There’s things going on that I can’t really write about these days. This is a bit painful, much as I have become accustomed over the last twelve or thirteen years to blogging about things that concern me; things both personal and political and which I have always tossed out there in the ether for consideration. It’s a kind of ‘thinking aloud’ writing a note, sealing it in a bottle and throwing it into the vast ocean of the blogosphere, whereupon someone may discover it, uncork the bottle, read it and say to themselves “My, that is interesting!” Or relevant, insightful, et cetera. Which I can’t do any more as regards the family; in the wake of Dad’s death, Mom came to feel that certain of my musings and posts were an invasion of family privacy, and directly asked me not to blog about them so I have not, in deference to her wishes. She is as well as can be expected, though … and the current situation is something that Pip and Sander are handling, as they are geographically the closest.
Blondie and I have been making some decisions in regard to the current political situation; the murder of four Marines and a sailor in Chattanooga … and the murder of Katherine Steinle in San Francisco by a repeat felon and frequently deported illegal alien. We have agreed that there is another situation and unfolding series of experiences that I will not blog, or discuss with family, or with neighbors. Sufficient to say that we have reached the final conclusion after suspecting it with increasing conviction over the last six years or so that the federal government and the bi-coastal elites who appear to have pretentions of being an aristocratic and ruling class definitively do not give a rodent’s patoot about the security and well-being of ordinary American citizens. No, they don’t, and won’t as long as the lavish parties keep happening, the juvenile spawn of the elite keep wandering into high-paying do-nothing jobs and multi-million dollar parcels of residential real estate in the fashionable sections of New York, Malibu, Georgetown, Boulder and San Francisco. The Ruling Bureaucrat Activist Class may continue pursuing their delusion that American citizens may be corralled, regulated and controlled transformed into obedient and docile serfs, dependent absolutely on the largesse and goodwill of the Ruling Bureaucrat Activist Class.
They might be onto something in that, seeing how readily certain demographics, localities and elite professions have rolled over, showing their bellies and begging for a pat, like an overly adoring dog. This show of abject submission is a bit disappointing, actually I had thought Americans generally were made of sterner stuff after all, our media has always made a big show of how courageous they were, in afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. Alas, most of our national media organs and personalities are curled up happily on a comfortable cushion at the feet of the powerful, gazing upwards in adoration. I would despair entirely but for knowing something about history, and in seeing certain rebellious trends developing, like ripples on the surface of a body of water which might indicate a strong current underneath.
Discuss the various means of aiming to misbehave that are available to us, be creative in line with Mr. Alinsky’s dictum about having fun with it.
>> our media has always made a big show of how courageous they were…
Show being the key word there. Putting on a show is their profession.
I am watching what is going on with California and wondering how long it can go on. House prices in this area of Orange County seem to be defying gravity. It is just astonishing what prices are like. I look back at houses I once owned and keep thinking “Why did I sell again?”
The fact is that something that can’t go on forever, won’t, as Herb Stein is quoted. I think it may be a safety premium as crime is low here and Los Angles is becoming a third world city.
I remember being in Tlaquepaque, Mexico a suburb of Guadalajara. The houses were all two story with broken glass along the tops of the walls. Each large building would have a large door, like a horse door, with a smaller human-sized door within it. The walls were right on the street, When the big doors were open, you could see pretty courtyards inside with fountains and there were often shops along the inside of the outer wall. That was how you lived in a third world city. At night the big doors were closed.
There was no area of small homes and yards that were open to the street. Paris is somewhat similar.
I was reading about a murder in Oklahoma and the location was in a prosperous suburb and the homes are described as “upscale.” The most expensive home on the street was described as being worth $245,000. You can’t buy a condo in Orange County for that and the ones I know of are all around $500,000.
How long can this go on with young people all halving huge student loans and with the aging of the population ? I like Tucson and was idly looking at home prices in an area I know well. Tucson has not recovered from the 2008 recession, I think because a lot of residents were “snow birds” from the midwest who are still distressed because a lot of them had their savings in bonds. The area I was looking at is a gated community with nice homes. One that is listed is 3500 square feet on one level on a large lot and is listed at $330,000.
My children and grandchildren area here and that is the draw. However it is weakening. I sold my house here five years ago for $600,000. I had done some work on it but it had no pool and needed a few things done. The people who bought it, I understand, have it back on the market. I haven’t checked the price but I’ll bet it is higher. So far, California has defied reality although San Bernardino got a heavy does a few years ago. When I sold my house, I moved to the local mountains but could not tolerate the altitude and had to move back to sea level.
I just don’t see how California keeps all the balls in the air. The coastal states are very fragile, I fear and the high tech jobs that keep them going may just evaporate. Maybe the H1Bs will be the vehicle as more and more companies import them to replace the skilled STEM graduates who are keeping things going. Just one example of what is going on.
Even Mother Jones is concerned, although tech workers with no economics knowledge are a big part of their readership, I’m sure.
Andrew Cuomo is busy trying to lure California business to New York although I would guess that California is the only state worse for business.
Upstate New York has been depressed for 60 years. Why ?
There are any number of candidates to blame. Cold weather. The Saint Lawrence Seaway, which destroyed the Erie Canal as a viable economic channel. New York’s business-unfriendly environment, which has gotten worse and worse as power has shifted towards New York City and the financial industry which is not much affected by the various work rules its employees like to vote for.
Fracking, which would save upstate New York, has been banned by Cuomo and there is no prospect of relief. Coastal states are fragile. Time to think about moving inland.
>>Los Angles is becoming a third world city.
Considering their policies, I’m shocked. Given another few decades, third world will be a step up for most major democratically controlled urban zones.
>>The Ruling Bureaucrat Activist Class may continue pursuing their delusion that American citizens may be corralled, regulated and controlled – transformed into obedient and docile serfs, dependent absolutely on the largesse and goodwill of the Ruling Bureaucrat Activist Class.
I have to admit, I agree with everything you wrote. I don’t think the answer lies in playing their game. The answer lies in dismantling the rotten structures and renovating the entire national framework.
Politics is downstream of culture. Culture is learned in the home, school and media. We can’t directly influence the home, but we can influence school – by privatizing it, and the media – by providing alternatives to the Leftist Narrative. We also need to dismantle the vast and completely captured regulatory state. Will any of that happen? I don’t know, but it certainly needs to be done, and we won’t right this ship until we do.
Of course, Chicago and Detroit are “coastal” in one respect. I love the ocean and spent many years one it but times are changing.
I think both political party are pre-revolutionary.
I’m still working on that post and might move it over here but right now I’m going out to shoot my brand new Colt 1911.
Hold them to their own rulebook is the approach I am taking. One of the most basic of rules is that the people themselves are the ultimate boss, the source of their legitimacy. Actually acting that way would entail very modest expenses and efforts but would destroy their ability to engage in systemic fraud and self-enrichment.
Theodore Dalrymple has a column on the incorruptibility of the British civil service which was admirable in the days when they left people pretty much alone.
Now that lunatics are in charge, this is a severe problem and his column is on the uses of corruption.
Charles Murray has something similar in his new book on misbehavior.
In the spirit of misbehaving, I intend to become as capable of self-sufficiency as I can. When it all implodes, we will beat the odds.
In the mean time, I’ll keep pressure on them to justify their every failure (Mom cited two very good examples). See the white house petition calling for service members and their families to have the same self-protection rights as we enjoy as civilians to go out and shoot our new 1911 Colt and to carry it for protection. Senator Moran has introduced this as a senate bill, but it needs more misbehaviorists to support it and him. I ain’t scared, bring it on.
Mike
your quarterly irs submissions might contain fewer dollars.
Misbehavin’ 101:
1. Get inside their committees in order to wreck them from the inside. Think Jamie Gorelick on Halliburton’s board of officers. You won’t be able to disrupt them entirely, but you can knock out a pillar or three, and then quickly leave to make room for the next misbehaver to take a swing or two. You’ll get away scot-free, and have fun doing it!
2. Reduce your tax-footprint. If that means you deliberately earn less declarable money, then so be it. Stop sending your hard earned dollars to the Zulu junta. And if you live in an expensive enclave like Flagstaff, AZ or Manhattan, NY, or Bellevue, WA, then head to more affordable pastures (Tucson, AZ’s a good bet, BTW. Or check out Cochise County’s mountain ranges, too. Great climate, arable land, and reliable aquifers)
3. Mock the junta’s celebrities and their hypocrisies relentlessly. Go to the public county meetings and the community center dinners where the poobahs pretend to “discuss” issues with the hoi poloi, and verbally knee cap the speakers. Ask them things like how much do you rely on taxpayers’ monies for your income? What do Jared Loughner’s parents do for a living? When did you stop beating your wife? Why don’t you like puppy dogs? Why, since you deign to decide the minute details of my life, is your front yard such a weedy mess? The accusation doesn’t need to be true, it only needs to sound like it might be. Use their own playbook to tweak their vanities and make them lose their cool; it’s the little things that’ll trip ’em up.
Maybe a reread of Alinsky’s “Rules” is in order.
My income is almost all tax exempt.
My 1911 Colt did great. I hit the target almost all the time but tended to hit to the left. All my hits were left of the midline. The target range was the FFL shop where I took delivery of my 1911 and I spent an hour filling out paperwork to take delivery. Then, today, I went in and ATF said a tax return was not enough documentation. Now, I have to reregister my car since all my records are to a post office box since I moved off the mountain.
I really miss Tucson which is where I had a house. The gun stores would back off visibly when they saw my California DL but I loved it. My daughter-in-law had a fit when i was going to move over there by myself. Now that my wife (ex-wife) and I are back together, I have to convince her that it is nice.
My house I sold five years ago is for sale again and the owners are asking $723 thousand. It is an 1800 square foot single story. It has a nice lot but I bought it in 1991 for $258 k. It’s crazy. A Tucson house in an area I like is $350k
this one for example .
Oh indeed, time rules. You are getting old and the virgin country you raped for so long, and for so much, is getting old too. Population increases are eating up your once huge disposable resources and you are not rich anymore.
That’s what you get, and as populations grow and resources dwindle, things will become even more interesting.
PenGun – Human beings are a natural resource beyond measure. We have plenty of resources to go around, provided they are not fenced off by wealthy elites on a hope and a dream of SUSTAINABILITY.
The rest – Meh- rulers have always tried to pull up the ladders behind them on their quest to preserve power. We the people have the solution built into our Constitution and we better start paying attention.
Yes, Pengun, my ancestors immigrated to NYC in the 1890s and raped the virgin country. Faded family photos show them on horse back, dressed in wolf skins and yarmulkes, running buffalo off cliffs in Brooklyn. You get the prize tonight because every one of your assertions is wrong. It saddens me that you read this blog all the time and yet appear to have learned so little from it. How about meeting us halfway and reading some economics and history books? I’m sure that the well-read contributors here could suggest some good ones.
“the virgin country you raped for so long, ”
The garbage truck driver shares some of his wisdom with us. It always amuses me when the left deigns to share some of their wisdom with us mortals. They know no history prior to 1950 and they know no economics but then they know that a $15 minimum wage will solve the problems of the poor.
They have never heard of Bastiat but adopt the policies he was warning about.
Nice work, PenGun. I hope you will forgive me if I choose to shoot my Colt 1911 than read your wisdom,
He has heard of the “Death of Marat” by David. His name won’t be on the list or so he thinks. I am astonished by how little people know of how unique our revolution was in comparison to all the rest.
My father’s hometown in NE Ohio came of age as a canal town and, in his words, had its peak in the 40’s. the town had been depressed for most of my life, with the pace quickening in the late 90’s/00’s.
The last time I visited, homes that were decrepit were fixed up and overall investment was clearly up.
The source of this turn: fracking.
If you count by my families dead in the French and Indian wars it seems most of the raping went the other way. One was the only survivor, after having at age two enough sense to crawl next to her dead mother and hide under her skirts.
Oh yeah, there was some land raping going on, ya know, cutting some trees for a house to live in, clearing enough rocks to plant a garden, catching fish to eat, just a bunch of totally unforgivable stuff like that. We jammed huge shrieking saws ( wait, no , we pulled them by hand) into the innocent trees and broke them down and made them into ….chairs. And tables..And boats. All stuff that no thinking sensitive person could ever want.
Matter of fact, PenGun, if you decided to chuck every last thing my ancestors and their compatriots “raped” from the land, you would find yourself living in a mud hut and eating a steady diet of root vegetables dug from the ground with a pointed stick. Yes, you would be sitting on the floor also.And that nasty infection just keeps getting worse and worse..
The utter lack of appreciation of how much work goes into keeping us fed, clothed, and housed, every day, astounds me. Talk about biting the hand that feeds!
Never mind the chump, Raven. The nearest rubbish I’ve heard was by some bloody Welsh socialist moaning about The Valleys. “They” tore the guts out of The Valleys, apparently.
I should explain that The Valleys of South Wales made their living from coal mining which is – gasp! – an extractive industry. And it was his trade union members who did the actual tearing.
Jesuit missionaries killed by the Huron during the disastrous Beaver Wars in which the Iroquois and Huron fought a turf war over who would control trade to Europe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Martyrs
The nomadic, peaceful noble North American native is a myth. They only seemed that way by the 18th century because they decimated each other and their territories.
I’ll make it plainer. You are not exceptional. Your country is so prosperous because of the massive resource of America. You were the first to actually use a whole virgin continent as you entered the mechanical age.
That is over. Now you face the problems the old countries face, resources failing, population steadily increasing and you don’t like it. Cry me a river.
“Now you face the problems the old countries face, resources failing, population steadily increasing and you don’t like it. Cry me a river.”
Hilarious rant from the left. By resources, do you mean oil ? HAHAHA
By “population” do you mean illegals ?
“you don’t like it. Cry me a river.”
Only when Democrats are in power.
Yes, we are prosperous like the Russians, the Argentines, the Mexicans, the Venezuelans, the Zimbabweans, and every other people whose national territory contains massive natural resources. Top logic. God forbid we should be as poor as the Japanese, the Hong Kong Chinese, the Israelis, and every other resource-poor people.
Oh, to be as prosperous as the Apache before the Europeans came!
Remember social change for the left is a full time job. They search out public service jobs that allow them to steal time for politics. We all have seen the librarians who stock the shelves with lefty books, the school teacher who constantly brings politics to the elementary school or the regulator in cahoots with lefty organizations. They need to be called out constantly and dragged into the sunlight. This is best done if your personal situation is one where you can withstand any backlash. So sit on town commitees to balance out tha lefty advocates , Show up at every planning meeting to catch things early.
It’s a lot of work but better to block the sappers work early
Yep. Those social and political systems don’t matter a hoot, long as ya got virgin land to rape,and aboriginals to exploit, any bunch of fools can get rich. That’s why the continents of Africa and South America developed just as wealthy as the US.
“That’s why the continents of Africa and South America developed just as wealthy as the US.”
Actually, Argentina had a pretty good argument to being the richest country in the world before Peron took over.
}}} Andrew Cuomo is busy trying to lure California business to New York
Yeah, while he’s been chasing off all the old gun manufacturies.
Texas is the state that is winning the business.
Florida could win a lot more if it plays its cards right, too — no income tax (and zero chance of one. It’s in the state Constitution, and thanks to that idiot “pig amendment” it got more difficult to amend the state Constitution), a housing market that was one of the four worst hit states in the nation and still hasn’t totally recovered, and a generally well-trained populace, with one of the top-ten state universities for brain fodder. For the moment, at least, we also have a fairly decent governor as far as business goes — it is a good sign that all the True Democrats** hate him.
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** “True Democrats” — anyone who knows the history of The South knows that everyone in the South is registered Democrat, regardless of ideological basis. This is due to the racist history of The South, and the fact that the Dems pandered to that racism directly for more than 80 years. So if you want to vote for ANYONE in the primaries — which is where the actual choices get made since often the Dem runs unopposed in November — you have to be registered as a Dem. I’ve been a nominal Dem for almost 40 years, though I usually vote against the biggest asshole in the primaries, and then vote, where possible, for the most small-L libertarian candidate available. This need to be registered Dem to actually vote usefully is notably less than in the past, but still remains.
There is something odd about investing in tax exempt bonds issued by governments which are expected to collapse in disaster or inflate the bonds’ value to zero.
>>our country is so prosperous because of the massive resource of America.
By that measure, most of Africa should be prosperous. China should have been prosperous before now. Japan and Taiwan and much of Europe are prosperous with few resources. Culture separates the prosperous from the less so. Also, I often wonder if you breathe vapid hypocrisy, because you seem to live on it.
By account of resources available, Mexico should have been in the 19th century and ever afterwards – an economical powerhouse. Mines, rich farmland, ranchland, natural resources, beautiful coastlands and all … and yet, nothing came to very much. The inflexible rule of the 1% – the dead hand of the medieval church has nothing on the dead hand of a oligarchy.
There was at one time, a movement for California to annex Baja California. A lot of us thought this might be a huge bonanza for Baja, a neglected and water poor area with miles of beaches and several good harbors. I can’t think it would help now. California is as inept and corrupt as Mexico.
PenGun,
Thank you for commenting here.
Whenever I worry that my comments are too extreme, stupid, ignorant, or just poorly written, I remind myself that at least I’m not you.
You invariably attract people who feel compelled to explain the most obvious and simple things about the world to you, because you seem to have never run across any of it before you see it here.
That’s sad, in a way, but at least it gets you the attention of people trying to educate you.
Generally, no one attempts to educate me, which makes me think I’m correct.
That often horrifies me, but at least I can console myself with my rectitude.
You have nothing.
PenGun is useful because there really are people who think that way. It is useful to see what they think. That’s why I read leftist blogs although I am no longer permitted to comment. I was banned when I did not agree that single payer was best for the US and when I suggested the French system as a better alternative. There was outrage and quite a bit of ad hominem attack, some of which was quite creative, like mining my personal information which I do not hide on my blog.
Mike K,
Sigh.
I used to argue with leftists on the internet for fun. Eventually the appalling ignorance, endless deceit, vile racism, and just plain nastiness got too tedious.
There’s an old saying that leftists believe conservatives are evil and conservatives believe leftists are stupid.
It’s wrong. Leftists are evil, and it’s no accident that countries ruled by them often end up covered in mass graves. Other, luckier countries, so far including the United States, merely end up terribly misgoverned and on a path to failure.
Conservatives, at least to the extent they fail to realize what the left actually is, are the stupid ones.