One year ago today: June 19, 2017, food shouldn't hurt.
Five years ago today: June 19, 2013, project 42
Nine years ago today: June 19, 2009, messing with CDG format.
Random years ago today: June 19, 2004, to the Buccaneer.
Here’s an area of the building you haven’t seen in a while. The front bedroom or office, same thing. The rush to get that attic insulated before the hot season took a lot of time. Shown here through a fuzzy lens is cutting in the north wall, the beginning of the last stage before I can use the room even if it is not finished. That color is your $9 a bucket Wal*Mart used paint. The focus today was the kitchen. That water heater needs to be moved from the center of the floor to a corner. I have the plans made and the electric cable and copper piping will move. But I have to cut it temporarily and carefully bend it into place. And I’m chicken. I have all the spare parts if anything goes wrong and I still hesitated all day.
I’m going to fit a cheap door on the bedroom for now, a $25 special from the ReStore. Shortly I’ll have the much-wanted combination kitchen-dining room. That will bring much of the renovations to a close, but not to an end. There will be no Florida room and it looks now like there might never be. The City has made distinct moves to make it uneconomical to fix up older places. I’m getting tired of working on the place for now. And today it was a sweat bath, no mercy. I still cannot find a contractor who will finish the porch deck, either. This calls for an extra coffee break.
Besides, I drank every bit of iced tea in the place. By mid afternoon I was even drinking water. Then I found it. A half bottle of that sour orange Cuban marinade ingredient. And another half full of those plastic lemons. And a jar of turbinado. Shake well, and you’ve got an original sweet and sour concoction that, over cracked ice, does the job.
50% of volunteers were women.
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This is a picture of the back of the water heater, showing the hot and cold lines and the old cloth-wound power cable. That’s just canisters and such piled on top, I’m out of counter space completely until the kitchen is done. The sheet of plywood to the left is from the floor, which is lifted to move these utility lines. Now there was a mickey mouse job right out of the 50s, whoever put that in. I worked until 7:00PM, noting the longer days will soon make it cool enough to put in some evening time. Get this job finished and commence relaxing. The water heater. It’s that white rectangular think with the wires coming out the back. The other white wire is just hanging there.
It’s one of many misconceptions about the American voting system, and I suspect the guys who wrote the Constitution in point of fact wrote in provisions to prevent the cycle from repeating. That is, by restricting voter’s rights, they sought to make democracy a stable American form of government. What! Did I just say restrict the most fundamental right of all Americans? Yep, because for openers it is not a right, it is a privilege granted under certain strong conditions. But as a right, it is never mentioned in the Constitution. Don’t argue, just go read it. Only the states allow you to vote, and the Constitution says they cannot restrict that vote on the basis of skin color, etc. But nobody has a law that says you have a right to vote.
For example, people think they vote for the president. They don’t. They vote for a group called “electors”, who, after being elected, they get together and decide who is president. Trump got a majority of votes cast by people who wanted him as president. He did not do so well with this “electoral college” but they dared not speak up this time. They knew their necks were on the line, and it was a totally new and sobering revelation to them. It happened [before] in the 2002(?) election (Gore got the most votes) but his opponent was not the controversial Donald Trump, so the electors didn’t fear a public outcry when they pulled the stunt that time.
The cycle to which I refer is from the same document, stating that once people learn they can vote themselves largesse (money or privilege) from the public purse (treasury), democracy is doomed. And you get this all the time. By allowing welfare recipients, civil servants, the military, and even illegal immigrants a vote, they are hardly going to bite the hand that feeds them. There is no law that says they cannot be removed from the voting lists because they represent a conflict of interest. But decades of indoctrination have convinced the average voter that we have universal voting rights. We don’t.
You can look up the quote, it has variations. It basically says over a 200 year period, the great civilizations that institute democracy go from dictatorship to faith to courage, then to liberty and abundance, which leads to selfishness, then to complacency, to apathy, to dependency and that is back to a dictatorship. Where everybody relies on the government for their daily bread. I believe if the Constitution were interpreted to prevent special interest groups from voting while on the government payroll, there is a chance that democracy could take an enduring hold. That is why I am for term limits and exclusion of any voting blocs who are reliant on government money. After all, it is all about the money.
[Author's note: the USA is not a democracy. In a democracy, it is majority rule, a quick way to national suicide. Ask Poland. The USA is a Republic based on rule of law. This is a system where the exercise of power is restricted by written law established over time as proper conduct, as opposed to law based on the will of one person who is in charge at the moment. This "rule of law" is commonly misinterpreted by most Americans. It does not mean everybody should obey the law, it means a society where people are answerable only to the law, not to the edicts issued by government officials and non-elects. Sound familiar? When the government rules by making laws to support itself, this is called "rule of man".
Income tax, using the driver's license as ID, requiring a social security number to open a bank account, etc, are all rule of man laws. There is no law that says you must do these things. But there are punishments if you don't.]
[Author’s note: at the same time, I am not saying one taxpayer, one vote. Civil servants pay taxes and most taxpayers certainly did not become so voluntarily. This country was doing fine before anyone paid taxes anyway, except for that debacle called the Civil War. Nor could I agree that voting be based on criteria like land or business ownership, since that can be too easily manipulated into a first-come-first-serve scenario.
Like the majority, I was born without land or business connections. I have no answer, but isn’t it interesting how those who felt it is the people who do the actual productive work that should have the say-so. But you can’t say that without being a communist, or that is, being called a communist. You could say sticks & stones don’t break my bones—at least until you meet large groups of liberals who, using rule of man, know that they can ruin your career or business with a well-worded accusation or two, even if they know you are innocent. The liberal media has been trying this one Trump since he handed them their arses.]
ADDENDUM
Take a look at this device I’m holding and keep it in mind until you read to the end of this section. This is your world class article that would cost you ten bucks if it was in a glossy magazine.
So there I was, taking a break when I punched in a DVD I’ve never seen before. In fact, I didn’t even know it was a movie. “A Raisin in the Sun”. It’s a 1961 production and I pick up how it addresses the issues of the day, or what was supposed to be the issues. It’s the story of a family of five who grew up in exceedingly cramped quarters, roughly the same size of the place where I grew up with eight. I recognized the conditions, alrighty. They certainly got that part accurate, all the effects of living in a crowded dump with no privacy, no hope, no way out except to leave which would put you into a world where you either find more people with nothing or find everybody has everything except you. That was a mouthful. So I identified with the plot of the movie, that’s for sure.
But consider this example. By some American standards, am I poor? I have no credit cards, no television, no cable, no phone in the house, and I rarely buy brand new clothes. I never owned a car for years until I bought a 1997 six months ago. So! It is indeed a question of lifestyle. Unlike the poor, I don’t have to get up to make the credit card payment, the car payments, and it could be I shop the thrifts because my nice clothes won’t fit me until I’m down another forty pounds. These things deeply blur the line between lifestyle and environment. Hence, my view that poverty cannot directly be measured by counting possessions. In America, welfare cases have microwaves and iPhones.
I’m more like poverty is a condition, a type of existence formed by a combination of factors that nobody can define. However, those factors include lack of opportunity, lack of infrastructure, lack of education, lack of social contacts, and mostly being placed in a situation while still young that the only way out is exactly the wrong thing—to go out and work hard for somebody else because you lack any resources to work for yourself. Nor can you get any of the right resources because you are in a situation where others would (and did) help themselves.
So I said to myself, is this the type of movie I should be watching the same time I’m funding the most American of all business startups: the hotdog cart? I might give myself a depression complex. Ha, hardly. This cart is doesn’t follow the other rules. I didn’t lose my job, there are no creditors pounding at the door, and I’m not up to my neck in bills. I could care less about the prime interest rate or the DOW-Jones. I’m not caught up in the poverty cycle any more, and it is wonderful. What isn’t so wonderful is the knowledge that I could have done it so long ago with so little—but poverty is also the situation where nobody will leave you alone long enough to do it. If that’s difficult to follow, ask what would be different today if when I was 18, I’d had a hotdog cart under the same circumstance. Instead, I had to go work in some damn lumber mill in the middle of nowhere. Because it’s part of the poverty cycle.
There, I feel much better now.
Okay, what is the contraption I’m holding? I wasn’t going to show this cruel-looking implement until I spotted the analogy. This is the model designed for those who refuse to admit I’m right about poverty. Who remembers the calf-weaning device displayed on this blog’s post of June 16, 2018? That was the Millennial brand. This is also a calf-weaning device, but this model is designed for people who think poverty can be cured with money. It does the same job, but works on a completely different principle. This one causes the mother cow to repeatedly kick the calf in the head until it learns.
[Author's note: This lesson has yet to be picked up by human single parent families.]
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