One year ago today: September 10, 2017, 4:30AM and dead calm.
Five years ago today: September 10, 2013, ‘how-to’ video guidelines.
Nine years ago today: September 10, 2009, remember George?
Random years ago today: September 10, 2015, Fort Ogden?
Consider today unusual in that I got to talking philosophy. There’s not many people around Polk who can hold such a conversation. I spent the day chasing around and discovered my auto insurance went up $10 per month for no good reason. Gee, I wish I owned a business that the government compelled people to shop at. However, I’ll settle for any business and that is slated to happen in five days. Not much else happens on a business day, and that, by the way, was one of the things I hated about having to work for a living. The days meld into one another and over time people forget entire years of their lives. I’m different that way. Not only can I recall what I’ve done every day of my life, I’ve written it down for you.
She has employees and I don’t. We started on that subject because we certainly agree it is not easy to find good ones. However, she’s pretty much stuck in a business that requires them. We had plenty of tales from the trailer court. She’s had some bad ones, but I’m less hard-boiled on that one, because the bad eggs you get rid of. It’s the mediocre ones that get my goat. Even then, I understand why they don’t really have any incentive to do anything extra for a business, and the smaller the business, the more noticeable this becomes. It’s the little things. Like how her last did stock the cooler, but never turned all the labels around forward.
My second in command, Agt. R, is more independent and sets his own guidelines, but yes, I notice he isn’t interested in what old accountants like me call leasehold improvements. It is in his best interest to keep the cart in shiny good repair but don’t expect him to fix a flat or grease the axle. Oh, if you want an armload of free hotdogs, show up Wednesday at 5:00PM. I’m staging a full stage rehearsal. In fact, take the whole case off my hands. I also put in a secondary order for him to buy $50 in diet drinks, which other vendors do not sell. The picture is the small A-frame sidewalk sign I’m painting up.
Naturally, the convo moved on to taxation and regulation. She merely hates it while I absolutely detest the entire system and the people who do it. No, I do not see excess law as the entity that protects the public. I’d admire it if that’s all that it did and stopped there. Once it degenerates into circular bureaucratic empire building, it becomes the enemy. Their purpose becomes the acquisition of power and not doing the most good for the greatest number. I recognize the need for guidelines, but am against the way the same are manipulated.
The evil is in the misapplication of “equality”. The rules are designed to combat those who knowledgeably endanger others, but that group is a minority. And that is where the bureaucrats should focus. But no, they twist the matter, saying that would be discrimination, or profiling, or whatever. Yeah, it would mean they’d have to do a proper job and, horrors, make judgments. The result is where we are today, where everybody is presumed guilty. The airport people know who the bad guys are, but their job security lies in searching everybody.
Jelly bean art.
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There should be a picture of the sign I’m painting nearby to direct people to the alley. I could not finish it today. Instead, I got rained out and the terrain got a preview of that approaching hurricane. These rain squalls come out of nowhere. Unrelated to the hurricane, which is still 700 miles away, there still seems to be a correlation. That’s how I ducked into the club, I had already got soaked walking out of the bank with my cash float. There’s another telling factor. Nobody else around here could come up with $250. This isn’t a repeat pic, this is real money this time. I got ones, fives, and tens. Anything bigger, let them go break it at the bar. I’m not keen on a guy standing in the alley after dark with change for a fifty on him.
This news just arriving now. The bingo on the 21st may be a no-go. Ticket sales have been disappointing. Myself, I suspect a lot of people don’t buy tickets this far in advance, so I left a note just saying let me know. If it is called off, I’ve got a back alley to hang out in. Anyway, we were on the topic of why I dislike bureaucrats and this goes back along ways. The following was not part of our discussion this morning, since as far as I know, the gal has never studied history. I view what is happening to the USA as what nothing new or different. It happens to all societies where the average Joe has led a contented and easy life, with not too much stress on education and few rewards for study.
Every empire in history followed a similar path and the one I see with the closest pattern was what happened in France about the same time as this country was founded. The people who were here necessarily had a hard life but ridding oneself of unwanted government interference was a simple matter of walking an extra few days to the west. Allow me to elaborate on that French experience. The king, Louis the Somethingth was drawing power from the feudal barons. This always done the same way. In a big way, the estates in France resembled the American colonies. The people who lived there were loyal to their local baron or lord and if he got out of hand, they rioted and burned down his castle. Today’s schools don’t teach how often this happened, but it was a lot.
The situation was ripe for a takeover. All these French provinces together possessed immense wealth, if only somebody could come up with a way to consolidate it. Problem. The reason for that wealth was due to the nation being a collection of individual states, but nobody likes to think that far ahead. So the bureaucrats go to work. The trick is to make the people think they will be better off under the leadership of a small centralized elite. And the lazier and stupider the population, the easier this task. Now you can begin to spot the parallels with what is happening to America up in DC. The French king built a big castle and we are taught it was because he was extravagant.
Nope. The real reason was the poor communication system at the time. If a revolt started on the border, it could take days or weeks for the news to reach Versailles. So you make a palace so alluring that all the nobles hang around there instead of back at their own drafty castle cooking up trouble. And you can keep an eye on them. America has a great communication system, but the central government is pursing the same task. They centralize the money supply and sell the people on safety, protecting children, and apple pie. How does the government get away with telling you what you can smoke? Safety. Or tell you what you can drink or sleep with? See the pattern. It’s for your own good, it always is. Until the central government becomes so pervasive, the power of the individual states is permanently crushed.
In the name of security.
This is no shapeless concept. You can find how every king in history did this, the process is called Absolutism. In England the same thing happened, just a different method. The local churches and nobles were very inconsistent in their cheating of the peasants. The king established a court of appeal. When a peasant was punished at the local level, he could appeal to the king, and he would because the king established a consistent set of rules followed at the national level. The goal is the same, it weaken the grip of the individual provinces until the king has absolute power, hence the term.
Marxism holds much of the same view, that the way to break the power of the state is to keep them squabbling between themselves until a small but organized group becomes strong enough, usually via the police or the military, to overcome any attempt for a state to revolt or secede. Here is a quote about daily life at the Palace of Versailles concerning the methods used by the king.
“Louis . . . took great pains to be well informed of all that passed everywhere; in the public places, in the private houses, in society and familiar intercourse. His spies and telltales were infinite. He had them of all species; many who were ignorant that their information reached him; other who knew it; others who wrote to him direct, sending their letters through channels he indicated; and all theses letters were seen by him alone, and always before everything else; others who sometimes spoke to him secretly in his cabinet, entering by the back stairs. These unknown means ruined an infinite number of people of all classes, who never could discover the cause; often ruined them very unjustly; for the King, once prejudiced, never altered his opinion . . . .
Yes, it is pretty amazing. This skullduggery has been around forever and yet some people still use Facebook and install Google chrome on their computers. After all, bad things only happen to the other guy. And when they do, there is always that sneaking suspicion they did something to deserve it. If you are not certain how that works, it’s that same feeling idiots get when they drive past when a cop pulls over the other guy.
ADDENDUM
Admire my new phono (1/4”) patch cables. These two ten-footers set me back $30. In contrast, I remember my first cable cost $1.98 and I had to save up two months for it. Yep, it was flashback time. I had asked my mother for it, because she always said if you ever wanted anything, you only had to ask. What a crock that was. You would never get anything if they didn’t know what it was, and it was easy enough to pretend that about a guitar cable in that household. For some reason I totally recall that first cable. Back then, they made them in multiples of 2 feet. Today, they don’t make an 8-footer, the smallest (except for patch cords) is a 10-footer. And with tax, they are $15 each.
I say Google can publish anything they want, unless is causes harm. There exists already centuries of tort law surrounding this issue. There are rules against causing harm and these rules are not reliant on whether a statement is true or false. You cannot maliciously hurt somebody by publishing either lies or truth. And Google should be held to that standard. It would be best for them to let old records lapse. That way, if anyone down the line is after the information, they would have to pursue it by the tortuous normal channels, which weeds out the proletarians. It balances quite well, the older the information, the deeper they should have to dig.
I would then apply the same restrictions to the Nexus bunch and the credit agencies.
Mercifully, I spotted the potential for on-line and database abuse long before browsers made the Internet easy. To that end, I often do an on-line search of what information exists on myself. Nothing of any consequence. My pseudonyms appear, but only because I had telephones connected in those names. What paid off was my natural distrust of “hiring agencies”. These people have a secondary interest in finding you a job. They are really after the information on your resume. Since I retired at an uncommonly early age, I continued to submit resumes, but with salted information, and nobody suspected a thing. So that you know, you must not use false information for the purpose of fraud, but otherwise, you can call yourself Donald Duck if you want.
Resumes were a natural spoof for me. Most people falsify resumes, so all I did was turn that popular realization to my advantage. I made sure that each resume only had one major “error”, that is, a statement that was wrong, but in a way that could be claimed to be a mere oversight or typo. After a while, you get really good at this and code the resume so when information crops up in unexpected places, you can tell where it came from. Do not trust AARP, Chase Bank, the phone company, or grocery cards.
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