Tag Archives: other

Abdicating Personal Responsibility to Politicians

Posted on September 19, 2011 by | 6 comments

The comments on the Yin Yang Conspiracy post got me thinking about this:

In 1961, at the age of 17 I took an oath agreeing to be part of a team effort to kill anyone John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and later Lyndon Baines Johnson, thought needed killing.

Everything I’ve learned about those two men during the decades since has caused me to believe both were despicable, incorrigible individuals bent on personal power and self-aggrandizement, first, with the betterment of the US public only a priority to the extent it contributed to those.

But I raised my right hand and took an oath to become the trigger-finger for anything they wanted doing, volunteered to point a rifle and kill whomever these two car salesmen cum rich-boy opportunists found more convenient dead than alive.

My thinking today is that, despite the popularity of the choice I made, despite the fact millions of other men made the same choice to abdicate their ethics, their intelligence, their judgement to those men and others exactly of the same unworthy breed, [still do so today,] it’s not a choice to be admired, praised, encouraged, or rewarded.  If anything, it’s a testimony to my own shallowness, stupidity, weakness of character and obliquely, a failure of self-respect.

Today, men and women who openly vilify the President of the US, the US Congress, detest the US military command and officer corps, are nevertheless pointing their weapons at whomever those people they detest tell them to kill.  And label doing so a virtue.

Aside from the fact I didn’t know enough when I took my oath to recognize what scum the two presidents I agreed to kill for were, those people serving today are in precisely the same position I was in.  They’ve agreed to do whatever the dregs of humanity tell them to do, do it without question.

The main change between 1961, and 2011, is that I agreed to do it for $78 per month, whereas they’re getting paid one hell of a lot more to obey the orders about which unlucky human beings get the downrange surprises.

Think about it.  Thousands of young men died, thousands killed because Richard Milhaus Nixon told them to do it.  Yet Richard Nixon outranked those politicians of the time in scumhood so conspicuously he was casheered from office by the others of his club.  His own peers.

What am I missing here?

Is there something in this worthy of admiration?

Old Jules

6 Comments

Posted in Adventure, America, Current Issues, Human Behavior, Politics, Senior Citizens

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Curiouser and curiouser

Posted on September 15, 2011 by | 12 comments

Notice that hash marking of diagonal sunspots.

spaceweather.com

Then have a look at the positions of the three weirdest spin axis / magnetic fields in the solar system.  Saturn, Uranus and Neptune:

SimSolar v2.0 Planetary position simulation

Old Jules

8:30 AM – Just for those who think a blog entry ought to have something for everyone.

Tired of buying compressed air to blow the dirt out of your computer, watching the prices on it rise to simulate gold?

60# of pressure that doesn’t run out.  Cost was $2 in a thrift store.

Computer gurus will tell you it might cause moisture to condense on the important components of your comp.  Physics says they ought to be maybe right because of the venturi created when the air expands leaving the pressurized tube.

I’ve been using this one inside and outside my comps for about two years.  Haven’t seen any signs of condensation, haven’t experienced any damage to the comps, haven’t spent a penny on compressed air, don’t have a bunch of empty cans lying around wondering what to do with themselves.

But that’s just me.   I’m a risk taker.

It also serves as a great, compact bellows for starting fires in a wood stove.

INTERIM UPDATE to September 13, moonbows and canned thunder

Mama Nature after two days of brainwashing with canned thunder:

Old Jules

5:00 PM – Decided I needed to go to Kerrville for necessaries.  Ended up getting a couple of watermelons from an old guy brings them up from the valley.  He says it’s his last watermelon trip for the year, says they’ve gotten too high in cost down there to allow him any profit after hauling costs.  I told him he needs to buy another truck and make up the difference in volume.  Some jokes have been dead long enough for reincarnating them.  This one fell on deaf ears.  Only drew a puzzled look, as though he was considering the entrepreneural aspects.

This was hard to resist.  All those foam ice chests could have kept my chickens pooping foam plastic until spring.

Those shower doors are still coming in for them I reckons, with nobody buying them.  I got 20 free for building my chicken house out of, but I’m betting you’d have to pay $5 for all these until they’re ready to put them in the dumpster.

Those have collected dust, been around a while.  I’m guessing a person could have them all at a righteous price as low as your conscience would allow you to offer.

Next stop:

Not much going on here.

Next stop:

A guy surely needs one of those, eh?

Didn’t buy nuffin there though.  Eventually did pick off a $3 electric 6 cup rice steamer never been out of the box at Salvation Army Thrift Store.

12 Comments

Posted in 2011, Adventure, Human Behavior, Kerrville, Redneck Repairs, RedneckRepairs, Thrift Stores, White Trash Repairs

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Desert Emergency Survival Basics

Posted on September 11, 2011 by | 8 comments

You survival and preparedness-oriented readers might find something you didn’t already know in here to be useful.  The Introduction section to the book Desert Emergency Survival Basics explains my purposes for writing it better than I can today:

The potential range of human experience includes finding ourselves in unanticipated dangerous situations. Most of those situations have been examined minutely and described in print in the form of survival manuals. Desert survival is not an exception. Excellent books are available to explain primitive survival in the desert southwest duplicating lifestyles of Native Americans a thousand years ago. That is not the intent of this book.

A few decades ago I had an acquaintance with a man named Walter Yates. Walter had the distinction of surviving a helicopter crash in the far north woods by jumping into a snowdrift before the impact. He managed to survive winter months with almost nothing except the clothes on his back when he jumped.

Walter’s experience was a worthy test of human potential for emergency survival in extreme conditions. The margin for error was microscopic. The reason he survived rested on his ability to quickly detach his mind from how things had been in the past, how he wished they were, and accept completely the situation he was in. He wouldn’t have made it out of those woods if he couldn’t rapidly assess his new needs and examine every possibility of fulfilling them. “It’s all in the mind,” he once told me.

The margin for error in the desert is also narrow. That margin is dehydration. Extremes of temperature are also a factor, but they are more easily managed than the needs of the human body for water. Anyone who survives an unanticipated week in desert country did so by either having water, by carrying it in, or finding it.

Over the years I’ve followed a number of search and rescue accounts and discussed the issue with searchers. The general thinking among those workers is that a person missing in the desert southwest should be found or walk out within three to five days. After three days the chances for live return spiral downward. Returns after five days are lottery winners. When a missing person isn’t found within a week, it’s usually because he’s been dead for five days.

This book is to assist in avoiding situations that lead to the need to survive those crucial three days, and to provide the basics of how to walk out and how to find water in the desert southwest. If you need the emergency information here it will be because you became lost, stranded by mechanical failure, or physically incapacitated. I won’t address the bugs and plants you might find to eat. If you have water you’ll survive without eating until rescue.

When this book was written I had a close association with New Mexico State Search and Rescue (SAR). I was also writing a book about a lost gold mine at the time. The State Search and Rescue Coordinator (SARC) knew about the book. I had a special arrangement with him because I was spending a lot of time in remote canyons searching. If something delayed me there I didn’t want them to send out the SAR guys to look for me.

One day in the coffee-room SARC asked me about my progress in the search and the gold mine book. I explained the lost gold mine search to him and how the information available in the past was sketchy.

“So you’re writing a book that’s likely to cause flatlanders to go out into the desert searching for this thing?”

I thought about it a moment before I answered. “It might. A lot of people would have tried anyway, but this book might bring in some who wouldn’t have come otherwise.”

SARC glared at me. His whole world revolved around  flat-landers getting lost in the mountains or desert. Several times every month they’d scramble the forces to try to locate someone misplaced. Sometimes it’s a brain surgeon from Houston who got himself mis-located mountain climbing on the east face of Sandia Mountain within sight of Albuquerque . Other times a physicist from California gets off the pavement in the desert and loses his bearings. Sometimes SAR arrived in time to save their lives. New Mexico back country can be unforgiving.

“If you’re going to publish a book that will take a lot of idiots out where they can get into trouble you’d damned well better include some warnings on desert survival and how they can stay out of trouble! I don’t want to spend the next five years dragging the bodies of your readers out of the arroyos in body bags.”

That conversation ultimately resulted in this tome.

Over time it’s been expanded and rewritten numerous times to eventually become what’s posted here. Here’s the link, but there’s a new page for it on the navigation bar at the top of the page.
Desert Emergency Survival Basics

Old Jules


Sons Of The Pioneers – Cool Water

8 Comments

Posted in 1980's, 1990's, Adventure, Books, Communication, Education, Emergency Preparedness, Human Behavior, Nature, Outdoors, Solitude, Survival, Writing

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Choose Something Like a Star

Posted on September 11, 2011 by | 4 comments

Choose Something Like a Star

by Robert Frost – 1947

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud —
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.

Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says “I burn.”
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.

It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats’ Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

4 Comments

Posted in Adventure, Astronomy, Creative Writing, Music, Poetry

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Thursday morning meanderings

Posted on September 8, 2011 by | 7 comments

SOLAR RADIO BURSTS: This week’s sharp increase in solar activity has turned the sun into a radio transmitter. Bursts of shortwave static are coming from the unstable magnetic canopy of sunspot 1283. Tuesday in New Mexico, amateur radio astronomer Thomas Ashcraft recorded some samples at 21 MHz: listen. Radio listeners should remain alert for this kind of solar activity as sunspot 1283 continues to seethe.  http://spaceweather.com/

———————————-

Got a call last night from Gale saying they were in Van Horn, headed home. They should have arrived around midnight, so they can take care of their own animalcules this morning.

He said the Hatch Chili Festival probably won’t be among their future plans for having a booth. Sales were flat on most of his crafts, though the Siberian Wolf fang jewelry sold a bit, and his old stand-by steak turners with elk-antler shaped handles might have brought him to the break-even point.  He sounded a bit down-hearted and beat to a small frazzle.  But those craft shows are a big piece of the glue holding this place and their lifestyle together.

I’ve wondered for some while how long financial ventures depending on consumers buying non-essentials could hold up in a lousy economy.

———————————

Came across an interesting blog: dumpster find of the week: boot haul, boat haul – Seems to be a kindred spirit.

————————————

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the past while about various news items I wouldn’t be aware of if it weren’t for the Internet and blogs I read.  It’s guided my thinking into directions I probably wouldn’t otherwise drift, such as actually having conscious priorities in my life for a while.  At least sort-of priorities.

Not to suggest anyone’s a good economic prognosticator, but with all that guessing going on out there, and with what appears to be a lot of contributory factors, I probably owe it to the cats, at least, to have a backup plan.  A way to get the hell out of Dodge intact if things go sour, that has room in it for four cats.  If something happens to Gale or their finances, or SS is eroded by inflation, or both, hedging against the sleep-under-a-bridge alternative probably makes sense.

My obvious first priority is to get my new truck running and street legal.

But after that’s done, I’m either going to need to build a house to live in on the bed of it, find an old overcab camper to fit in it, or find a camper-trailer sitting out somewhere I can pick up for nearly nothing for fixing up to pull behind it.

I see these sitting around with weeds growing up around them a lot.  I think once I have transportation I’ll have to get serious about trying to acquire one or something rhyming with it as a future place for me and the felines if the Coincidence Coordinators decide to play dirty.

I’m thinking if things get too rough I might be able to slick out further west and establish a moving circuit of campsite homes on US Bureau of Land Management and US Forestry Service lands, changing locations every couple of weeks to stay legal.  The cats don’t care for the idea, but they tell me they’d agree to it if I won’t get any chickens.

I’ll probably talk more about various facets of all this in future posts.  Progress reports, learnings, that sort of thing.

————————————————-

Meanwhile, happy posthumorous birthday to Jimmie Rodgers

http://youtu.be/qEIBmGZxAhg

He’d have known exactly how a person ought to go about becoming an honest-to-goodness hobo with a house.

Old Jules

——————————–

7 Comments

Posted in 2011, Adventure, Country Life, Emergency Preparedness, Senior Citizens, Social Security, Solitude, Trucks

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Don’t Call an Angry Jersey Bull a Sick Cow

Posted on September 7, 2011 by | 16 comments

He won’t like it.


  Every spring and fall the lady friend I mentioned in So Long, and Thanks for all The Valentines entry and I used to go adventuring down the Rio Grande to the wildlife refuges.  We’d watch the antics of the full quota of migrating birds at Bosque del Apache  Wildlife Refuge near San Antonio, NM  [ http://friendsofthebosque.org/aboutrefuge.html ] and other sites near the river.  We carried our cameras and binoculars along, same as everyone else, and let where the birds were tell us where it was okay to go.

One year we were scouting the roads and farms on the east side of the river when we spotted a huge flock of cranes grazing among a dairy herd.  No signs forbidding trespassing, so I followed the irrigation ditch bank to get us as near them as possible.  Then we got out of the truck and began threading our way through the cows as we tried to get close enough for good pictures while the birds tried to foil the effort by moving further away.

The cattle were contained by an electric fence positioned about 18 inches off the ground.  The lady and I got separate by about 40 yards, me trying to be sneaky and circle around the cranes, her a few feet away from the cattle but on the side of the fence opposite them.

“Jules! There’s something wrong with that cow.”  I was focused on the cranes and didn’t pay her any mind.  I didn’t care if there was something wrong with one of the cows.  “Jules! That cow is SICK.”

This happened several times, me still ignoring it, her becoming increasingly shrill.  Finally, frustrated, I glanced toward her.  SHEEZE!

A huge Jersey bull was snorting and pawing up a dust cloud fifteen feet across that single strand of electric wire from her, telling her to “QUIT CALLING ME A COW!”

I yanked off my mackinaw.  “THAT IS NOT A COW.  STAND STILL!  DON’T SAY ANYTHING ELSE!  DON’T MOVE!”  I waved the mackinaw in the air.  “HYAAAAH!  HAYAAAH LOOKEE HERE YOU BASTARD!”

Snort.  Stomp.  Paw.  Dust.  Now he’s turning my way and I ain’t even across the fence from him.  “Hyahhhh!”  Less enthusiasm.

To her:  “Back away slowly.  REALLY slow.  Hyahhhh!”  Me backing away too, still waving the mackinaw, stepping across the fence, him taking a few paces toward me.  “HEAD TO THE TRUCK!  Slowwwww and easy.  Don’t attract his attention again.”  SOB’s thinking he’ll charge me, moving my way stomping and snorting, pawing up dirt.

I got up on the ditch road thinking how I can jump into seven, eight feet of water if I need to without ruining the camera and binocs.  He’s maybe 40 feet away, still coming.  She’s beside the truck.  “OKAY!  START YELLING AND WAVING YOUR ARMS AROUND, THEN IF HE TURNS GET IN THE TRUCK!”

She did, he did, and I did.  He never came past the fence.

When I was a kid a Jersey bull was universally known to be a dangerous beastie.  We had to sit through films at school telling us to watch out for them.  I read somewhere once that more kids on farms were killed by Jersey bulls than died any other way.  She sat through the same films.

I suppose she forgot.

Or maybe I was just more tuned in because of a Jersey milk cow who used to chase me all over the barnyard, me trying to get her into the stall for milking.  My step-dad always sneered at me about that, “All you have to do is grab that ring in her nose!  She won’t do anything after that.”

I don’t recall I ever got close enough to grab that ring and test it out.  I preferred batting her across the nose with a broken hoe handle.

When It’s Mushroom Picking Time in Minnesota http://teresaevangeline.blogspot.com/2011/09/when-its-mushroom-picking-time-in.html reminded me of this.  Rather than bog down her comments with my yarns I figured I’d best post it here if I wanted to tell it.

Old Jules

Johnny Cash -the Bull Rider
http://youtu.be/TViGS1ePGp8

6:15 AM Newsflash:

Last night I heard a ruckus outside the back window along with the sound of destruction.  I shined a flashlight through the screen and found a feral sow and 5-6 piglets about the size of Cocker Spaniels had broken into the rooster pen and were tearing everything up, one trying to get up the chute to the night rooster fortress.

I got the .22 and picked a target, the one tearing up my chute, fired through the screen, resulting in more destruction of the pen, a squealing, flopping-all-over-the-place pig, herd stampede by the others, and one ANGRY feral sow.

She’s been out there all night snorting and grunting.  My guess is that piglet’s still alive out there, injured, and she’s waiting until I come out to express her displeasure.

I’m not going outdoors until it’s light enough to see what I’m doing and she’s doing so’s we can come to some sort of permanent understanding about the issues involved.

Old Jules

7:30 AM aftermath

Judging from appearances she and the pigs ate the one I shot during the night.  Stinks something awful all over back there.  They did a lot of damage to the rooster pen, which I’ll have to shore up today while the two roosters run loose and hopefully leave The Great Speckled Bird: Respecting our Betters alone.

The Liar: The Great Speckled Bird, Part 2 might have to hang off in the background today, leaving the hens alone.

Damage from the hogs wasn’t restricted to the chicken pen.  They tore off some of the siding to the storage building trying to get to the chicken feed, also, broke pieces off.  More repairing and shoring up necessary there.

When I went out the sow was in a cedar thicket near the main henhouse where I could hear, but couldn’t see her.  Couldn’t tell whether the pigs were in there, too, or not.  I agreed not to go in after and she agreed to not come out after me.

Old Jules

16 Comments

Posted in 1990's, Adventure, Country Life, Education, Human Behavior, NM, Wildlife

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The Sawmill: Joys and Frustrations

Posted on September 4, 2011 by | 8 comments

One of the ways Gale makes money for himself is saw-milling mesquite.  There’s a guy with heavy equipment bulldozes cedar and mesquite off ranch land, and he pushes big mesquite off to the side instead of burning it.  We go pick it up in a trailer, haul it back here and stockpile it for cleaning up to be saw-milled.

These are mesquite boles waiting to be sold to a woodworker or for Gale to work them down into something tasteful and useful:

Here are a few larger ones stockpiled by the sawmill waiting for sawmilling.

But when Gale bought the sawmill he din’t actually have an enviable shelter to put it in.

We plotted, planned, watched and horse-traded when they were putting in new power poles to acquire enough for a new sawmill barn:

Even laid out the footprint for the new pole barn and got the holes drilled:

We’ve got the design put together by us two geniuses.  Those poles need to be measured and cut to length, then dragged over to be slid into the holes, set vertical, tamped into place, first off.  Then everything that doesn’t look like a pole barn needs to be removed from that airspace sitting there empty.

But the fact is, Gale’s an old guy.  Claims to be older than me even, by an imaginary year.  He’s got a bad hip and too many other things troubling him to have any business out there trying to do work ought to be reserved for a younger guy, namely me.  I can’t afford to be losing an old friend and the man who owns this place because of some silly notion he might have about getting out there doing any heavy lifting and sweating.

So that barn of the future’s been sitting there waiting to happen for a year now.

If I had my new truck running I’d be up there now, while they’re gone and can’t do anything about it, measuring and cutting those poles, dragging them somewhere they can become something better than what they are now.  I’d be getting those poles up pointing at the sky the way the Coincidence Coordinators intended when they delivered them.

All while they’re off in New Mexico at the Hatch Chili Festival doing what’s best they do and they do best.

It ain’t going to happen this time, because I don’t have anything to pull them with.  But that new truck’s going to be running next time they leave.

On the other hand, I think he might be edgy about me doing it.  They’ve both seen the things I’ve built, or am building down here:

White Trash Repairs: Throwing Down the Gauntlet

Thumbing Rides on Throwaways

News from the Middle of Nowhere

Disclaimer and apologies – I posted this accidentally when I went to save the draft.    But there’s been too much deleting of accidental posts here lately, so I’m leaving it up.

Old Jules

8 Comments

Posted in 2011, Adventure, RedneckRepairs, Senior Citizens, Texas, Trucks, White Trash Repairs

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Something Rhyming with Joy in the Pre-dawn

Posted on September 4, 2011 by | 6 comments

The temperature dropped enough last night so’s I turned off  the fans.  When I walked outdoors the cats were doing those little rear-on-hindlegs-pivot happiness acts they’ve taught one another, all gathered for a some grub, a refill on the water bowl,  having their tails tugged and a few words of greeting.

They all explained they’re grateful to me for turning down the heat, and I didn’t tell them any different.  Anytime a person can get a cat feeling beholden he’d best take advantage of it.  I took my coffee out to the porch swing hangs under the oak and let them take turns snagging a few scratches behind the ears, held Tabby upside down and explained how she was one of the best cats around here and just listened to the night trailing away.

I stay fairly joyful around here always, but somehow it managed to get itself trumped this morning.

If I was shorter and had me a mirror and a sink to stand on I’d do what Jessica’s doing in the video below.

Jessica’s “Daily Affirmation”

http://youtu.be/qR3rK0kZFkg

Instead, I reckons I’ll have another cup of java and wait for the roosters to begin their concert.

——————–

8:00 AM

Without taking anything away from Jessica, here are a few of my own gratitude affirmations this morning:

I’m grateful Gale’s got water up there I can haul, grateful for all these jugs to haul it in, and grateful he’ll loan me Little Red for packing it down here.

I’m grateful Gale gave me this new truck:

“GOT ME A NEW TRUCK” https://sofarfromheaven.com/category/trucks/

The wiring's too Communist and beyond my ken to fix myself, turns out. I'm grateful there's a real mechanic in town and we can tow it in when he gets back.

Won’t be long now before I have transportation again and whoooeee will I ever be grateful.

I'm grateful we don't have to depend entirely on rain.

If I had a sink I’d dance on it, same as Jessica.
Old Jules

6 Comments

Posted in 2011, Adventure, America, Country Life, Free, Homesteading, Redneck Repairs, Trucks

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Déjà Vu All Over Again – Ways to Be a Good American Without Waving a Chinese-made Flag

Posted on August 29, 2011 by | 18 comments

Lose the God-Damned Bigotry or Quit Calling Yourself an American -You’re Walkin’ on the Fightin’ Side of Me

on

Paid for by Americans to Restore Freedom, Austin, TX 1970

A word in advance:  About the time Merle Haggard was reaching the top of the charts with “The Fighting Side of Me”, and “Okie From Muskogee” a war over forced busing was being fought in cities all across the country by good Americans.  The poster you see appeared on telephone posts, taped to the outside of doors, windows of public places, scattered on the streets. 

In 1970 a friend and I came across a guy taping one of these up near the University of Texas.  He had a ream of them beside him on the concrete.  We discussed it with him and his noggin required surprisingly little thumping to persuade him to give us all the posters and swear he would not do it anymore.   He didn’t have the strength of his convictions.

I suppose I kept a few of them  boxed up with other curiosities from  over the decades.

The administrator for this blog found a few of them among some boxes of scribblings and asked what it was all about.

Merle’s had a change of heart, repudiated a lot of what he said and did during those times, says we all make mistakes and we all eventually grow from having made them.  But interestingly, instead of vanishing from arena of public bias, the past two years has seen a re-emergence of surprisingly similar material intended to assist in denouncing the US president.

Being a good American and a good human being isn’t about waving a flag, hating Democrats or Republicans, Muslims, or people who say ugly words about political leaders.  It isn’t about fear, hysterical dialect, consumerism and waste.

Being a good American and a good human being is about personal responsibility.  About having enough confidence and courage not to feel threatened by every little thing.  About assuming the responsibility of not being part of the problem any more than is absolutely necessary.  About self-reliance.

Sometimes it’s not obvious how a person might accomplish those things.

  • On a personal level your life will find itself a lot better place if you can recognize the fact you are going to die as a means of exiting it.  Maybe disease, a car wreck, any of a thousand common ways that don’t have a damned thing to do with any foreign country, foreign leader, foreign war.  You are going to die.  No point in going into frenzies of terror and hate because the death you get stands a billion-to-one shot at being the act of a terrorist.  Trust me on that.  You are going to die, and I’ll only be the tiniest, most microscopic bit of a liar when I tell you it won’t be from anything any foreigner does  to cause it.
  • On a personal level you’ll find it’s a hell of a lot better place if you can learn what is your own business, and what isn’t.  If you can change it, it’s your business.  If you can’t, it ain’t worth concerning yourself with, getting all worked up about.
  • On a personal level you’ll find your life’s a lot better place if you spend considerable energies looking at it, instead of other places, looking at what you like about it, and what you don’t like about it, and changing what you can.  Looking in a metaphorical mirror at the sort of person you are and asking yourself if that is the sort of person you want to be.  You can’t change the kind of person the prez of bongobongoland is, but you can change the kind of person you are into someone you have more respect for.  No one respects a dishonest, hysterical coward, including you, when you see it in others.

If all of us could pull that off our own lives would be a lot better, and America would be a better place for it.  But insofar as personal responsibility and being a good American, we can expand on that a bit.  Here are a few things a good American might do without having to shout from the rooftops about what an admirable person he/she is:

Dependence on hydrocarbons is the ultimate problem of this nation you say you love.

  • Be conscious of your own energy use.
  • Every plastic grocery or garbage bag, every foam-plastic hamburger box, no matter where it was produced, drives up the price of oil.
  • Every time you fire up that hair-dryer you drive up the world-wide price of hydrocarbons.
  • Every made-in-China yellow ribbon ‘SUPPORT OUR TROOPS’ you buy to stick on your car drives up the price of hydrocarbons world-wide, increases the demand.
  • Every made-in-China flag made of nylon you wave drives up the price of oil and increases worldwide demand.
  • Every new plastic radio, CD player, computer monitor.  Every plastic wrapper from that frozen pizza pie.  Every cellophane cover and foam plastic bottom covering the piece of animal you’re having for supper and sending to the landfill afterward is driving up the world-wide competition for oil.
  • Sure, there are the other obvious things.  The things Jimmy Carter used to beg you to do when he was prez, to help you quit relying on foreign petroleum products.  Turn down the heater.  Turn up the thermostat on the AC.  Don’t drive anymore than you have to.  Which, of course, you didn’t care for then and immediately forgot when he left office (which is part of the reason you’re in the fix you are in now.)

But there’s a lot more to being a good American, as opposed to a good human being.  Here are a few more ways you could try to be part of the solution, rather than part of the problem:

Quit buying ANY foreign product if you can avoid it.  Even if it saves you a few cents.  Just say no.  Refuse and make it clear why you’re refusing.  If US workers didn’t manufacture it and you can live without it, don’t buy it.  If your old one’s broken buy a replacement used in a thrift store, garage sale or flea market.  If it can be repaired take it to a local appliance repair shop and let a US worker repair it.  Every dollar you spend on a new foreign-manufactured product reduces the value of the dollar you’ll get next paycheck because of the overwhelming trade deficit.

If this country is going to survive another century the population is going to have to begin manufacturing what it consumes, energy-wise and every other wise.  Building hamburgers to sell back and forth to one another isn’t enough to keep a country sound.

Americans are going to have to produce products, and the other Americans are going to have to buy them.  We can’t continue indefinitely sending our chunks of our trade deficit off to bongo-bongo land for petroleum, to China for plastic bags, television sets, seat covers and rubber monster toys.  We can’t starve out our farmers by buying agricultural products from Mexico and Argentina.

Being a good American involves a hell of a lot more than getting angry when some foreigner says something ugly about it.  Loyalty to America and Americans is about keeping America alive, productive, self-reliant, healthy economically.

If we can do those things we’ll find we’re spending a lot less time hurling empty rhetoric back and forth, hating the owners of bongo-bongo land oil, a lot less time bombing the hell out of foreign lands, a lot less angry and full of fear and hatred.

And we wouldn’t need to wave flags to prove we were good Americans.

Old Jules

http://www.presstv.ir/usdetail/187535.html

MERLE HAGGARD – Fightin’ Side Of Me
http://http://youtu.be/QX9X5zJ91Ac

Afterthought:  Tffnguy’s got a rant on similar but not identical subjects you might find worth a read, along with comments by a number of oldsters on my blogroll.  http://terlinguabound.blogspot.com/2011/08/divide-and-conquer.html

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Posted in 1970's, 2011, America, Current Issues, Ethnic Supremacy, History, Human Behavior, Politics, Relationships, Senior Citizens, Survival, Thrift Stores

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So Long, and Thanks for all the Valentines

Posted on August 16, 2011 by | 19 comments


During the early 1990s I had a lady friend with whom I was close enough to
exclusively share a few years of my life.  Interior decorator lady who grew up in the same town and entirely different social strata than I did.

I first remember noticing her in the fifth grade, and from then until the time I left that burg as a high-schooler, I don’t believe she ever spoke to me.  She was upper crust and I was somewhere down there below the lower crust.

Anyway, 30-35 years later we spent a few years together seeing one another every day and night.  She had a lot of strong points, beautiful woman, smart, and well-intentioned.  I’d mentioned to her once that it used to really hurt my feelings in school on Valentine’s Day.  I hated it, all those kids getting valentines from one another and I didn’t get any.

Valentine’s Day, maybe 1993, ’94, I headed down to her house after work.  Came in the door and fell over.   She’d decorated the house with valentines, fed me a piece of cake shaped like a valentine, and handed me a box shaped like a valentine wrapped. Made me open it.

Crazy woman had filled that box with old-timey valentines like were around when we were kids…… full, chock full, that box was, with valentines claiming to be from kids we went to school with, all addressed to the kid I used to be …… the lower-class scum of yesteryear. Crazy stuff.

I’ve cried maybe twice during my adulthood, but for some reason I was having to hold back tears on that one. But that isn’t why I’m writing this blog entry.  I just wanted to preface the next thing with that one, so you’d understand she wasn’t a bad person underneath everything.

Anyway, she had two habits I found particularly irritating, aside from being miserable and liking to spread it around, toward the end of our relationship. She pronounced the “G” in guacamole. “Gwakamohlee.”  Drove me nuts.  Knew better, but maybe couldn’t remember, maybe didn’t care.

Secondly, she had this thing I figure came from being upper- crust as a kid.

“You find someone to work on the roof?” I might ask.

“Oh yes,” she might warble. ” Hired this little Mexican man.”

When I see the guy, he ain’t little.  He’s 240 pounds.  But he is Hispanic.

“Oh!” she might say.  “I hired this little Indian woman to do some bead work for me.”  Turned out the little Indian woman was taller than she was and weighed in heavier than the roof repair man.

You get the picture. Non-Anglo-Saxons were little, particularly if they were hired to do something.

No, the lady wasn’t a bigot, precisely.  She wouldn’t sit still for racial slurs unless they were subtle, oblique, or less so, but about Navajo folks, whom she generally disliked.  She conveyed the impression instead, that she found little men who did repairs to the plumbing so cute, so lovable, so adorable and quaint.  Something akin to looking through the big end of a telescope at them standing there so tiny doing their assigned jobs.

When we parted company after a few years it wasn’t pleasant, but I learned a lot about myself from her, once she began explaining what all was wrong with me.  It was worth a lengthy listen because she probably knew me as well as anyone ever has.

After I decided it was over I continued talking to her every night on the telephone for about a month, an hour-or-so per night, determined to listen carefully and consider everything ugly she could think of to say about me without any argument.  She mightn’t be right, or she might be right but about something I didn’t want to change, or she might be right and I might want to change it.

But we don’t get many opportunities in this life to have someone who knows us well go into loving detail explaining every flaw and wart, everything we haven’t noticed  about ourselves.  There aren’t any little people a person could hire to do that.

Eventually I came to realize she was enjoying those protracted nightly diatribes more than was possibly good for her.  She’d begun repeating herself, also.  So I told her it was over.

I mostly remember her for the valentine side.  The going up big was worth the coming down little.

Old Jules

P.S.  For you bloggers, a note from Jeanne (Admin):

Click here for a chance to win a slot in The Bloggess sidebar for a month sponsored by freefringes.com
http://freefringes.com/2011/09/20/lovelinks-24-open/

P.P.S. Another note from Jeanne (Admin):
We’re getting a few new readers from the contest site who are probably confused about my linking  to some old guy’s blog… so I wanted to mention that I’m a background partner on this blog and no, I didn’t write most of these posts!  I didn’t really understand the submission forms, so the blog is listed under “Jeanne Kasten”. I don’t know why. Sorry for any confusion!

Paul Simon– Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes

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Posted in 1990's, Communication, Ethnic Supremacy, Human Behavior, Native Americans, NM, Portales, Relationships, Youth

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