The Crypto of All Evil

I’ve been looking at crypto currency lately. Yes, I know. It’s the thing of the future. Digital money. Credits and what not. Star Trek Socialism Bucks. I’ve heard everything about it from, ‘It’s the next gold,’ to ‘Wave of the future,’ to ‘It’s a Ponzi scheme!’ Of course it’s a Ponzi scheme. Every economy is, ultimately, a Ponzi scheme. The only question is on which side of it you are: The Ponz side or the zi side? Every economy has ended in ruin. Just give this one time.

I’ve heard that Elon Musk is buying it, and also that he is selling it-not that I listen to someone who thinks he’s Tony Stark. I’ve also heard that China is thinking of banning it. And that they are about to release their own digital Yuan, thereby nationalizing it. Con se com sa.

Economists are a laugh, as per tradition. A self-adoring laugh. They routinely pontificate on the economy while auto-administering proctoscopy exams using their own heads as probes. Dismal science, indeed. Defecating dismal science.

I downloaded the Coinbase app a month ago and set up an account. I had to go through hoops, upload copies of my ID cards, verify a payment method, etc. blah, blah. In the meantime Elon Stark is rumored to be selling Bitcoin, thus depressing the price, China has banned Bitcoin mining, whatever that is, thus dooming their own economy, the economist-proctologists say, and gold has gone up to near $2,000.00 an oz. Several economist heads have shifted rectally. And Charles Schwab is head-swabbing his own colon. Blah, blah…, gloop?

There has to be a way to cash in on this cash grab. C’mon. A fool and his money, after all. This is nothing new. Just new lamps for old. I’m sure they were selling clay tile futures in the market square of Babylonia in the shadow of the Ziggurat.

They say all new technology is immediately used for pornography. Starting with Neolithic Venus statues littered around Europe to frolicking frescoes of satyrs and nymphs on bedroom walls in Pompei to Mr. Daguerre’s Dirty Daguerreotypes to the first phone sex between Belle and Watson. “Come here, Watson. I need you?” Seriously? I’d say it was Platonic, but you know what Plato was into, right?

Sex has a history. A full 69% of the Internet is devoted to it. There’s a shoe shine tip for Mr. Rockefeller. Bet long. Go short. Count on the load in between. And wear protection. Why do you think they call it Wall (Diaphragm) Street? There are no splits but plenty of spread eagles. And always bet on the basest of humans instincts. Sex sells.

Maybe I should market a new sexo-currency. Something from the here and now and whatever is to cum. The Crypto-Epsteinbuck! The obverse can be a picture of Bill Clinton waving a cigar around over a map of Little Saint James Island, how appropriate. The reverse can show the Lolita Express zooming in for a penetration of one of the gaping runways. Choose one token of exchange, they are all the same. Fools will buy what bigger fools will sell. Now we’re talking.

While we’re talking. Let’s talk about crypto money mining, or whatever. They say that crypto currency, money, fiat, whatever, does not exist until somebody ‘mines’ it. Just like gold! That makes it sound legitimate-ey. If I have to dig it out of the ground, it’s shiny, and it’s scarce, people will think it is worth something. Now here’s my shit! It’s worth something, too!

I have to ‘mine’ crypto so I then ‘have’ money which I can then ‘spend’ on ‘things’ as collateral.  Or save or invest or whatever. As long as I can ‘find’ a sucker/partner who accepts that this ‘shit’ means anything. I’m sorry. ‘Means’ anything. Lovely. Well, it’s no different than shells or wampum. Giant blocks of limestone or disks of copper. Imaginary Monopoly money has been around for forever. It has been useful as a tool of accounting for forever. As it has been prone to inflation and abuse for forever. As has been con artistry and Tom foolery. For forever.

In ancient Babylonia there was the concept of a year of jubilee. It was the trendy economic theory of Babylonian economists with their heads up their Bronze Age butts in the second millennia BC and it went like this. Every seventy years or so all debts were cancelled. All obligations negated. Everything was reset. A Great Reset, as it were. Claus Schwab eat your fascist heart out, or whichever of your organs your mouth is currently close to. Someone beat you to it.

There you go. All economic problems solved. All economists unemployed. Two birds. One stone. No more home owner debts. No more business debts. Forget that college loan and cancel that credit card. It was either that or inflate the fucker out of existence. Oh, and as for the fine print, er, the fine cuneiform. Any money somebody might owe to you; a bank account, retirement fund, a jar of pennies in the closet, blah, blah, blah; also gets wiped out along with the rest. Thank you for banking Babylonian Bank and Trust Company. Have a steak knife!

This was an economic holocaust. In capitalism depressions, recessions, downturns, panics, great resets, and all of the other economic wrenches that get tossed into the money gears sort of happen on their own just about every 40 years or so. With the Babylonian school of economics these were engineered into the system. Socialist style state planning is a lot older than we think. Five year plans? Pshaw! We’ve got you beat by a factor of fourteen!

Of course, it also meant it got harder and harder to borrow money the closer to a Depression/Jubilee Year/Great Reset you got, but never bet against the bank.

That’s where the real money is. Faking people into believing that there is something here and then scarfing them of all they are worth for as long as it is worth anything. After which. RESET! JUBILEE! Not to worry! Another generation of suckers is on the way!

Speaking of the Great Reset. And Crypto-Bucks. I decided to buy a gram. Or a shell. Or a Bongo Buck. Bitcoin has been going down drastically lately. From a high of $69,000.00 about ten days ago it is currently selling for $58,199.58 which means it has dropped by over 15% from an all time high. Time to buy, Mr. Warbucks. I slapped down a fifty Paypal bill and was sold $48.01 worth of Bitcoin with a Coinbase transaction fee of  $1.99 for the astounding amount of 0.00082492 of a bitcoin. I’m a ten-thousandth-aire!  

Meh, I would have just blown that half a C-note on trash, anyway. Now I’ve got something virtual to sneeze at. A-Cho! Oops. It’s gone.

So, back to my life’s obsession of unburdening the gullible of their undeserved wealth. What next? Let’s see… Crypto currency mining sounds like something the Wizard of Oz would come up with. Come one! Come all! See the Great Crypto! The economic miracle of the ages. First invented by the ancient Egyptians who used it to build an empire. Borrowed from the Babylonians who first learned of it from the emperors of Cathay in the far Orient. It’s the Wonderous Wurlitzer! Master of Money, Killer of Kingdoms and Elevator of Empires! Void where prohibited.

Why not? I remember when you could download a program, we didn’t call them ‘apps’ back then, which would use the spare cycles on your home computer to crunch through pictures from SETI. I guess the search for extraterrestrial life is awfully computer intensive so they devised a way for enthusiasts to volunteer their otherwise wasted computer time to inspecting radio wave maps of the cosmos searching for signals that could be generated by living planets. (Today that extra processing time is commandeered by Google Hive.)

Shit. My bitcoin account has just gone down by nine cents. I’M RUINED! It’s the suspenders and pickle barrel for me. Once I built a railroad… I made it run… made it race against time…

There must be a Disney Bros Studio in the detritus. There must be a way to make this railroad run again. Fortunes are made when the going it good but empires are made on the ruins of those who go bust.

Crypto-Mine-Ography! With every crypto coin you mine you get a jolt of high voltage neurotransmitter down the genitals of your choice. I mean, come on. That’s what human civilizations is all about, right? Jolts of neurotransmitters down the right brain-chutes?

Nah, that’s not right. Good concept but bad marketing.

Crypto-Mining is a good scam. But what to do with it? I’ve got it. And I call it Mine-Crypto-Pornography! MCP for short because that makes it sound legitimate or important or something. With your shares of MCP at $96,000.00 a share, more if your name is Elon, you can generate obscure mathematical strings of digits that don’t mean anything to anybody. But that can be reduced to an original sequence that resembles a tulip bulb in a JPG format. I’m sorry, Non Fungible Token, which is shorthand for, ‘Give me your money!’ Seriously. I could take a selfie of my gouty big toe, reduce it to a digitized, crypto-circumcised, commoditized string of digits and some fool would buy it. You, my friend, might just be that fool. If you play your cards right…into my hands.

So, with the new Non Fuckable Tokens, you too can own ‘art’ that is indistinguishable from any other garbage on this planet of landfill, but it’s unique! And it’s non-fungible! Try as you may, you cannot ever funge this string of digits! Cash only. All sales are final and non-fungible.

As God is my witness my tooth print will be on every coin I bit.

Brother, can you spare a dime?

Nam

I am not a war veteran.

I got my 1-A draft card two months before the war was over.
Nixon ended the war.
I was not called.

In the late 70's I worked for a defense contractor in Connecticut. Electric Boat. I was a clerk. No, Tech Aide. That's what they called us. Glorified clerk. In an engineering department in the South Yard. I knew a lot of great people. Distinguished people. People I respected and was glad to call friends. Chester, who I commuted into work with, had been at Pearl Harbour. He told me what happened when the bombs fell. How he ran around like a mad man and about his friend who was late for work. When he finally got there, his desk wasn't. Chester was a wiry little Frenchman. "Chester the Molester," we used to call him. He could swear like a sailor, which he was, and sex-talk like a, well, like a Frenchman.

I met a lot of interesting people at EB. A lot of vets. WWII. Submariners. Pacific Theater. Viet Nam. Engineers. Draftsmen. Just plain people. I worked in a big room clustered with military grey desks, built like tanks. There were no partitions. No 'cubicles' like in the modern Dilbert sense. Your desk probably butted up against someone else's desk, with someone else beside you. Maybe you were lucky enough to face a concrete wall. Maybe near the central pillar where they put the coffee pot, though that meant you had a lot of traffic at your desk. If you wanted to talk to someone, you just yelled.

I sat in various places, as the office reorgs shuffled. Once I sat across from a black veteran. He was fascinating. Served in Nam. After his tour he asked to serve in a far north listening post. That's where serviceman were stationed to monitor the Soviet nuclear threat. It was cold. It was boring. It was dark 50% of the time. And you hoped it would never change. You had only one companion. Why the fuck would anyone want to be there?

The military screens people who request to serve there. They don't want anybody who will go coo-coo and start a nuclear war. So they asked him, "Why do you want to serve a tour of duty in a place like that?"

"For the money," he said.
"What?"
"If I put up with six months in that place, I automatically have my pick of where else I want to serve. Berlin. London. Paris. Hell, I can go anywhere I want!"
"You're in."

Every day I learned something new. Something important. I learned how to read blueprints. How to read engineering documents. How to make sense of military specs-that's not easy, and how to put up with my coworkers. 'Networking,' as they say today.

I learned what it meant to be an engineer, a veteran, a technician, and an American.

Larry was a draftsman. He worked in the same department as I. I was in the tech aide coral. He with the other draftsmen. He had served in Nam. Been on the front line. He lived in Jewett City and was one of my car pool buddies. He would sometimes talk about his service. He was an infantryman. Front line. Grunt. He talked about prying open mines to get at the C4 inside. You could take it out and put it on the ground. Then light it on fire. It would burn OK. Just like charcoal. But if you said, "Hey, Fred! That's on fire!" and Fred stomped on it, it would blow his foot off. Larry wouldn't do that to anybody, of course. But it was something he lived with. Daily. Using C4 to blow up fish in streams. To make little holocausts. To kill gooks. To-I never learned what else. He didn't talk about it.

Larry had a girl he loved. He talked about that, too. And a psychologist he saw in Hartford regularly. For his war problems. They used to call it Shell Shock. Then Battle Fatigue. Then Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It doesn't matter. He was in pain. He was holding something in that should never have been there to begin with. Larry and his girl had an on again, off again relationship. Like all of us. They did their best.

On New Years Eve, 1980, Larry put a rifle into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

I miss Larry. I hate war.

New Orleans

After an intoxicating year and a half avoiding the Twenty-first century’s Black Death, I got tired of sheltering in my holocaust robe and subsiding on woke MRE’s (Vegan sushi, sour grapes, and vaccines,) and fear. I decided that I had to get out of here. And go SOMEWHERE!

That somewhere was New Orleans.

I’ve always wanted to see the Big Easy. A town that was populated by paying French prostitutes to go there and settle down is just too good to be true. This was last July, not the optimal time to visit the City That Never Sobers-Up. But I was desperate to get out of town. If just for a few days. I checked out some YouTube videos on NOLA, found out what to avoid, where to go, what to eat, and what’s historic. I bought a one way ticket from Tampa to Louie Armstrong International Airport. Just in case I wanted to stay longer. Or shorter.

I reserved a room in a youth hostel called City House New Orleans on Burgundy Street. It was a block away from Canal street and near the Museum of Death. What’s not to like? I downloaded the Regional Transit Authority app and purchased a 30 day geriatric RTA Jazzy Pass that would allow me unlimited access to streetcars, busses, and ferries in and around the city. (Um. Jon, buddy? I think they’re called ‘senior passes’ not ‘geriatric passes?’ Yah, sure. And I’m ‘Dr. Facilier.’)

I won’t go into intense detail about the visit. I was not at all disappointed. In fact, I extended my stay at the hotel a few more days. A city bus brought me from the airport to Canal street. Along the way I had a nice chat with a couple visiting from Georgia. The youth hostel was almost empty, clean, and the staff, when I saw them, courteous. Of course, I did what I usually do in a new place. I walked. Used the local transport. Got lost. Asked for directions. Had people approach me and ask if I needed help when I was particularly lost looking. And got to know the city.

The RTA app is infuriating. It’s often wrong. I would type in that I want to get to, say, Marie Laveau’s Museum of Voodoo and Sunbathing, and it would show me the destination and which line, streetcar or bus, stopped there. Great. Now show me the stop closest to me so I can get on said streetcar or bus. Nope. If I instead looked for the nearest station to me, it might not be for the line I want.

Great. Schrödinger’s Bus Schedule. You can know where you are or where you are going, but not both.

Speaking of Marie Laveau… One walking tour was with a Vodu priest named Robi (Note: Voodoo only exists in Hollywood.)  He was a card and a full deck at the same time. He let me video his tour and I have it on my YouTube channel (Yes! I have a YouTube channel!) I’ll just say that we ended at the location of Marie Laveau’s house, long gone. The house, that is. Well, Marie, too. When she died and the locals examined her house, they found a secret passageway underneath that lead to another building nearby. She was instrumental in an underground railroad that transported slaves away from the sugar plantations and as far away as Canada. And, well. You know. If some nigga disappears…, them alligators in the bayou leave no scraps. All that BS about Voodoo priestess and horror-magic that Marie Leveau practiced on the unwary was a scam to keep people from looking too deeply into what she was really doing in helping her fellow slaves get to freedom.

I love a woman who can manipulate the clueless. And there are none more clueless that they who know.

One walking tour was for adults only. That allowed our guide to go into the more seamy (there is a less seamy?) side of NOLA. From Alistair Crowley to Casket Girls to Al Capone and the prostitute named Brick. She was a kicker. She had startling red hair which she put up in a bun, which made it look like she had a brick on top of her head. New Orleans, like every other port city from Shanghai to San Francisco, had an influx and outflow of sailors who had been on the celibate seas for months and were looking to dock their cargo in port. Brick is thought to have murdered one for sure, three more probably, and suspected of several dozen more. Don’t dick with Brick.

I went on a jazz cruse. Took the ferry across the river. Rode a streetcar to a cemetery with a ‘Weeping angel’ in it. I made sure to maintain eye contact. Took a boat ride into the bayou. Alligators love marshmallows, don’t you know. And did a lot of walking around the French Quarter, of course. Did a self-guided audio walking tour of the Garden district. Marvelous how the lives of the ne’er do well pale before the e’re do well in society. Smashed my cell phone on the street pavers. Oops. Is there an at&t store around here? Make sure you have an alternate thinking machine with you wherever you go. I had my tablet in the hotel as backup.

There was one thing I wanted to do. That was to buy something local. Most of the gift shops in the French Quarter are owned by one of about five families and all of the merch is made in China. I wanted to get something authentic. So on my last day there I found a little shop far away from Bourbon street that sold the usual trinkets and geegaws. And masquerade masks.

“I am looking for something that is made by a local artist,” I said to the sales woman. “Do you have things that are made by local artisans? I’d like to support local talent.”

“Yes,” she replied. “These masks on the wall are made by me or by the owner.”

“Wonderful,” I said. I peered around the walls, flitting from mask to mask, my eyes finally settling on one garish Mardi Gras celebration of life. It was decorated in peacock feathers around the cheeks and nose, felt, pearls and sequins, and plumes of larger feathers radiating outward from the eye sockets that bore into you.

“Perfect,” I said. I had her ship it to me.

“How do I protect such a beauty?” I mused, once I got back home. “It comes from New Orleans. It represents a gaiety of spirit bristling in a world of pain,” I thought. The mask was just too lovely and fragile and fleeting, “Like a brass band on Bourbon street with the street sweepers bringing up the rear and the dawn behind them.” Another day always follows the last.

“Well, it needs a shadow box.” I thought. “Of…, cedar? Live Oak? Some wood native to New Orleans? No, those don’t do it. What does tribute to the memory of Brick and Marie Laveau? Or Robi, my new Vodu priest friend? Robi is not from New Orleans. “There are no more legitimate Vodu priests in New Orleans,” Robi told us on the tour. “Just imposters.” Robi comes from the Bayou outside of NOLA.

“Ah! Of course.” I realized. “The bayou! The tree clogged swamps surrounding the Mississippi river!” I decided to make my case out of Cypress.”

I found a lumber yard near me that had native Cypress. “Can you tell me where this came from?” I asked. “Since we wholesale it from a distributer we can’t tell for sure.” “OK,” it would have been nice to know exactly where it came from. “But,” she continued. “We can say for certain it is from between New Orleans and Florida and even as far north as Delaware.” “Delaware?” “Well, some. But most likely it was harvested in Florida.”

Florida. OK. That’s good.

I bought some Cypress boards and built a display case for my Mardi Gras mask. It reminds me of Brick and Robi and Marie Laveau. Of the streetcars and the friendly people I met on the sidewalks and the gumbo and the riverboat jazz musicians and the alligators snapping at marshmallows hung overboard by the bayou swamp boat captain. Of the New Orleans RTA official who helped me find the right street car to where I was going.

And of the beautiful city betwixt the lake and the river that is New Orleans.