The Ultimate Answer to Kings

It’s not easy work being part of the leftist intelligentsia, but those six impossible beliefs aren’t going to be entertained before breakfast all by themselves!

U.S. District Judge, George Streeh, of the Eastern District of Michigan ruled that Congress does have the authority to enact a key part of President Obama’s healthcare law reform, requiring US citizens to obtain coverage by 2014. The day Obama signed it into law, the Thomas More Law Center had filed a lawsuit arguing that it was an unconstitutional tax outside Congress authority. The latest ruling said that under the ...

Wait for it…

… Commerce Clause of the American Constitution …

THERE it is!

… a penalty could be imposed on those who did not get insurance coverage.

Ah, the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause! Is there nothing it can’t do?

Y’know, the mornings have been getting pretty nippy lately. I wonder if I could get the CC to let the dogs out and bring me coffee in bed? ‘Cause that’d be pretty cool. And much less annoying than this.

H/T to Claire.

Finally.

There’s a bit of insulation I never got around to installing in the Lair, because, well, I dreaded it. It’s the part of the side walls between the main stretch and the rather radically pitched roof, and I put it off so long that I only made things worse for myself by installing interior walls for the bathroom that are really in the way, and crowded the rest with a bunch of other stuff that’s always in the way.

But I got’er done today, and that’s the very last of the insulation. Didn’t really have enough fiberglass batting to do the job before I tore down the old pantry house, and most of that was in pretty rough shape, which meant I needed to cut intact pieces out of every old strip and fit them into place on the walls. But it was doable, since most of what those wall sections needed was pretty small. So today the insulation is finally DONE! AT LAST! DONE AT LAST! THANK GOD ALMIGHTY, I”M DONE AT LAST!

I also got a good start on installing the toilet – though I’m gonna be digging the whole damned septic system out by hand if I can’t find out what’s wrong with the tractor’s clutch. Got the hole cut in the floor for the flange, then climbed under the cabin and dug out the trench with an old entrenching tool, which in our “soil” was every bit as fun as it sounds. But it’s done now, and I’m ready to lay pipe.

Four things I need now, to render the cabin minimally habitable for winter: Treads for the loft ladder, wood stove, kitchen sink and stove, and toilet. M called me last night, though, and told me the pipe flanges for the pipe treads I was going to use would cost me $150 – just for the flanges. Well, that ain’t gonna happen. But I can still make treads out of 2X6’s laid on 2X4’s, and though it’s a poor second-best that’s probably what I’ll do. If I find a source of flanges later, I can always install pipe treads later. I haven’t been able to get into the loft with anything other than a ladder since I put up the interior panelling, and there’s no way I’m doing that all winter. A ladder takes up pretty much the whole damned open part of the cabin.

The toilet’s the hard part, because of all the damage Monsoon did to my septic pit and trenches. But if I’ve gotta dig, then dig I must. Of course I’ll try to fix the tractor first, but so far the only information I’ve been able to find on the clutch in the service manual is that it’s got one. I knew that, and can’t believe that’s all there is in the book. So I must be missing something; I’ll bring the other volumes up from the Meadow House where M left them and try again. I don’t even know if the thing’s hydraulic or mechanical, though I see no sign of a hydraulic cylinder external to the transmission. But if it’s mechanical, why would it suddenly not work? It worked fine when we parked the tractor for maintenance work.

Don’t bother answering that, I already know. Children are bad for the environment, because they may grow up to be carnivores or even (gasp) entrepreneurs.

Unlike polar bears, which only eat baby seals alive.

“Act-Responsible” is apparently an advertising group, of all things.

Its goal is to federate, promote and inspire responsible communication on sustainability, equitable development and social responsibility. ACT shows how advertising professionals from all continents can use their core talent – creativity – to play a significant role in addressing today’s crucial world issues.

Personally I think ad executives seem to have lost their collective minds, right about the time they got tired of two ladies standing in a kitchen and rapturously discussing dish soap. As an example of their concern for “social issues,” the above ad – which was apparently aimed at some expo in Cannes last year – makes me wish they’d go back to hawking detergent. Now with Extra Phosphates!

So I got the engine running on the tractor. Yay me. Took long enough, but then I was just doing it in spare minutes, right? Not my tractor.

But then, having let it warm up through posting the previous, er, post, I go outside to play with it a bit. Take off the trickle charger, rescue my wrenches, swing the battery tray back over the engine.

Close the hood.

Climb into the seat.

Goose the throttle once or twice: Nice and smooth now.

Run the scoop up so it’ll roll.

Engage the clutch. (Hm! That’s a mighty easy clutch!)

Attempt to put it in gear. (GRIND)

Attempt to put it into another gear. (GRIND)

Hmm. I think maybe we got snookered.

Alternate Title: “It was working fine before I fixed it.”

Yes, after only about eight attempts at what turned out to be a very simple but apparently futile maintenance procedure, HPAV Gulchendiggensmoothen decided this afternoon that it had tortured me enough. Damned thing’s finally running again, for the first time in nearly two weeks.

*Since I don’t actually speak German, I may have just said “The Gulchendiggensmoothen Armoire,” or something equally indescipherable.  Play along.

I’m not a big fan of his oratorical style, but he didn’t handle this very badly. I wouldn’t have played it up quite so big, but then I’m not Obama.

I am sitting in the cell phone lot at the Indy airport right now. This is simply a small lot a mile or more from the terminal where you can park whilst waiting for someone to arrive and call you.

Decent idea as it removes a significant amount of congestion from the terminal. My only question is this: given that there is – by design – nothing nearby except for a fenced employee lot, why is there are reserved handicapped spots.

Anyone?

H/T to Tam.

Going…

Gone!

It’s too late to worry now. Two down, one to go.

This kinda sucks.

September lasted for an eyeblink. This morning’s got me rummaging around in the barn pantry for my winter woolies. Yeah, I knew I’d be peeling it off in an hour, but still. It sucks.

Ghost was really full of beans this morning, which was nice to see. He spends large periods of time acting like a grumpy old dog, and considering that this time last year I lost two old dogs in quick succession I find that unacceptable – particularly considering that Ghost is only about five. But this morning he wanted to PLAY! Wanted to PLAY! Let’s go for a walky, Uncle Joel!

And the truth is I’ve been criminally remiss in the walky department lately. Most of the summer I’ve had some pressure sores on the side of my stump that Would! Not! Heal! The best that could be said for them was that they didn’t ever get much worse, either. Can’t blame the skin for the problem. If you were a patch of skin, I’d defy you to heal if you spent all day sweating into:

• A nylon sheath
• A thick wool sock
• A closed-foam soft insert
• Two layers of other socky stuff, just to make up for the soft insert having pretty much collapsed from age
• A fiberglass prosthesis.

Yeah, go ahead and make fun of it for not healing.  It’s not the skin’s fault.  The only way to get pressure sores to heal is to take off the &%$# leg and leave it off.  Which I pretty much refuse to do.  But the sores make walkies less than giddy fun for Uncle Joel, so we haven’t been doing them much.  Which, in turn, makes life dull for the boys.

But the sores have been much better just lately, Uncle Joel is feeling pretty damned good, I certainly don’t have the excuse that it’s too hot, so off for walkies we go.  Pretty quick I was sweating into that ill-advised overshirt.  I know better than to do that.  When preparing for a good walky, always dress at least one layer less than you need for comfortable warmth.  It doesn’t take long to regret that extra layer, once you get going.

After several tries, I’m still having trouble getting M’s tractor going again.  Bleeding the filter housing and the injector pump was a piece of cake, but I can’t get the engine to pump the air out of the injector lines and I’ve worn the battery down twice trying.  I get some dampness and bubbles, but no clear flow from any of the injector lines.  At this rate I may need to wait for M to come up next weekend and was really planning to have it running long before then.  It’s not that complex, but so far it’s not working.  It is an irritation.

Ah, well.  As usual I’ve a list of things I want to do today, and as usual by the end of the day I probably won’t even get to half of them.  I’ve cut all the tiles I need for the Lair’s stove pedestal, but so far still haven’t glued them into place because I can’t find a single toothed trowel on the whole damned place and I know we have at least two.  I still need to pull the shower tub up in the bathroom so I can install that new drain fitting I’ve had for over a week.  Little stuff like that: Stuff that I really need to get off my duff and get moving on, because IT’S OCTOBER!

One thing that’s really going surprisingly well is the matter of batteries for the Lair.  There are all these big 12-volt gel cell batteries we obsoleted out last year; I pulled the ones with the best readings and tried to coax them back to life with a trickle charger, with no joy.  But I’ve found that wiring them directly to an 18-volt solar panel and just leaving them in the sun for three weeks seems to work a lot better than I thought it would.  I think that’d boil the electrolyte right out of a regular lead-acid battery, and am pleasantly surprised to learn that these maintenance-proof gel cells actually do have at least one advantage over the old-fashioned way.

Oops!  Just got a call from H; I’ve overdue for shit-shoveling, and she’s making bacon and eggs and wanted to know (snicker) if I (choke, chortle) wanted any.

Gotta go!

Yeah, I know. I’m a dick. But I didn’t become a hermit because of my people skills…

Introducing a new neighbor, whom we’ll call SurvivalDave. He’s kind of a wannabe, but they can be cute when their hearts are in the right place and his seems to be. I dunno – maybe when he’s in the city he’s the second coming of Charles Manson. But what I see is a perfectly nice guy who doesn’t deserve this crap.

Long story. Between the Property and S&L’s Place, there’s another settled parcel. Sort of settled. It’s a nicely skirted trailer, a couple of utility sheds, solar panel rack, well and cistern. It was put in long before I arrived here, maybe ten years ago, and for all that time it has sat there untenanted, just sort of slowly falling back apart. It’s not that rare. For years I never met the owners. One time, a couple of years ago, I saw activity there, went up to see what was up, and by the time I’d climbed the ridge the boys had this total stranger cornered against the wall of the trailer…

That was my introduction to SurvivalDave, though it was nearly two years before I saw him again. The property in question was a family affair, and a very complicated one even by the standards of many, er, dysfunctional families of my acquaintance. Suffice that the owner of record decided to sell it recently, more-or-less out from under his son-in-law who had been the driving force behind it. That would be SD. But property agreements out here can be…informal. S&L wanted the parcel as a buffer against possible unacceptable neighbors moving in too close to their place. They knew SD, and didn’t really care about that little patch of buildings on the ridge, so they subdivided it and agreed to sell it to SurvivalDave. So he’s become a more familiar visitor lately, and when I spotted him coming in yesterday I didn’t think much about it.

Went up this morning to say hey. He was sitting on his porch, and before I was even out of the Jeep he started pouring out a sad story. He’d been on a business trip out of state for a week. When he got back he was served with protection papers right in the frickin’ airport. He’s been having problems with his soon-to-be ex-wife, and she apparently decided that while he was gone she ought to see about screwing up his life good, instead of simply divorcing him like a civilized person. He had to have a cop come with him just to collect some of his clothes. All his guns, gone – what little the ex hadn’t disappeared he had to turn in to the cops. He didn’t have anywhere else to go, so came up here to try and wrap his mind around it and make plans. Good thing he had it available, and that it isn’t legally in his name yet. I gather he plans to leave it that way for a while. Can’t blame him.

Nice. The “protection order” thing is the one trick my ex hasn’t pulled on me, but for a while I waited for it, just because she could and conceivably would. Just to be mean. It seems to require no evidence that a guy is an actual danger to anyone. Just go to a judge and bang! Ruin a guy’s life. You’re done.

Sweet.

I really hate society sometimes. In a passionate and childishly nihilistic way. I really do.

S, a regular reader and commenter here, had some comments to add to last week’s “20 Questions” post, but for some reason his comments kept getting knocked off the blog. I still don’t know what that was about, but when he sent the comment to me via other means I found it much worth saying. So here it is.

The answer to all twenty questions is the same:

You and I are different. I will not use violence to achieve my personal goals. I make my way in the world using peaceful, voluntary, mutually beneficial trade. I use violence only when necessary to defend my life and property from violence initiated by others. Even then, my response will be appropriate to the threat and circumstances.

You and your ilk use violence to get what you want. Whether it is market outcomes that displease you or tools you fear and loathe violence is your first and only tool. It’s quite pathetic really, how limited your imaginations have become. You can’t even imagine solutions to most problems that don’t involve violence. I typically have to choose from a myriad of options when negotiating a solution to a problem that troubles me; all you can ever do is demand new laws.

You’re also a coward, and unwilling to do the dirty work required by your reliance on violence. So you rely on others to pass “laws,” hire men armed with the very same guns that so terrify you, give them costumes and costume jewelry, steal the money to pay for these parasites from their victims, and then set them upon me.

There’s your answer. There is no frontier here, only a bleeding edge. Because you will try to have me killed if you can’t make me agree with you, while I will go my peaceful way and do my best to ignore and shun you. I have trades to make and a life to live. There’s really no point to further discussion with you, since the outcome has already been decided. By you.

Couldn’t say it as well myself. In fact, I didn’t.

WARNING: The contents of this video are gross and offensive. Really. No Joke.

So it seems there’s this NGO called 10:10, and it got a lot of government money to convince people to “reduce their carbon footprint” because otherwise we’ll all die or something. Purveyors of fuzzy bunnies and warm puppies that they are, their resort to brutal, bloody misanthropy right off the bat is … actually rather typical of the breed, alas. These people would have been right at home during the Thirty Years’ War, as long as they weren’t the ones doing the actual bleeding.

Iowahawk gets the last word:

…And somehow, throughout this entire process, not one of the hundreds of people involved seemed to have questioned the wisdom of an advertising message advocating the violent, sudden death of people who disagree with it.

Don Draper, call your office.

Oh, and they’ve apologized. Sort of. Not very much.

H/T to Treacher.

Aristippus passed Diogenes as he was washing lentils.

He said, “If you could but learn to flatter the king, you would not have to live on lentils.”

Diogenes said, “And if you could learn to live on lentils, you would not have to flatter the king.”

M will get a kick out of this, because he knows I hate lentils. But I don’t turn my nose up at rice and beans, and I bake a mean loaf of bread.

Thanks to TJIC for the reminder of a story I haven’t heard in many years.

The Grey Lady has been a friend of the blog since…well, pretty much as long as there’s been a blog. And a generous one! When the Official Blog Camera died, she sent a new one – just in time for LB’s puppy pix, which is pretty much the only purpose I put it to for a while. Last winter she and her family sent me a care package with all sorts of winter goodies, including some cool hunting gloves/mittens I’ll probably use the rest of my life. Count on Canadians to know how to make warm gloves.

Anyway, a generous and valued friend. One of the few who has my direct email addy. When I made the “hiatus” announcement yesterday morning, I went off to do my chores and came back to an email from GL containing a detailed and intricate plan for getting my connection back on its financial knees, and she wasn’t taking no for an answer – not that I said no. But the account isn’t in my name, of course, and since I not only have no bank account but also don’t even have regular access to town, just sending me money wasn’t really gonna be much of a help. I don’t actually use much money. I put her in touch with Landlady, having first gotten L’s permission, and they worked it out between them. Landlady likes the blog too, has been supporting it right along, and pulled the plug only reluctantly. But she’s got her own problems right now and could just no longer pay for it. Between them they found their way around the legal issues – you can’t just send money from one country to another, you know, because we must sacrifice a little convenience for a lot of security – but they’re both a lot more capable in that regard than I am. And by mid-afternoon, GL sent me an email saying the deed was done and TUAK was back in business through the winter, by which time I’ll have made other arrangements.

So that’s the story of TUAK’s near-death and sudden recovery, and my most heartfelt thanks to all involved!

A flurry of e-mails later, TUAK is back in business through the entire winter! Which also means I get to continue enjoying the wonders of e-mail and net access. No details right now, I’ll tell you more after we get our stories straight I get certain permissions.

Folks, as you may know or have guessed, I’ve been on a satellite link that I only partially pay for. Landlady has been subsidizing it for as long as it’s been up, and of course when Claire was here she paid (at least) her share. But Claire’s gone, it does Landlady no earthly good, she can no longer pick up the expense, and I can’t pay the whole thing. As of Monday I’m likely to lose my connection, and that’ll be that for a while. There won’t be another connection until sometime after winter, probably quite a while after.

This isn’t a bleg. To ask people to make sustained contributions for a little 200-hit-a-day hobby blog would be absurd, and I’m not doing it. I’ll continue to explore options in the time I have, but the best that can be realistically hoped for is a part-time connection through neighbors which would be an enormous hassle for everybody and certainly cut down on posts.

Sorry about that, I’m working on it, but that’s the way it is.

I hate frickin’ tumbleweeds.

It’s mid-autumn, which means cool nights and warm days. The monsoon – a fairly wet one this year – has pretty much gone away. Which means the tumbleweeds are mature, and oh, we got us a bumper crop.

Tumbleweeds only seem to grow in any profusion where the ground’s been broken up, like if you dug a septic pit or tore up ground for a building foundation – All things that have happened a lot, here and there on the property. Each seed has a wicked little thorn, and the seeds start falling off before the plants die and break off. Which means walking anywhere but virgin ground or really packed-down trails is like walking on a carpet of caltrops. No big deal on shod feet unless your soles are really worn out, but it’s hell on the dogs. No day goes by that I don’t have a couple of three-legged dogs hobbling about and looking miserable. Poor Ghost must have picked up dozens of them and his pads are getting really tender. Crossing hard-pack, he looks like an old guy mincing across hot beach sand.

It happens every year, but as with so many things it’s worse some years than others. This has been the summer of the housefly, weevil, and tumbleweed. Next year I’m looking forward to unicorns, Skittle showers, and chocolate toads.

Back in June I uncritically repeated a claim that was not entirely dismissive of a cop’s hero story. I should know better than to do that.

It appears the story was unraveling even before I saw it, but the local sheriff’s department and evil brown menace illegal immigration alarmists had every reason to want the story believed. Since I have no trouble believing that drug mules would shoot back at cops intent on destroying their lives, I didn’t question it at the time and in fact haven’t given it much thought since then. Well, bad on me.

PHOENIX — Two nationally known forensic pathologists are questioning a sheriff deputy’s version of how he was shot in the remote desert south of Phoenix, adding to theories that the incident was a hoax timed to enflame the debate over illegal immigration.

Pinal County Deputy Louie Puroll told investigators he was following a group of smugglers carrying bales of marijuana on April 30 when he was ambushed by men firing AK-47 rifles. In what Puroll described as a running gunbattle, he said he was grazed by a bullet in the back.

The pathologists, Dr. Michael Baden of New York and Dr. Werner Spitz of suburban Detroit, examined photos of the wound released by the sheriff’s office. They told The Associated Press on Friday they concluded the bullet was fired from inches away, not at least 25 yards as Puroll said.

Thanks to Balko for the tip.

“Look, the voters’ only choice is between GOP policies and ours. They’re screwed either way. But there’s another way. The way of courage. The way of love of the Homeland. Without getting our fingerprints on it, we must scare the shit out of them with something more frightening than us or the GOP. Then we must give them hope. We must rescue the friendly newspapers again. We must tell magnificent stories, stories that extol sacrifice, bravery. We must make them believe in the victory over this evil. We must give them hope, pride, a desire to fight. Yes… we need to make examples. But examples to *follow*. What we need are heroes.”

This is some funny stuff, right here. Complete with slideshow!