In the old days it was about taxes and heaping the payoff of the national debt on farmers who made whiskey out of their corn. In 1790, it was considered an abomination and the farmers rebelled. Abraham Washington or George Lincoln, I think it was, sent troops and eventually the Whiskey Rebellion became a footnote in history.
The song was ended but the melody lingered on.
Miss Marcy doesn’t quite fit the theme, but it involves whiskey stills, illicit sex, murder, dancing, adultery and other dirty stuff, and it’s a good song. I’d be remiss leaving it out.
The Night Chicago Died isn’t precisely historically accurate, but it’s the only song comes to mind encapsulating what Prohibition led to: Gangsters, cops and bystanders being gunned down, speakeasy whiskey nights, corruption, and a lot of richer cops, politicans and gangsters with nobody else better or worse for it except prison guards, more lawyers, judges and cops. Sound familiar?
Even into the 1960s illegal whiskey still brought a smile and tacit approval from a population unaffected by the tiny wars still going on between back-woods whiskey-makers and ‘reveneurs’. Not to be mistaken for Jack Daniels or Johnny Walker. Nobody was getting killed over in the Jack Daniels plant.
Roger Miller’s classic’s just another example the general public attitude as opposed to the governmental enforcement apparatus tactics.
The US Government isn’t a fast learner. They were already controlling and taxing whiskey. They’d have saved more treasure than anyone can imagine it they’d taken that approach to dealing with cocaine. The substance abuse happened, the machinery of justice cranked up to deal with it, the prisons filled, and the taxpayers paid, paid, paid without taking it off the streets. Nor even out of the prisons.
Much the same song, different stanza for the poppy derivative family.
But whiskey and illicit drugs weren’t enough. The only obvious place the government was successful collecting taxes across the board was on tobacco.
But even a lot of whiskey drinkers and cocaine snorters didn’t like smokers. Gradually smokers were eased over there with prostitutes when it came to hammering them out of existence.
I’ve included a lot of different versions of this next song because we’ve needed a lot of jails for the people who get crosswise with moral superiority, barrels full of money, cops, politicians, judges and people who just like to know people they don’t agree with are in jail.
I’ve had to leave prostitutes and prisons for women full of them out of this because nobody cares enough about them to write a song.
If the power to intimidate is derived from a 'legitimate' source the term 'bully' is not applicable.
When I promised a summation of conclusions about bullying behavior based on ponderings and experiences described in those recent other posts, I didn’t grasp what I was setting myself up for. Every direction I took in my thinking led to unsettling places I couldn’t trust without backing up and thinking it through from other directions.
If you’re new to this blog and haven’t read the earlier posts it’s possible you’ll find it easier to follow if you read them first.
Okay, all that prefacing and cowardly side-step-waffling out-of-the-way, here’s what eventually I found myself inescapably glued to as a conclusion:
Bullying is so much a part of life on this planet we don’t even notice it. It’s the glue holding every community together, every species, cross-species, inter-species. It’s the determinant governing community behavior of every description. We just don’t recognize it as bullying unless it falls into a class of activities we happen to disapprove in our matrix of human-cum-societal judgements.
That’s if ‘bullying’ is defined as a behavior, as opposed to being anchored to a larger concept: the source from which the power being exerted is derived. Building a concept bounded by ‘legitimacy’ and protocols does allow what we usually label bullying to be cut out of the herd and isolated in a pen of repudiation. But by doing so we’d be forced to accept an equally unpalatable conclusion:
If the ‘bullying’ behavior subtracted from the bullying definition is legitimate because it derives power from approved sources of authority is an important piece of what holds things together, we’re stuck with it. Lock, stock and banana-peel. As an example, that 5th grade teacher of mine who liked to beat-hell out of me and other kids who weren’t in a ‘protected’ mode, wasn’t bullying us at all. Reason being that his power derived from his position as a designated tool of the power of legitimate authority.
Similarly, all that Jew-baiting that went on in the 3rd Reich and elsewhere in the world. The pervasive use of police forces to beat hell out of union strikers in the late 1800s and early 20th Century. The iron fist used constantly after the Indian wars in the western US to keep tribal members on the REZ and out of the hair of the ‘legitimate’ citizenry far into the 20th Century. The removal of the tribes east of the Mississippi, to designated places west of the Mississippi, even though doing so was a clear violation of previous treaties and agreements. National Guardsmen shooting students at Kent State. Policemen spraying little old ladies with mace.
Almost overnight, previously accepted non-bullying behavior/attitudes can become disgusting examples of bullying.
Sometimes focusing precisely on where the power resides becomes ambiguous.
Other times it’s not ambiguous in fact, but owns the tacit approval of de facto power.
Sometimes it’s bullying when it happens to the the group in question, but non-bullying when they’re doing it.
Sometimes it’s just a matter of being the wrong place at the right time.
And when the ‘legitimate’ source of power tacitly approves it, it’s not bullying.
So when a cop tasers a ten-year-old kid it’s actually business as usual. It might eventually become ‘brutality’ or might be deemed excessive force, but it will never become ‘bullying’.
But it gets more complicated than that. There’s a more subtle side of non-bullying we all see so frequently we take it for granted. For instance, the entire pantheon of political rhetoric today is choreographed to promote an atmosphere of something akin to bullying, character assassination, and denigration of the opposition. But because it’s satisfying to the targeted body of listener/participants, it’s ‘legitimate’.
Bullies constantly strive to give the moral high ground to their attitudes and behavior. Frequently, they succeed, and when they do those attitudes and behaviors cease to be bullying. Probably the best example can be found in the most non-bullied segment of society filling the jails and prisons in the U.S. Prostitutes.
They do openly and honestly what millions of women do every night with less honesty, more covertly, in singles bars and honkytonks. They do it on streets surrounded by ‘legal’, ‘legitimate’ porn houses run by ‘legitimate’ businessmen and patronized by ‘legitimate’ consumers paying to observe the act of fornication.
But prostitutes enjoy the unique, traditional status of being bullied by pimps and johns, brutalized and extorted for sex by cops, exploited by lawyers, and of being the ‘product’ passing through the criminal justice system into the prisons-for-women industry.
They’ve never achieved the sanctity of the moral high-ground to get wives, girl-friends, and ‘respectable’ women objects of scorn and outlawed. They’ve never found a reservoir of support to allow them to see those other classes of women outlawed and thrown into jails.
But they probably would if they could.
Inside they’re almost certainly bullies, too, like cops and schoolteachers, and like you and me.
Old Sol’s finally recovering some dignity, getting some of the southern hemisphere melodrama behind him. He’s spun around about 90 degrees and you can still see some of it lower right near the horizon. But all-in-all he appears to be getting back to the business at hand.
Nobody’s sure what the business at hand is, there’s a nice little solar breeze flowing out of that coronal-hole complex mid-south, leading us the way a hunter leads a goose he’s trying to shoot down. It ought to reach us around the 29th of November. Interesting stuff happening down at the south pole. Remember where you heard it first.
I went up to turn out Kay’s chickens just before daybreak and kicked up a herd of about 20 wild turkeys, which we haven’t seen on this property in a goodly while. But the country’s filled with hunters now, and there was some shooting not-too-far from the property lines yesterday. They’re skittish critters and might have decided this side of the fences is safer, everything else being equal.
I swung into Kerrville yesterday to finally pick up that primer-bulb for the chainsaw and get chain and bar oil. In the AutoZone store I noticed a couple of things I think might actually be worth buying as new tools after studying them a while. One is a ratchet with 1/4 inch drive on one side and 3/8 inch drive on the other. It has a comparatively short handle and a break just where the ratchet handle ends with a swivel on it to allow the handle to be bent allowing access to communistly personal space invaded places.
The other was a set of two box-end wrenches with ratcheting heads covering 8mm, 10mm, 12mm, 13mm, 14mm, 17mm, 18mm and 19mm. If someone had told me yesterday morning I’d buy some new tools if I went to town they’d have lost intellectual standing in my eyes.
But looking at these I’m figuring I’m a pretty smart puppy.
Afterthought: Jeanne found a discarded copy of Chancellorsville, by Edward J. Stackpole and sent it to me for my birthday. I’m up to my elbows in it, finding it particularly interesting because the Stackpole generation of Civil War historians have such different perspectives about so many facets of what went on in that war. He goes into loving detail about Hooker’s history, his behaviors throughout his career, his relationships with Lincoln and his various commanders and particularly with Burnside. I’d never read that scandalous self-aggrandizing report he sent in about Antietam before now. I’d also never encountered Grant’s “I consider Hooker a dangerous man,” appraisal of him.
If I’d been driving my own truck I’d have had Chancellorsville propped up on the steering-wheel reading it on the drive to and from Kerrville, is how seductive I’m finding the tome.
It’s sad, but they have to migrate: there’s no good water in the Rio Grande anymore. It’s all sewage passed downstream from Albuquerque and other towns.
This was almost home to them. Their ancestors arrived with the first cattle drives from Texas in the 1880s. But finally they’ve had enough. Lemming-like they’ve decided as one to return home, Lone Star Ticks to the Lone Star State, same as those invading Confederate Texas humans had to finally stagger and stumble home when things took a turn for the worst..
This far south they’ve just begun to gather; just started to come out from under the grassleaves, the treebark, stragglers still coming out of the brush. The main migration gathering is further north in the Isleta lands, Lost Lunas, and up by Belen.
There they’ve mostly already grouped. They’ve dropped off the rats, cows, deer, dogs and coyotes. The earliest ones are drifting south ahead of the others. They’re the lucky ones. Those got far enough south yesterday to find a stray muskrats along the river and get a little something to eat. The stragglers will find it hard going.
It’s sad, but hopeful: tiny seed ticks huddling close to their mamas at night, the great herd constricting in the cold dark, mama and daddy ticks worrying about the great crossing of the Jornada del Muerto, about the dearth of animals on the Jornada. But also knowing in their tiny network of neurons passing for a brain, that once further south, things will still not be easy……the migration there, the gathering will have already emptied the countryside of hosts, bloodmeals will be a rarity.
When those Isleta and Lost Lunas ticks get as far south as Socorro, the southern ticks will have eaten away everything available. Fishermen will know something’s up by then; they’ll be staying away from the river bottom country sensing some new thing, some change in the atmosphere near the river, hectored by the early gathering; the dogs, the feral cats, the rodents, all driven away from the river bottom by the strange new presence of so many tiny pests.
The animals left will be sucked dry. Probably when the latecomers reach Socorro they’ll have to take their chances in town. Maybe they’ll find pets or townspeople for a last meal before they try to cross the dreaded Jornada del Muerto.
Some of them will drift up onto the freeway to find broken-down motorists with flat tires or dead batteries. Truck drivers stopped to urinate by the road or unsuspecting drunks sleeping with the window opened a crack to release the foul tobacco smoke from inside the car will save a few. Maybe an unlucky hitchhiker sleeping under a bridge or one of the frequent escapees from the prison or jail; some hapless hobo along the railroad, waiting for the next train.
If the motorist doesn’t get bitten by too many at once there’ll be a chance for a jump south by vehicle across the Jornada and avoiding the hard crossing….a quick ride to Cruces, or Truth or Consequences, or El Paso for a small group if they don’t get greedy and just take it easy on the driver. But so many of these younger ticks want everything now.
It might be hard going for them when they get down toward Cruces. That’s where they’ll first meet the newly arrived fire ants. Also, those deep southern ticks will resent their presence, nudging their little fat grey bodies aside as they scramble in a fold of flesh for a foothold and a meal. And ahead, Texas.
The ancestral homeland.
Renewal.
Yes, it’s sad, of the hundreds of millions of ticks starting home; tens of millions won’t make it. There’ll be stained smudges on the freeway where they try to cross, but many run over by recklessly speeding cars.
Thousands clogging the river with their tiny carcasses where the water rose unexpectedly during a crossing, catching many unaware, the long march, the trail of tears, the trek home; so many dead, so many lost, the seed ticks, the mama ticks, the large swollen soft ticks shriveled and wrinkled with hardship….so many friends left back there along the trail, so many loved ones, lost, so many seed ticks lying there in the massive killing fields along the route.
But they’ll do as they can, do as they are able, do as they must, heading south on that lonely migration that long dusty trek, always knowing they won’t be welcomed by their distant kinsmen.
The plethora of ticks in Texas, those hungry, selfish younger generation ticks will push and shove on the hosts, fighting for the best positions in and behind the ears, high on the necks where teeth can’t reach, tiny skirmishes and struggles for position everywhere; on cows, on dogs, on rodents, in the thick hair of women and unreconstructed hippy men in cowboy hats..
As always, those selfish Texas ticks will not agree to share their bounty. They’ll fight despite the sad happiness of the return of their distant relations.
Someone spang found this blog searching for “lowlifes on welfare“.
I’m thinking it must have been Google analyzing this pic I posted describing how a person could get spiffed up to go to town by shaving with sheep shears instead of a razor: Shaving with sheep shears.
Well, heck! I hate to see someone come here and find only half of what he was looking for. I’m just hoping the emphasis was on finding a lowlife instead of finding someone on welfare.
On the other hand, I have a suspicion a person who’d do a search using that particular phrase probably would define the Social Security I paid into five decades and some change and draw now qualifies as welfare. So maybe he went away having gotten his moneys worth. Riding the Bread Line
Brought to mind one of my favorite quotes from the bard. Hamlet’s immortal summing up just about said it all, but when they set it music for the musical ‘Hair’ I’ve always thought it might be considered an improvement in some contexts. Enough irony there so’s a magnet would pick it up.
The fog’s gotten so thick outdoors I can barely see across the front porch.
There’s a heavy fog hanging over the valley this morning and it’s full of deer moving around ghost-like hoping for a shot at some chicken-feed.
Big news among the cats and chickens: There’s a stray cat hanging around here, might be feral, or mightn’t. The cats are fairly upset by it, though after watching it a few days I think it might be a pretty good cat. Haven’t decided what to do about it yet. I can’t count higher than four when it comes to cats, and I’ve already got four firmly in place.
I’d been having a lot of problems with MS EXCEL overloading the RAM on any machine here because of the file size I’m prone to work with.
I emailed Ed Hurst [Do What’s Right]a couple of weeks ago and asked whether he knew of a piece of spreadsheet software that would do most of what EXCEL would do without all the bells and whistles clogging up the works. In a short while he sent me a link to Libra downloads. The download was a lot larger than I could handle on a dialup, so my friend Rich in NC, downloaded it to a CD for me and mailed it to me.
I’m still learning how to use it, but it appears to be able to do what I need doing as well as doing it without demanding a National Defense Department supply of RAM.
Thanks Ed and Rich. I’m obliged to both of you.
The Dell Optiplex 745 I bought for $50 in a thrift store to replace this gradually dying machine I go on line with has turned out to be a hermit. It didn’t come with an internal modem, and it refuses to recognize the external modem I use for this machine. Works okay otherwise, but I wasn’t needing a machine for offline work. I’ve already got one of those I do most of the math and whatnot on, so this one’s just a box sitting there twiddling its un-powered thumbs wondering why it doesn’t have a monitor, keyboard, mouse nor nuthun to allow it a closer look at the Universe.
Worked on the Toyota some yesterday without getting it standing on its hind legs howling to be turned loose on the world. Didn’t get the starter off, but got my hands greasy enough to think I might as well have. Probably more on that today if the weather cooperates.
Maybe something else later if anything happens and I don’t get lost in the fog.
Old Jules
“You ask me why I drive a ’56 souped-up Ford Deluxe with high-compression heads and overdrive?”
Yesterday Gale and Kay were away on another craft fair and I had access to Little Red, so I decided to trip into Harper for the farm/livestock auction.
The pickings were fairly slim because fewer people showed for it than I’ve ever seen at that auction. But things were going dirt cheap as a result.
Cheap, I should have said, by comparison with the usual fare. On a normal third Saturday someone falls in love with this sort of thing and is willing to hock the family jewels to carry it home.
But yesterday even jewels of this sort were going for a couple of bucks:
You’d think the seat and steering wheel on this would be worth someone hauling home at those prices.
A few items did draw bids a bit higher.
This compressor that might work went for around $15.
Plenty of antlers of all description but I wasn’t sure what Gale could use or I’d have stayed around to bid on some of the lots.
The poultry barn only had a few dozen birds, none I found a compelling need for. The livestock weren’t out in force. A few bighorn sheep, four starving longhorns, a few ibex, maybe a wildebeest I didn’t get a look at, and a horse headed for the dogfood factory.
I could have left after one quick swing around except for this:
It was set up for propane and water at some time, but mostly everything except the wiring and hoses were removed. That bottom-middle vent, when opened, looks directly inside through a stripped cabinet that evidently once held a sink.
This rear window would have to be removed to get anything wider than the door inside. It doesn’t open. And I couldn’t help wondering why there had been a deliberate removal of the tail lights. No evidence of a license tag ever having been on it.
Those two vents open directly into the trailer underneath the two seats at the front, which would be a problem on the road in inclement weather.
But even knowing it was going to require a lot of work, beginning with protecting that particle board, it was a possible. This winter would be a lot warmer living in there, and that’s a factor to warp judgement to a degree. And having something that would provide a mobile escape route if I need one, a lot easier than anything I’d come across thus far lent itself to a decision to bid if the competition wasn’t strong.
I figured it might go for $300, which I could cover. I decided I couldn’t go more than $500, and even that would squeeze things a bit uncomfortably. When the bidding came it went to my $475, long pause and someone bid $500. I turned to walk away, then spur of the moment raised my arm for $525. And the bidding stopped.
I’d just bought the damned thing.
I went to the office to pay for it, forked over the money and the young lady was filling out the paperwork when the older lady behind her chimed in. “He told you about not being able to get a trailer title for it didn’t he?”
“Hmmm. No.”
Her face curled into a snarl. “That SOB! He was supposed to announce that before he auctioned it. You can’t take it onto the road. You can’t get a title for the highway.”
This caused me to have to back up and try my hand at rapid thinking. Not my long suite.
After a pause, both of them staring at me, “Do you still want it?”
“Um. I guess not.”
She counted my money back to me, I handed them the keys and went back outdoors to re-organize my life.
Nothing much had changed while I went from one package of my immediate future back to the one I began the day with. The world was still waiting for Godot.
But while I went about the task of getting my mind back unshuffled I watched this dog make a statement about the whole event, laying a line of cable between me and all that potential future I’d just stuck my toe into, then pulled it back out.
Morning, readers. I’m obliged you came by for a visit.
Today marks an event I never expected to see. Old Sol’s about to light things up, shake his head and shrug when he looks down and sees I am here again, come spang around him one more time. Sixty-nine times I’ve gone around him and come to this same spot, tipped my hat and said hi.
Here’s the reason neither Old Sol, nor I, had any reason to expect this:
Back in the late 1970s I had occasion to spend some time looking around nursing homes. I managed to do it enough times and look them over closely enough to convince myself that we Americans haven’t kept our eye on the ball when it comes to living and being alive.
The people in those nursing homes are alive, but they aren’t overjoyed about it, and the life they’re living only has in common with actual life that the bodies and food are warm. The caretakers roll them back and forth or they hobble between television sets, meals, games, then through the long hallways filled with the forever odor of urine, back to their rooms.
I did a lot of thinking about why that happens, those mass coffins for the living. Of one thing I was certain. I didn’t want it to happen to me.
The reason, I decided, people end up in those places is because they live longer than they’d have expected to, wanted to. The reason they lived so long was that they took all kinds of measures to make certain they did, increasing the intensity and focus as the years built up on them.
Every year those elderly reduced the numbers and kinds of risks they took. They watched their diets, quit doing things they enjoyed when they were younger, many barely did anything at all as they reached into the advanced years of retirement besides a golf game or sea cruise.
And they got what they paid for. Lives that endured long past anything a person would call living. They sidestepped and hid and and ran from Death, and he didn’t find them when he was supposed to. So now they sit around strapped into wheel chairs watching rolling television screens paying the price for being too worried about dying when they were still alive.
That’s when I came to an important conclusion about how I wanted to live my own life.
From that time until now one of the rituals I’ve tried to perform around birthday time and New Years Day involves examination of the physical risks I’m taking now, and how I’m going to increase them during the coming year. And how I’m going to stay as far as possible away from do-gooder, busybody medicos and CPR-knowers sticking their noses in my living experience getting me cross-wise with Death.
How I’m going to be out there when Death comes looking for me, in a place where he can find me, doing something I love to do.
“A theory,” Robert Frost observed, “If you hold it hard enough and and long enough gets listed as a creed.” “And people build castles on it,” observes Old Jules.
A September report from CERN giving results of neutrino experiments might rattle some expensive real estate underneath castles so solid we don’t even think of them as ‘theory’. Neutrino bunches, they found, were moving at speeds higher than light speed. 60 billionths of a second faster than light doesn’t sound like much, but it was enough to raise a lot of naysaying and protests the results couldn’t be valid.
The experiments were repeated, this time taking into account the factors that might account for result errors. Now those results are out. Those Communist neutrino SOBs are STILL going faster than light speed.
Lousy news for all manner of certainties of physics stacked precariously atop old Albert’s theory that became a creed. But nobody cares about neutrinos anyway and how fast they go. The smart approach would be to just ignore it and not let it foul the nests of everyone working on all manner of important other theories they figured on becoming creeds.
But if you can’t trust a neutrino, who can you trust? What other Communists and anarchists are skulking and going faster than light and not getting caught at it because it would violate the speed limit and nobody was playing cop?
The world of people who call themselves scientists because they’ve read and memorized what people getting their hands dirty put forward as theory and adopted it as a creed to say back and forth to one another doesn’t like to be banged around this way. Yanking the rug out of things they memorized creates all manner of conversational difficulties. Now when they say something they memorized there’s a chance someone who memorized something different will say that back. Instead of two people reassuring one another how mutually smart they are, how well they both understand everything, you get this pack of mooshy uncertainties and blank looks.
All because of something so small nobody can see it anyway.
Who cares how fast a neutrino goes, anyway? It doesn’t exceed light speed because 10,000 grant applications are based on premises relying on light speed being the speed limit.
First I was trying to chase down anything I could find about that double-helix nebula the Spitzer watched a while before it died. There’s almost nothing about it I can find aside from the little bits and pieces just before Spitzer went south. That helix nebula arrangement perpendicular to the galactic plane almost certainly says something fairly strange about magnetic field behavior in the vicinity of the galactic center. Or at least makes for an interesting postulate. But can a guy find out anything about it? Nada. Nada. Double-helix-nada.
But that got me trying to look at things happening out that way and it was no time at all I stumbled across those 2002 short-lived radio bursts from the neighborhood, GCRTJ1745-3009. http://tinyurl.com/3kd8v. But one of the articles about it mentioned in passing that part of the reason they couldn’t nail the source was all manner of things between here and there bending things every which way.
I happen to be fairly interested in Sagitittarius A, [Sgr A*] and S2. They’re in there pretty close. So I started checking to make sure Sgr A* and S2 weren’t being pushed around and bullied by neighbors getting into their personal space.
“Astronomers have been unable to observe Sgr A* in the optical spectrum because of the effect of 25 magnitudes of extinction between the source and Earth.” Osterbrock, Donald E. and Ferland, Gary J. (2006). Astrophysics of Gaseous Nebulae and Active Galactic Nuclei (2nd ed.). University Science Books. ISBN 1-891389-34-3.
25 bags of trash lying around in the grader-ditch blocking the view. It’s no wonder nobody can see what’s going on in there. What ever happened to the DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS program to clean up all that garbage? Why don’t we have some jailhouse students out there cleaning things up?
But that ain’t all. A regular guy without a lot of fancy instruments and some parallax has another problem. There are a dozen or so regular stars bunched up standing in the way, too. HR this that and the other. TYC so-on-and-so-forth. And all manner of ICRF J174 radio source nonsense.
I’m thinking of writing a State Congressman about this if I can figure out who one is. Or maybe call the sheriff.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 
