Presents!

I went to town yesterday, not expecting anything at the post office. But there were two separate packages!


This is a Michael Malice book I’ve wanted for several years but wouldn’t buy for myself because the chances of my working all the way through it were slim and when it first came out I didn’t have money for luxuries like that. It’s mostly a series of lectures, pamphlets and the like from late 19th and early 20th century anarchists, explaining their reasoning for what turned out to be very wrongheaded ideas. I’ve always been interested in the anarchists of that era because in my heart I’m an anarchist but in my head I’m anything but: My idea of the ideal society would have no overarching government at all but unfortunately it would have to be populated by ideal people and I haven’t met many of those. It’s not exactly a new observation – James Madison famously said, “If Men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Since he didn’t know any angels, he was largely responsible for arranging the Constitution that the current government busies itself pissing all over.

But the fin de siècle anarchists lived in a sort of intellectual bubble in which they thought that if you could remove the shackles of traditional government from them, people everywhere would just naturally sort themselves into a sort of benevolent mutual-aid society. Curiously, virtually all of them seem to have assumed that that society would be communist – and that communism would be a good thing. They at least had the excuse that communism hadn’t ever been tried at that point on any scale bigger than a voluntary commune, and some of them lived long enough to get their errors smeared on their faces: Michael Malice likes to tell the story of how Emma Goldman, “Red Emma,” happily took a trip to newly-Bolshevik Russia for meetings with Lenin, came away horribly disabused of her naive assumptions, and then got called a traitor by British commies when she tried to tell the story of what she’d seen in the first actual communist state.

Anyway, that book has languished for years on my Amazon wish list and I probably never would have gotten around to buying it, But Big Brother saw it there and got it for me! Thanks, BB!

Also…


These are two water conditioners that a Generous Reader sent me, in hope that one of them might help me with the rather extreme calcium build-ups I get from the very hard well water. It will be a while before one of them gets installed, like not till Spring, but I know I’ll do it because I want to retrofit a ball valve in the line between the well and the tank anyway so it won’t take a special project. It’s supposed to cause the dissolved calcium in the water to “remain in aragonite talc form, passing through unnoticed.” I’m looking forward to seeing if it really works. Won’t do any harm even if it doesn’t, though it will probably serve to confuse the next generation of people to work on that water line. 🙂

Thanks, guys!

About Joel

You shouldn't ask these questions of a paranoid recluse, you know.
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4 Responses to Presents!

  1. Anonymous says:

    I binged “remain in aragonite talc form, passing through unnoticed.” to try to find out what those are, but this page was the only search result.
    They may not be helpful, but they are fast.

  2. Jeff Allen says:

    https://www.superiorwaterconditioners.com/permanent-magnetic-fields/
    OK, it’s a vendor. That said, I had never heard of “aragonite talc” before but mineralogy has never been my strenght.

  3. Jeff Allen says:

    … neither is spelling, it appears.

    this looks like a decent current survey… could read on a phone I suppose.
    Alimi, Fathi. 2024. Influence of Magnetic Field on Calcium Carbonate Precipitation: A Critical Review.
    Magnetochemistry 2024, 10(11), 83;
    https://doi.org/10.3390/magnetochemistry10110083 [23 pp. PDF]
    Published: 29 October 2024
    ABS “This review reports a critical study on the effect of magnetic fields on the precipitation process of calcium carbonate scale from hard water. Indeed, the harmful consequences of the water scaling phenomenon urged researchers to find effective solutions. One of the interesting antiscaling processes is the magnetic treatment of water, which triggers a reduction in the precipitation of calcium carbonate on the walls when in contact with hard water. In the present review, we discuss selected examples related to this process in a combined analysis of the latest advances and the mechanism of action of the magnetic field. Despite the diversity of studies investigating this phenomenon, the effectiveness of this treatment remains a controversial issue, and it is not possible to obtain a clear explanation of the phenomenon. This review proposes, finally, interesting hypotheses which can effectively explain the effect of magnetic treatment on the behavior of hard waters and the precipitation of calcium carbonate, which include magnetohydrodynamics and the hydration effect.”

  4. Ben says:

    When you do that plumbing job, invest in compression PVC fittings. You should be able to do it with the water gushing (for a minute or two) to save the hassle of draining the big tank.

    https://www.homedepot.com/pep/JONES-STEPHENS-1-in-PVC-Compression-Coupling-for-Cold-Water-Lines-C12100/320222208

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