In The End, This Mess Belongs To Us

A bit more on the election in a minute. First, breaking news from the world of beef briskets.

My first one was a disaster. I followed a recipe that said to cook it for 8 hours. 8 hours wasn't nearly enough and we served our guests late and even with the extra time granted by that social faux pas, the meat only hit 185 or so. It was tough as leather. Horrible.

This time, I started my brisket at 0000. I set my Oklahoma Joe's* pellet smoker at 225, used this rub from Southern Living** and went to bed, unsure if the pellet hopper would run out. Good news all around. The brisket smells fabulous, it's now 183 degrees with a full day's smoking still to go and the hopper could have gone another couple of hours. I just wrapped the thing in butcher paper. Dinner tonight should be fantabulous.

Nom nom nom.

More Election Blathering

I haven't codified it here in exact words, but I have become convinced that the most stable society is one where power is as decentralized as possible or at least far more decentralized than what we have now. Today, the presidency is an inconceivably rich prize. The people vying for it have almost always had a good deal of knave and charlatan DNA, but so long as they couldn't do much with it, we didn't have to worry. Now that the Federals think they can tell us what we can and cannot wear on our faces and who can go to which bathroom, control of that seat of power deserves a huge amount of our attention.

Anywho, that's not the real point of this blog post. Sorry for rambling.

The Point

The institutions telling us that fears of a stolen election are a conspiracy theory are themselves conspiracy theorists. They peddled the Russia hoax. They howled about systemic racism. They pushed the "fine people" hoax. It was all lies. Now they want us to believe them.

When you can't trust large institutions, the rational response is to give those institutions less power. We've done this with the news media by watching and believing them less. We need to do this with government in general. We really need to do this with Big Tech.

As a Catholic, Church hierarchy, up to and including Pope Francis, has shown it doesn't have our best interests at heart. He and they need less leverage in our lives as well.

It's time to get back to local governance over our lives as much as possible. If we do that, we can live with a venal, dishonest news media, a corrupt government and a wayward Church.

They were always thus, anyway. It was us who changed. We became too credulous and dependent. This election mess belongs to us.

We need to cultivate our inner Walt Kowalski and become cranky individualists. We need to be a bit more ungovernable and a whole lot more self-reliant. If I don't need central authority, then I don't care what it does.

Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Pope Francis, Facebook and the AP need to get off of our lawns.

* - Oklahoma Joe's is racist because Oklahoma.

** - Southern Living is racist because Southern. This is going to be a delicious, but very racist meal.