Wars on weeds, privacy, common sense and other matters. (My wars make more sense than theirs.)

It was a good weekend. Saturday I declared war on the Dreaded Knotweed. I did not obey the Geneva convention.

While berserking and crusading against the Vile Vegetable, I hatched a scheme that might take care of my two problems at once: knotweed and hazardous trash — using the trash as part — only part — of an elaborate barrier against the weed.

It will take earth-moving equipment, as Commentariat members noted. Or it will take backbreaking manual labor. It will take a concrete retaining wall. As Roger rightly notes, the only way to stop the vegetation invasion, if you can’t entirely eradicate the plant at the root, is with a truly impenetrable barrier two feet into the earth. (Roger lives in Wales. The UK has it much worse than we do). A deep, solid barrier. It will take that.

It will take more sweating in the summer sun. It will no doubt involve Much Cussing. But if it works, it puts the trash in the knotweed’s path and gets it out of my lawn.

It was a good weekend. I am the Knotweed Nemesis.

—–

On other subjects, friend Y.B. ben Avraham sends a link to this essay on how modernity — or specifically the welfare state — has not been kind to the Celt.

Celt as in the U.S. backwoods population of Scots-Irish who fought the Revolution, then fought the Whiskey Rebellion, then fought each other (Hatfields and McCoys), and fought in every U.S. war, and at every step fought “the revenooers.”

These are my people, along with the Irish-Irish and a bunch of rock-ribbed German religious dissenters. They are likely also somewhere in your family tree. They are the people Jim Webb (a rare “good” politician) wrote about in Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, a book PT shared with me and I learned a lot from.

These inconvenient Celts have always been scorned by those with pretensions, always been useful in a fight that the privileged and pretentious didn’t care to fight for themselves. Now what will become of them? What becomes of them is what becomes of the country they were so vital in helping build.

—–

And does anybody find it telling that the head of Transparency International, which wants to end financial privacy for thee and me, is a former head of the World Bank (H/T MJR) — an outfit not known for being all that transparent, its ownself. Or terribly interested in the transparency of government powers.

Government secrecy. Such a handy weapon against We the People. So many handy, handy weapons for them, so few for us. Lord Acton knew.

And so begins the moral crusade, post-Panama Papers.

BTW, one reason few Americans have shown up yet in the infamous papers is that the type of offshore entity Mossack Fonseca specializes in is more utilized by Europeans. And since the purloined records go back to 1970-something, FATCA (evil though it otherwise is) is not the reason for the lack of U.S. people in the data dump.

Still waiting for the other shoe to drop, though.

—–

No wonder people say note that “government intelligence” is an oxymoron.

Eejits. They proliferate worse than knotweed.

Sometimes it seems as if the collective “mind” of government works like this poor woman’s (H/T ML). It thinks but can’t put any of the thoughts together in a coherent narrative that might reveal why everything it does turns again and again to shite.

—–

Still, it was a good weekend.

It was also a good weekend because I received a baby lemon eucalyptus tree from MamaLiberty. She grew it from a seed planted indoors this winter in Wyoming. And now it sits, a couple inches high, in a window in the Pacific Northwest.

It sits next to an aloe vera plant, the only potted plant I’ve owned in years that hasn’t promptly died. That monster aloe appears likely to live forever.

Here’s hoping the aloe will be an inspiration to the baby eucalyptus and that it will someday grow up to live in the outdoors and take care of itself, as Nature intended plants to do. (Alas that some plants mentioned here take care of themselves all too well.)

—–

Okay, that’s it for my news.

Finally, for you miniature geeks (not meaning very small geeks, but geeks who love miniatures, and in particularly model railroads), take a gander at this.