One year ago today: January 30, 2016, doing nothing costs $664.
Five years ago today: January 30, 2012, California corruption.
Nine years ago today: January 30, 2008, they want details.
Random years ago today: January 30, 2004, on travel & tourists*.
[Author's note: you should read the link above to 2004. That entry was not written as blog material, it is a transcript of a log I used to keep of my travels. It concerns events from the early 1980s, and it was actually written at that time. It was only posted in 2004. I do not recall what happened to the original hand-written material. It's an interesting comparison to Merida today.]
MORNING
Here’s my entry into the 21st century contest for most boring photo. Allow me to present a running commentary as boredom soaks through your follicles while you admire the sheer blandness of this photo. Boring even by my standards, that makes it top story this AM. Shown on the ground are the messy paint peels that Agt. R doesn’t like cleaning up or throwing down a tarp to collect. I tend to use the largest oblong cardboard box I can find and then pick up the spillover by hand. These chips are from the window frame, which you can see peeled right down to the bare wood.
I look at the list of Oscar nominees to realize I have not seen one of those movies. Of course, living out here in the toonies doesn’t help. I read the local paper, a leftist publication where no pro-Trump headline shall appear before page A6, and even then, must have a negative headline. Don’t we all love those front page articles. The ones written by people who know nothing more about economics than the guy they are criticizing. Economics is a statistical field, free game for anyone trying to support a pet theory. They go on about how both countries benefit from buying at the lowest cost, a classic textbook theory.
But it doesn’t work if one of the countries, while having no tariffs for show, has a deliberate hidden tariff policy of not buying goods from the other. Think Japan and China. It’s called a trade balance and it’s one of the rare cases where barter would work better than money. When you’re out of goods, the trading stops. And it has a miraculous side-effect: the trading cannot resume until some sort of balance is restored. Instead, we print up money and the hemorrhage continues. The target for Trump is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is designed to benefit corporations, not the wage-workers, a distinction the media stolidly refuses to admit. After all, they are corporations themselves.
True, the same goods produced domestically would cost more, but that has two positive effects. One, it keeps the money inside the country, and two, it reintroduces the element of competition. Sadly, neither of these work very efficiently any more because the marketplace is complicated by regulation. In my youth we drove through countless small towns that were humming with little factories. A corporation was a company from which you bought laundry detergent but otherwise ignored. Everybody who wanted a job could get one; there was no competition from foreign or illegal workers.
Like many Americans who found no fault with that system, I was mystified by NAFTA. I was too busy to study it, but I resented that it was an attempt to upset the existing applecart. It was also common knowledge the driving force behind this legislation was NOT the little factories in the little towns. Today I drive though those places and see the abandoned factories. My clothespins come from Korea or Mexico. Most Americans would gladly pay the extra dollar a box if those factories were still running, there could be a time again when your kids could get a summer job there and not have to borrow every cent for college.
[Author’s note: by the way, in today’s dollars, I paid off a $40,000 student loan in six years while getting on with my life. To this day I view parents whose kids have to borrow for college as complete failures. If there is one reason to not have kids, it would be because you can’t afford to educate them. But that implies a level of self-control that you don’t find in most marriages.
The one exception I’ll make is if the parents buy a house near a campus and allow the student to live there as an adult. That, I have seen. Adult means they can bring home company into their private area of the residence. I wonder how many kid’s lives were wrecked because they had to leave home over that issue?
Pacific storm, Washington.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
NOON
Kiss last weekend good-bye. Not a thing got done, I have one large room sectioned off for cold days with a small heater. We never did get the heating coils of the old A/C to fire up, though Howie says it kept the place warm as toast. And I was too cheap to buy a room heater when they were on sale last August. It’s me and the birds, so I put on this English movie, “Atonement”. How many hours does this thing go on? I’m only half-watching it because I don’t mind chick flicks. This one is about some English family with a daughter who is doing the gardener’s son. This gets witnessed by the 11-year-old sister. When she catches another couple in the bushes, she accuses the gardener’s son of rape.
It shows how instantly the police will believe rape stories even from 11-year-olds who never actually saw anything. They throw the guy in prison so that the niece doesn’t have to admit she consented (it was a family friend her brother brought home). It is a known fact that before 1965, no unmarried women in the western democracies ever consented to a thing. (Then on October 1, apparently, they all did, en masse.) It takes the movie an hour to get this far.
The son is allowed out of prison if he joins the army and I took a break to make some sandwiches around the part where the British were celebrating their great victory at Dunkirk. They beat the Germans by retreating so fast the panzers ran out of fuel. Don’t knock it, the Soviets did the same thing a year later and it worked, eventually and sort of. I kind of have to watch this one. It is the last unwatched movie in my collection.
Coincidentally, today in 1933 is when Hitler was appointed chancellor. In Germany, this meant he could, like the American president, rule by decree. He did not have to seek the approval of their version of Congress who, like the American counterpart, was loyal only to their bankers and businessmen. They did not represent the will of the German people, Hitler did. He was not a dictator, he was democratically elected by promising to restore law and order to the system. It is one of the most heavily propagandized periods in history, almost none of what’s in western history books is even remotely consistent with the facts. Germany is the most democratic nation in Europe and they do not elect madmen.
AFTERNOON
Here’s a puzzle I don’t do becauose I can’t figure it out. The directions are inadequate, which doesn’t help, but I grasp the concept. You add up the rows and columns to the sums in the circles around the edges. If somebody could show me once, I’d get it, but I run across this puzzle beside the crossword and I’ve tried it a few times. But for me, it isn’t worth the effort. Take a look at the upper two squares in the left column, the one with the 7 in the circle.
Later, I finished watching “Atonement”. My take on it is the 11-year-old grows up and becomes a writer. The movie portrays a happy ending, but that is just in the book she wrote as, you guessed it, atonement. In reality, the gardener’s son dies of blood poisoning in a Dunkirk cellar the morning before he was to be evacuated. And the older sister who’s life she destroyed drowned in a bomb shelter a few months later.
The message I get is that people will go through all kinds of commotion to make apologies and express regrets—except do what is needed to make things right. Yet if you look at most of their situations, they had the capability to do so. I say one certain sign of a loser is they always wait until it is too late to compensate or pay reparations before coming forward with their boo-hoo I’ve-suffered-too confessions and regrets. This casts a serious dark covering over their true motives. How one reacts to these bastards depends, I think, on how often they’d seen this brand of selfish stunt before they were ten, maybe twelve. I speak from experience.
As the more astute reader has spotted, the country lyric feature has been replaced by one-liner of the day. I’m only hoping there is enough source material on the ‘net. I, too, have read those long compilations of jokes and such. But they wear thin after the author has posted all the easy finding. One a day is more steady, and the odd repeat or weak entry here at least gets lost in the works.
“Relationships are a lot like algebra,
have you ever looked at your X and wondered Y? .”
NIGHT
The late afternoon was warm enough on the south side to get me out raking leaves. Five piles, even bagged three of them. It you can make out the shape, I’m just starting to apply the first exterior coat to my screen door. That’s the shining white color I intend to do the entire trim of the house with. I now realize that using 3/4” lumber for the screen door was not optimal. It should be at least an inch thick to stop warping. Like mine already is. Not much, but I can eyeball it. No big deal, I’ll think of some artistic way to reinforce it. And now I know better.
It’s a quiet laugh to see these consumer products, like my oscillating tool, to have a replacement parts list in the box. Anyone who has actually tried to get a replacement part in the past thirty or so years can contribute a few remarks on that enterprise. Nor has the Internet made it any easier, if fact, the thing the Internet does best is advertising. America’s role in modern advertising is in a class of its own, for sure. I found a book on the downside of Liberalism I’ve not read. This should be fun, as I’ve been an opponent of liberal intrusion since the first day I was on the receiving end.
My concept of liberalism is the grasshopper and the ant. You buy some emergency rations, a liberal buys a gun. What, you thought liberals were peaceful, kindly people? You have not been paying attention to their riots and protests lately. Or listened to their threats. Liberals are the ones who actually behave the way they accuse others of behaving. When it comes to self-interest, liberals are the real rednecks.
By 8:00PM, I’ve decided the book is too long-winded but it uses great examples. Great for me, because I don’t follow TV news that might contain facts, but if you think books are long-winded, TV is an opiate. If I find an example I like I’ll tell you. Example, when California decided it was going to make the rich pay the majority of taxes, they forgot most rich people derive their income from investments. When the next stock market crash came around, they found state revenues dropped below recovery levels.
Only a few states, such as Texas and Florida, have learned that the only reliable flow of tax revenue is the sales tax, a so-called “regressive” tax (a tax that discourages spending). Nothing regressive about user-pay in my books. It’s the places that rely on state income taxes that seem to always be in fiscal trouble. The book delves way too far into the personalities of obscure lobbyists and such. When I hear a town in Texas voted out English as an official language, I don’t need to know the name of the county or every chapter and clause number in the legislation.
Another redundant theme is that Mexico regards parts of the southwest as still their own territory. This is mystifying when you consider even on the Mexican side, agriculture and development (except for those industries concerned with exporting) stops hundreds of miles to the south of that barren desert. The last thing Mexico legitimately wants or needs is more arid, uninhabitable land. What would they do with it if they got it back? Remember the lesson about the kid who whines because you have a bicycle and he doesn’t?
[Author’s note: if you don’t remember that lesson, it could be because I created it. And if you didn’t read it here, you probably didn’t read it. It’s about parents, not kids. It goes like this:
“It’s like the kid brother who whines because you have a bicycle and he doesn’t. When the parents finally buy him his own bicycle, they don’t understand why he doesn’t stop whining. Because he didn’t want his own bicycle. He wanted yours.”
So nobody misses the point, the kid doesn’t want his own bicycle. He wants the situation whereby he has a bicycle and you don’t. I’ve always said this is a result of parents not wanting to admit their younger children are spoiled, greedy little brats. And they get that way whenever you got parents who try to “teach” their kids to share. Think about it.]
Last Laugh
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