Satire piece on the National Sales Tax My third piece on LRC, about the absurdity of Libertarians spending time dreaming up new taxes for statists to impose on us.  ¶ 2:25 PM 1 Comments Links to this post

  Soothing images

... Oolong balancing a pepper, and my favorite, the reclining eggplant of Ashbury's Aubergines.

  ¶ 2:14 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Blind pig finding an acorn ...
I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.


Of course, this was the same man who forced Americans to pay for the interstate highway system and created both NASA and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Thanks for the Suburban Sprawl and for paving the way for the Great Society, Ike. Not!  ¶ 10:57 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  I.R.S = C.R.E.E.P.Y.
Don't ask why, but I was perusing the IRS website and found this totally creepy picture (entitled with the postmodern sneer: 'Family at a Picnic Table') on one of the subpages. Gives me the shivers!  ¶ 3:44 PM 1 Comments Links to this post

  Wrightsville Beach
I'm taking a ten-weekend course from the somewhat oxymoronically-named
Institute of Political Leadership, and several of the weekends are in Wilmington. I had a nice walk at the beach (Wrightsville) with one of my classmates several weekends ago, and got her to snap this picture.  ¶ 12:44 PM 1 Comments Links to this post

  VERY busy Wednesday
Yesterday I took off work (I am - for now - working at a startup biotech company. Very startup. It's fun/strange to be doing benchwork again. I'm amazed at what I remember - or as I put it the other day 'Molecular biology is as easy as falling off a bicycle'). Anyway, I took the day off, starting with Tuesday afternoon.

On my way out of town, I finally broke down and let a lube place put oil in my car because apparently I am too slack to ever get it done by myself. I had them replace the gear oil, too, and go figure, that immediately solved my issue with 5th gear that I've been in high angst about. Then I swung by a total stranger's house (sorry, mom!) to pick up some yellow cannas - which look like a plant so unfussy that even I will likely have success with them. The guy was digging them for fall and giving away the excess. I took them with me to the friend's where I was staying so I could split them with her. On the way to her house I picked up another friend and gave some to him and his wife. I had also made some candles from soy wax for these friends. I've started leaving many candles uncolored - the wax is so beautiful just plain white. We hung out for a few hours talking until, in a bit of a panic, I remembered I still hadn't written a campaign commercial for this weekend's IOPL assignment. Fortunately they helped me hash something half-decent out.

Wednesday morning we got up early and went to Mom's in Wentworth for breakfast. Great place! I love eating breakfast out, and Bill doesn't, so I always try to drag friends out to breakfast when I can. We went to Greensboro, picking up two more people on the way, and headed to the University for a student free speech protest.

Rather than bore you with details of the protest, I'll direct you to Paul Elledge's excellent posts and commentary about the event here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Incidentally, I took those pictures (except the one of me above, of course) and also made the poorly-lettered 'freedom IS free' sign in the last picture.


Afterwards we ate lunch with some of the people from the protest and then (at my instigation) visited Guilford Mill, which is a functioning commercial grist mill. There was an old Scotch miller there who very kindly showed me around including the 'underparts' (the pic is part of the Hurst frame and assembly for moving the large stones) - I felt like a bit of an industrial espionager taking pics after I'd already told him I worked at the mill in Durham :) He ribbed me a bit about working at the Durham mill, which puzzled me until I realised he was teasing me because of my "Libertarian Party" shirt (the mill in Durham is run by the county government) and then I was pretty amused. The difference between this going commercial business and our 'showpiece' mill was pretty interesting - their building was packed with ladies bagging and selling products and full of grain dust and noise - in other words, people were working their butts off (of course the miller did have a prime spot staked out on the porch for when everything was running smoothly:)

After the mill visit we drove to Chapel Hill to hear John Stossel speak at the university there. We were way early (even accounting for the perilous parking situation) so we went to the university gardens, which were closed, and walked in the natural area surrounding them. Nice to walk on a warm fall evening with all the great smells! I felt bad for being in the woods without dogs, so my friends offered to chase some rabbits for me, which was kind. They drew the line at eating deer poop, though ;-)

The Stossel talk was virtually unchanged from an earlier version I heard, but the larger and younger audience made it much more interesting. Of course we kept bumping into other L(l)ibertarians, and I felt like some prowling old lady exchanging names and email addys with a young student who sat next to me and mentioned he, also, was a Libertarian. After the talk we were wandering around the lobby and I ran into several more people I knew, including strangely enough ... the guy who had given me the cannas the day before! I also hooked up with a friend who worked with me when I was at UNC, and she joined some of the libertarian folk for late dinner at Elmo's Diner in Carrboro (which is NOT the same town as Chapel Hill!). I remembered the last time I was in Elmo's was with Michael Badnarik and Jon Airheart in '04. When we got back to my friend's van we found a tire was flat. Fortunately the very strong rain that evening had all fallen during the Stossel talk, so it wasn't too bad (of course it wasn't my car, either :-/ )

Although Chapel Hill is closer to my house than my friend's, I had left my car at her place, so by the time we got back to Wentworth, it was too late to drive home and I crashed there (thanks, B!!). That meant TWO hot showers for me (Bill's still working out the bugs in the solar heating system) and another breakfast at Mom's this morning. I went straight to work so I didn't get to see the dogs until lunch, and still haven't seen Bill.  ¶ 5:42 PM 2 Comments Links to this post

  Bowie Fell to Earth Last night Bill and I watched The Man Who Fell to Earth. Very good, but depressing! Somehow it's almost worse when depressing films are well executed - I couldn't even just fall asleep as I normally do during movies. From comments I've read about the film, a lot of people seem to take away an anti-business message, but (naturally) I was more struck by the anti-state bits - particularly the pitiful university prof being brought back to life by contact with this large company, but then selling it out to the state in the end. The G-men themselves were totally creepy - with the bragging about not being any sort of 'mere' mafia. I guess the state is the uber-mafia! But of course the strongest sense of sorrow came from the alien's desire to return home and his inability to do so. You thought - along with him - that if he worked just a little bit harder, he could get what he wanted so badly. But then you (and he) wondered if he really was willing to do that, especially with all the resistance he met. But then of course sympathy for him was tempered by the reflection that he must have started his journey here by murdering the woman who he tried to sell his ring to :-/

Bill and I sat around after the movie hating the state and all people who want to push other people around, and the miserable dragging weight such people inflict on the world's stock of creativity and energy.

The best comment from Amazon's review page is probably this:

It is a film about failure and disappointment .

You will see an unforgettable film in a great package .
However , be prepared to be depressed - watch it when you're in a good mood , as you can only go south from there.

One quibble - it might be better to watch when already depressed, because why spoil a perfectly good mood by getting bummed out by the seeming inevitability of death and grief into he world? Why now wait for a moment when you're ready to wallow in the world's sorrows? Like the Blues, something like this can trip you 'down so low that that it looks like up' (to paraphrase someone).  ¶ 7:15 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Pictures of the Mill

While I was at the West Point Mill Saturday, a fellow named Erik Perozo took these lovely pictures, and was kind enough to email them to me. Thanks, Erik!

Below is a shot of the Meadows Mill, which is what we usually grind with:



And here are the big horizontal stones:



  ¶ 6:46 PM 0 Comments Links to this post