This is what I've been reading lately:

The author, C.J. Box, is award-winning, and this is the debut of his Joe Pickett series. Pickett is a game warden in Wyoming, and the narrative is sort of the "last good man standing" narrative; nearly alone in a corrupt world, Pickett ends up facing off with his awful former boss, Vern, who has become a high-powered executive at an oil company. The idea is to route a pipeline through their county over the Rocky Mountains so that oil (or perhaps methane, I was never clear on that) could be delivered to California. Everybody would make a pile of money, the town would boom, etc. Unfortunately, in a hidden valley, the last colony of Miller's weasels on earth threatens to ruin everything, since the pipeline won't go through if anyone finds out.

The narrative and characters are good enough for government work (heh), but not particularly exciting; the Longmire books are a deeper read with better characters. But the main thing I have against this book is that ultimately, the deaths of four people, the shooting of a pregnant woman that results in a miscarriage, the terrorizing of a small child, and the wholesale poisoning of the whole field of Miller's weasels (which happens to take out everything else in the field too), is blamed on the Endangered Species Act. If only the Endangered Species Act weren't there, then all those people and animals wouldn't have had to be killed; in addition the town could have had a boom and everybody could have gotten a living wage! Hooray!

Why does no one notice that the fossil fuel barons almost always get their way, and have for the past forty years, and yet, somehow, despite holding the evil environmentalists at bay (them and their nasty regulations) the economy is still in the shitter for almost everyone, the concept of a living wage is farther away than ever for most people, and towns are becoming ghost towns right and left unless they have a university, a military base, or a prison in them? There is quite literally no evidence that a fossil fuel economy necessarily implies prosperity and well-being for workers. There is actually more evidence of the opposite.

How many victories over environmentalists does the fossil fuel industry need before it actually ponies up the prosperity it claims to offer? How many decades of political and economic dominance are required before that happy result comes about?

In fact, the victory of private enterprise over "regulations" has rarely resulted in economic improvement for anyone, and almost never results in persistent economic improvement. Sometimes, when a pipeline is being laid, the people laying the pipe get good pay. Just ask LIUNA; that's why that union is in bed with the fossil fuel barons. However, once the pipelines are laid, those jobs evaporate, or, more accurately, move somewhere else. They don't stay with the town. Any secondary jobs that have sprouted because of the influx of pipeline workers will also wither once those jobs move somewhere else. The town is left with polluted water, the economy goes back to what it was before. The notion that the energy industry promotes working people's prosperity is, at best, an outdated notion, surviving from a time when our economy and our politics were quite different. It's an old idea that went to Washington D.C. and got itself some new clothes at a convenient think tank.

This is why it's difficult to find good stories. Almost everything is either genuinely conservative, or, worse, "warded." A "warded" book, television show, or film, is driven by propaganda of a particularly nasty sort. Of course, many stories, including some stories I like, are also propaganda; for instance, Casablanca is propaganda created by some people who wanted the U.S. to get involved in the second World War. On the other hand, propaganda designed to persuade people into fighting the Nazis is a very different thing than propaganda that suggests that the fossil fuel economy contributes to working people's well-being and that their poverty is the fault of environmentalists. I'm not just saying this because one agrees with my political ideas and the other does not. In fact, the message of Casablanca, while debatable, is not actually false. The propaganda of Casablanca is not a lie, but a debatable opinion. It's one thing to persuade people to accept an opinion; it's quite another to persuade them to accept lies.

It's getting to where I'm not going to be able to read or watch any narrative in English unless it was made before 1994.

YouTube, which we in my family have now christened "GooTube," because of the disgusting manipulative behavior of Google, which has deeply damaged a once beneficial application, still has some good things to watch on it; they haven't all been excised. I've been watching these gentlemen, James Townsend and sons, who are historical re-enacters. Their period is the 18th century, in particular 18th-century Britain and America, and they have a really fun YouTube series on 18th-century cooking:

Here's how an eighteenth-century person would have made fried chicken:

I've mostly been listening to Kate's music lately, and she likes pop more than I do. Here's one of the ones we both like. It's a terrible earworm, so listen at your own risk!

How are you all today?