The “Conservative Woodstock”

2 October 2009

An old friend of mine sent me an email about the “Conservative Woodstock” that took place in DC recently. Here’s my response to him:

Thanks for the message.

BUT — anyone who is singling out Obama for blame is deceived. They are ALL (including Obama) part of a ruling elite that is uninterested in the well-being of average Americans. NONE OF THEM care about us. They care about wealth and power and perpetuating the same for themselves. The show in DC was conceived, designed, and implemented solely to turn the people’s attention away from the sickness and corruption of the ENTIRE SYSTEM and make us think one man is the problem.

With any luck the ruling elite’s time is almost over, but it won’t be if we allow ourselves to be distracted from the heart of the problem: the worship of money and material possessions and the abandonment of the ideas on which our country was founded.

The problem is that we’ve sold our souls for a few creature comforts and cheap trinkets.

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Money

1 October 2009

I complain about American culture being about the worship of money and material possessions above all. But isn’t that what I’m doing?

I don’t like the education my kids are getting in public school, I don’t like the behavior and language they pick up there. So why don’t I quit my job and homeschool them?

Because I’m clinging to my job because we have to have that middle-class income to buy the stuff we want and I’m hoping for some kind of retirement in another 8 years or so. And I fear poverty. How is that different from what most people are doing?

It’s not. We all want what we want, and mostly we want money and stuff. We’re really not that interested in freedom or liberty or equality — we want our stuff and we want a system of government that will protect our stuff from each other and from outsiders. THAT’s our true priority and belief system (the acquisition and protection of stuff). We are an amoral society.

What would a moral society look like? What would a moral life look like?

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More Frost

1 October 2009

Another light frost this morning, and then it looks like we’re above freezing for a while.

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Barely a Frost

30 September 2009

There was frozen dew on the windshield of the car this morning, but none of the garden plants seem to have been touched by frost, so I guess I’d call that a very very light frost.

Yesterday I picked a watermelon from the garden, and we had it for desert after dinner tonight. Yellow flesh, not too juicy, not overly sweet, but good.

Also picked another bunch of red peppers and put them in the drier yesterday.

Also picked all the stevia and put it in a paper bag in the greenhouse.

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The heating season has begun

29 September 2009

First fire of the season in the woodstove today.

Menards, one of our local home-improvement stores, is advertising a woodstove for $195, this one. I like the design of it, where you put logs in end-first, because it will take logs up to 27″ long, which would mean quite a bit less cutting of wood compared to the 16″ limit on our Intrepid II. AND, for $195, I could buy 5 or 6 of them for what we paid for ours.

But here’s what that stove’s manufacturer says about the stove meeting EPA requirements: “Vogelzang stoves meet EPA requirements for “exempt” wood/coal burning appliances (stoves).” Which means that it’s exempt from the EPA requirements and so meets no standards whatsoever. Weird.

It turns out that the EPA has these odd standards for which stoves require certification and which don’t. The stove for sale at my local Menards should be required to meet the EPA certification requirements. People are going to buy that stove and put it in their house to heat with, in other words, they’re going to use it just like I use mine. But because the EPA leaves these loopholes, it doesn’t have to meet any standards at all: http://www.epa.gov/compliance/resources/publications/monitoring/caa/woodstoves/exemptwood.pdf

I guess I should be happy about limits to government regulation, but it’s still pretty odd….

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