One year ago today: April 14, 2016, stability & equality, my eye.
Five years ago today: April 14, 2012, pretend you’re 20 again.
Nine years ago today: April 14, 2008, reads like a DNS transcript.
Random years ago today: April 14, 2007, see one million.
[Author’s note: first, thanks to my regular readers for waiting out this long weekend. Sorry, but only in the sense that I forgot it was a holiday weekend. Look at the bright side, it means all my duties get suspended until Monday and that gives me time to read. Which means you get to wonder what in sam hill is going to attract my attention next. Myself, I look at it differently, that anything that still can catch my interest is always something that at least some of you have wondered about. And this blog always attempts to give the easy explanation, or has nobody noticed?]
In my ongoing crusade to make the corner of my front yard into bird utopia, I made a guard on the feeder. It is designed to prevent larger birds from alighting by blocking their wingspan. It’s just a guess but the convenience of watching the feeder right out my window will quickly let me zero in on an effective solution. It’s clamped and drying now. Feeling ambitious, I painted the rock tumbler and added a switch. One thing led to another and the morning was gone to tinkering. I had to add a cleat for the power cord and, well, there went the morning.
That’s your trivia, the beginning of schoolhouse indoctrination of the young. It says here the war made prohibition necessary because it “seemed dangerous” to allow armed men to drink liquors. Like these men didn’t have guns at home. So DC must have meant large armed groups of organized men, and that’s something every government is best worried about. Now this one will slay you. Children were told that farmers objected to raising more grain because it was diverted to making booze. Ha, since when did any farmer complain when he could sell his crops?
My exposure to prohibition was watching Elliot Ness in black and white. I thought prohibition was the law of the land, but not so. The individual states decided on participation and Nevada and Pennsylvania never did stop sales. States like Wyoming and New Mexico banned it, duh, only in rural areas. And most of the northeast and south left it up to each county. Now with what I’ve read after repeal, it begins to make sense why the federal government at that point began a deliberate policy of extending its power. It must have been embarrassing as hell to have only half the states obey the Volstead Act—and no doubt some of them voted no just to tell the feds to kiss off.
Less humorous is the description of the war. The torpedoed liners were sailing in a war zone and the Germans knew that neutrality was a joke—the Americans had been aactively supporting the British war effort for years. And they knew these passenger liners were carrying ammunition. Even the language of these textbooks is slanted. Like how the Germans were “granted” an armistice. In one text, the word armistice was only used once, the remainder of the chapter substituted the word “surrender”.
I left this rock tumbler thing running while I cleaned and baked the Civil War frying pans. (Metal-handled frying pans should be dubbed branding irons.) I dunno, this whole rock polishing affair seems a bit, you know, too tech to be powered by electricity. It would make more sense to put them in the creek or attach a windmill. Say, that’s something I’ve always wondered. How do those prairie windmills connect to the water pump and still rotate 360° in the wind? Is it a pivoting pump? We never had a windmill. The answer will have to wait because, in some ironically appropriate way, a great many people don’t read library books on major religious holidays.
Luxembourg.
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Here’s those nesting trunks, there are three of them here. You only see two because they are not “unpacked” yet. They are an interesting design—for storage. The tray in the big trunk removes to sit on the bottom, and the smaller trunk then fits inside. There is a third smaller trunk inside the other. So, the whole arrangement fits inside the big trunk. The idea is the trunks take minimal storage space when not being used. The set is $150, which compares well with Vuitton suitcases selling for $15,000 each.
Do I watched a DVD movie, this time “The Last Castle”, another busted army hero who earns the respect of the prison population by the grand foresight of having saved all their father’s lives in some previous war or two. But that is still not as miraculous as their ability to meet and fall in love with at least one blonde, passionate, height-weight proportionate bombshell. She’s invariably the one who kept her cheerleader figure after bearing three of his children. Not only that, she visits him in prison.
My latest reading of the 1900s took me through the Depression years. These were not uncommon after wars, or in the case of America, between wars. What struck me was this early article blamed the severity of the down cycle to credit. I recall from grade school the analogy of too many doorknobs for too few doors. This was expanded on to explain how credit causes the customer to overspend, so the shopkeeper overstocks, so the factory overproduces. Soon the whole economy overheats until somebody wants to be paid in cash, but nobody has any. Funny, isn’t that what we have today, except we’ve added the government to make it inconvenient as hell for anyone to demand most payments in cash. Imagine a real estate agent in Miami wanting $500,000 up front when the government won’t any longer print thousand-dollar bills.
From what I’ve been learning about money supply, there isn’t enough cash in the country to begin to pay off all the debt. So ponder that. Look around you and spot ten adults. On average, at least one statistic says they average $97,000 in debt. So those ten people, if they all had to pay their debts at once, would require nearly a million dollars. Yet they probably don’t have $10,000 cash between them. This is one vulnerable situation for all of them. I’m evil, some would say, because I’d love to watch that house of cards come tumbling down. Credit distorts the economy and it distorts people. I was surprised to read that somebody was far-sighted enough to see that in 1942.
“I was watching the London Marathon and saw one runner dressed
as a chicken and another runner dressed as an egg, and
I thought: 'This could get interesting'.”
Having the sniffles, I stayed home reading the last of my textbooks from the twenties. It was an experience alright, as I could now spot the mammoth influence this “state approved” version had fifty years later still, when I was in school. It shocks me how bad most of it is, yet like you and the others, I must have eaten it right up as a child, because I was a straight A student. Try it, if you can find an old textbook from your own era, see if you come away with the same disgust I do.
Even the terminology is strange, I had to flip the book over more than once to be sure this was not published in Moscow. Money was a constant struggle for all but the rich throughout the 1900s and it is ridiculous to paint any different picture. Every government program eventually backfires and the bureaucracies of the Depression grew into today’s bloated civil service welfare state. After most wars, the government sent the soldiers and war workers home, but not so much after World War II. Whereas I’d like to see Trump can 90% of all government departments beginning with the IRS, I wonder if he’s read these books and realizes how entrenched these people have become.
Note that I am not against the IRS or taxes, I am against how they go about it. After weighing all the arguments, I conclude all tax systems are unfair to the poor. But for simplicity, you could not beat a 10% flat tax on purchases. I’m not saying that is the perfect solution, I’m saying that is the best option that’s out there even if it does cause a few hardships on the minority. Anyway, a minority that is so off-base they would suffer no matter what you do.
ADDENDUM
Oddly, no mention in any of the texts was made about the housing market. It wasn’t an issue. In 1900, most Americans did not own a house. For reasons I cannot find out, houses have always been expensive in this country. I’ve read other accounts that explain how home ownership was impressed upon returning soldiers as “the American dream”, but that should be instantly recognized for the sales job that it is. Some other factor changed to cause otherwise intelligent people to sign a 30-year purchase contract for a house priced some eight times higher than the land, materials, and labor that went into it. Ah, the banking system.
Have you ever talked to people who are in the 20th year of a 30-year mortgage? They are resigned to their fate, willing to do anything the boss tells them. There is too much at risk for them to think or act on their own behalf. Yet they believe they are “free” and will be freer one day in their mid-50s when the mortgage is paid. Certainly, the factory owners love a docile class of working wage-slaves. Getting everyone on a 30 a-year mortgage is virtually identical to indentured servitude as long as you can prevent rebellion, but then, you have to resort to policing everything. Such a system works even better if you can get them proud to own credit cards.
And now would be a good time to check that this was not written in 1960 in Moscow.
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