
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My HS computer lab had an IMSAI 8080 in one corner, and a teletype to the school district’s one and only mainframe in the other, and then my senior year we got an Apple II, so the fact that my first programming class at SJSU (FORTRAN) used IBM punch cards was a bit of a shock.
Having IBM card experience gave me good stories, though (Job Control Cards for the win!).
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The only real punch card programming i did was an IBM 360 that ran a pen-plotter in the Engineering Lab. Used it for an automated cartography class. And, no, I didn’t use the last 4 digits to sort the deck. I did use the old felt pen diagonally on the side of the deck, but I was very careful to never drop it. :)
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I never dropped mine, but I was in that lab when other students did. Oh, the wailing and gnashing.
The worse thing was when the TAs didn’t run enough JCL cards towards the end of the semester, when everyone was trying to get their runs done. I figured out early on to use the punch machine’s copy function to run off a bunch of my own on blank cards. Those JCL cards were not the right colors like the official ones, but they worked just fine.
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I have to check your book out. I’m a bit older than you, as the 8080 came out around my last two years in undergrad. High school had the first* Midwest install of an NCR Century “mainframe” circa 1969-70. A couple of 5MB hard drives with removable media, and a refrigerator-sized cabinet with an extra 68K** worth of RAM. (The Burroughs it was replacing had 8K worth of magnetic core, so don’t laugh too hard.)
CS101 at U of Redacted was on the*** IBM mainframe, though a later EE course entailed use of a GE beast that was old enough to need the older Type 26 keypunch, and it only handled Fortran II. (The IBM was Fortran IV, and we had one program in PL-1.)
Much of my product/test engineering was on automagic test machines on some flavor of minicomputer. Did have to use the 110 baud TTY for a while until they got an HP1000 mini to talk to it. When (after many years) we got machines that spoke C and were under Unix, it was nirvana.
(*) sigh, bodies of pioneers are frequently found with arrows in their bodies
(**) 9 bit “byte”. Don’t know what technology any of that memory used. The 9th bit is a tell that bit-rot was a thing.
(***) One of them. They had two for CS, and I believe admin had a third. Biiig school.
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I doubt you’re older than me. I just didn’t get into computers until I was 30 when I realized that writing thing wasn’t going to work out for me. I do remember once lugging a “portable” terminal home once. It weighed about 25 pounds and consisted of a keyboard and a modem, the kind you plugged the phone’s earpiece and mouthpiece into suction cup like receptacles. https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1130/1*UFfVt8Tcu8S5ck_P64RAFQ.jpeg.
Did my first 12 years using FORTRAN although I did learn Pascal and BASIC, and eventually Ada before moving on to the C family and Java.
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I seriously considered buying a KaPro (know I’ve got the spelling wrong; it’s been a long time, mortally speaking).
FORTRAN in college, eventually a bit of DOS. First office computer ran Windows 3.1.
Never really an IT guy and totally out of date now.
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My first “portable” was the ’90 Compaq DOS portable. Portable definition of “you can carry it”. I was not fond of the thing. About the size of a sewing machine, and heavier. Did not have a very big harddrive.
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BTW the book is A Geek’s Progress.
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Rather than “we must fix earth first”, I’d say the historical evidence suggests that finding new frontiers to open goes a long way towards fixing things in the home society. Reduces stress, gives new sources of resources, and forces governments to lighten up on taxes, etc., because hey, you have the option to go somewhere else, you don’t have to sit still for this!
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Yep.
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It would be nice to have wilderness to flee to.
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I’m only an armchair historian, but I see a striking correlation between the frontier being closed and D.C. getting uppity.
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Meanwhile, the blue states are starting to pass “exit tax” laws aimed at residents who move out.
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Noticed, yes.
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Aaawww, it’s not bunnies?!?!?
But Bugs Bunny taught me “hoss and feffer” meant bunny something!
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“…my husband coined the term Feffers as a short hand for all the sad mouths who yell “Fix Earth First” every time anyone tries to escape…”
Imagine all the socialists screaming “FIX EUROPE FIRST!!!” in 1492 when Columbus was gearing up to sail the ocean blue. That’s what they are.
Everything they say and do is fake anyway, this is no dumber and no less fake than anything else.
And really, we don’t despise them half as much as they deserve. Haven’t we just learned that the SPLC is literally paying people to pretend to be racist in the USA, because there’s not enough real racists left to run a proper parade?
These two things are the same, two tentacles of the same Cthulhu. Despise them harder, slackers. ~:D
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Given how much the left complains about colonialism, they absolutely would say “fix Europe first”.
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Africa has been so much worse since they ran the ‘colonizers’ out of town. The British and Dutch in particular spent a lot of effort dissuading the various tribes from conducting their age-old wars of extermination. With access to modern weapons they were much more capable of wiping each other out.
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Not to be confused with feoffer which does have an entry on m-w (dotcom).
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It wasn’t Africa that devoured Rhodesia. The Rhodies had whupped Africa. It was commies in Beijing, DC, and London, and at the Unionized Ne’er-do-wells’ office in NYC. They denounced the Rhodies for running Rhodesia efficiently instead of consulting themselves, and for beating “Africa always wins,” so they blockaded the country and sat their swine fundamental on the “Tribal backwater” side of the scale. Blame Jimmeh Carter et al for Zimbabwe.
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Nixon not disavowing the Plumbers and declaring he would get to the bottom of the whole Watergate thing with a blue ribbon commission (to report after the 1976 election) and thus serving out the rest of his term led to Jimmeh, and Jimmeh yielded a huge amount of modern problems.
But Ford being nothing much and Jimmeh being so bad led to Reagan in 1980, who by ending the USSR saved the world, so let’s not go fiddling with the timelines, eh?
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Amen.
Just like Obama led to Trump 45, and Biden led to Trump 47, and now.
I do believe historians, which ultimately is the record, will report that Trump won three elections, but wasn’t sworn in as president three times.
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I blame Jimmah for the rivers of blood in Africa and for my own shitty teen years.
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Makes you wonder if Billy wasn’t the better brother.
Billy leased his name and likeness to a brand of beer made by a maybe-better-than-nothing brewery. The joke that circulated was that Mo Udall bought a can, took one pull, and sent the remainder to the Dept. of Ag. for analysis. A week later he got the report: “Dear Mr. Udall, We are sorry to report that your horse has diabetes …”
Metaphor for the Cahta years?
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“You should pour this back into the horse.” 😁
Toddy: [holds up a glass of cheap white wine] “The last time I saw a specimen like this, they had to shoot the horse.”
Waiter: “How lucky can you get? In one evening a Rockefeller, and a Groucho Marx.”
Toddy: “Oh, they didn’t shoot a real horse. Just a costume with two waiters in it.”
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When I asked my wife to pick up some beer for me and my (then-bachelor) brother one evening, ’09 or so, she (the non-drinker) brought back Heineken. We hadn’t had Heineken before, and each poured a glass. Our first impressions were simultaneous and synonymous:
To wit:
“How much whiskey did they give that poor horse?”
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When I asked my wife to pick up some beer for me and my (then-bachelor) brother one evening, ’09 or so, she (the non-drinker) brought back Heineken. We hadn’t had Heineken before, and each poured a glass. Our first impressions were simultaneous and synonymous:
To wit:
“How much whiskey did they give that poor horse?”
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It wasn’t Africa that devoured Rhodesia. The Rhodies had whupped Africa. It was commies in Beijing, DC, and London, and at the Unionized Ne’er-do-wells’ office in NYC. They denounced the Rhodies for running Rhodesia efficiently instead of consulting themselves, and for beating “Africa always wins,” so they blockaded the country and sat their swine fundamental on the “Tribal backwater” side of the scale. Blame Jimmeh Carter et al for Zimbabwe.
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Aw, hell. Another double-post.
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Reminds me of the constant theme on Yellowstone where every episode the Indians would piss and moan about “stolen land” and just how bad the Reservation was … I always noticed that on the Reservation the place ALWAYS looked like a sh*thole and yet they acted like if given more land they would behave differently. I also never once saw any fences or barriers around the Reservation… absolutely nothing prevented the Indians from going and living anywhere is America yet most stayed … even in the final episode the “chief” said “we stopped fighting 160 years ago” … I guess nobody had the heart to point out that they stopped fighting because THEY GOT BEATTEN like a rented mule and surrendered … land was conquered just like THEY conquered the tribes that lived there 200 years ago …
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In reality, that’s because anybody who leaves they don’t count anymore.
My cousin Hezzie is the only one left- his… um… K, I don’t know the generations, but my great grandfather’s brother was his ancestor– is literally the only one still alive for his entire bloodline, at least on the rez.
Because he hung out with the Scottish side of the family when we were kids, and he left the rez as soon as he graduated.
Other side of the family, amusingly via the husband of the niece of that cousin’s ancestor, she didn’t count because she was at least half possibly fully Indian but “went white” in the late 1800s.
It’d be like if someone could only be “Black” if the lived in the inner city subsidized housing or something.
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“but younger son refuses to invent the technology.”
Sounds like a job for your cat. Maybe with the right incentives? 😁
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