Smock Blogs

Smart people know they’re not, just that they’re smarter than they used to be. “I’m smart” gives one the sense of arrival, that I’m here, and I don’t need to go any further. And smart people usually know better than whoever’s in charge, lately because they’ve “done their own research” which is just a series of Telegram, Truth Social, and Rumble influencers all sharing the same information that probably started in either a misinformation ministry in Moscow, or more likely at the Dorito-dusted digits of some keyboard warrior reclining on the futon in his mom’s basement between shifts at the Dollar General, where they’ve been promoted to interim assistant general manager in training.

Smart people would agree with F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

For example, I can think that little people are stuck in a world that goes out of its way to make them feel inadequate. And I can also laugh myself unconscious at the thought that a hotel would give someone in that community the job of restocking the minibar, because while a job gives someone a certain level of agency, that feels less like equity and more like a, “Well, their hands will fit those little cans, so…"^[1]

So maybe it’s OK for me to think that RFK Jr. is right that the way to tackle obesity in America is through better habits instead of pharmaceuticals, and also think that the one guy we all know has a recipe for bear carcass used heroin like it was Adderall and while it’s in line with his hate for Big Pharma, I’m not sure the answer to the attention deficit problem in American schoolchildren is growing in a field in Afghanistan.