Car of Four Doors, or...

 ...it could only happen to me. Folks, I'm a shade tree mechanic. Didn't have much choice in the matter, being a poor boy it was learn to mechanic or walk. Just kind of a cultural fact of life where I come from. I've argued with some stubborn problems over the last fifty some years, but what the little Jeep threw at me over the last couple of weeks had me scratching my head and wondering if I'd somehow gotten on the bad side of the Witch of Wrench. You know the Witch of Wrench, she goes to the same church as the infamous Murphy whose name is tagged to the laws of misfortune.

First, the rack and pinion spit out a seal. Check the oil, top the gas, and fill 'er up with power steering fluid. Drat and damn. Big parts on the bottom of the car. Not cheap parts on the bottom of the car. But, a straight forward job. New rack and pinion, new power steering pump (the old one took some serious abuse, kind of sounded like four or five hyperactive kids with castanets) so a new one of those, and what the whale, those tie rod ends had been under there a long time and they had to come off anyway so why not, change them before they failed. All well and good. 

And then the real fun started. Hydraulics and hoses and O rings and lions and tigers and bears and oh my why is it just pouring out oil and all the O rings keep coming back out looking like a tiny bagel sliced for breakfast? Why is it I torque the fitting to factory spec and by the time I get back to it it's finger loose in the hole? (this was where I began to seriously suspect the Witch of Wrench in the game). Well, O rings don't last very long at all when there's a tiny crack in the steel right under where they go, a couple of thousand psi of oil pressure through a tiny crack pretty well cuts like a razor knife, and when it's a re-manufactured pump and the last guy who worked on it over tightened the fitting to the point the threads were deformed they just don't tend to stay tight.  Three freakin' gallons of power steering fluid later all the parts and pieces fell into place: a new hose you install by popping off the grill and pulling out the headlight of all things and courtesy of O'Rielly AutoParts most excellent warranty policy another pump and YEA! power steering with no leaks and no noise. 

Of course, when you mess with the rack and pinion you're messing with the steering column, that metal rod that begins at the steering wheel and dives down to the bottom of the car. You have to kind of wiggle it to get it off the old rack and onto the new one, and of course the other end of that rod runs through a couple of switches and what nots, and you guessed it: wiggling the rod pissed off the doodaddy that hooks all the switches on the steering wheel to the rest of the wiring. It just sort of went kablooey. No horn, no cruise control, and a lovely warning light with chime advertising the out of commission airbag. 

Folks, they are VERY proud of that little widget (officially called the "clock spring connector") being as how it is part of the airbag circuit and all. Oh, joy. Off with the steering wheel, swap out the the spinny thing. Not a bad job, certainly not worth the six hundred bucks the dealerships commonly quote. Eh, go figure. Standard is to double the price if Suzy the Safety Slut had any dealings in the matter.  They do go bad and that one lasted eighteen years. Ok, coincidence maybe. All of these things were, are, just what you get into when you keep an old one running. But... the last one was a true one in ten million, you couldn't make it do that again if you tried.  

Some months ago the window lift on a back door blew out. You know that awful grinding sound and the window quits moving and if you're lucky it doesn't try and fall into the door where you have to duck tape it up until you've got the time to mess with it. A pretty common problem, one I've dealt with more than once. What was not common was when the little motor finished it's death agony the door was jammed solid shut. No getting it open at all. Well, being as how I was fighting with the machinations of machinery anyway I decided I was tired of having a three door Jeep and tore into the situation to see what had happened.   

Luck was with me, on my model you can get the inner panel off the door with the door closed. Didn't even break any plastic. Belly down across the back seat I stared at the situation for a good hour, and in the end decided my repertoire of creative obscenities, educated and evolved as it is by five decades of fixing things, just could not quite describe what I was looking at.  The drive cable that goes from the motor to the little screw jack that holds the window had broken off the screw jack leaving behind a good six, eight inches of casing. Of course, without the casing the cable is just on very long set of threads flopping around inside the door. It fell down to the back of the door, caught traction on the door latch and promptly tied itself in a knot around the latch while screwing itself  INTO the latch mechanism by way of the child safety lock slot! Solid steel knot holding the door firmly closed with maybe one inch of room to work. Normally I don't hold with using brute force, but... they'd left me no option. It took an angle grinder, two cold chisels and two pair of vise grips to resolve the issue and get the door to open. And the truly amazing thing?  Once open, and a couple of tiny bends tapped back close to straight? The damn door latch works just fine right down to the power lock solenoid. 

I guess I should take that for a good omen and take it on down the road. For all of our misadventures in maintenance the little Jeep has been a truly noble soldier, and he has one MASSIVE advantage: he's been paid off for fifteen years now.

Capitalism and the Fate of Kings

===originally published 11/2012===

Allow me to illuminate for you the failure point of Capitalism. I am convinced that when Capitalism's greatest advocate Ayn Rand realized this conundrum it destroyed even her, she self destructed in drink and bitterness and despair. A shame, really, she came closer to getting it right than any other, she almost had it, and the final point to be resolved is not at all impossible. It simply requires thinking a bit outside tradition for society to implement a correction that keeps all of capitalism's benefits and dissolves the problem.

Consider if you will that ultimately a society lives or dies on the degree of ethics in the morality practiced within that society. I give you that from an ethical perspective these two events are identical: the year is 1795 and a man goes to Savannah to buy himself a slave to work his farm; and, the year is 2005 when his direct descendent goes to his stock broker to buy 1/10,000th of a ten thousand man corporation. What both men have purchased is the surplus productivity of another human, the ultimately unethical ownership of another man's accomplishments. Both men have imbibed exactly the same poison. The mechanism of the poison they imbibed is the covert evil of slavery, the evil that has in fact been responsible for destroying every slave holding society known to history.

But please note from history, and mark this point well: the society does not fail and fall because it is the slave who becomes weaker, degenerate and debauched, it is the masters who suffer those reductions generation after generation until inevitably the society collapses. Most who hear this argument miss my point, in compassion they focus on the total and complete injustice endured by the slaves even though it is not the slave I'm speaking of. The slave is a man defrauded, his life of no value, his existence reduced to a commodity somewhere between cattle and horsepower. When considering a society as a integral unit any slaves (be it bondage by force of arms or the golden handcuffs of modern capitalism) are of no consequence in and of themselves, they're slaves, they don't decide anything of consequence. A fact of life. Not an ethical state of affairs, but a fact.

No, what I am speaking of is the hidden evil of slavery whose existence is universally denied, the multi-generational miscarriage of the logic upon which capitalism is founded. This evil impacts not on the slave but on the master side of the equation, the masters who do decide things of consequence. This evil is intimated, implied, in the classic saying "poor little rich kid."

But what happens when the poor little rich kid grows up to inherit command of something larger than he is? What happens when the poor little rich kid is called on to make judgments impacting many lives, many fortunes, judgment calls beyond the temper of his experience, beyond the depth of his wisdom? What of the poor little rich kids children? What measure of human will they be, compared to the parents or grandparents whose proven competence compelled such potentials for evil onto his life and the life of his descendents? The fortunes of the wealthy include their slaves, be those slaves literal or the slave-by-proxy of common stock, and those fortunes are inherited even as were the crowns of kingdoms. What kind of track record do the Royals have at maintaining true greatness to sit the throne of a land? One king in three? One in five?

Those who put the poor little rich kid in this unforgiving situation were proven successful and competent people, able to acquire on their own merits matched against all others competing, able to endure the covert evil of slavery without their personality, their ethics and their judgment degrading and failing beneath the burden. They after all were formed, evolved, as a great people before the evil entered their life. Their competence provided to the common man a better life than he could have had without them, their wealth was earned and deserved in the surpluses it provided to all. The grandfather is the man Ayn Rand wrote of, the Hank Rearden's and the Eli Wyatt's. But when the building of the land is a century deep in history it is not the greats who built it who are running it, it is their children and grandchildren where entropy takes its' toll.

I think this is what Ayn Rand realized, that the laws of inheritance would subject Capitalism to the same fate as plagued the kingdoms of old, that soon enough the laws of inheritance and human nature would cause Capitalism, now empowered with the wealth of the world, to deliver humanity back into the same state it had known in the days of the feudal kingdoms. She saw how the example the grandchildren would portray to those not born to such wealth and power would play out, how it would effect the perspective held by the common man: that wealth is not a matter of personal competence (since anyone with eyes and a mind would be able to see the grandchild wasn't that much of a much, just born lucky), but rather that wealth is to own a larger share of your fellow man's abilities than the next guy. She saw how should that attitude became the opinion of the majority the result would be that competence would no longer be measured in terms of productivity and wisdom but rather by parasitic prowess violently demanding to be provided with slaves by whatever name they might be known, exactly as it had been in the days when ignorant brutes ruled by the edge of a sword rather than by wisdom.

But the cure for this is not so very hard, not really. It is actually rather simple, and it draws from another old and well known folk saying, to wit "A fool and his money are soon parted." The solution is to change the laws of inheritance to where the child or the grandchild will inherit the cash value of any stock on the day it's owner passes away, but is prohibited from inheriting the stock itself or reinvesting the cash back into the same industry for one full generation. Let the money test the man, make it law that by court order and under court supervision the inheritor and only the inheritor may invest the inheritance into any other industry of their choosing, but not pass control of the money to a professional investment firm or banker to be handled for them. Let the money test the man.

If they have built themselves into the same caliber human as the source of the money the result will be that the money will be invested with good judgment into several diverse industries that it might continue to grow where opportunity presents, they will continue to prosper as will the health of the economy. But if they are weak or foolish, if they allow themselves to be swayed and manipulated by the predatory and the parasitic then they will be the only ones impacted by their poor judgment, their poor judgment will not have the ability to impact the successful industries from which the wealth was acquired, the most basic properties and characteristics of the parasitic will cause that money to evaporate back into the society by other channels. Likely less savory channels, likely causing damage to the lives it passes through, but still and all it will be just money and will only impact a few lives. It will not have the power to influence the overall health of the economy and the lives of the innocent and the honorable as it did when it was in the form of the slaves-by-proxy which is common stock. Let the money test the man, do not let the money set one human lower than another human who has not proven themselves the superior in fair and open competition. Problem solved.

Three letters...

 Which three letters?  The word "bus" typed into a search block on a computer. You wouldn't think much of it, not at all, not unless you knew those three letters were the first written communication deliberately initiated by an 11 year old boy who at one time was a totally non-responsive autistic.  Proof positive that words, symbols that have meaning, are now part of his reality. The walls are falling...

The Truth Liberal Academia knows, and Can Not Admit...

Recon run... in, and back out

 Yup, it has been a bit since I posted anything new, and yes, the celebratory tales some tell of my demise were definitely premature.

I've been filling this covid extended sabbatical pulling a recon run in the cause of being a genuine patriot who much prefers the idea and ideal of using a keyboard rather than a rifle in the defense of freeeom. I've been haunting the offerings of a high end liberal propaganda page.  Like all good propaganda offerings they offer a lot of good and true things to put a foundation of trust beneath some whopper grade nonsense running down to full out lies.  That's to be expected, I did say it was a propaganda page.

What made that page of particular interest is that they represent the political aspirations of the academic community, one of several public voices of Empire Academia.  The Empire of Academia is, as you might expect by the name,  comprised of different Kingdoms internally, those being the various departments and disciplines within a University.  

As it usually goes with Empires some kingdoms are more powerful than others.  In the case of Empire Academia the kingdom most represented by that propaganda page was the Kingdom of Psychology. Not a surprising thing, the Kingdom of Psychology has effectively taken over the humanities, it is the Kingdom of Psychology which is home to the Empire's socio-political aspiration to displace and replace that category of thought called 'Religion" and assume the power "the Church" once enjoyed as the unchallenged provider of social certification of acceptably moral behavior. 

The U.S. edition of the Australian publication "The Conversation" is quite often home to articles which give solid evidence of what Empire Academia's Kingdom of Psychology (EAKP, for brevity) has for their goals and intentions. Of even more interest, quite often by what they deny it is possible to discern what tactics and techniques, developed to give assistane to the troubled, they've bastardized into weapons of mass manipulation and sold indiscriminantly on the open market to those who also attempt to manipulate the public mindset in ways the public is not intended to perceive or understand.

Long words cut short? If there's one thing this recon has shown it is that they desire to be the power behind any and every throne.

EAKP is without a doubt the largest single weapons merchant in the Covert Cultural Warfare raging for control of America's psyche and soul.  They have their own agenda in play, in exhange for politial clout and favoritism they provide the ways and means by which the other power players (did I say the Liberal elements of America's political scene? No? wheww... a close one) attempt to advance their covert agendas. They need watching, and they need watching with a most critical scrutiny.  We don't need anymore Donald Trumps in office, and we damn sure don't need his Liberal equal and opposite to  have such power.  

That's where I've been, an intellectual combat recon in the cause of Freedom. In days to come, when can and as it might apply, I'm going to be posting links to The Conversation's more... revealing... articles along with my take and opinion on the subject. As a Patriot that's the least I can do for my country.