Early voting started this week in Texas! Get your ass out there and cast your ballot for whichever train wreck of a human you think will keep us all afloat the longest!
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VOTE
Author: Martin Hodo
Just a guy trying to have a meaningful existence.
I couldn’t sleep the other night and decided it would be cool to watch a Netflix documentary. Oops.
I’ve always been a conservative leaning guy when it comes to the Constitution and federal vs state governments. I’ve been more of a liberally-minded guy on individual rights–let people do whatever they want, so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else–and I’m a nature-lover. I grew up in the Texas Hill Country, and it’s just goddamn gorgeous out there, but from a young age I recognized that there was less and less of it. The more I rode in the car with my parents, the fewer hills and trees I saw, and the more houses or businesses or quarries or industrial plants I saw.
It always broke my heart a little.
So, I’m a bit of a green dude. I’ve tried to avoid supporting companies that use loads of pesticides, but I don’t typically insist on organic. I curse under my breath when I get packages with tons of plastic packaging. I worry about how many plastic grocery bags are piling up in my garage. I see first-hand that we’re eating up more natural resources than we can replenish, and I have always felt that there’s no way we can sustain our “advancement” as a society.
And then I watched Sir David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet and it fucked me up. Attenborough does such an amazing job of intertwining the timeline of his career and everything he’s seen with the rise of population, carbon levels, and reduction of environmentally-stabilizing wilderness. He ties industrialization with wilderness reduction, but where he really got me was his ability to tie that reduction to real and tangible harm.
When discussing the impact of fossil fuels and general non-renewable resources, he says something along the lines of “humanity has released the carbon from thousands of years worth of animals in 200 years.” If you consider that the refinement and combustion of a hydrocarbon is chemically similar to the original creature that hydrocarbon originates from going through decomposition on the surface, it’s a comparison that really hits home. We’ve released a few millennia worth of gasses in the short period of the industrial era.
His lifetime of experience, combined with existent scientific research, presented with the passionate desperation of a man who sees his mortality and believes this film to be his last opportunity to save not only ourselves, but also every wild species on the planet, is deeply impactful. By framing the problem from multiple angles, and tying each of those angles to a single causality, he makes a strong case for impending catastrophe.
His lifetime of experience, combined with existent scientific research, presented with the passionate desperation of a man who sees his mortality and believes this film to be his last opportunity to save not only ourselves, but also every wild species on the planet, is deeply impactful.
Basically, he’s made me a climate change believer in a way that nobody else has managed to do.
Now, that might not in itself seem like enough to send me into something of an existential spiral, but it sure as hell did. It wasn’t the assertion that we’ve managed to reduce the wilderness coverage of the globe from 2/3 to 1/3 in less than a hundred years, which I personally believe is likely to be accurate (maybe even an underestimate). It wasn’t that swaths of reefs in the oceans are dying because the pH of the water has shifted beyond what they can sustain, which I personally believe is true (and is probably our fault). It wasn’t that we’ve transitioned to this reality where the ability to sustain a practice for long-term success isn’t a consideration for profit-driven enterprises. It wasn’t even that we’re reaching a point where we won’t be able to grow enough food to feed humanity, which seems ever more apparent as we’re being forced to use crazy carcinogenic pesticides and engineered fertilizers to help our overworked farmers make a living.
It was that I knew there was nothing that I could do to stop it.
Who am I to do anything? I’m just a guy trying to raise a family and make ends meet. Nobody knows me. I don’t have a following of any kind. I don’t have a reputation as a scientist that will leverage folks to see the errors of our ways and make changes. But I’m trying anyway, because I feel like I must.
As a logician and scientist, I’ve analyzed this problem before. I’ve read the research and dismissed many of the conclusions as representing some poor data practices and playing into confirmation biases. What I’ve learned from the places that I found credible is that the biggest offenders, by a huge margin, are not individuals but commercial and governmental entities. It’s such a large gap that even if we managed to reduce our individual footprints to nothing, we’d barely make a scratch. For example, if you look at the data coming out about the impact to carbon emissions from the quarantine, which was a worldwide reduction of travel by a huge percentage, the numbers look promising at first saying that there was a 17% reduction during peak months, but in the end, the impact is only going to be a 4-7% reduction for the year. So, if we all stay home and our cars are only having a 17% impact (averaged out to 7% when we return to normal living) where the heck are the other 83% coming from?
Industry and infrastructure.
Infrastructure is controlled (or at least regulated) by the government. That means we have to convince our leaders that the only way to truly “Keep America Great” is to ensure that we replenish our resources as we use them so that they will be there for future generations of Americans. I would have thought that this would be a no-brainer, but with lobbyists making our politicians rich to help keep their investors rich, we’ve seen virtually nothing in the way of legitimate efforts to increase our infrastructure sustainability.
Some day (hopefully very soon) we will be able to convince the political apparatus that renewable resources and sustainable processes are the only way to ensure the long-term survival of our species and pretty much any other.
That brings us to Industry. I firmly believe that industry will not change until their consumers and/or government regulators force them to. They are making far too much money to consider the possibility of really making lasting and impactful changes. If they don’t stay competitive, they will lose money and go out of business and then their competitor will rise and wreak the same havoc they did before. They do this for profit and they won’t stop until it’s no longer profitable. How do we make it more profitable for them to work sustainably?
I don’t really know, but I do know that corporations only listen to dollars, so we have to begin showing them that the long-term implications of unsustainable operations and what that looks like to their bottom dollar. They have to see that harvesting without allowing regrowth will only serve as a self-limiting mode of operation. They will run out of supply and then they will run out of business.
What I can say with some certainty is that humans have a history of adapting and overcoming through innovation and technology. Sometimes that tech ends up failing in spectacularly unanticipated ways, but other times it succeeds and carries us forward. It is my sincere hope that this documentary turns the tide and Sir David Attenborough’s final witness has the impact he desires.
Stay ready. Stay safe. Stay free.
-Hodo
Categories
No Deal
If you take nothing else from my Rambles, please, please, please remember these next couple of sentences. Nothing in the Constitution or Bill of Rights of the United States of America gives its citizens anything. Those documents acknowledge that humans are born with certain Inalienable Rights, and outline a series of restrictions against government to protect those Rights from being stolen away. To emphasize: the Bill of Rights protects rights already belonging to you it doesn’t give you rights through benevolence.
Winston Churchill once said that one should never let a good crisis go to waste. As a politician and leader, it was his prerogative to make the most of any given situation–to turn public outcry, outrage, or fear into a lever to pry more money, power, or influence from the populace. This is not a partisan statement. All portions of the political spectrum are guilty of this, and it has led to the downfall of pretty much every powerful government in history. Eventually the leadership takes and takes until the people refuse to give anymore.
Then war happens.
Historically, there have been many nations where the power was taken from the people by force of arms. There have been a few much more sinister governments who took advantage of confusion, fear, and anger to convince the populace that their Inalienable Rights were too dangerous, and should be forfeited for the greater good. In effect, the people voluntarily gave up their base Freedoms for a momentary sense of security–a deal with the devil.
Never give away a Freedom during times of war that you will miss during times of peace
You, me, our parents, and our grandparents have been the currency of a similar barter for nearly a century now. Since the early twentieth century (and probably before, but I consider the NFA of 1934 to be the first big offender), we have allowed the government of the United States to convince us that our guaranteed Liberties are just too dangerous. So they trimmed them here and there in the name of keeping us safe from ourselves. One of the largest and most sweeping infringements on our rights of the last 100 years has to be the Patriot Act.
The Patriot Act is the sort of draconian legislation that would have made the founding fathers start another revolution. It basically gives the government carte blanche to suspend a citizen’s Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendment rights, if they decide that you might be a terrorist. That’s absolutely nuts, but we were so petrified of a bearded dude with a suicide vest that we allowed Big Brother to trample on our Inalienable Rights in exchange for a promise of safety.
And this happening in a country that revolted over some fucking tea.
This is all to say that we must be vigilant. An organized, civil, and Free society isn’t the sort of thing that just happens. It takes a lot of people making hard decisions. It takes risk. It takes sacrifice. Sometimes personal freedoms mean that you have to deal with idiots doing dumb things, dangerous things, or things that just don’t make any sense. But that’s part of the package. And it’s abso-fucking-lutely worth it.
Never give away a Freedom during times of war that you will miss during times of peace, because it’s not like the powers-that-be are going to relinquish it back to you when the threat has gone. They will hold that action as precedent and use it again and again until eventually it is the new normal. And then the only way you’re buying it back is with blood.
I’m afraid we’re already too far gone in the modern age. “Shall not be infringed” has been trampled into obsolescence. There are no more Self Evident Truths. When the government can tell you that you have to shutter your lawful business or that you can’t take your children to the park or that you don’t have the capacity to choose your acceptable level of risk, then we’ve lost what it means to be American. American used to mean Free to brave the wilds and push against the status quo. Now we must stay indoors, wear masks, and fear hugging our neighbors.
I’m not willing to cede these basic rights to anyone. You shouldn’t be either. I hope, deeply, that there will be legal precedents set with the SCOTUS that strike down executive orders from governors and mayors, if for no other reason than to say that the executive does not have the power to levy these types of mandates, even in a time of “crisis.”
Remember how I started this little piece. Are you willing to be forced to shutter yourself in when there isn’t a virus being spread around? Are you willing to be told you have to close your business, because your governor or mayor or the president said so? If your answer is yes, then I charge that you aren’t worthy of the protections afforded to you under the Amendments to the Constitution. If your answer, like mine, is a resounding “Go fuck yourself,” then I think we can be friends, and I’d be happy to fight beside you when they come to shut us down.
Stay ready. Stay safe. Stay free.
-Hodo
Categories
No One Is Smart In a Bubble
Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply
Stephen R. Covey, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
This dude, Stephen Covey, is a pretty smart motherfucker. He’s written a couple of hugely successful ‘self help’ books about how to become a more successful and ‘effective’ version of yourself. One of the most under-rated skills that smart, skilled, and generally worth-a-shit people focus on is the simple act of really listening. Listening to comprehend. Listening to learn and grow. Listening to expand.
Not listening to refute. Not listening to find loopholes. Not listening to teach.
Listening to understand can help save the world. I don’t think that’s hyperbole. I legitimately believe that the path we’re on right now, with all the unrest, the shouting each other down, the rampant victimhood, and immediate dismissal of others’ problems as somehow lesser than our own, is going to be the downfall of the United States of America, and maybe the world as we know it.
This is something we don’t see in our media much anymore. Watch any CNN/MSNBC/Fox, etc. panel and you will either see lots of people arguing with each other and talking over one another, or two people with exactly the same viewpoint nodding heads and patting each other on the back about how right they are. Very few members of the media invite someone on their show and really talk with them to learn what it is they have to say, to expand their own meager worldview by merging it with someone else’s. A counter-example of this is someone like Joe Rogan. On the Joe Rogan Experience, he invites all kinds of people on, from all walks of life, and has these extremely compelling conversations with them. He counters points here and there, but it’s with intent to press them for legitimacy, to make sure they aren’t bullshitting, and not with the intent to shoot them down and prove how right he is.
When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know; but when you listen, you may learn something new
Dalai Lama
I chose the title of this post because no matter where you look in history, you will find some really bright people, but you won’t find a single solitary asshole among them who got to be brilliant on their own. Archimedes, Socrates, da Vinci, Newton, Tesla, Einstein, Curie, Hawking. Read up on them, and you will find that none of them came by their brilliant discoveries on their own. They existed in a sea of other brilliant minds who contributed to their understanding and knowledge.
Every person sees the world through a filter of their own experiences. This works pretty well if humans don’t have to live around other humans who have lived different lives, but it really falls apart when we try to create policies and practices that will govern the lives of people from different parts of a country as large as the United States.
Consider for a moment the geographical and cultural spread of the United States as compared with other countries. Latitude has a massive impact on lifestyle and culture. Compare the approach to food and leisure of someone from the southern US to someone from the Midwest. Being in Texas, we see this within the borders of our own state. Life in Brownsville near the border with Mexico is completely different from life in Amarillo, near Oklahoma, simply due to weather. Add to these inherent differences that we also encourage people from all over the world who are fleeing oppression to come bask in the glory of Liberty and Freedom, and we get an immense spread of life experiences and expectations.
And all of these people have to live together harmoniously, or the greatest social experiment in the history of Earth falls apart in ruins.
And we’re on the brink of it. It’s up to us to save this thing called America.
It can’t be done without sharing perspectives. We all absolutely must learn to hear one another with openness and compassion, in order to build an inclusive and productive society.
Stop. Look. Listen. You might find we have a lot in common.
Stay ready. Stay safe. Stay free.
-Hodo
Categories
Honey Badger Don’t Give a Fuck
In a modern day example of “What Second Amendment? I’ve never heard of the Second Amendment!” the ATF sent a Cease and Desist letter to Q, LLC regarding the manufacture of their Honey Badger pistol. Q responded to the letter and has taken up a legal battle with the ATF. Now, you can go read the letter yourself from the link above, or you can listen to me, a self-proclaimed expert and blowhard, break it down and rave ad nauseum about what a crock of shit this is, and how the ATF is such a dysfunctional and broken organization that it doesn’t even understand its own regulations.
Basically, the ATF is saying that Q is manufacturing short-barreled rifles (SBRs) and not pistols, when it’s pretty obvious (to anyone whose head lives outside of their rectums) that the Honey Badger, et al., are AR pistols. By the ATF’s own definitions, an SBR is a firearm with a rifled barrel under 16″ in length (overall length less than 26″) and that is intended to be fired from the shoulder. That last clause is the one the ATF is saying damns the Honey Badger to a life of hellfire and arbitrary NFA censorship.
Like most everything in the world of laws, legalities, and political double-cross, the devil is in the details. So what, you may ask, are those details?
Well, I’m glad you fucking asked.
Back in the old days of pistol manufacturing, folks (Sig, in particular) started replacing the stocks on shorty ARs with these awesome little forearm braces, so they could actually control the crazy little fucker in their hands instead of turning the entire countryside into a sporadically-planted field of 5.56mm Freedom Seeds. These braces had a split along the bottom and a Velcro nylon strap around them so these pioneers of shoot-em-up could have a safe and fun Saturday afternoon.
Initially, when questioned, the ATF issued a letter determining that shouldering a pistol no more turned it into an SBR than strapping a dildo to a hedgehog turned him into Ron Jeremy. Then later on in 2014, they probably decided they could make themselves more relevant if there were more people breaking their regulations, so they decided that in fact shouldering a pistol did magically turn it into an SBR, which seems nuts (reference above crude porn simile).
Fast-forward to 2017 and some goddamn freedom fighters got together and pestered the ATF enough to make them reconsider their idiocy, and the bureau issued a reversal. For those who don’t give a shit to try and parse bureaucratic bumfuckery, that whole letter basically says that a brace is a brace and not a stock, and if you don’t fuck with your brace to make it more comfortable or practical to fire from the shoulder, then you haven’t made a SBR, no matter how you shoot the damn thing. At the risk of bringing to light some shit that might further get the ATF pissing in their britches, I have to wonder out loud if something like the splitfix qualifies. I would argue that it doesn’t, since it’s primary purpose should be to aid in keeping the shape of the brace opening, thereby preventing undue wear on the brace and making it more effective when strapped to the forearm*.
But now, in what I view to be a prime example of governmental overreach and treachery, the ATF has once again decided that braces are stocks and pistols are rifles. It’s my personal belief as a red-blooded American who understand the English language and has read through such documents as the “Constitution of the United States of America,” and the appended document commonly referred to as “The Bill of Rights,” that we can solve all this hassle by just repealing the National Firearms Act and moving on with our lives. When I read a statement that says “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” and then look at a law whose express purpose is to infringe on my right to keep and bear arms, I have to wonder how it even became law in the first place.
So, in summary: Fuck the ATF and their arbitrary limitations on firearms; Fuck the National Firearms Act and its arbitrary limitations on firearms; and Fuck anyone who thinks that going against God-given rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness is an American agenda.
For more, you can always just throw something into your favorite search engine (I use Duck Duck Go because information security is what I do for a living and Google can suck my nuts) or you can listen to Colion Noir talk about it, because he’s a badass.
Stay ready. Stay safe. Stay free.
-Hodo
Categories
In Memoriam
I’ve debated with myself for the last 12 hours about whether or not I should post anything about this. Part of me feels it isn’t my place. Part of me feels like I shouldn’t put it out to the world. Part of me feels like people don’t want to see it. But, if I gave much of a damn about what other people thought, I wouldn’t be who I am today. I’m gonna ramble some, I’m gonna be melodramatic, I’m gonna be hokey, I’m gonna say a bunch of shit that may or may not even be intelligible. So, here it goes.
As a writer, I always want to find the perfect words to convey something. After this last weekend, I’m at a complete loss. First came the loss of my high school theater director, whose impact in my life almost can’t be measured.
J. Gary Wyatt was a storm of a man, a force to be reckoned with, even if his hands shook and threatened to spill the Diet Coke he always carried. With memorable phrases like “Don’t let stupid out of the box!”, “Don’t expect it to work, inspect it, so you know it will work! Just because it worked yesterday does not mean it will work today.”, and “You are auditioning all the time!” he instilled a sense of self-sufficiency, responsibility, and self-worth into every one of his actors, techies, and crew. It didn’t take long to realize that J Gary yelled because he cared. If he was yelling at you, it meant you were worth him spending time to get you on the right track. If he wasn’t yelling, you weren’t one of his kids.
Every night before a show, we would all gather in a circle around the stage, behind the curtain and clasp hands. Mr. Wyatt would bow his head and give a little pep talk. It always ended the same way. “Your talents are a gift from God. What you do with those talents is, in turn, your gift to God. The power of the circle is the strongest power of all. You take strength from one another and give strength to each other. Take the power and pass it on.” Then he would squeeze the hand of the person to his right. The power would traverse the circle and end back at him.
“Whatever you do, wherever you do it, always do it with Class and Style.”
Then on Sunday, we learned of my father-in-law’s passing. Not everyone thinks of their in-laws as real family, heck, not everyone think of their in-laws as real people, but since the first time I met Tom and Sally, I’ve felt like I belonged among them. I have been so lucky to have a mother- and father-in-law that love and accept me in the way they have. It’s like getting an extra set of parents, even when the first set is pretty damn amazing.
I first met Tom one week after I met his daughter. He and Sally and Amanda and I sat in lawn chairs in the river, drank beers from a floating styrofoam cooler, and talked about all the things you’re not supposed to discuss with people you just met: religion, politics, sex, the meaning of life… oh yeah, and the fact that I was still married, working on getting a divorce, and fighting desperately for custody of my son. In honesty, it could have been pretty bad, but they were very accepting of me and I was grateful for that. Probably more than they will ever really understand.
Ever since that day in the Blanco river, for as long as I have known him, no matter what else he was doing, Tom always had extra hands for two things: a baby and a beer–often at the same time. I’ve never seen him happier than sitting on the porch with a baby on one arm and a beer in his other hand while watching the grandkids ride bikes and play in the yard. No matter what cancer did to him, what toll it took on his body, when my wife walked into his room with grandbabies, Tom would light up like everything in the world was right. And I like to think that, if even for a brief moment, my children helped him forget the pain and hardship of leaving this world. It makes me feel like I’ve helped pay him back a little.
When we would go visit them, right as we were leaving, Tom would stand up, shake my hand and say “Glad you got to see me,” and now, all I can think is “Me too, Tom. Glad I got to see you.” Glad I was lucky enough to get to know you.
People in your life are like stars. They send forth their light for all to see, even if some aren’t observant enough to look for it. Every once in a while there’s a star so intense, so undeniable, that all who see it are changed. Long after the star burns out, as all stars must eventually do, its light carries on, bounding endlessly through time and space, leaving everything it touches a little brighter than it was before. I have seen more such stars than any one person has the right to keep to himself. It is my duty to these people, these beautiful people whose very nature shaped me as a man, to carry on their legacies. I have been made brighter by their light, and I only hope that the meager glow I send forth is enough to make them proud.
Martin Hodo 