The Ultimate Answer to Kings

Over the past few days of web-crawling I keep getting directed to a Forbes article from some guy named Bruce Bartlett, whom I’ve barely heard of, but who has apparently outraged Libertarians from sea to shining sea. This sunny, cool Sunday morning I was having coffee and Lew Rockwell and came upon this:

Bartlett’s remarks were truly maddening and contorted. He separates libertarians into the unsophisticated rednecks and rubes who are only interested in not paying taxes, and in survivalism and gun culture; and effete, unprincipled, cosmopolitan metro-libertarians who don’t mind paying taxes and who are not very career-oriented.

What a bizarre dichotomy. First, despite some unsavory characteristics of some metro-beltway libertarians, even most of them are in fact against taxes, and many of them are actual gun owners. And it is natural for think-tank and beltway types to be less “career-oriented” than typical professional working people. As for the anti-income-taxers, as noted, many of them are in fact metro-libertarians, but even outside the beltway, many of us are in fact sophisticated, educated, and professionals, and we are very principled and interested not only in tax abolition but in abolition of a depressingly wide array of state policies that violate rights.

Yes, you’re ugly and your mother wears army boots. Seriously, while I haven’t kept a journal or anything, I must have seen this guy Bartlett’s article come up half a dozen times in the past three or four days and I don’t even follow the sort of discussions that would normally notice its existence. Which means that the actual “Big-L” types must be immolating themselves in protest on Bartlett’s front lawn.

But people. Read the first paragraph of this blasphemous article:

I recently attended a dinner with a group of prominent liberal and libertarian bloggers to see if there is a community of interest that might lead to closer cooperation on some issues.

Prominent bloggers.

Hm. Just how many “prominent bloggers” are there in this plane of reality, and how much influence do they actually wield? IOW, who really gives a shitdarn (sorry; it’s Sunday) what “prominent bloggers,” or Bruce Bartlett for that matter, say or think about anything? I know I live in a bubble and all, but is this really a serious concern?

People get wadded up over the darndest things. How’re your preps coming?

This has been going on for some time now, but always when I was nowhere near the camera. I mentioned that Click was the only one of the animals that seemed afraid of Little Bear when he first arrived, even though LB wasn’t doing anything to harass her. Well, both things have changed. LB is harassing Click, after a fashion, and Click is … loving it.

…let me fix that for you.

Maine Takes Aim at Dangers of ‘Green’ Lightbulbs

It can seem a green contradiction: Compact fluorescent lights – those spiral energy-efficient bulbs used to fight global warming – contain mercury, a toxic metal. If the bulb breaks, mercury vapor can harm infants, pregnant women and young children. If tossed in landfills or incinerators, discarded bulbs can pollute the environment.

Now, as sales balloon, Maine legislators have voted overwhelmingly for first-in-the-nation legislation requiring manufacturers to reduce the mercury in all fluorescent lights, and pay for recycling each bulb safely. That cost is estimated to be 50 cents to $1 per bulb.

Maine Governor John Baldacci, a supporter, is expected to sign the bill, which was passed over the last week. Similar bills regulating compact fluorescent lights — or CFLs, as they are called — are pending in Massachusetts and Vermont.

Scared yet? Whoooo! Compact Fluorescent bulbs contain mercury! Whoooo! There – is that scarier?

Note, though, the article mentions once that the bill applies not only to CFLs, but to all fluorescent lights. Because all fluorescent lights contain mercury. Always have. Yes, the ones that have been around since before you were born; the ones in your garage, that you have to smash because otherwise you can’t close the lid on your garbage can. Let’s try it again: Whoooo! All fluorescent bulbs contain mercury! Whoooo!

Scary, huh?

Uh…you don’t seem scared. Well, that makes you smarter than some of the commenters below the article, because they shit bricks:

I’m so angry about this. My wife was 33 weeks pregnant when our cat knocked over a lamp and broke one of these bulbs. She did not know the dangers and cleaned it up. Only after picking up the pieces did she see the small sticker that reads, “contains mercury.” How can this be acceptable? How can these bulbs be sold and how can there not be an extremely obvious warning label that describes the potential harm particularly to a fetus or small child on the packaging. Our daughter will be born in the next week, and we can only hope that this has not caused significant harm. I feel like we’ve regressed decades as it relates to health and safety with this product. Clearly this product should not be in households with pregnant women and young children, perhaps not at all.

This shit just makes me sad.

Of course if you’re planning that off-the-grid gulch in your future, I guarantee your pantry will contain a supply of CFLs and you probably won’t own a single ‘old-fashioned’ incandescent lamp. Those things suck juice like Little Bear sayin’ hi to Momma. And yes, CFLs do have mercury in them, and yes, you should keep mercury out of your system as much as you can because it can hurt you.

You shouldn‘t shoot yourself in the foot with your handgun, either. Because bullets can hurt you. You shouldn’t burn old (pre-1997) alkaline batteries – mercury. NiCad batteries – cadmium. Lead-Acid auto batteries – lead, and – um – liquid sulfuric acid, which I guarantee ain’t good for you. Don’t stand under Acme anvils. Stay out of the way of moving vehicles. Don’t eat out of bulging cans. Wear a hat in the hot sun. If you go to lunch during a job interview, skip the soup. Am I really telling you anything you don’t already know? Use common sense.

Exposure to a milligram or two of mercury vapor has been proven to cause … well, exactly no health concerns whatsoever. You are far more likely to be damaged by the glass shards from a broken fluorescent bulb than by all the mercury in all the lamps in Wal-Mart.

When I was a kid, “fear-mongering” wasn’t even a word. Now it’s a way of life.

I need to start a category for this. I wake up humming a totally irrelevant song, often one I haven’t even thought of for years, and I don’t…know…why! I must have a very colorful dream life; wish it would let me share.

Anyway, I always enjoyed this guy Deutschendorf’s voice and some of his music, but the videos still get on my nerves. All that oily faux-sincerity, all that moony posturing… I don’t know. I don’t think I was a cynic in the seventies. I could listen to the albums, but never could take his TV performances.

So yesterday afternoon the boys and I heard engines – lots of engines. Something approached over the neighboring ridge, and it sounded like it was bringing friends. We ran up the driveway to see what was what. Ghost, always open to an opportunity to show off his legs, ran down and hunkered in the meadow, praying to his Speedy Perro fetish that it would be something chaseable. Oh, pleasepleaseplease…

Then not one, not two, but five of those damned 4-wheel ATVs appeared at the end of the ridge, crossed the wash, and headed up the road toward S&L’s property. Now, S&L’s driveway is not quite at the end of the road, but it’s as far down the road as anybody ever actually goes; you can continue straight for another 20 yards or so and then face the impossible, heavily-rutted upgrade, or you can angle slightly right and up their driveway. The traffic pattern indicates that virtually everyone does that last thing, so virtually every tourist does – bypassing the easily-visible ‘no trespassing’ sign, around a couple of S-turns to the top of the ridge where a chain blocks further legitimate passage. I’ve never been entirely sure why S&L put their chain halfway up the driveway where it’s not visible from the road, but every time I see an unfamiliar vehicle go that way I know what’s coming next.

So the boys and I – sans Ghost, who had gleefully chased the five ATVs and knew they’d be back to chase again! Yay! – crouched on our own ridge and watched S&L’s driveway. The ATVs actually stopped at the mouth of the driveway and read the no trespassing sign before proceeding to trespass – which I thought was nice of them, to at least acknowledge the sign’s existence. Then like all tourists do they rode up the driveway till they got to the chain, and then turned around and came back. Why, I have often wondered, does a symbolic chain stop tourists, when the equally-symbolic sign never, ever does?

Now, whenever something like this happens the boys and I make ourselves clearly visible and as uninviting as possible: Them armed with lots of teeth and seismic, low-pitch barking and roaring; me armed with a nasty-looking rifle. So these tourists did what tourists always do after exploring the wonders of S&L’s driveway: They rode back the way they came – ignoring the perfectly good BLM road up to the plateau that would have given them some actual adventure – and we went back to what we were doing. And that would have been the end of the matter – I’d forgotten all about it by bedtime – but along about 11:30 the boys woke me with a cacophony of barking that seemed to indicate more than a howl-off with the local coyotes. Even Magnus was out in the yard raising hell, and Magnus never bestirs himself after dark. Never. Also, I heard Magnus and Fritz, but…not…Ghost. Which meant Ghost had gone into combat mode. Something was actually present and nearby.

I went out and peered into the dark – we’re only up to a half-moon, and it had already set – and couldn’t see any lights that would indicate people up to no good. Animals don’t usually concern me: As long as they stay off our ridge, it’s their desert too. But I did remember all those ATVs, and I wondered if a few of those fellows had decided to check out S&L’s property after dark. Grumbling, I got dressed, loaded the boys into the Jeep, and drove up to the chain. No sign that anything wheeled had bypassed the anchor posts, and nobody was likely to walk this far into the boonies. But we were already here, so we walked the remaining 200 yards or so, circled the house, and saw nothing out of order. I went home and back to bed, the boys settled down, and sure enough this morning I saw lots of cattle sign crossing the road from the meadow.

Cattle. I hate cattle almost as much as tourists.

Stupid cattle.

“The Worst Is Yet to Come”: If You’re Not Petrified, You’re Not Paying Attention

Remember that kerfuffle last year when HS Precision published a product endorsement by Lon (I Aim For The Stars, But Sometimes I Hit Nursing Mothers) Horiuchi, and then wondered why all their faithful customers surrounded their building with torches and pitchforks? Sure you do.

Here’s another item for the “Never, Never Do This” file”:

President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor shows that empathy has won out over excellence in the White House. Sotomayor has sterling credentials: Princeton, Yale Law School, former prosecutor, and federal trial and appellate judge. But credentials do not an excellent justice make. Justice Souter, whom Sotomayor would replace, had an equally fine c.v., but turned out to be a weak force on the high court.

Obama had some truly outstanding legal intellectuals and judges to choose from—Cass Sunstein, Elena Kagan, and Diane Wood come immediately to mind. The White House chose a judge distinguished from the other members of that list only by her race. Obama may say he wants to put someone on the Court with a rags-to-riches background, but locking in the political support of Hispanics must sit higher in his priorities.

Sotomayor’s record on the bench, at first glance, appears undistinguished. She will not bring to the table the firepower that many liberal academics are asking for. There are no opinions that suggest she would change the direction of constitutional law as have Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, or Robert Bork and Richard Posner on the appeals courts. Liberals have missed their chance to put on the Court an intellectual leader who will bring about a progressive revolution in the law.

Personal to the American Enterprise Institute, because I know you just hang on my every word:

When you think John Yoo, what image comes first to mind? Thoughtful constitutional scholarship and commentary? Or a certain memo? See, after he pissed all over the Constitution in such an unambiguous and very public way, his opinion and attitude toward the document is, well, sort of established. Y’know? So…

Okay, so the gulch has this garden plot, right? And the only thing it grows is a rosemary bush that clearly loves it there, and an occasional twig of asparagus. So I figure – Hey! I’m supposed to be this functioning survivalist, this genuine grizzled desert paranoid reclusehermit, and I should be raising something toward my own sustenance besides rosemary – which is very good in bread, but otherwise not all that terribly nutritious.

A neighbor gave me three tomato plants, and while I don’t actually care for tomatoes there’s still this perfectly good garden plot just sitting there. So I plant them, and they…don’t die. That’s a plus, I think, until I visit the neighbor’s house again yesterday and theirs are going nuts and mine have basically…not died. Then I get these little plastic greenhouse thingies from Home Despot and plant a whole bunch of herb seeds, and everything’s going great until I actually plant them, at which point they not only die immediately but actually vanish completely into the earth.

Ah, but we genuine grizzled desert hermits are not so easily thwarted, no we’re not. So yesterday I caught a ride to the feed store in town to get some wormer meds for the boys, and the feed store finally had a few herb sets. So now I’ve planted sage and oregano and chives.
And started a timer for the death watch.

Well, I’m glad some talking head gets it…

Governator plans to completely eliminate welfare for families

You know, if this is the kind of threat you think you have to make, you might consider the quality of the people you’re threatening…

Photographing moving objects is a lot like shooting them with a rifle; which I guess is why they call it ‘shooting’. When you’ve got your range and your lead, you squeeze the trigger (or shutter) and you want the gun (or camera) to fire NOW. Not two seconds from now; two seconds is a world away. Now.

I used to be heavily into high-power rockets. When I wasn’t building, prepping and flying my own rockets, I took photos of other people’s rockets for the club newsletter. I got pretty good at it.

I wasn’t a professional-quality photographer by any stretch, but I had a decent 35mm camera body, a set of adequate lenses, and the other wherewithal, plus I knew enough about the rockets themselves to know how to frame the shot and when to snap the shutter. It was important to know that at the moment of full motor ignition, the rocket was going to go from stationary to really fast, really quick.

A basic film camera is a mechanical device, like a rifle. When you push the button, the camera doesn’t take time to make up its mind. It just snaps the shutter. This is an advantage.

Which is why I’m having to learn how to take pictures all over again. A typical digital camera has the advantage of storing electronic images you can load directly into your computer; it has the disadvantage of being an almost entirely electronic device, which doesn’t always behave the way you want/need it to. If you press the shutter button halfway, it automatically sets up the focus and exposure, which is great. But then when you press the button the rest of the way, it takes its dear time doing … whatever the hell it’s doing. Since I’m trying to take photos of a wiggly puppy, this can be infuriating. By the time the image is captured, the image you wanted is long gone.

I say this because I just got back from a photo walky that had me fuming and swearing. I need to take the time to learn how to use this new camera, and I need to get it right before I get so frustrated I just shoot myself in the head. With a rifle, not a camera.

Well, the landlady’s on her way home, and I hope she doesn’t hit too much holiday traffic on the way. We had a great, very productive weekend making the barn less of a clutter collection and more of a … er … barn. That was great. Hung a bunch of cabinets, threw away a bunch of crap, sorted a bunch of tools and parts. Books are starting to gravitate toward shelves and out of boxes. Pretty cool.

The boys are taking a more proactive approach to living with Little Bear. He’s generally a well-mannered puppy, but still a puppy and as such his favorite means of demonstrating affection is to, you know, bite you. Being dogs themselves, they find this behavior acceptable within reason, but he can exceed reasonable limits. Magnus, for example, is very large and not neutered. He is possessed of impressive – and to a puppy, apparently tempting – swingy bits. Saturday evening, while Magnus was distracted trying to get his full portion of attention from Mom, Little Bear closed in from the rear, and…

And Magnus demonstrated that while he may be an old dog, saggier and slower than he used to be, he is still a very impressive predator, rightful ruler of the pack, and not lightly to be bitten in the balls. He emitted a window-rattling roar, turned instantly on his own axis, and suddenly all there was to see of Little Bear was his spatula-size paws waving frantically in the air as he squealed and yipped for mercy. Magnus had him on his back, jaws at his throat, explaining in easily understandable terms exactly why this was not acceptable behavior. Earlier my landlady had asked me why I didn’t discipline Little Bear when he made the other boys mad. I said I have my rules, and they have theirs. I’ll stop him from chewing on the furniture or tugging on the blankets, but if they want him to stop biting them on the ass, they’re big boys and perfectly capable of imparting that information. Seems to me that’s what being part of a pack is all about, and I wouldn’t really believe that they’ve accepted him into the pack until I see them start doing it. When Magnus had laid Little Bear down and administered his rough discipline, and it was clear he had no intention of actually harming him in the process, my landlady laughed and said, “Well, you were an infant but now you’re a toddler. Suck it up.”

In meteorological news, it appears that the Monsoon has come early this year. It started raining last Monday and hasn’t missed a day since. A little spring rain isn’t unusual, but normally it doesn’t do this until late summer. This is only my third full year in this part of the desert, and of course there are variations I haven’t seen yet. But everybody agrees this has been a weird year, weather-wise. First winter went on like it never planned to stop. Then it gave all that boring spring stuff a miss and went right into summer for a couple of weeks. Suddenly it’s cool and wet. This morning, for the first time in a week, day broke cloud-free and gorgeous. Now it’s nearly noon and very threatening clouds have rolled in; it’s clearly planning to rain all afternoon. Saturday, right after my landlady arrived, we got a helluva downpour. The canyons finished filling and spilled into the wash. I’ve never seen the wash run in May, but like I say this is only my third year. Now I hear preliminary drops on the scriptorium’s roof and a few bursts of wind, and it’s time to decide whether I want to spend the rest of the day here or in the lair. No more workies today.

All that planning. All that scheming, all those lists! Did I remember to build an ark? I did not.

And now I’m up to my keister in mud. If it keeps up like this the washes are going to be running by nightfall. Normally I wouldn’t care, but my landlady’s coming for the long weekend. Mud we can deal with; I’d just go get her in town with the Jeep. But if the washes run … well, that would be bad.

Oh ye powers! Ixnay on the ainray!

The sheer chutzpa of standing in front of a crowd, claiming you will now right all historical wrongs by closing Guantanamo and locking the prisoners in supermax prisons without trial instead, expecting (and receiving!) applause for having ‘re-established American principles’…

It’s breathtaking.

H/T to Silver @ TMM

I’ve had moments like this.

C.M. wrote yesterday:

If I may be so bold what kind of flowers/weeds are those tufts of white flowers?

Well…

I think you mean these:

And I’m not sure they qualify as flowers at all, plus I have no idea what they are. So – er – Well, I don’t know.

These are kinda cool, though. The little cacti, the only ones we have around here, usually only produce one or two blossoms each but some of them are going crazy this spring. Maybe it’s the sudden weather change – we had a couple extra months of winter, then just went straight to summer. Not really knowing, I’m gonna go ahead and guess that that’s the reason for the red-flower explosion.

And the guys say hi!

It has threatened rain for the past couple of afternoons, but nothing beyond drizzle ever really came of it. Today was another gray one, and I assumed the ‘threaten a downpour, deliver a sprinkle’ trend would continue so I went ahead and watered the trees this morning. This damned near emptied the cistern, so I fired up the generator and plugged in the well pump.

Approximately 36.4 nanoseconds after I completed that task, the heavens opened. I am now sitting in the scriptorium, listening to the generator suck up my precious gasoline, just barely audible over the rain pounding on the barn’s roof.

I’ve said it before; anybody who tries to predict the weather here is a damned fool. I’m no exception.

The Golden State of California offers me an ever-full cornucopia of entertainment.

With other things going on here, I’d actually forgotten that Kali had scheduled yet another special election yesterday; something I’d have enjoyed watching. Kali’s proposition system excites and endears observers (who don’t have to live through it) on several levels: The individual propositions are often deceptively phrased so that “no” can mean “yes” and vice versa; funding measures provide opportunities for insanely misleading advertisement campaigns (1% of a funding measure can go to something like the prevention of warm puppy and rainbow extinction while 99% goes to further enhance the illiteracy of schoolchildren and pave over the Sequoias ; the advertisements will sing the praises of the 1% and pretend the 99% doesn’t exist.) As long as you don’t actually have to live there, all the sausage-making can be quite diverting.

None of it ever does a damned bit of good, and lately the chaos and disruption have reached monumental proportions even by California standards. There may be a few people in Tibet who aren’t aware (in nauseating detail) of the financial hole Californians have dug for themselves through their government. Schwarzenegger’s 2005 special election propositions for bringing the budget into some misleading semblance of control was resoundingly trashed by government “workers” unions, and since then the Governator has behaved like a broken toy. He was elected in a historic recall election to undo the financial damage blamed on Gray Davis, but he seems to have outdone him instead. The only solution (of course) Sacramento could come up with to fill in the deficit was a new round of even more outrageous taxation. Virtually all those propositions went down to defeat yesterday, no doubt leaving federal bailouts as the state government’s only hope of even temporarily continuing solvency. The recriminations, of course, are already under way.

To paraphrase a certain fictional Rabbi: “May God bless and keep the California government – far away from us.”

UPDATE: This is amazing. I hope to hell George Orwell patented the Memory Hole, because if he did his estate stands to make a fricking fortune. The second link above originally went to a Sacramento Bee article addressed to California voters, taking them to task (in extremely snarky terms) for their foolish votes on the propositions.

That article has apparently been pulled, or at least the link now goes to a different article entirely, addressed to California legislators, taking them to task (in somewhat snarky terms) for their foolish spending habits. That’s just weird.