Georgia Weather

They say if you don't like it........just wait a minute.
I came in a few minutes ago from taking the pooch for his nightly patrol of the concrete driveway.

Wow. As an old redneck, that thought, of a concrete driveway, seems a little odd. For most of my years a dirt drive has been more the norm. Mostly rutted, slide 'em in the ditch, red dirt.

Anywho, scouted the perimeter with the pooch as stated, wearing my "Got Ammo" tee shirt, PJ bottoms and bare foot. How's that for the next to last day in January. Supposed to be 6o or better degrees for the next 5 days with high 30's and 40's at night. Before you know it we'll be sleeping with the windows open.

My Choice for President

What? You thought I can stomach voting for the lessor of many evils again?

The first time I ever voted was for Ronald Regan in 1980, knowing that ultimately he was the choice of the Rockefeller's, the CFR, the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderburgers. David R. laid his arm around Regan's shoulder and said, "Ronnie's my Man".

I've voted every election since, either holding my nose as with McRino, or voting Libertarian.

To tell the truth, I'm a little fed up with the whole process. Super Tuesday I'll have another opportunity to either hold my nose or write in Ann's name.

I think my arms gonna be too sore from recoil to reach high enough to hold my nose again.

They thought they were free

They thought they were free: The Germans, 1933 - 1945,
by Milton Mayer

“You see,” my colleague went on, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ ... In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’



“These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic... the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked... But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C?”

Remind you of anyone we know?

The fact is that the US has been on a slippery slope for decades, and it’s about to go over a cliff.

Do you own Stocks for your retirement?

Maybe in a 401k, a private nest egg you'll use in your dotage, or leave to your wife, or children?

You do own them? Right?

Perhaps we all need to read this.

I once bought a stock. It was in a gold mining company in the US. Highly recommended by a highly recommended adviser. A long term hold, he said.

I took my eye off of it. It was sold to another miner in Canada. No worries. Then it became a diamond mining stock........ in The Ivory Coast. Who had a civil war. Whose diamonds were banned because they were Blood Diamonds. They made a movie out of it.

I still own the stock. Its an energy company. A very small energy company. In a very small country in Africa. It was never worth a lot of money. Now all it is, is a piece of paper, suitable for framing. To hang over the toilet perhaps.

The Candidates

I watched about as much of the SC Republican Debate as I could stand.

About 1 hour and 20 minutes and I was ready to stick the Browning in my mouth.

God Help us. BHO and the usual suspects are certainly not going to do it.

"Kill 'em all", is the hue and cry from all but one and he's suspect.

Don't get me wrong, the worst loss I ever had was the tee shirt from VN that I'd adorned, in bold Majic Marker, with, "Kill them all, let God sort it out". As if God is gonna stop us. The old "free will" thing don'tcha know.

Fred

 , as usual says it much better than I, and he's going to visit The Kasba to boot. 
I'm jealous.
Both of his writing, and his traveling.

Motivation

Tried and failed to embed this new fitness motivational youtube video in a comment at

Yabu's

That should help get a guy in shape.

Out of the 'hood

"People seek retreats for themselves in the country, by the sea, and near the mountains, and you too are especially prone to desire such things. But this is a sign of ignorance, since you have the power to retire within yourself whenever you wish. For nowhere can a person retire more full of peace and free from care than into his own soul."
Marcus Aurelius: Meditations

I've heard it said, "you can take the boy out of the country, but, you can't take the country out of the boy".

I guess that's true. If, like me, you were raised on a working farm, if you one time owned your own farm with cattle, crops, fences, equipment, even with all the headaches and heartaches that may have led you to leave...........there remains within me those memories of running through the field and furrows, woodlands and streams, barefoot, shirtless, not totally heedless, but, careless of the rocks, dirt, briars and critters, cowpies and mud puddles. A scrawny redneck child who could throw a rock at a field lark, and lie down against a Jersey cow, calmly chewing her cud in the sun.

And I yearn and strive to keep those memories and places alive, somewhere, down deep inside. Down where the free part of me lives, down there with the anguish of putting a good cow down because the strain and pressure of delivering her latest calf had stretched and torn the pelvic ligaments and tendons past the point of being able to rise to her feet ever again. Down there with the pleasure of watching a newborn calf flop about while discovering her balance, to respond to the lowing and licking of the mother, taking those first tentative steps, searching, without knowing exactly why, for the warmth of mothers udder and latching onto a teat and having the milk of life giving goodness run wetly down a new throat.
Down there with there with the remembered smells of new mown hay, fresh cut silage and the acrid smell of chlorine cleansers sanitizing the stainless steel milk tank.
Down there where you would watch the dawn come....first a faint grey, later washed out blue, then a bright red half oval rising into the blue of another beautiful May morning.
Down there with the satisfaction of coming in after all the light has gone from the sky, smelly, sweaty, itchy, dirty, from honest toil well done, well completed. Watching your daughters and son play with the dogs and kittens, the calves trying to nurse on finger tentatively offered to soft pink and black noses.

These parts of me cause a searching for those barbed wire fences sagging between locus posts, so old and hard that a staple will only bend instead of driving cleanly into the wood......to hold for another day, year, decade 'til the inexorable spread of subdivisions and supermarkets overrun it all.

So I guess it's no surprise when the kudzu wife wants to move away from the 'hood that I start thinking about more than a half acre lot with a used double wide on it. Almost a year after starting the search, Friday saw us become the proud owners of another mortgage.

In the middle of cattle and chicken country, with quite a few goat farms, a few row crops..... mostly soybeans, or corn maybe, if the farmer is raising cattle, no big grain farms like out West.
Just country folks, most with a job in town, either near or far.

Back....... perhaps to a second childhood, only with more work this time, and less shirtless running, a bit of dignified middle aged strolling perhaps and the shirt stays on, lest the glare in the sun causes jet liners far above to confuse me with destination airfield lights.

Part of the front porch:



View of dining room from kitchen:


Back deck:



The new Kudzu Grotto/man cave:


About a 100 young pecan trees in need of tending, along with Fescue grass and Coastal Bermuda grass, wild blackberry thickets for rabbit homes and cobblers.

I hope I don't wake up from this dream anytime soon.

Sunday Evening going down.

Winding up another quiet day here at the KG.

Not much has transpired. Woke up late (7:45) as usual, but after I started making noise cleaning last nights dishes out of the dishwasher the KW came in made the coffee and cook us up some nice sausage and fried eggs w/toast. God Bless her. I can do an adequate job of it, but, it just tastes better when she does it.

It's been a cloudy, kinda moist day, with more fog later in the afternoon. We just took it a bit easy after showing the new property off to our youngest daughter and grand daughter yesterday. The son, his wife and two children came over after a bit and look things over also. Lee, my grandson is growing like all get out. Almost as tall as I and just under his dads shoe size, he bids to outdo both of us in height. I'm not sure exactly when you realize you're all grown up, but think it may be when you realize that you'll soon be the oldest to carry the name on and soon it will be others turn.

Life goes on, and, I'm glad it does, but wonder if it'll be over before I've seen all I wanna see.

I want to climb to the top of the Temples of the Sun and Moon and look thru the Sun Gate at

Machu Picchu

at sun rise.

What do you want to do, that you haven't done yet?

Is there really any reason to vote this year?

Between now and November of this year there will likely be 10's of Billions of $'s spent in this country.

O'Fuher Obama is said by some to already have almost a billion $'s collected to assure that either he once again buys the top spot or has a tidy little nest egg to apply to his library and foundation which is sure to follow.

Who knows how much will be spent by the other candidates for the presidency, not to think of all the congress critters, one third of the senators and all the state and local wannabe's.

Put that way, it could be that 10's of Billions of $'s is far short of the total. Would a Trillion $'s be closer to the mark. I dunno. Maybe someone will go to the trouble to add it all up some day in the far off dimly seen future.

Is it worth it? Is it? All the efforts expended for literally years......sometimes decades, to claw and fight and struggle to the top of whatever heap you want to ascend to.

Really?

I confess that my juice's get to flowing every two years and especially every four years during the election cycles.

I rant, I rave, I flail about, waving my arms, eyes bulging out, veins in my neck and forehead bulging, red faced, frothing at the mouth, even more so than is usually my demeanor. Just ask any of my family and acquaintances. There is a reason that I'm that weird cousin, brother, in-law, that people keep one eye peeled for at any gathering of over one person. (that being me, myself and I) How my dear Kudzu Wife (KW) of 44 years and 2 days has retained any bit of sanity is, quite frankly, both a mystery and blessing to me.

I do keep the manufacturers and marketers of hypertension medication, anxiety and depression pills, muscle relaxers and massage therapists in business....so there may be some good that comes from all this.

But otherwise?

Sure, we go to the polls, we vote. We feel either satisfaction or despair depending on whether our choice gets the gold medal, or just a ribbon for participation.

To what end?

Does the number of bureaucrats diminish by any appreciable amounts? Sure a few of them may lose their patron or their job, but their is always either another politician or maybe a lobbying group that has need of their services or more likely their little black book of names and contact information.
Have you ever seen an agency or institution eliminated?

The "State" still lives. Managers come and go, either doing good or ill, and mostly nothing, while the bureaucracy, the core of the problem, remains, immovable, inviolate, resistant to change, year after year, cycle after cycle. Get rid of them. You jest. Where would these millions of minions-in-name, rulers......regulators-in fact go. On welfare? To further increase the problems?

This is the real State, hidden beneath the surface of this public theater. It is the vast army of professional bureaucrats and the mandates they carry out. It is the enforcement apparatus that oversees a gargantuan tax code. It is the Federal Register that is too large to print. It is the central bankers, their staffs, their machinery, their mandate to bail out the state no matter what. It is the hundreds and thousands of agencies that purport to control every aspect of life. And would if permitted control even the begating and ending.

We don't vote for this; no election puts any of this at risk. This is because the state itself is not subject to our whim. Imagine if the President and all the elected officials in the entire country and all those who work in their offices decided not to show up to work for a week. What would happen? New bills wouldn't pass. The media wouldn't have politics to cover. There would be a periodic scramble over superficial issues like the debt limit. But otherwise, the state would go on just as before. Nothing fundamental would change.

And it seems that none of the elected officials have the power to do serious damage to this system. This goes for the president, too. They can often influence the way the state grows, but they can't actually fundamentally threaten the apparatus itself. The longer they are in office, the less personal power they realize that they have. The reason is simple. The system is not structured to permit them to dismantle it, even if they wanted to. They are temporary managers of a ruling class, and the members of this class mostly scoff at these people, treating them like actors on a stage that the class itself owns.

Hosanna! Eleven months and our new managers take their seats, the talking heads will tell us once more: "The system worked." Yes, it did work in exactly the way they want it to work. Nothing much will change. If you don't like the results, there is something wrong with you. If you don't like the rules, taxes, human suffering, wars, inflation, intrusions, confiscations and all the rest of the apparatus, you had better run for office, give to another candidate or otherwise throw yourself into the politics full time!

This is not choice. When we go to the grocery, we face a choice of what to buy. Or we can walk out without buying at all, keeping our money instead. Whatever the result, it is really in our hands. The electoral system is different. The store is the state. The products it offers are produced by the state. There is no real choice, only enough shadings of differences to keep us entertained. And we cannot really walk away. There is "no none of the above" and there is no keeping your own money. After all.....look at your money. Does it say, "kdzu's money, or Bill, or Sally's money........or God in Heaven above, even United States Money?

No. You don't have to look, but if you need reminding, pull a fiver out and read what it says at the top.

Do you want the blue pill, or the red one, maybe the red, white and blue one?

Choose carefully, but be warned.........Storm clouds building on the horizon.

Just Imagine

“Where knights and hosts could not be assembled, there was no warfare afield...Ideas of using power for advantage had not yet burgeoned. Disaster and disorder did not occur...People munched their food and disported themselves; they were carefree and contented.”

Pao Ching-yen (4th century A.D.):

This seems a nice fantasy. What recorded history of the peoples of the earth show us is that as a species we are all to eager to be riled up into a mob to go and rain destruction on anyone that we're told is offending us or our allies. Mostly without much in the nature of hard concrete evidence. We didn't bomb Saudi Arabia after 9-11 even though most of the terrorists aboard the planes were Saudi. Instead we sent our drones and bombs into remote patches of Afghanistan which, while there may have been camps there at some point, were mostly populated by a few goatherds and their lovers.

What if they gave a war and nobody showed up? Not to worry, we'll soon have enough drones and remote controlled vehicles to do all the work for us. Strangely we're most often treated only to the number of our causalities.........not the other sides.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a strong believer in "Kill them all, let God sort it out". If you're going into a fight thinking any other way, you've already lost.

You can quote Sun Tzu all you want. All I need to know about winning a war I learned from Timur-i-ling.

Well, well, well

Happy New Year.

First work day of 2012. Actually, Sunday was, but due to a good winter sinus infection I didn't get a lot accomplished.
I'm due at the VA clinic here, just outside the Classic City, to see my primary care Dr.. I was probably supposed to fast since midnight, but, damn that. A little benadryl to attempt to dry my head out, washed down with a little coffee and real, by damn, cream will just have to be accepted.

The Iowa ca-ca's are today and most likely whoever gets the most vote will go next to the NH primary, along with most, if not all, of the other candidates......ad infinitum, until we culled the herd down to the most photogenic and bland personality available.

Just remember that the American public get the leadership they deserve.

Scary.......ain't it.

What if?

with a jaunty tip o' the hat to

Gun Rights 4 us all

The Republic is dead, All hail the Empire

Did you ever notice how so many bad acts of legislation are signed into law on Christmas Eve or New Years Eve.

First the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, now the

National Defense Authorization Act of 2012

signed by Barack Hussain O'Facist Obama on Saturday.

Of course he claims that although he has the power to detain American CITIZENS indefinitely, without either charges or trial,.....of course

Hheeeeee would never use it.

He being too noble, honest and true believer in the Constitution that he is.

Of course he is aided and abetted by his fellow dictators-in-training now serving in the congress.

For an idea of just how committed they are to the Oaths of Office they swore to, consider that of the Senate the vote was 93 for vs. 7 against, and in the House the vote was 229 for vs. 186 against, and 17 voting either present/or not voting.

My Congressman voted against, but, our two staunch Conservative senators voted for.

The RCOB over my eyes threatens to blind me to any calls for restraint. Suffice it to say that my money and time will be committed to removing them from office. Bastids!!

Many church signs around the community lately asking, " what will we be praying for in the coming year?

Gonna give this some serious thought.