What Time Is It?

“The family asks that in honor of (name withheld) that you write your Congressman and ask for the repeal of Income Tax and Day Light Savings Time.”

-- From a recent Washington Post obituary

One of 2021’s most surprising political stories was the revolt over Daylight Savings Time. While ordinarily a simple, administrative gesture moving sunlight hours to later in the day when workers and families might enjoy them, Daylight Savings Time in 2021 triggered an insurgency from the far right, led by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a newly-elected, QAnon-supporter from pre-Holocene Georgia, and Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, a champion of the Constitutional vision of three branches of government -- Congress, Smith, and Wesson.

The first signs of the battle to come were seen at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida late last February. “This is how our freedoms disappear,” said Representative Boebert during a deeply personal speech laying out her core beliefs of unceasing, undiluted anger. “Biden and his antifa socialist friends start out with little infringements, like moving the clock back and forth, or giving your package a tracking number at the Post Office, or using your posts on Parler to follow you through the Capitol while you’re shooting bear spray at cops. Before you know it, they’re silencing you when you shout there’s fire in a crowded theater – even though other people in that very theater have heard that there might be such a fire because you told them it seemed likely. This is not about an extra hour of sun, or whatever the Fake News says. It’s about freedom,” Representative Boebert says, her eyes bright with frenzied enthusiasm as she embraced a gilded statue of Donald Trump wearing a variant of a Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders outfit.

• 

• 

Representative Greene was just as emphatic. “The deep state has decided to set everybody’s clock back every Spring, regardless of whether or not they have the right to do so. The nanny-state doesn’t care if it still light outside when your numerous, identical-looking kids have to go to bed, or if it’s dark as night when it’s time to let the dog out in the morning before not going to the job you don’t have anymore because China sent us a virus they made in a lab. It’s even more oppressive than wearing a mask to save your life. How long do we have to endure these attempts to deny real Americans our basic freedoms? If we can’t even put an end to this, how will we ever we get to the truth about Satanic child-molesters in the basements of pizza joints?”

The two legislators returned to Washington and formed a Free Time Now! Caucus and went to the House floor with their complaint. “Daylight Savings Time does not appear in our Constitution,” Greene argued. “The truth the socialists are trying to hide is there was no national time standard until 1882. Up until then, each municipality had the right and the duty to establish its own time standard, based on when the sun was directly overhead, the way God intended it and our theocratically-obsessed Founding Fathers affirmed through omission. In fact, historians say a person traveling from one coast to the other in the middle of the nineteenth century would encounter as many as twenty different time standards on their journey, but that did not prevent America from having a Golden Era, including a civil war in which 600,000 people died, an epidemic of racist vigilante violence, the growth of economy-choking monopolistic Trusts, and the impoverishment of the nation’s small farmers at the hands of Eastern banks and railroad interests. It’s a vivid reminder America was once great, and is now confronted with a pandemic of government overreach. You can argue facts all you like, but here’s a fact – I’m mad as hell!”

After making their case on such familiar outlets as Parler, Rumble, Newsmaxx, and Russian state television, the two advocates quickly amassed a loyal following of “Time Choosers,” a ragtag bunch drawn from such groups as Three Percenters (who oppose fat-free milk), Elks Club competitor The Oath Keepers, sidewalk dance team the Boogaloo Boys, LGBTQ pride allies The Proud Boys (and their more woke variant, the Proud Cis-Boys), and several people who claimed to be Q him- or herself (“And, just like the letter Q, I have the tail to prove it,” claimed one).

The Time Choosers then shocked the nation when an angry mob of them appeared at the Gaithersburg, Maryland headquarters of the National Institute of Standards and Technology at 2 AM on Sunday morning, March 14 to stop the switch to Daylight Savings Time from happening.

Given the late hour and the belief that a crowd would never desecrate a place as sacred, or bother with a facility as boring, as NIST, security was unprepared for what ensued. Storming the front door and overwhelming the security guard as he watched television and ate an egg salad sandwich, the mob tore through the building, searching for the atomic clock that maintains the world’s “official” time so they could prevent it from being reset. But once they had broken into the room where the clock was kept, there was confusion. Some exclaimed irately the clock did not look like a clock at all. “It looks like some kind of a gizmo in an OK, Go video,” complained one rioter. Another protested he could not find “the little windy thing” on the side of the clock that moved its hands, while others searched in vain for “the button you press for five seconds before the dial stars blinking.” A member of the West Virginia State Legislature, who was only there as a peaceful citizen-journalist to memorialize the event, argued in favor of “smashing the fucking thing to bits.” But others in the mob reported it contained radioactive cesium, which was, according to one participant, “one of the two most dangerous elements, along with desistium.” Another noted cesium had been replaced with the element ytterbium for greater clock accuracy. “This proves it’s all completely bogus!” one of the patriots said, “since there’s obviously no such word as ytterbium! It might as well be upsidaisium!” The rioters then disbursed, but not before chopping down the famous apple tree in NIST’s courtyard, one grown from a cutting of Newton’s original apple tree. “Gravity is a theory, man,” one freedom fighter noted, “just another form of tyranny.” “I’m mad as hell,” said another.

The Free Time Now Caucus then brought a stunning maneuver to the House floor. Speaker Pelosi had announced that the House would resume session at 10:00 AM the next day, and Boebert and Greene were on the floor and ready when the House was gaveled into order. They immediately rose to announce the rules of the House had been broken. Insofar as they had “made the deeply personal choice not to avail themselves” of daylight savings time, they held it was really 9:00 AM, not 10:00 AM, for them and their fellow Free Timers, and asked that calling the House to order be deferred for an hour. When they were ruled out of order, they walked dramatically off the House floor and filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court claiming their rights had been abridged by the Chair’s failure to ask them what time they wanted it to be.

A three-judge panel ruled against them, but the Caucus petitioned the Supreme Court for review. The Supreme Court surprised many with a 7-2 decision against the petitioners. Their petition was accepted by Justices Samuel Alito (“I’m mad as hell,” the sourpuss jurist remarked) and Clarence Thomas (“Virginia liked it, so I’m good with it”). The reasoning among the majority varied. “Don’t bother me with this stuff. I’m busy, trying to guarantee every woman who copulates be forced to carry any and all unintended reproductive products to completion, even if against their will,” said Justice Comey Barrett in her concurring statement. “Wish you well, but I’m trying to preserve the little dignity have left,” argued Justice Kavanaugh. “I didn’t think I was a liberal until this morning,” wrote Chief Justice Roberts.

And so, Daylight Savings Time was preserved, at least for now. Yet the signs of revolt are everywhere. “Ask Me What Time It Is” T-shirts, ballcaps, and Kevlar vests can be seen across rural America. Local city councils and other governing bodies have ordered the clocks in their colorful town squares be preserved on Standard Time. Senator Rand Paul has taken to wearing two watches “to demonstrate his commitment to the ‘time diversity’ inherent in our Constitution.” The movement adopted rock band Chicago’s “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” as an anthem, although a radical minority favored the same group’s “25 or 6 to 4,” and one rogue member’s suggestion of The Jive Five’s classic “What Time Is It?” was hooted down.

And rallies have sprung up around the country, although there is always an element of confusion as to when they start. But they are surely all as mad as hell.

Life in the Spam Folder

Dear Ev,

I just thought I’d drop a line and see how all the folks back at evehrlich.com are doing. It’s been a couple months since you sent me out along with a few hundred other e-mails in one of your weekly posts – I was “Baseball Memorabilia,” in case you’ve forgotten – and like so many of my brothers and sisters, I ended up in somebody’s spam folder. It was very abrupt. But now that I’ve had a chance to settle in here, I thought I’d say hello and tell you what’s been going on with me.

You know, when I first ended up in a spam folder, I figured I was about to experience a lonely, pointless existence trapped in a dark corner of one of your subscriber’s laptops pretty much forever. I guess “spam” just has that kind of bad connotation.

But life in this spam folder has turned out much better than I anticipated. For one, far from my expectations of endless isolation, I’m not alone. Far from it -- there are thousands of other spam messages in here to hang around with. In fact, many of them are my fellow evehrlich.com e-mails, and it’s great to see some old, familiar faces – the Hurricane Iota post, for example (no one gave a rat’s ass about that one!), Oarsman Bob, the Public Service Announcement -- they’re all here. No wonder they had such low click rates!

I’m a little hesitant to come out and say it because it plays to all sorts of stereotypes, but living here in the spam folder is just about the most fun I’ve ever had. I know what you’re thinking, but, it’s not just the sex trade. For starters, the place looks like that village from The Prisoner. And it’s like a party around here, with all sorts of gifts lying round, everywhere you look -- gift baskets of fruit, wine, and chocolate, floral arrangements, candles, macrame, crafts, wall decorations, ceramic mugs and honey in baskets, and all sorts of stuff . And I haven’t felt this well in forever. I don’t have fungus, tinnitus, hernias, diabetes, stomach pains, hair loss, or a shortage of catheters. I know the telltale warning signs of more diseases than I knew there were. And if I ever did get something, there’s a complete arcade of homeopathic, New Age, chi-related, herb-based, meditative, jellyfish, magnetic, and prayer-centered remedies for it, none of which are proven to be effective, but they’re there for the taking. I eat paleo, gluten-free, high-fiber, sugar-free, high-omega, lactose-free, kale-based, and vegan. There’s exercise equipment everywhere – treadmills, Stairmasters, Soul Cycles, quad extenders, stationary bicycles, straps, mats, ropes, bands, free weights -- and if I hurt myself, I can rub CBD oil on it. And I mean lots of CBD oil. I’m living in the Saudi Arabia of CBD oil, as well as CBD tablets, CBD capsules, CBD creams, CBD powders, CBD ointments, CBD gels – all of it guaranteed to cost a lot of money, stain your clothes, and not get you high.

Then there’s the seamy stuff. Sure, it’s here. There’s plenty of porn, particularly if you know Cyrillic. I’ve never seen so many ways Tab A goes into Slot B. And you can acquire companionship over any time frame – you can get a date for an hour, an escort service for an evening, an Eastern European or Southeast Asian mail order bride for a few years until it reaches its logical conclusion in either divorce court or a mortuary, whatever you like. It’s like the bond market – you can find something for any duration with a predictable yield and a corresponding level of risk. And, of course, you can get opiates – Fentanyl, Percocet, Vic

odin, Dilaudid, Oxycontin, everything this side of a poppyseed bagel. One guy took so many he got a headache. And you can get Viagra, Cialis, Levitra, Stendra, implants, herbal supplements, tantric mantras, what-have you -- the only thing not stiff around here are the teetotalers. We try to file them next to the politicians who want donations. And you can get guns, too -- AK-47s, Uzis, street sweepers, all sorts of stuff the Founding Fathers must have had in mind when the British were firing pellets at them out the bell of a trumpet. And you can get concealed carry permits, too, in case marching around with an assault weapon gets tiresome.

And there are plenty of steroids around here, too, in case you need some ‘roid rage to go with your weapon. You could spend a few hours going through the list and before you knew it, three National League General Managers would be offering you a contract. Then there are the fakes, fake everything. You get fake UPS, fake FedEx, fake American Express, fake Social Security Administration, fake IRS – if it’s got any possibility of getting some idiot to give away his credit card number, some impersonator is asking for it. The other day, I saw a fake enrollment form from The National Directory of Mothers Maiden Names. Nobody likes these phonies, though -- they give all of us a bad name. In fact, we were all icon-ing around one day when a couple of the supplement users noticed that Nigerian prince asking for money and took him off to the Recycle Bin and messed him up pretty good. Nobody saw a thing, know what I mean?

But the most surprising thing about being here is the culture, the social character of this place. For one, everybody accepts everybody else – within reason – because they’re all in the same boat – they’ve all been dumped here without any warning and have to make a go of it. Everybody feels like that girl in Outlander on their first day, but then they get the hang of it. No one’s any better than anybody else, although some of the politicians asking for money and the people from The Ministry of One Thing or the Other will put on airs. It’s like a society of misfits, a community of the unwanted, where everyone’s accepted for what they are and that’s the end of it.

But – there’s always a but, isn’t there? -- the person in whose computer you’re living in has the power of life and death over you. Maybe she needs to free up disc space, maybe she was searching for something (although, sorry to say it, it doesn’t seem like she’s searching for old evehrlich.com posts very often) and are surprised by how much stuff is in here, or maybe her friend told her to go to Control Panel and delete all her temporary or extra files, or maybe she just don’t like a lot of clutter. So, they hit a key and erase the entire spam file. It’s like the Black Death, but even less selective – more like the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. Poof – we’re all gone.

Nobody likes to think about that. But the paradox is that, once you accept it, there’s no need to think about it. And that’s the point for all of us, isn’t it, Ev? We all show up without asking to, everyone around us is in the same boat, and it all will end suddenly one day, but who knows when? You just have to go about your business and when the erase command comes, it comes, nothing you can do about it. When you get right down to it, we’re all spam in somebody else’s folder. The difference is, we spam e-mails don’t pray to whoever put us here, but you do,

Well, that about sums it up! Keep in touch, and keep sending out those weekly posts. We need some new company and fresh blood to liven up the conversation.

Maybe another baseball post, if you don’t mind the suggestion.

Should I Buy Bitcoin?

My neighbor is a congenital idiot -- a nitwit, a dunce, a complete clot. When God called us forth for brains he came in sixth or seventh. He bought GameStop at $400 because a kid on the Internet told him to: he built a bunker to survive Y2K; he donated to Trump’s Save America election legal fund. Nevertheless, he told me the other day he had made several million dollars buying something called Bitcoin. What is this Bitcoin and is it so lucrative a guy like my neighbor, who is one small step away from extinction, can make that much money owning it?

Bitcoin is the leading example of what is known as a “cryptocurrency,” a word that combines ”currency,” meaning money, with “crypto,” meaning secret, as well as the name of Superman’s dog. And that’s what Bitcoin is – a secret currency that very few understand and that, thanks to this compelling virtue, gains in value every day. Let’s answer your questions about it!

So is Bitcoin a piece of paper, or perhaps a coin, as its name suggests?

No. Ordinarily, “currency” is a piece of paper. A government takes a piece of paper, prints some words on it along with a picture of a dead white guy, and presto, it’s worth twenty or fifty or a hundred bucks, depending on the Caucasian in question. But Bitcoin is different – instead of a piece of paper, it consists of 64 hexadecimal characters that are kept in a cloud, or written down on a Post-it note, or kept in a hard drive you throw out one day and then hysterically search for in a landfill when it’s worth more than the GDP of Burundi.

What is a hexadecimal character?

“Hexadecimal” comes from the Latin word “decimal," meaning “point,” and “hexa,” meaning cursed. It replaces the conventional counting to ten with counting to sixteen, a tradition that goes back to enforcement of the Mann Act. It was invented by relatively-unknown mathematician Edward Spiderhands. When written out in notation, It includes the numbers from zero to nine and most of the treble clef.

How does Bitcoin differ from “ordinary” money?

“Ordinary” money is printed by the “government,” whoever they are. Bitcoin, in contrast, was first proposed in a “white paper” released under an MIT “public license” in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, or a person who claimed to be named Satoshi Nakamoto, and is therefore far more trustworthy. The government, after such notable failures as the moon landing, monoclonal antibodies, the Interstate Highway System, the integrated circuit and Internet, the coronavirus vaccine, and Tang is hardly in a position to ask to be trusted with something as volatile as the money supply. Every time the government prints its name and the words “Twenty Dollars” on a piece of paper, it makes twenty dollars in profit. As many economists – a word derived from the Greek word “econo,” meaning “cheap,” and “mist,” meaning “fog” – will tell you, this leads government to print too much money, which is why we experiencing crushing hyperinflation today. Moreover, as Bitcoin proponents point out, any government can at any time declare its notes no longer valid and require people to exchange them for new ones at the bank, which actually happened in India a few years ago. To some, this is a clear warning that governments cannot be trusted. To others, it is a clear warning not to live in India.

If governments don’t create Bitcoin, then who does?

Instead of being printed by the oppressive hand of government, Bitcoin is created by thousands of computer weenies who could not find the treasure buried in the Rockies by eccentric millionaire Forrest Fenn several years ago. They are called “miners,” under a plan created over a decade ago by Satoshi Nakamoto, or a person calling herself Satoshi Nakamoto, or a group of people calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto, and is therefore much safer and reliable. “Mining” a Bitcoin does not mean “mining” in the conventional sense of toxic groundwater, pneumoconiosis, and militant trade unionism. Instead, every so often, new Bitcoins are created by an algorithm even smarter than Alan Greenspan but without his mistaken opinions about deficits and mortgage regulation. These self-appointed “miners” attempt to “find” the new Bitcoins in exchange for a reward. They do that by guessing the 64 hexadecimal characters in these new Bitcoins. If they guess them without exceeding any of the values of each of the 64 characters, they earn a Bitcoin reward and the Bitcoin is put into circulation. If they do go over any of the 64 characters’ actual values, they do not earn a Bitcoin reward, and do not win the dinette set, Spiegel catalogue prizes, or a hug from Drew Carey on The Price Is Right.

This sounds incredibly easy, as if the government was giving out twenty-dollar bills to anyone who can guess how much they’re worth, or as that’s called nowadays, “monetary policy.” But there are over 16 trillion combinations of those 64 characters, so “mining” them requires a supercomputer, a great deal of patience, and the ability to pay an electric bill larger than the GDP of Burundi.

How many Bitcoins are there?

There are now 18.6 million Bitcoins in existence, although about twenty percent of them are thought to be “zombie” Bitcoins, meaning they’ve been lost or otherwise unavailable to the people who once owned them. Two people have reportedly lost 70 million Bitcoins each, which is understandable, since people are always losing their car keys, their passwords, or a thumb drive worth 400 million dollars. If Bitcoin were cash money and had the same “loss” rate, there would be about 1.7 trillion in bills, coins, or checking that disappeared between sofa cushions, in pants sent to the dry cleaner, or under the seat of your car when you intended to have them available for parking meters or tolls, demonstrating the greater security Bitcoins offer.

In his MIT “public license” white paper 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto, or a K-pop band named Satoshi Nakamoto, or the talking dog living next door to Satoshi Nakamoto, decided there would be no more than 21 million Bitcoins, a number that captured “the perfect spirituality of three times seven, particularly in Atlantic City,” times a million, a number that captured “a lot.”

Can I use Bitcoin to buy things the way I would use money?

An enthusiastic “yes!” You can donate to Wikipedia, pay your AT&T mobile bill, make purchases on Overstock, or, thanks to the visionary Elon Musk, you can buy a Tesla automobile or a SpaceX Starship that explodes into a fireball after crashing. In Venezuela, where people don’t trust the money in their pocket or the government that created it or each other, you can buy a Burger King Whopper with Bitcoin, and then use it to pay for bail, if offered, after the kid behind the counter fingers you to the secret police for evading currency controls. Of course, with Bitcoin now worth $56,476.76 – give or take a few months’ pay – a Burger King Whopper that costs $4.19 can be purchased for 74.19 millionths of a Bitcoin. The good news is a millionth of a Bitcoin has a name – it is called a “Satoshi,” to honor Satoshi Nakamoto, the name chosen by a guy named Irving Finkelstein when he first thought up to Bitcoin idea over a decade ago in a retirement community in Naples, Florida.

Can my Bitcoins be stolen?

Anything can be stolen – a glance, a kiss, your virtue, or a German Christmas fruit bread. But Bitcoins are very hard to steal. That’s because every one of Bitcoin’s thousands of “miners” has on their computer a record of every Bitcoin transaction that was ever made. This technology is called “blockchain,” as in “blockhead,” “blockbuster,” or “arterial blockage.” To steal a Bitcoin, you’d have to hack the majority of the computers that use Bitcoin, which would be incredibly difficult unless you’re a teenager in St. Petersburg, a member of the North Korean military, or a 400 pound guy lying in bed in New Jersey who’s tired of reading John Podesta’s e-mails. When you use a Bitcoin, all of the computers in Bitcoin’s brain-like network ratify the validity of the Bitcoin – or the Satoshi – being used in the transaction, as if a panel of ten thousand Orthodox rabbis were certifying whether a particular cow was kosher.

Given its secrecy and anonymity, isn’t Bitcoin just a plaything for gangsters, criminals, and social reprobates?

No. It is also used or sold by such upstanding citizens as Amazon’s game platform Twitch, the Libertarian Party, the Robinhood brokerage, and Elon Musk.

Why is Bitcoin appreciating so rapidly?

Sometimes a company’s stock price appreciates because it has invented a microbe that consumes carbon in the atmosphere, or finds a way to put two razor blades on one razor. The price of Bitcoin appreciates, in contrast, because most people think they are smarter than everyone else and will sell their Bitcoin to the people like my neighbor when the time comes.

Proponents offer various reasons for the increase. Some note the number of Bitcoins will not keep up with the economy’s growth, a trait Bitcoin shares with bellbottoms and episodes of The Gilmore Girls. Others point to big companies (Apple) and financial institutions (Goldman Sachs and J. P. Morgan) announcing their intent to hold Bitcoins, which means Bitcoin has a bright future, and these entities have way too much money. Sure, Bitcoin (or son of Bitcoin) could become the way big banks, companies, and rich folks move money around the world, but it it did, would central banks like the Fed restrict or replace them? Like they say, you can't trust government.

So – bottom line – do you recommend buying Bitcoin?

What do you want here, the meaning of life? How should I know? “Everybody” says Bitcoin, once worth $3,000 only three years ago and now worth around $56,000, is a sure thing for $100,000 on its way to $500,000. And if “everybody” says it, how could they be wrong?

One day, you may use Bitcoin to tip the waiter, put in the church collection basket, and flip before a football game, and everybody will have at least a few Satoshis in their portfolio, a name taken from the penname used by a staff writer for Mr. Robot on a treatment for a dystopian science fiction television series starring Rami Malek and BD Wong, which ended up published as a “white paper” under an MIT “public license” in 2008.