Disrecognized, discounted

 Welfare-police state  No Responses »
Sep 092007
 

Logging truck on Nate Shaw’s route

The above photo was taken on a bike ride in west-central Alabama in April 2006. Among other things, I wanted to see the places that had been described in All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw. Nate Shaw is a pseudonym, and most of the places named in the book were pseudonyms, but this is one of the very real places he had talked about.

Nate was a sharecropper who made a good bit of extra money for himself by hauling lumber with his mule team. This is one of the roads on which he hauled lumber. The area was pretty much logged out, but trees have grown back and now there is a lumber industry again. I encountered these logging trucks all the time when I was riding there.

Nate did pretty well for himself, but had some severe obstacles to overcome. In the end he accepted the help of the Communist Party in protecting his private property rights, and ended up going to prison for using a gun to defend his property. (The same day I took the above photo, I took photos of the courthouse building where the trial was held — at least I assume it isn’t a newer courthouse. A couple of days earlier I got photos of the prison where he did most of his time.)

What has provoked me to post this now is John Edwards statement about requiring people to get physical checkups under his plan. I’ve run into people who defend that. “What about mandatory seat belt laws?” they ask, as if back at the time those laws were introduced we didn’t object, saying it would lead to nannyism like this.

I don’t think these people understand how odious this is. Maybe it would help to see how Nate Shaw reacted to that kind of behavior from a Mr. Curtis, one of his least favorite landlords.

This is from page 109 in my paperback copy of the book:

Mr. Ames was a little better man than Mr. Curtis, and not sayin that altogether because he put me on better land–it weren’t much better. I didn’t just look at one angle or one point in the difference. I looked at it this way: Mr. Ames put me on a little better land than Mr. Curtis, but I had to go by his orders, too. Well, that cut my britches; he didn’t let me branch out like I wanted to. But I got along well with him. He never did cripple my cow and he never stood over me, tell me how to drive his mule of a Sunday–Mr. Curtis done that. When I’d go and get that plow mule to hitch him to the buggy that I bought from his brother-in-law, go where I wanted to, he’d tell me–well, I know that no man wants his stuff mistreated, but I never did treat his mules wrong; he had no cause to get at me about it. And I never was pleased to mistreat my mules after I got able to buy my own mules. Mr. Curtis laid his larceny to me: “Nate, when you get to where you goin, you’ll be thar. Give the mule his time, give the mule his time.”

Didn’t want me to drive him out of a slow gait. His way of speakin was “thar”; he didn’t say “be there,” he’d say, “be thar.” That was his mule, it weren’t mine, but he just disrecognized me, considered me not to know nothin. Know or not know I had to go by his orders to please him. He just considered me not to know nothin so he would have to tell me.

It’s stamped in me, in my mind, the way I been treated, the way I have seed other colored people treated–couldn’t never go by what you think or say, had to come up to the white man’s orders. “You aint got sense enough to know this, you aint got sense enough to know that, you aint got sense enough to know nothin–just let me tell you how to do what I want you to do.” Well, that’s disrecognizin me, and then he slippin around to see that I doin like he say do, and if I don’t he don’t think it’s on account of I got my own way of doin, but he calls it ignorant and disobeyin his orders. Just disrecognized, discounted in every walk of life. “Just do what I say, like I tell you. Don’t boot me.” Showin me plain he aint got no confidence in me. That’s the way they worked it, and there’s niggers in this country believed that shit.

Edited for niceness, 10-Sep-2007

Nationalized health care = compulsion

 Health care reform, Welfare-police state  No Responses »
Sep 042007
 

I’ve been saying for several years that the greatest current threat to our civil liberties is nationalized health care.   John Edwards was recently kind enough to show how it works:

Edwards backs mandatory preventative care: 

It requires that everybody be covered. It requires that everybody get preventive care,” he told a crowd sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Cedar County Courthouse. “If you are going to be in the system, you can’t choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK. …

Edwards said his mandatory health care plan would cover preventive, chronic and long-term health care. The plan would include mental health care as well as dental and vision coverage for all Americans.

Of course, this talk about preventative care is what also gave us HMOs, brought to us by the same people who are now pushing a single-payer HMO on a national scale.

And mental health care was a formidable weapon against political dissidents in the old Soviet empire.

Let’s have separation of Health Care and State for the very same reason we have separation of Church and State.

Stop it from happening again

 Russia  No Responses »
Sep 042007
 

Interesting closing paragraph to a WSJ article about the new Museum of the Soviet Occupation in Georgia:

The story goes that Vladimir Putin considered the display highly provocative and asked President Saakashvili why Georgia would do such a thing. After all, the most prominent butchers were themselves Georgian, such as Stalin and Beria. Mr. Saakashvili responded that the Russians were free to open a museum about how Georgia had oppressed them. The Georgian no doubt knew well that such an exhibition would offend his menacing northern neighbor with a former KGB officer at its helm, but he went ahead anyway. Perhaps he calculated that it was the best way to stop any of it from happening again.

Which reminds me, well over a year ago I used to see some interesting movies on RTR Planeta about the bad old days of Stalin and his executions. I seldom get to watch that station on the internet anymore, but sometimes I do. I wonder if Putin still allows that kind of thing to be shown any more.

It’s not going to make you better

 Legislative process  No Responses »
Sep 022007
 

Quote from Peggy Noonan in the WSJ: “You’d better be pretty good going in, because it’s not going to make you better.”

She’s talking about politicians going into politics.

I’ve often said that politicians are generally less corrupt than their constituents. What often provokes me to say that is seeing what people ask their congresspersons to do for them — things that a congressperson would have no business doing in a good government.

Peggy Noonan is referring to something a little different — the way politicians both left and right need to change to deal with the Iraq war.

A time for grace

America needs unity in dealing with Iraq. That means the president must lead.

Friday, August 31, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

What will be needed this autumn is a new bipartisan forbearance, a kind of patriotic grace. This is a great deal to hope for. The president should ask for it, and show it.

Normally I’m against bipartisanship, but in this case I think Ms Noonan is right.

Back to the village

 Social controls  No Responses »
Aug 282007
 

The WSJ tells about controversy in Japan over new trash rules:

Talking Trash: Tokyo residents feud over controversial garbage rules

It’s about how Tokyo will run out of landfill space in 30 years. The city is trying to extend that time by changing the rules about what trash can be incinerated in the city incinerators. Rules are changing for residents about how they should sort their trash. For example, things such as styrofoam food containers were in the past supposed to go in the bags destined for the landfill; now residents are increasingly encouraged to put them in the bags to be incinerated.

The above headline misses the really interesting point though. Of course there is controversy over this. There are environmental issues, and there is the fact that old customs die hard. But what was interesting to me was the method of social control:

There are no fines to punish offenders. That’s because Tokyo can rely on neighbors’ ire to keep everyone in check. Sanitation workers can refuse to collect garbage that is improperly separated or taken out on the wrong day or left in the wrong place. This adds to the shame of the culprit, since neighbors will see that the bag wasn’t collected that day.

According to Ryouichi Sawachi, a 62-year-old maintenance man in charge of trash at a Tokyo apartment complex, a messy communal area sends a message that residents don’t obey the rules, which can lead to crime and property devaluation. “A person’s morality is really tested when it comes to disposal of trash,” Mr. Sawachi says.

Punishment takes various forms. When 27-year-old apparel maker Asami Sakurai moved to Tokyo from Yokohama in 2004, she didn’t know which days to take out her burnable and nonburnable trash. So a neighbor showed her, laying a bag full of banana peels, toilet-paper rolls and soggy rice cakes out neatly…on Ms. Sakurai’s front doorstep.

This is different. Traditionally people have left small towns and villages to go to the city to get away from the neighbors. Where it takes a village to raise a child, the adult children want to go someplace where they don’t have the whole village playing parent. So they go off to the city at the first opportunity.

But here, one of the most densely crowded cities in the world is a place where the neighbors are expected to mind each other’s business. Have the rules about village vs city always been different in Japan than in the west? Or is it more the case that when population density increases beyond a certain point, the city needs to become a village again?

Bitter and harsh coffee

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Aug 212007
 

Chemists Find What Makes Coffee Bitter says this Yahoo article about a LiveScience article, never mind that I can’t seem to find the original at livescience.com.

“Roasting is the key factor driving bitter taste in coffee beans. So the stronger you roast the coffee, the more harsh it tends to get,” Hofmann said. He added that prolonged roasting leads to the formation of the most intense bitter compounds found in dark roasts.

Oh, yeah?  These people seem to be confusing harsh with bitter.ÂThey are not the same thing, at least not in coffee. I found an actual livescience article from two years ago that gets that part right:

Bitterness comes from skimping on grounds when you brew, brewing for too long, and brewing in a pot or machine with residual grounds left from hours, days or weeks ago.

The person who wrote that knew what he was talking about.  Those are exactly the factors that make coffee bitter.  And bitter is bad.
But harshness is something else entirely. Starbucks coffee tends to be harsh.   Their school of coffee-thought has been labeled the “Burnt is better” school.  Some people like that kind of harshness.   I don’t myself, but I can understand, sort of.

The yahoo article has it partly right.  You get harshness from roasting too much.  But that’s not the same as bitter.

I wonder if that research was done by a non-coffee drinker.  I say never trust a non-coffee drinker to make your coffee.  And maybe you shouldn’t let a non-coffee drinker do coffee-taste research, either.

Bike paths and falling bridges

 Legislative process  1 Response »
Aug 202007
 

Bike path near Homer, Michigan

Is it true that bike paths like the one in this photo are responsible for bridges falling into the Mississippi River?

I encountered this one on a July 2005 bike ride to Homer, Michigan. I’ve been there since, and still haven’t seen any good reason for that particular bike path to exist. The money would have been better spent on the road alongside, which would have made conditions better for both cars and bicycles.

A Wall Street Journal editorial, “Of Bridges and Taxes,” tells how tax money for highways in Minnesota was spent on many things other than what taxpayers probably thought they were buying. One of these was bike paths.

I’m all for things we can do to encourage greater use of bicycles for transportation, but bike paths are not usually the way to do it. Sometimes bike paths do accomplish that purpose, but often the money spent on bike paths is a sop to interest groups, and NOT a way of fostering alternative means of transportation. Those paths are usually for recreation, not transportation. They don’t usually take me where I want to go. For that I need roads, often the same roads that cars use.

As for the falling bridges, the WSJ article contains this sentence of the day: “Minnesotans already pay twice as much in taxes per capita than residents in New Hampshire and Texas–states that haven’t had a major bridge collapse.”

Diversity and distrust

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Aug 162007
 

From Daniel Henninger at the WSJ:

…Now comes word that diversity as an ideology may be dead, or not worth saving. Robert Putnam, the Harvard don who in the controversial bestseller “Bowling Alone” announced the decline of communal-mindedness amid the rise of home-alone couch potatoes, has completed a mammoth study of the effects of ethnic diversity on communities. His researchers did 30,000 interviews in 41 U.S. communities. Short version: People in ethnically diverse settings don’t want to have much of anything to do with each other. “Social capital” erodes. Diversity has a downside….

Give me a break! you scream. What about New York City or L.A.? From the time of Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” through “Peyton Place” and beyond, people have fled the flat-lined, gossip-driven homogeneity of small American “communities” for the welcome anonymity of big-city apartment building–so long as your name wasn’t Kitty Genovese, the famous New York woman who bled to death crying for help….

The diversity ideologues deserve whatever ill tidings they get. They’re the ones who weren’t willing to persuade the public of diversity’s merits, preferring to turn “diversity” into a political and legal hammer to compel compliance. The conversions were forced conversions. As always, with politics comes pushback. And it never stops.

The harvest of bitter fruit from the diversity wars begun three decades ago across campuses, corporations and newsrooms has made the immigration debate significantly worse. Diversity’s advocates gave short shrift to assimilation, indeed arguing that assimilation into the American mainstream was oppressive and coercive. So they demoted assimilation and elevated “differences.” Then they took the nation to court. Little wonder the immigration debate is riven with distrust….

Like he said, there’s lots here to argue about. But I think I’ll want to find that original article and see if I can stand to read it.

Clintons in my dreams

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Aug 122007
 

We’re just now finishing up breakfast at a campground. I was telling my wife how I dreamt last night that I introduced the new Associate Justice of the Supreme Court to the Clintons. He was someone I had met earlier in the dream, very young, and presumably conservative, though I can’t say who he resembled. My wife and I were sitting at a table in a church basement-like setting when the Clintons came over and sat down across from us. I think there was some conversation, though I’ve already forgotten that part of the dream. Then the young Judge came over to the table, and I figured the proper thing would be to introduce him to the Clintons. They were speechless at seeing this young Judge, and looked at each other, but Bill soon recovered and gave him some of his “You know, we have to work together, blah, blah, blah.”

I think the stimulus for this encounter was an old article of Peggy Noonan’s that Opinion Journal.com had mentioned a day or so ago:

“Peggy Noonan http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=85000464 more or less predicted 9/11 (and Bill Clinton’s evasion of responsibility for it) in a Jan. 19, 2001, column, and we don’t remember being particularly perturbed as we edited it.”

The part of Noonan’s article that got me to thinking was this:

That the speech was lacking in grace or largeness goes without saying, that it offered seemingly wise and even avuncular words with a subtext of political aggression and competitiveness was in its way perfect. That is what Mr. Clinton’s career has been, aggression offered as sympathy.

I used to say similar things back in those days, but not in such fine words as Ms Noonan used.

It had been quite a few years since I met any presidential persons in my dreams, and this was the first for a Supreme Court Justice. And it’s nice sitting at the campground picnic table to use the internet, but the sun is coming up to make my screen hard to read, and it’s time to be off on a bike ride.

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