Thought For The Day

let's see if I can get auto-post to work...

Road Trip

Another long, and long overdue, vacation. 

Work has been especially grim the past week, due in no small part to teenagers who shouldn't be drinking at all, combining that stupidity with driving, and knocking people off in job lots hereabouts.

We could live a long and happy life not listening to devastated families wailing with grief they feel down to their bones, over jackassically slaughtered loved ones cut down in the prime of life.

So we're getting the hell out of Dodge for some well-earned anything-but-trauma time. Coastal Califrutopia is beautiful this time of year, and we may even get as far north as San Franshitsco, while bumming along taking in the highlights of the central coast. There is also an excuse to do some continued book research during our travels.

There may not even be a Sunday Music post this week (which hasn't happened since the last computer crashed into a smoking hole in the ground some years back), because we may not be anywhere near internet access for a week or more.

Our best wishes to everyone, including a number of correspondent fellow bloggers, currently under God's thumb in central Florida.

By all means, entertain yourselves with the Usual Suspects' Political Sh*tshow, and the bloggers over on the right, while you prepare for sporky times over the next couple of months.

We are temporarily closing comments in our absence, and only during our absence, purely out of a desire to avoid having to wade through any amount of spam and/or bile upon our return. They will re-open immediately upon our return to our humble digs.

Administrivia Note: 208Silver Miner (who evidently couldn't comprehend how low a priority his squabbles have on our life, nor the meaning of "wait your turn") has apparently elected to spank himself on our behalf. Having skipped most of the classes on hydraulics, while learning just enough to activate his internal Dunning-Kruger Switch like a rat in a crack cocaine experiment, he evidently proposes to show how little he learned of logic too, by attempting to prove a negative, and showing the world what he cannot accomplish, as if that somehow disproves what others can. While we invite him to ponder the phrase "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence", we yet wish him well, and hope he doesn't leave too purple a mark when he pulls his own pants down on the internet for your entertainment. He would be better advised to hope and pray we fail when we attend to his comeuppance, and realizes that him failing only proves his own incompetence, without settling anything. But we never interfere when our opponent is making a colossal blunder.

Meanwhile, we have a bag to pack, and a gas tank to fill. If we had our druthers, we'd be signing on as a burglar with a wizard and a company of dwarves, but this will have to do in the meantime.

Sunday Music: Windy

 

#1 hit for The Association in 1967, since used in about a million places, from commercials to elevator muzak. It sat there on top of the charts for the entire month of July, the peak of "The Summer Of Love", and the Beatles were nowhere to be seen until the end of the month, when "All You Need Is Love" finally showed up at #71.

Douchebags Gonna Douchebag

 h/t TL Davis

Plus Ca Change

Sunday Music: Sunday Girl

 

Beautiful and whimsical anything-but-new-wave retro-pop confection from 1979 by way of the 1960s, courtesy of Blondie, released as follow-up to their Heart Of Glass #1 single. This one hit #1 in several countries, but didn't chart in the U.S. But should have.

Government Is The Problem. As Usual.

 h/t CW

Reference please the above pic from CW's daily timewaster site.

Yes, we're sure it's an idyllic place, with gorgeous views, and tucked right in amidst Nature on all sides. Which is rather exactly the problem with it. If we were to name such a homestead, on the order of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, we would name this architectural act of insanity contrary to all common sense Kindling. Calling it Kingsford might be a wee bit too on-the-nose.

My absolutely curmudgeonly response:

"In a canyon, with a wood shake roof. And dead leaves all over it. Might as well just stack full gas cans against the outside walls. And violating just about every other survivability measure in a wildfire zone.

And some fall, the tearful owner will be "Shocked! Shocked, I say..." that's it's about to become a monument to human stupidity during a major brushfire.

This is why some areas should be declared unbuildable, all fire protection withdrawn completely, home insurance legally denied in perpetuity with the full backing of the state, and the entire area redlined from ever receiving a penny of federal disaster relief.

If you can absorb the cost to rebuild it every ten or twenty years out of your own pocket when it inevitably burns to the ground, ROWYBS.

Otherwise, once it burns down and the owner can't eat the cost to put it back, rebuilding permits are denied forever, and it reverts to permanent wild habitat by eminent domain, and the owner given $1/acre.

Now show some rich stupid jackhole's house perched over the waves and built beyond the mean high tide line that gets surf-pummeled by storms every generation or so."

And then, inevitably, Anonymous Yahoo (funny how they're almost always Anonymous, i'n'it?) pipes up:

"But also we are totally opposed to government intervention in people's private lives! Do we know that this property is in a location where brushfires are common? Seems like you want to confiscate these people's property based on a picture. But again, small government and "don't tread on me" or something"

 

To which load of halt-witted codswallop we reply:

"1) "Totally opposed"? No. Never said any such thing. You conflate "minimal" with "anarchy" at risk to your own argument, with a heaping helping of reductio ad absurdum. Best wishes with that approach.

2) Those are oak trees, growing in a canyon. Brushfire city. Period.

3) I don't want the property confiscated until Reality makes it obvious it never should have been built upon to begin with.

It was jackassical government greed that let some mid-century idiot build there in the first place, to maximize the county's taxable property value. Which then requires more brush crews to save it, and more roads to maintain to get to it.And then more disaster funds when it repeatedly gets burned up.

Government created this problem.

Smaller government would start by ripping out the paved road that gets there, closing the nearest fire stations, condemning the land, and turning it into permanent natural habitat. But that breaks five or ten government rice bowls, and gets entitled idiots all riled up. 

I've only seen this about 5M times in my lifetime in this state.

If some idiot wants to build his own private road, or make do by getting supplies in and out by pack mule, and carries the liability for such an idiotic house out of his own pocket, that should be the only way that place gets built.

Dollars to donuts the owner also gets all bent up when coyotes eat his pets, and mountain lions start eyeing his kids, and screams to Uncle Government to "do something". Then pisses and moans when the local fire department tells him that with trees and brush 20' from the house, they've already written it off when a fire breaks out. And he's likely the first in line at the trough when they declare a "disaster" (as opposed to "natural causes x human stupidity", which is also the plot recipe for every episode of Rescue 9-1-1, USCG: Cape Disappointment, and 57 other reality-based shows) once his house is a charred chimney surrounded by ashes.

It was big government that started such nonsense, A to Z, in the first place. Like people along the Mississippi found out a few years back, some places shouldn't have houses on them, ever, unless there's an annual stupidity tax on the property equal to 100% of its assessed value.

If government withdraws all services to such parcels save tax assessments, and cancels utility easements, which currently start a goodly number of brushfires up there in competition with lightning (you could look it up) the problem self-corrects within years, if not months, with no further effort nor public expenditure.

That's minimal government.

Your ball.

For a vivid exemplar of this sort of stupidity right now, google "Rancho Palos Verdes landslide zone", and read up about the latest batch of entitled idiots with more money than common sense, currently pissing, moaning, and harrumphing that gravity has annoyingly reasserted itself in their multi-million-dollar cliffside neighborhood, and demanding that government somehow stop it, and/or recompense them from public funds for their idiotic residential choices.

Boo frickin' hoo."

QED, podex.

Doubtless we'll be seeing further examples from FL and the Gulf Coast in a day or three as well, crying about "How dare Nature impinge upon our desire to build substandard houses in stupid places! Government should pay us for being that dumb!" in 3, 2...

We apologize to CW for buggering up his site with the second entry, or having to. Should he choose to zap all of the above back and forth into oblivion, we wouldn't blame him. His house, his choices. Which is why we moved it here, in case he does exactly that.

The annoyance at idiots who build such houses where they don't belong, purely out of presumption on the public's funds and good wishes, deserves calling out, which is why we have done so.

Ditto the air-headed thoughtlessness of Anonymous Yahoo's asinine riposte. But the lack of critical thinking which underpins such opinions bespeaks that the left end of the IQ bell curve continues to be over-represented both in real life, and on the internet. As always.

As my father pointed out more than once, "You could get rid of all the horses in the world, but you'd still never run out of horses' asses."

UPDATE: And here's the latest edition of The Stupid People's Gravy Train

Cultural Curios: The Ass-Dollar

ass-dollar (n.) 1. Any piece of currency received in change so worn out and raggedy that the recipient rightfully concludes was almost certainly stored up some prior owner's tailpipe at some point in time. e.g. "I got two ass-dollars in change at the drive-thru."

Having received far too many exemplars of the type, we herewith officially coin the term. Use it widely with our sincerest benedictions. They have apparently overrun the circulating bills to the point that the Treasury Department no longer finds it convenient to remove them from circulation.

Just one more indicator of the true state of civilization, and its continued slippage towards mud-hut Turd World status.

Don't even bring up the actual value of same over time.