Everything is illegal these days. You know it. You’re lucky if you get through your first cup of coffee without committing a federal felony or three. Your state legislature churns out new offenses targeting you for improper swimming gear or an unlicensed lemonade stand. As we saw yesterday, mere countycrats may already be building a SWAT team to raid your unpermitted garden shed. That sucks, of course. But the silver lining is that when everything is a crime, everybody is an outlaw — and inevitably a gratifying minority of new-minted enemies of the state embrace their status, don their broad-brimmed…
Category: Mind and Spirit
Spirituality, moods, feelings, and thinking free to live free.
… and on private property. Though I’m trying to move the blog away from knee-jerk reporting of Bad Government News, when S. sent this, I realized it said as much about the resilience of the victims and the obvious fear “their” government feels toward them (armored teams for code violations?) as it says bout the outrageousness of L.A. County bureaucracy. So read it and weep: “A County’s Private Property War.” You desert rats might want to take special notice.
I admire and shake my head at the brass-balled hackery of LulzSec and Anonymous. I think these guys are gloriously crazy and that they’re either going to save the world or get their asses ignominiously whupped. Or both. For sure, they’re getting into the pit with the biggest and most ruthless of Big Dogs, breezily unaware that they’re likely to get their throats torn out. The world needs people like that. It’s so good not to be one of them. Watching them got me wondering: Whatever happened to the glorious and not-so-grand tradition of monkeywrenching? Sure, those guys of LulzSec…
Optimism? Optimism? Does that preposterous word dare raise its head around here — again??? And in association with matters economic? Never fear. I know nobody in these parts is as blind as Bernanke or as oblivious as Obama. Is the economy going straight to hell? Yes, of course it is. Are things likely to get worse long before they get better? You can bet your six-gallon superpails of hard red winter wheat on it. Are your children’s futures in peril? Oh my. Will politicians continue to try to “cure” the economic poison they administered with ever-higher doses of the same…
Took me a while, but I said I’d have tales (and tails) from the Mother Earth News Fair. So here are a couple. The young lady with the radiant smile is — you can tell! — a member of the furry community. She wears her tail happily and presented me with a bushy faux wolf tail of my very own. Furry folk are much misunderstood and (you won’t be surprised) sometimes discriminated against for their playful self-expression. (The example at the last link happened on private property, so the security guards in question were probably within their rights — which…
I said I was going to de-focus on bad news and its attendant blogistic knee-jerking. But once in a while the reality checks are too stunning to ignore. Here’s how bad it’s getting: The U.S. Department of Education sends a S.W.A.T team to kick down a door and terrorize a family — for defaulted student loans. (NOTE: Original link is now 404. Thanks to dsd in the comments, here’s another link, with photos. Check his other links, too.) Facebook is at it again. Keep your photos OUT of Facebook, guys. How you’re going to prevent Granny or your best buddy…
This is a follow-up to last week’s “Middle-Class Shrug” blog. —– We hear about economic “pressure on the middle class.” Business media tell us the middle class is being squeezed. Popular media try to break our hearts with profiles of couples who have fallen out of the middle class and into desperation. But the picture they paint is incomplete and distorted. The “squeezed” mostly remain an abstraction. The “fallen” families beloved of the media are, as often as not, a misrepresentation; they’re usually folk who made dumb decisions (mostly by buying houses they couldn’t afford at prices they should have…
A few weeks back (thanks to alert blog readers) we read about the notable “shrug” of “Mad Men” ad-man and restauranteur Jerry Della Femina. And surely Della Femina fits the typical profile of a Randian shrugger (i.e. he’s self-made and rich). But what about the rest of the world? A lot of us here have already shrugged in various ways. We’ve left “respectable” jobs to move into the backwoods. Some have given up entirely on “official paperwork.” We’ve done our best to keep a low profile and make a low economic impact. But face it, when we dropped out most…
I hesitate to ask this question because I’ve found that when speaking from voice of experience, you guys are brilliant. But when we’re talking hypotheticals … well, we’re talking hypotheticals and sometimes all of us merely repeat freedomista cliches. But here’s the question: What do you think you’d do in a hyperinflation? I’m not talking about some post-apocalyptic George Romero scenario where starving urbanites are crawling through your windows in search of your stash of freeze-dried potato dices and fruit galaxy. I’m talking about getting along — as people did in Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, and most other places when their…