Oh, here we go AGAIN...

National Lawmakers Meet in Chicago to discuss Gun Control

National lawmakers were in Chicago holding a Congressional hearing on proposed gun control legislation today.
...
WEIS: It's just common sense legislation. I don't see how anyone could say this is restrictive when we're simply asking for a background check if you're going to buy a weapon. This is pretty simple to understand.

And guess who the "reporter" is getting its "facts" from.

Tell a lie often enough...

H/T to Unc.

Madame O impresses the Japanese Chinese?...

...Not, you know, in a good way, but...

Ol' Plumber Joel...

Yeah! Some months after Claire moved into one of the fifth-wheel trailers here, I happened to notice that her toilet didn't flush. I asked her if she wanted me to have a look at it, and she said no: She just used the hose from the shower to flush it. Okay.

Well, that trailer's going on the market soon, and Landlady would surely get more money for it if the toilet worked. Since there is now nobody around to say me nay, I figured, "what can go wrong?"

Heh.

Question the first: Is the toilet getting water at all? A slightly loosened fitting explosively answered that question. Oops! Tighten it! Tighten it! Then go turn off the water.

Now, full disclosure: My toilet doesn't flush either. But that's because the valve is all chingered up and I'm not going to spend large amounts of money I don't have for fixtures in a trailer that - if all goes well - will be reduced to parts very soon. (Landlady has developed a heavy hate for the rather large collection of trailers on her ridge.) So "Yes, the toilet's getting water" wasn't really good news. If it's not the pipe, it must be the toilet.

But unlike mine, that toilet is practically new. T installed it only a little while before he died, and it hasn't gotten much use since. So I dismounted it and pulled it out into the light to see what was what.

Here's an immutable fact of life: The water on Landlady's property isn't just hard: It's positively crunchy. Only a fool would actually drink it, absent serious thirst. So any pressure-reducing orifice that hasn't gotten all calciumed-up just hasn't been around long enough. I took the valve off the toilet, sprayed it off, and looked for places where the calcium could build up. If I could get at the offender, maybe I could fix it. If I couldn't, well then I couldn't.

Turned out I could. I worked a pipe cleaner through the offending hole, and a garden hose demonstrated that what hadn't passed water through before now did. I put the whole thing back together, and then my only problem was getting the cheap-ass pipe fitting to stop leaking whenever I turned the water back on. Toilet flushes!

It doesn't flush well, mind you. But then as I recall it never really did.

Earth to D.C. Politicians and Pundits...

Guys, "your" people have the absolute right not to keep or carry arms any time they want. Seriously, anybody who wants to be a helpless, harmless victim may do so, at any time. I'm aware of nobody who wants to take that right from them, so it isn't necessary for you to continue attempting to oppress the rest of us to protect it. 'Kay?

Oh, and John (I suddenly remembered I'm supposed to be a conservative) McCain? Go (redacted) yourself. You're not fooling anybody anymore.

Get the &*(! off my lawn!

8^(

Okay, technically (and not so technically) it's not my lawn. But damn do I wish the roofers would just install the (redacted) roof and go away. Six in the morning, radio blaring, dogs all upset, I dunno whether I dare leave them unwatched so I can go do my own thing...

These guys are driving me crazy. How the contractor makes any money, spending this much time to install one (redacted) roof, I truly don't understand.

Might be light posting...

One of my brilliant improvisations gave up the ghost, and I've had to hardwire the 'pooter to the modem. This has driven me back to the scriptorium. That was fine a year and a half ago when I really didn't have anything else to do most days. But I've got more of a life now, plus the scriptorium is used for other things that make it less congenial for moving all my stuff into it when I want to websurf. So we'll have to take it as it goes. I need to score a longer - or shorter - patch cord so I can set the wifi back up.

Hope and change, baby. Hope and change.

Brady admits committee analysts could not fit the entire health care bill on one chart. “This portrays only about one-third of the complexity of the final bill. It’s actually worse than this.”

It's a damned good thing for the government that Franz Kafka is dead, that's all I can say. He'd have such a copyright infringement suit...

H/T to Sipsey Street

I almost feel sorry for them. Almost.

Landlady has been trying to get a local roofing contractor to commit to a project date for months now. Months. Guy's a flake; rarely answers calls, and when he does it's always with an excuse. But roofers aren't very thick on the ground around here, and this one had just what she wanted for the roof. We're now deep in Monsoon season, but we weren't when she started trying to get this guy on the job.

So day before yesterday the dogs alerted me to a truck pulling into the meadow. I'd met the guy once before when he measured the roof for the estimate. He showed up around 4:30 in the afternoon, and I wondered why on earth he'd bother driving all the way out here so late in the day. It seems, in trading text messages with Landlady, that he'd told her he was on his way earlier that morning, but - as he so often does - let other things get in the way. He brought one other guy and a trailer load of stuff, only battery-operated tools, no generator, no compressor, no nothing. They hung around for maybe three hours, accomplishing little I could see, and finally split.

Yesterday he came back, this time equipped and with a crew. They spent all day in the sun and got some work done this time, but even so - all day, five guys, and they were nowhere near done by dusk. Storm clouds were roaring in and I warned them the washes are saturated and every hole in the canyons is full of water. If it rains the washes will run, and I hope they brought camping gear. They pulled out shortly after - never did more than sprinkle.

This morning they showed up at six, and I don't know how close they are to done. Guess I should go find out, but - surprise! It's raining cats and dogs.

It's a very small house. Granted there were some carpentry issues they had to deal with first, but - sheesh! Ten man-days for a small roof? We erected and sheathed the whole damned thing in that much time, and we weren't pros. I've been around professional roofers. They come, they see, they conquer, they leave. These guys - I don't know.

Our Moment of Culture

It may or may not be appropriate that this poem came to my mind while shit-shoveling this morning.

Cassandra
Edwin Arlington Robinson

I HEARD one who said: "Verily,
What word have I for children here?
Your Dollar is your only Word,
The wrath of it your only fear.

"You build it altars tall enough
To make you see but you are blind;
You cannot leave it long enough
To look before you or behind.

"When Reason beckons you to pause,
You laugh and say that you know best;
But what it is you know, you keep
As dark as ingots in a chest.

"You laugh and answer, 'We are young;
Oh, leave us now, and let us grow:'
Not asking how much more of this
Will Time endure or Fate bestow.

"Because a few complacent years
Have made your peril of your pride,
Think you that you are to go on
Forever pampered and untried?

"What lost eclipse of history,
What bivouac of the marching stars,
Has given the sign for you to see
Milleniums and last great wars?

"What unrecorded overthrow
Of all the world has ever known,
Or ever been, has made itself
So plain to you, and you alone?

"Your Dollar, Dove, and Eagle make
A Trinity that even you
Rate higher than you rate yourselves;
It pays, it flatters, and it's new.

"And though your very flesh and blood
Be what the Eagle eats and drinks,
You'll praise him for the best of birds,
Not knowing what the eagle thinks.

"The power is yours, but not the sight;
You see not upon what you tread;
You have the ages for your guide,
But not the wisdom to be led.

"Think you to tread forever down
The merciless old verities?
And are you never to have eyes
To see the world for what it is?

"Are you to pay for what you have
With all you are?"--No other word
We caught, but with a laughing crowd
Moved on. None heeded, and few heard.

What's wrong with this picture?

Suddenly the GOP loves gays?



I thought it was weird enough when Ann Coulter became Judy Garland. But I don't really know anything about Ann Coulter, so maybe that sort of thing is normal for her. Still, it seems a bunch of right wingers think this is a voting bloc up for grabs.

Huh. I would have given gays more credit. But I guess when you still believe in the "system," you take your allies where you find them. Personally I don't understand why gay political activists think this will help them long-term. But then there are a lot of things I don't understand.

So you want to be on a city council?

Heh. I think I'll pass.

The enlightened rulers of Bell, California threw the city manager and police chief out of the sleigh, hoping that would be enough for the ravening wolves. Not so much, it seems.

Yeah, who didn't see that coming?

Sen. Robert Casey (D., Pa.) and Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D., N.D.) are pushing legislation that would commit taxpayers’ dollars to bailing out the Teamsters’ retirement pension fund. The financial crisis and the Great Recession may have upset your retirement plans, but that’s not reason that politically connected union thugs have to share the pain.

Here’s the deal, as former Department of Labor official Vincent Vernuccio, now an analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, tells Exchequer: Under the Democrats’ plan, the U.S. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., which is basically a pension-insurance fund run by the federal government, would be able to receive tax dollars to bail out so-called orphan pensions — pensions for which employers have ceased making contributions, usually for reasons of insolvency. Under normal circumstances, PBGC does not use taxpayer money to bail out pensions; it charges aninsurance premium to the funds it covers and uses that money to make good on pension obligations if a particular pension fund goes bankrupt. It’s like an FDIC for pension funds: If a fund is sufficiently mismanaged, PBGC can step in, take it over, and take care of its obligations.

The Casey bill would change all that, creating a “fifth fund” within PBGC that would receive taxpayer support. Currently, federal law carefully specifies that PBGC obligations are not obligations of the U.S. government. Casey-Pomeroy would reverse that, mandating that “obligations of the corporation that are financed by the [fifth fund] shall be obligations of the United States.” In other words: You, sucker, are paying the bill.

I'm confused. Which is it?

Barring hormones that have gone all wacky freelance, the only way I know to achieve a state of obesity is to eat too much. I've been poor, and when I was poor obesity was the least of my troubles. Whatever its other downsides, poverty is a great weight-loss program.

Here I'm told that poverty has become so pervasive that "food hardship" (A new term I only encountered this morning) is now a national problem. No doubt soon our masters will unveil their five-year plan to eliminate such suffering.

For households with children the numbers were significantly worse. According to the survey, "... nearly one in four such households suffered food hardship in 2009." Mississippi, the state with the highest incidence of food hardships report, saw their numbers increase when children under the age of 18 were factored into the statistics. Mississippi households without children held a hunger rating of 22.5 percent while Mississippi households with children held a hunger rating of 33.8 percent.

And yet! We're also supposedly battling Madame Obama's national obesity crisis!

Obesity continues to plague the U.S., with nine states now reporting that more than 30% of their population is obese. ”In 2007, only three states reported an increased prevalence of obesity above 30 percent — Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi,” said Dr. William Dietz, director of nutrition, physical activity, and obesity at the CDC. “Now, there are nine states that exceed [that mark]: Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.” Furthermore, no U.S. States have managed to lower obesity rates to 15 percent.

We're told this, too, is because of poverty. "Poor food choices," don't ya know.

When I was poor I thought a pretty good day was when I had food, let alone food choices.

So which is it? Hunger or obesity? I just don't see how you can have it both ways. But then, I'm not a politician.

Here's the last Claire update...

Claire has arrived at her destination safely and with no further trouble. She went through the closing ritual and is sleeping in her own house tonight. All's well.

The Freedom of Simplicity

If you're any flavor of prepper, you hear a lot about self-sufficiency. Most of it is hyperbole, because I've never met a fully self-sufficient person and neither have you. Certainly I'm not one. Even if I lived in a place with actual soil, I couldn't garden for my own subsistence if you put an RPG to my head and said "Play Scott Nearing or die." Nor would I want to. I admire the self-righteous Bolshy for his abilities, but not for almost any of his beliefs.

I got to thinking about it this morning after reading an essay called The Freedom of Self-Sufficiency. It quoted a Laura Ingalls Wilder book:

"Truckling to other people for his living, all his days—he’ll never be able to call his soul his own.”

Yeah - maybe. Personally I never met a happy farmer, or a self-sufficient one. Maybe it was different 150 years ago. Dunno - I wasn't there.

So I can't speak to the freedom of self-sufficiency, because I think it's a chimera. It's not a bad dream, just not a realizable one.

But the point wasn't in the self-sufficiency, but in the freedom - the ability to "call your soul your own." And that, I think, is realizable. It may not be possible or even desirable to become fully self-sufficient. But it is possible to simplify.

In this society everything's about money. All too often money's how you keep score - the one who dies with the most money, or the stuff that money buys, wins. But it's a cruel game. Dodgeball has nothing on the Money Game for blows received, enemies made, or arbitrary rules and perverse incentives endured. And when you burn out and fall by the wayside, they'll get another that looks just like you. All the toys, all the pretties are cold comfort. I wondered how a fellow could reduce the need for money...

...And whether that was even a good thing to do. After all, this business of simplification can get awfully complicated. The matter of living without a lot of money can be damned expensive - just like living with a lot of it.

At this point I would go off on a long, self-congratulatory riff about my rugged individualism - except that there are people who will read this and know better. That self-sufficiency thing again. I'd never get away with claiming it for myself because without the kind assistance of others I'd be working a counter somewhere and happy for the work.

Let's take a look at that Secret Lair I'm so proud of. M supplied the land, and the water, and the transport for virtually all the lumber, and a huge chunk of the labor in framing, sheathing and roofing it. Landlady and Claire provided the place I've lived while building it. Sure, I've tried to pay back in kind but self-sufficient? Hardly.

Still, there it is. I've got a roof over my head, and running water, and even the hope of electricity. It's all a means to an end, and the end is not self-sufficiency, but simplicity. My hope is to reduce my list of needs to the point where they can be met with as little money, meaning time and aggravation, as possible. It'll never hit zero. Things break and wear out, food doesn't grow on trees. But I can find the reasonable minimum of "things," and I can train my palate to enjoy simpler food. "Reasonable" and "Enjoy" - that's important. The point of the exercise is not to become some sort of Anchorite, punishing myself for my own sins or the sins of the world. My own sins, I've largely paid for. The sins of the world are no concern of mine.

Why go to all this complication to seek simplicity? A couple of reasons. First and most immediate, I don't quite suit the world anymore. I have offended people on high, and they'd throw me in prison if they found me. They still might. But honestly, that's not the real reason. If that bothered me so much, I could make my peace with them. I'm not a criminal, except in a Mala Prohibita sense.

It sounds silly, just writing it out like this. But it's not silly to me. I wanted to become comfortable with who I am. I wanted to be able to say "I am not what I do for a living," and not be a liar. And if I'm not what I do, then who am I really? And is it a person I can happily spend time with? I spent so long trying to be what other people wanted me to be - in my work, in my family, in my belief structures, as a child and as an adult. For so many of those years I longed to be alone, and yet was afraid of being alone. Really alone. What if it turned out that, without those props to my identity, I was really - nothing at all?

It's not a simple question. Finding the answer - finding simplicity - has not been simple.

It's not like building a house, where one day you find yourself done. It's a journey that's its own destination. And maybe it's a trip to nowhere. Certainly, as I've said all along, it's not a trip I recommend because it wouldn't be for everyone. I had a lot of the simplifying done for me - my wife and career are gone, my child is grown, I can pretty much do whatever I like. Even for people without those impediments, this trip is very likely not for them.

But it's a trip I felt I had to make, for my own sake. So far I haven't regretted a minute of it.

Claire Update

Just got off the phone with Claire. Her third day on the road was uneventful but very long. She expects to reach her new home tomorrow, and then the adventure begins.

Beans!

Following last week's culinary bleg, Landlady happened to see an old pressure cooker at a flea market, bought it, tested it, and sent it up Friday night with M, all without saying a word to me. Thanks!



Last night I set some beans to soak, and this morning we gave it a try. I've never used a pressure cooker before, so I read the instructions (which she had thoughtfully downloaded and printed out for me) and then gathered materials. Claire had left half a package of bacon behind, the remains of which I now expended on this experiment. Some tomato sauce, molasses, a diced onion, some brown sugar - Yeah, baked beans call for navy beans rather than the pinto beans I've got about a hundred pounds of, but with enough flavoring beans are beans.


A little watery, but the real question was, "what's the texture of the beans?" I've boiled beans for hours and still had them crunchy. The instructions said to cook these for six minutes after the pressure release starts hissing. Compensating for altitude, I let this go on for about eight. Perfect! Also delicious.

Looks like beans are back on the menu, boys!

"You do recognize the irony of this, right?"

The Lair has a door. The door has a lock. I don't typically lock my doors, but the Lair spends a lot of time just sitting out there all by itself and it does contain things I'd rather people not steal, like Landlady's cordless tools and my favorite carbine. So after some weeks of leaving the key in the lock so that Claire could shelter there during her long dog walks, on Friday I took the key out of the lock and put it on a key ring. This marked the first time in several years I've carried a key.

What could go wrong?

Yesterday M and I were working on the footers for his dome's retaining wall. We're talking about a wall that needs to retain a truly monumental amount of dirt: I'm fairly certain there are major buildings out there with less substantial foundations. Since we've got three building projects going on here, any tool you need is almost sure to be somewhere else. He needed something from the Lair, and I tossed him the key ring. A little later he needed something else from the Lair, and I tossed the ring to him again.

He held it up and said, "You do recognize the irony of this, right?"

"All too well, my friend. All too well."

He decided to go back to the city yesterday, so he'd have a day when he wasn't working or driving long distances. Made sense to me.

Of course he went back with my key ring in his pocket.

I've been busy this morning with domestic chores: Emptying the black water tank, filling water bottles, burning a bunch of boxes and other trash left over from Claire's departure, and another project I'll post about later if it turns out well. So I haven't been to the Lair this morning, but I'm gonna go ahead and assume I'm locked out and have been since the VERY DAY AFTER I STARTED LOCKING THE DOOR. I'll probably have to cut out a window screen to get in; I know the windows aren't locked.

Irony, hell. That's karma.

ETA: I just got a call from M, who says he did not take my key with him but left it at his dome and forgot to tell me. Lesson learned. I've got another key for the Lair - which in my vast foresight I left inside the Lair - and I'll find an appropriate hiding place for it. I've totally lost all the ingrained habits a city-dweller has about keys, and can expect this little drama to play itself out a dozen times until in disgust I just stop locking the damned door.

I don't testify to this thing's accuracy.

I got it off a progressive site, which means it's probably a lie. But if true, and I still depended on conventional "employment," I'd find it chilling.

So far, so good...

Just got off the phone with Claire. All's well, she's still on the road and the truck's behaving itself. She sounded much happier today than this time yesterday, fer shur.

Update: This day went well. She's behind the projected schedule, of course, but safe and well.