I don’t really get why people get so partisan and like but my guy is one of the good guys. The truth is people seek public service, not as a service to the public but because they enjoy using power to coercive their political enemies through the power of the law.
More on Rip Van Winkle 🧔…
Every time I go back to my hometown, Greenville I bemoan the changes over the past twenty years. But how much has it really changed compared to myself? I’ve been working and studying in the city for twenty years now and my connection is most distant to the town I grew up in.
But more than that, I’ve also become more wilder and aware of places far beyond the borders of the town I few up in. Greenville is rural and it’s farm country but at 25 miles from Albany it’s still very exurban. Compared to the deep rural country of Madison County – to say nothing of the Allegheny Wilds of Pennsylvania or the back country of West Virginia.
And thanks to the internet I’ve been exposed to greater and more wild country in places like the Mid-West, and the true West like Idaho. I’ve been able to learn about off-griders and homesteaders who really are living on the frontier. I’ve learned about cattle ranchers and dairyman, goat farmers and trappers. Often residing on far greater acreages than is common in an commuter town on the far outskirts of Albany.
It’s not to say that I didn’t grow up in a town of country boys and gals, that there aren’t still cattle and hills and hollers on the back roads. But I’ve experienced far more wild places even in New York State to say nothing of those other states I’ve visited. There are many other towns that smell like cows, places where they homes are far more spread out, where the mountains are bigger and the people are more wild.
Greenville might be rural and the Catskill Mountains looming large, but it’s no Idaho or even West Virginia. In many ways I’ve outgrown my old town both in my dreams and hopes, and while it has changed so I have during my past twenty years away.
Replacing plastic for glass and metal is a bad idea
There are some who want to replace single use plastics with single use aluminum or glass containers, noting the greater recycablity of both materials. But I think it’s a bad idea:
- Glass and metal, once produced last forever in the environment.
- A glass or metal object doesn’t just rot, it also doesn’t doesn’t burn. A discarded plastic bottle may be incinerated, burned in a burn barrel or campfire or be destroyed by a wildfire
- Plastics, especially outside of a landfill have a much shorter life than metals or glass thanks to the combustible nature of hydrocarbons
- Metals and glass discarded can lead to cuts in children and adults when they step on the glass, are working in the woods or swimming in the creek
- Metals and glass discarded can puncture car tires both on and off the road
- Metals and glass discarded can get into pasture and cause painful death from hardware disease in cows and other livestock
- Traditional deposit for recycling programs do increase recycling rates but still don’t eliminate litter or even ensure most of the material is recycled
- Recycling is great but even with glass and metal which is said to be 100% recyclable, material is lost when the metals and glass are melted down for reprocessing
- Glass and metal makes a lot more sense with true rewash and reuse programs – like milk delivered by a milk man
- Milk in glass is colder and purer
- As would be other beverages such as soda or beer produced and distributed in reused growlers
Do I Believe in Liberalism?
The best way I can answer that question is with ‘Pruitt-Igoe’, the failed 1954 public housing complex that was blown up and hauled off to a local landfill in 1972.
The idealistic architect Minoru Yamasaki designed Pruitt-Igeo, the World Trade Center, and many other buildings during the 1950s and 1960s. Built in the modernist style, the buildings ultimately failed to reform the people they were designed to inspire and quickly fell into disrepair and became dangerous cesspools only a few years after opening.
America is the wealthiest society in the world, we have a moral obligation to help the poor. Yet, Minoru Yamasaki idealism and plan to help the poor with beautiful high-rise buildings set in a park setting with playgrounds, stores and clean, modern apartments with running hot water, heat and flush toilets proved to be disaster that ultimately would be blown up and hauled off to the landfill. Remember, many cold-water flat tenants prior to his buildings bathed with hot-water in a bucket, with water available only in common areas. You can blame really two things — cost cutting and top-down planning that was unresponsive to community needs.
Pruitt-Igoe is emblematic of what is wrong with Big Government liberalism — a bold vision for a better tomorrow, that inevitably fails to make a better community. It’s not saying we shouldn’t help the down-trodden build a better life, but it shouldn’t come from big centralized government programs that aren’t build for unique communities. Big buildings are great for politicians to cut ribbons on, but they rarely suit community needs. Liberalism should focus on small problems at community level, and move away from big national programs that don’t reflect local community conditions.
Big ideas are impossibly expensive to implement, especially with the inflation pressures that any big program is bound to create in the economy. The high cost of implementation doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. And that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t help working families get ahead. But we should do it in a measured steps, making small changes to existing programs to make it better. We shouldn’t take a bulldozer to existing programs, but instead look to build on what has proven to be successful. It’s hard for politicians to take credit for small changes, but small changes are often the best way to make the world a better place for ordinary people.
A Rainy Saint Patrick’s Day 🍀
It’s the holiday brought to you by triphenylmethane and chlorophyllins, the later which is considered less bad to put in your body, as made from chlorophyll which is green because plants absorb primarily red and blue light to turn into energy with carbon dioxide. But as the tangy smell from the air reminds us on this morning, they got to get the manure out on the ground before things can turn nice and green and into hay and silage for moo-moos.
It’s raining out so no riding to work. ☔It’s fine, that was the forecast and tomorrow I can’t ride in either as it’s going to a meeting after work with Save the Pine Bush. Wednesday through Friday I should be able to ride in and possibly this weekend I’ll ride trail and maybe do an overnight in wilderness 🏕 if the weather is good. Nice not having to work evenings or weekends in March. 
Back to work but I’m hoping for another quick to pass by winter weekend, as spring approaches. 🌷Obviously the farmers have faith in the changing seasons and so should I. I still want to get a night in the wilderness and have a big fire 🔥 and I know those days aren’t that far away. 
Maybe I could ride in but I don’t want to risk getting soaked. 
Lots of rain on the radar. Plus there are the drunks to deal with on the roads in the evening. 
It’s fine, I’ll bus it in. 
I do need to get shopping tonight, 
though I wanted to wait until to tonight for a couple of reasons. 🛻 I am thinking of washing my truck tonight, and I figured it would be good to do after the salt is off the roads. Plus it breaks up the week going shopping after work, and Monday nights are often slower at the grocery store, with better stock 
and less crowds. Especially on Saint Patrick’s Day. Hopefully get home before dark after shopping, so there aren’t drunks on the road, though it’s not like it’s a long trip to the supermarket. 
I’ll drive carefully and if there are drunks on the road this evening, give them lots of room.
Got reading about laundry powder vs liquid laundry detergent. 
It sounds silly but I’m trying to get away from packaging, as much as possible in my life, especially those thick plastic packages that burn black and are noxious. 
Recycling is such a scam, but I also want to avoid glass which never goes away and metals which don’t burn though probably actually have some value in recycling. There is some disadvantages to traditional laundry powder, like it’s not as effective on difficult stains, but it seem so much less wasteful then those big plastic jugs. 🧺
Used to be I used styrofoam plates and plastic forks 
all of the time at camp — and even in summer at home — and burnt them up, but truth is it kind of stinks and those chemicals are nasty. 
But I’ve really tried to get away from so much plastic, especially now that I’m looking more at my own land, and I don’t want to make a mess of it even if I don’t want to go to dump with bags and bags of garbage every week. 
Used to think it was fine if it burnt up completely — silly greenies — but I think it’s better to avoid consuming such things in the first place. 
I might drive a big jacked up truck, but I do try to be more sustainable even if I don’t have that off-grid property yet and still buy some things in plastic. Still, I prefer to have more compost then things to burn these days, no matter how much fun watching dripping plastic might be.
Solitude Doesn’t Bother Me Much.
Apparently some people get quickly bored when they are alone. They can’t take extensive solitude. I’ve never felt that way, although like every human being, I do crave interaction with other humans from time to time. But I’m quite happy being alone in the wilderness, just enjoying my time without anybody else to set my schedule, or tell me what to do.
I Hate the Term Landowner
There are few terms I dislike more then “landowner”. This word got a lot of play in New York during the debate over fracking.
“Landowner” in it’s most general meaning is a farmer, a person owning a hunting camp or home in a rural area or other person to who owns land. But for many anti-natural gas activists, landowner was used to describe a greedy individual who wanted to profit and domination over their personally owned natural resources. Many in the anti-natural gas community use the term landowner as negatively as one might use “slaveholder” today.
I would argue that no farmer who works the land, and no hunter who hunts their land is doing it in domination of their land. You can’t stomp into the woods and shoot a deer, you can’t carelessly throw seed in the air and hope it to grow. Natural resources have to be carefully managed and sustainability harvested for generations to come. You can’t exploit the land without limitation and expect to keep it going on. You have to carefully understand the woods and field, observe what is going on, understand the consequences of your action.
Sitting in the woods with a shotgun watching the wildlife can teach you much. You can’t just jump into the woods, you have to prepare and think about your surroundings. You have to understand the science, the risks and rewards. You have to have a deeper connection to the land, you’re more then just a “landowner” out to exploit the land.
Pennsylvania often calls people who lease their natural resources, “farmers”. And indeed many if not most of them are. Even though not every landowner cultivates a field with a tractor or milks and feeds cows and hogs, most landowners are “farming” their land for wildlife to hunt, wood to chop or harvest, and natural resources to sustain themselves.
