September 20, 2016

Yesteryear
One year ago today: September 20, 2015, English tooter.
Five years ago today: September 20, 2011, T is the amount of trust . . .
Nine years ago today: September 20, 2007, the fine print.
Random years ago today: September 20, 2012, left at the second light.

MORNING
           Identify this plant. Spear or arrowhead shaped leaves. It is one of two vines growing in the back. Note the copious layer of oak leaves on the ground. I’ve been trying to find a good old fashioned weed whip for sale. What, nobody uses them any more? Do you know the tool I’m talking about? A six inch blade on the end of a handle that would whisk side to side to hew the weeds. Some of the vines seem to be ground-hugging, but others are crawling up my oak trees. Time to buy a swede saw. I’ve decided also on a squirrel shield for my birdfeeder. Pictures of all this I’m sure will follow. It’s a whole new lifestyle and it could cost me a block of my readership.

           Five hours on the floor, and it is as done as it is going to get for a while. The room is livable again, that’s what counts. The subfloor is down and I’m tired of working on it. I’m putting a tarp across the middle of the room and setting up my workshop, which will have to be dismantled when I want to finish the room. But so what, the important thing is I now know the place is not going to collapse on me. The termite damage was caught in time, that’s enough to make me happy.
           Taking a break, I read the next chapter on the locksmith boy. The gang hits this house with a safe, but it turns out to be a fake. The diamonds are zirconium. They figure there must be another real safe so they make the dumbest mistake in the book. They go back and hit the same place again. He survives only because the security guards won’t shoot a kid. Blog rules say I’m to report the most exciting event of this early day. I painted the little oil can I bought last week. Bright red. Four coats. Acrylic paint doesn’t cover metal so well.

Picture of the day.
Kudzu.
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NOON
           I put in the whole morning so I could take the remainder of the day off. Stopping for some iced tea, I saw this classic “cabin photo” of the red scooter in the yard. This is the view I would get if I was washing dishes. Everything on the street is completely visible, This would be a truly favorite perch for the town gossip. The batbike, not shown here, is parked off to the right. What a nice “documentary” type photo.

           Then I partitioned the back room with two free tarps from Harbor Freight. That’s my crash pad for the duration of repairs and renovations. You already know it better than any room in Florida, so I’ll hold off on the photos. While up at the lumber yard, I met a guy who is also fixing up his own place.

           Great local information source, he’s lived here 30 years. No that I would touch vinyl siding but he reports he started a bonfire in his back yard back a while, and despite being over 20 feet from the side of the building, he watched the siding warp. It’s a good thing I’m sticking with good old shiplap, although I have not yet found a yard that carries it. What, the Yuppie Puppies prefer synthetic building materials? It would match their taste in music.

NIGHT
           Here’s the way to hold a meeting. Down to the local watering hole. Grab some beers and pizza. Vote on floats for the next parade. I talked with this one guy who remembers the streets around town when they contained more buildings. For example, the park kitty-corner used to be a large drug store. It was so infested with rats, when the wrecking ball went to work, the rats were running up the legs of the crew.

           I stopped in for a couple after dark on the way home from another major shopping trip. Tools, building supplies, victuals. That’s major when you are driving a scooter. The meeting had taken over the front section of the saloon and there was your interesting dynamic in small city politics. Voting was by show of hands, as depicted here, so everybody knew who had voted and how. Try that in Broward and you’ll get your arm chewed off. That reminds me of some trivia. The ancient plague of cholera is returning to England.
           That makes sense, for the English lead the world in establishing free public services, like drinking fountains. Anyway, the disease is responding to climate change. I don’t know the vector, but apparently the disease requires 15 or more days of warm weather to incubate. As England warms, such stretches are allowing the germ to re-establish itself in at least the southern portions of the country. I shall keep an ear out for developments.

ADDENDUM
           The book on the American Left rambles, I’m already on page 50 without any new information. The chapter I’m on discusses the failures of New Harmony and every other commune in the country. There is ample evidence the Left believes in a glorious future while choosing to forget past mistakes, a process I have always preferred to simply call “stupidity”. However I draw the line at communes that lose their own money and Liberals who go after other people’s cash, usually in the form of taxation.

           The book offers repeated examples of how community work schemes never succeed. I have never supported any philosophy that subordinates the individual to the group—provided he is doing something worthwhile. By the age of eight, I’d learned that “community” never works, but it sure is popular amongst the lazy majority. The philosophy that it takes a village to raise a child is undoubtedly the rage for the woman who wants twelve children but not have to cook for them herself.

           The common theme is that Liberals equate private property (including the wage system, the private home, marriage, and inheritence law) with greed. I’m a firm believer in private property—but only insofar as that property cannot be used to prevent others from acquiring their own through industry. I’m also a stickler about inheritence laws. When somebody comes into money, it should never be tax exempt because of genetics.
           Whether it is Christianity or Communism, the idea of helping themselves always appeals to the majority, at least until the money runs out. This pattern repeats itself in every communal system. It is also false that lazy people sit around idle, on the contrary, they often put on impressive displays of hard work. Until you count the chickens.
           As for the free-rider syndrome, I’ve always been an advocate of user pay, but that means per user. The family is not “one unit” or any such bullshit. The man with five children should be paying five times as much as I am in school taxes. The whole concept of the “family-oriented” society has always been nothing but wishful thinking. The one place I generally agree with communal activity is at the workplace, but it should end the instant the worker leaves for the day. There is a reason paychecks are individual and come in sealed envelopes.

           One amusing concept I identified with is the attempt to do away with money. This usually takes the form of “work equivalency”, where a mechanic is deemed more valuable than a laborer, so the mechanic gets to work fewer hours for the same pay. It amounts to the same thing as what it purports to abolish—different pay for different work. I’m adamant on that point, the man who works longer, harder, smarter, should get more pay. Taxation is counter to that freedom.
           Where I would not fit into a commune is on the issue of musicianship (and there would be many equally valid stances). We go work in the fields all day as a group, say. But at the end of the day, should I be required to perform while other sit on their haunches being entertained? According to the like of Robert Owen, he says yes because my music was a “gift”. Obviously he’s never tried unwrapping such a “gift”. No, Rob, if I’m working extra at the end of the day. I get paid extra at the end of the day. Then I get booted out of the commune for someone more “sociable”.

           Anyway, this book is dwelling on the history of Liberalism in the 1850s, I want to get to the immediate roots of what exists today. People who would destroy America, the Abby Hoffman bunch. Think of it as, once Trump gets in, my policy of “know thy enemy”. The establishment is going to put up a terrible fight to keep their privileges. Look how they did it in Canada. They expanded the civil service to the point where every family includes a civil servant. Nobody is ever going to vote their relatives out of a job. Fifty years later, there are Canadians living under bridges but Ottawa is giving free housing insane third-world radicals and people who set their wives on fire.
           I do know one thing about myself in regards to communism. The moment the family agrees between themselves to divide up what I worked for, I quickly switch to the type of work that cannot be divided. Those who think they can vote yourself to half my piano lesson, by all means, give it a whirl. It’s been tried.


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