100,000 Downloads, Part Two

In the ten days since my last post, gleeful hackers have made improvements on the Liberator II -- enough that the plastic gun can now reliably fire eight shots before collapsing -- and, of course, put them up on the Internet too.  Another inventor has announced improvements in metal-deposit 3-D printing, and given estimates on the expected cost of the hardware.  Out of the fringes of medical research, scientists are discussing means of using 3-D printing and cloned tissues to rebuild whole organs.  The various governments of the world have been silent on the entire subject. 

This silence won't last forever.  The immense possibilities of 3-D printing go far beyond sounding the death-knell of gun-control;  they also spell the death of economic monopolies -- and the rich and powerful of the world won't take that lying down.  3-D printing will bring back cottage industry, or at least village industry, with a vengeance.  This means economic decentralization and independence, a complete reversal of the trends of the last century and more.  The long-lost village blacksmith will be replaced by the village printing-mill, the century-vanished wandering tinker will be replaced with the itinerant printing-mill, and so long as that mini-mill can get electric power, an Internet connection and raw materials, nothing short of an invading army will be able to shut it down.  A few years down the pike, any county hospital will be able to create cloned-organ transplants.  Add to that the food-growing capacities of aquaponics, and the implications are both liberating and mind-boggling.

They mean that the average county, at most, can be economically -- therefore politically -- independent.  It will no longer be possible for Captains of Industry to impoverish or starve out whole towns, let alone countries.  Governments will have to lure and persuade their subjects rather than threatening them.  The rule of force will be reduced to outright warfare or nothing.  Freedom will be a hell of a lot more possible.

Of course there will always be a place for direct-manufacturing plants;  they'll be better at specialization, mass production and speed.  They just won't be able to manipulate scarcity or surplus as they do today.  What this will do to the financial "industry" is anyone's guess.

What the various governments of the world will do is another story.  No doubt, a lot of them will try to regulate the new industry to death;  inevitably, they'll fail.  Where anti-3-D printing laws proliferate, the crime "business" will grow likewise, and spread into areas where it never had foothold before.  We may yet see the Islamofascists overthrown by the Russian Mafia, and China disintegrate into a dozen bandit-industrial kingdoms.

In any case, the new technology can't be stopped.  The hackers and inventors are coming up with new 3-D printing inventions and processes, and spreading the word around the Internet, with an almost frantic speed.  Many hackers predict that governments will first try to censor and shut down the Internet, and they're making plans for that.  Just what those entail I couldn't say, being an absolute Toddler On The Information Highway myself, but one snippet of gossip I've heard is: "Even if They chop down every cell-phone mast in the world, line-of-sight will still work."

The techno-cat is out of the bag for good and all, and the better world is indeed coming.

--Leslie <;)))><   )O(    

100,000 Downloads -- Part One

An odd little incident happened last Thursday which just might change history.  Note:

From Forbes, 5/9/13

State Department Demands Takedown Of 3D-Printable Gun Files For Possible Export Control Violations

On Thursday, Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson received a letter from the State Department Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance demanding that he take down the online blueprints for the 3D-printable “Liberator” handgun that his group released Monday, along with nine other 3D-printable firearms components hosted on the group’s website Defcad.org. The government says it wants to review the files for compliance with arms export control laws known as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR. By uploading the weapons files to the Internet and allowing them to be downloaded abroad, the letter implies Wilson’s high-tech gun group may have violated those export controls.

“Until the Department provides Defense Distributed with final [commodity jurisdiction] determinations, Defense Distributed should treat the above technical data as ITAR-controlled,” reads the letter, referring to a list of ten CAD files hosted on Defcad that include the 3D-printable gun, silencers, sights and other pieces. “This means that all data should be removed from public acces immediately. Defense Distributed should review the remainder of the data made public on its website to determine whether any other data may be similarly controlled and proceed according to ITAR requirements.”

Wilson, a law student at the University of Texas in Austin, says that Defense Distributed will in fact take down its files until the State Department has completed its review. “We have to comply,” he says. “All such data should be removed from public access, the letter says. That might be an impossible standard. But we’ll do our part to remove it from our servers.”

As Wilson hints, that doesn’t mean the government has successfully censored the 3D-printable gun. While Defense Distributed says it will take down the gun’s printable file from Defcad.org, its downloads–100,000 in just the first two days the file was online–were actually being served by Mega, the New Zealand-based storage service created by ex-hacker entrepreneur Kim Dotcom, an outspoken U.S. government critic. It’s not clear whether the file will be taken off Mega’s servers, where it may remain available for download. The blueprint for the gun and other Defense Distributed firearm components have also been uploaded several times to the Pirate Bay, the censorship-resistant filesharing site.

Wilson argues that he’s also legally protected. He says Defense Distributed is excluded from the ITAR regulations under an exemption for non-profit public domain releases of technical files designed to create a safe harbor for research and other public interest activities. That exemption, he says, would require Defense Distributed’s files to be stored in a library or sold in a bookstore. Wilson argues that Internet access at a library should qualify under ITAR’s statutes, and says that Defcad’s files have also been made available for sale in an Austin, Texas bookstore that he declined to name in order to protect the bookstore’s owner from scrutiny.

Despite taking down his files, Wilson doesn’t see the government’s attempts to censor the Liberator’s blueprints as a defeat. On the contrary, Defense Distributed’s radical libertarian and anarchist founder says he’s been seeking to highlight exactly this issue, that a 3D-printable gun can’t be stopped from spreading around the global Internet no matter what legal measures governments take. “This is the conversation I want,” Wilson says. “Is this a workable regulatory regime? Can there be defense trade control in the era of the Internet and 3D printing?”

Wilson compares his new legal troubles to the widely-followed case in the mid-1990s of Philip Zimmermann, the inventor of the cryptographic software PGP, who was threatened with indictment under ITAR for putting his military-grade encryption software online. “It’s PGP all over again,” says Wilson.

Wilson revealed a nice sense of history when he labelled his 3-D-printable gun the "Liberator".  The original Liberator was probably the world's cheapest and flimsiest professionally manufactured gun, produced by the millions in the last year of World War Two -- and dropped by the millions over occupied France.  The Liberator wasn't intended -- or designed -- to be fired more than a dozen times apiece;  the idea was to use it to shoot a German, and then take his (much better) gun.  Yes, the Libertor pistol played a significant part in the liberation of France.  It's anyone's guess just whom Wilson intended his gun to liberate people from.

He's quite correct, though, when he says that the genie is definitely out of the bottle.  In the two days that the file for printing the Liberator was available on the Internet, it was downloaded more than 100,000 times.  Likewise, as he mentions, there are other sites outside the US that have the files are are gleefully posting them.  Knowing what mavericks computer-nerds tend to be about Internet censorship, I daresay that plenty of them have downloaded the files, passed them on, and started 3-D printing the guns just for the hell of it.  

The only limitation here is the availability of adequate 3-D printers, the material (high-impact plastic) to make them out of, and ammunition.  (Of course, files for 3-D printing ammunition are available on the Internet too.) Now it's anyone's guess how many 3-D printers are already out there in private hands.  I saw one making cute little sculptures at LunaCon just a couple months ago, I've heard that the simplest machines are on the market for $500 and top-of-the-line industrial printers can be bought for $8000.  The materials have been available everywhere for years.  There is no way that the government -- any government -- can stop the underground manufacture of Liberators -- by the millions.  So forget the legendary "Saturday Night Special", zip-gun and underground arms-dealer;  the Liberator can outnumber all of them.

This is the death-knell of all hope for gun control.  

The only solution to the gun-crime and gun-violence that the Schumers and Feinsteins cry about will be to adopt just the opposite tactic: the Swiss System.  The lessons of history show that when all Americans are as well armed and trained as the Swiss, we'll have an internal crime-rate as low as Switzerland's.  Gun control will be as dead as Prohibition, thankfully.

And we'll have the 3-D printer to thank for it.

--Leslie <;)))>< Fish        

Stopping Pests in the Bedroom Window

(As promised, here's the tale of the Window Weenie-Wagger -- and a couple more besides)

Three times in my merry career, in three different cities and states, I've had to chase burglars -- and worse -- out of my bedroom windows, using serious weapons.

 The first time was back in Michigan, where I was going to school.  I was living in the second-floor apartment of a rented house, and I'd elected to stay and take classes over the summer semester.  The house had no air-conditioning, the attic insulation wasn't very good, and an unusual heat-wave came along, so I was distinctly hot that night.  My roommates were out at a movie, and I was alone, so I stripped off my clothes and sat naked in the armchair to do my homework.  I'd finished my studies, still wasn't sleepy, and we had no TV at the time, so I turned on the radio to the local Classical/Folk/Blues station, took down the ornamental sword from the wall, pulled out a knife-sharpening stone and began sharpening the sword in time with the music.  Talk about cheap thrills on a hot Michigan night!

Anyway, as I was sharpening the sword, I heard a funny noise -- like raising a window -- from the bedroom next to me, which had been made out of a former dining-room and was cut off from the living-room only by an archway and a pair of curtains.  I knew that nobody was supposed to be in that room, let alone raising the window.  I set down the stone, took the sword in hand, got up and peeked through the curtains.

There I saw, in the dim light, a punk climbing through the bedroom window.

Well, I knew there was no point in calling the police;  they'd never get there in time to help, and besides, they were notoriously lax about responding to calls from students -- hippies and radicals, you know.  I had to take action myself.

So I plunged through the curtains, sword held high, yelling "Kreeee-gah!" -- straight out of Tarzan novels.  Yes, I fully intended to skewer the punk -- or slash him, and I knew that the sword's edge was up to the job.

Well, the punk saw a naked woman, swinging a sword, charging at him while screeching a battle-cry in an unknown language -- and decided that this scene was a little too weird for him.  He yanked himself back out the window, grabbed for the drain-pipe he'd clambered up, missed it -- and fell all the way to the driveway below.  When I got to the window and looked out, I saw him pull himself up and hobble down the driveway as fast as he could drag his injured leg, which looked broken.  I was disappointed that he hadn't broken anything else, thought again of calling the police, and decided that it wasn't worth the hassle.  That broken leg would keep him out of the crime game longer than any likely jail sentence.

I also resolved to get a more serious weapon than an ornamental sword.

Interestingly enough, we weren't bothered by thieves anymore, all the time I lived there.

                                                               *          *         *

The second time was a few years later, in Chicago.  By then I'd managed to buy a 12-gauge shotgun, which usually stood in a corner of the bedroom.  I was staying with the late Mary Frohman then, in an old-town "carriage house" -- a small house at the end of the back yard, with the bedroom window overlooking the alley -- on the notorious Near North Side.  One lazy Sunday afternoon we were lounging around in the bedroom, reading, when we heard the unmistakable sound of the garbage-can outside being dragged to just under the curtained bedroom window.  We looked at each other soundlessly, then I got up and got the shotgun.  Mary slid around beside the window and took hold of the curtain.  I sat on the bed, aimed the shotgun right at the lower edge of the window, and waited.  When we saw a poking motion move the curtain, I nodded to Mary.  She yanked the curtain away, revealing...

...a young punk with his hands and nose just over the window-sill, in the classic "Kilroy Was Here" position -- with his nose just about an inch from the muzzle of my shotgun.  I crooned: "Hel-LO there!"  His eyes grew very wide, and he pulled back fast out the window.  I scrambled after him, leaned out the window in time to see him jump down off the garbage-can and run -- quite quickly, too -- down the alley.  I called after him, in my best Chicago accent: "Oooh, come back!  We wanna play wit' yez!"  Of course, he did nothing of the sort, but dodged into the nearest available back yard to get out of my line of fire.

Mary and I collapsed on the bed, hugging the shotgun and laughing our @sses off.

No, we didn't bother calling the cops.  This was the Near North Side, after all.  But in any case, we weren't bothered by thieves again all the time we lived there.      

                                                                   *          *          *

The third time was here in Arizona, in Phoenix, when I was living in Ozzie's and Allanna's house, just off 7th Avenue and Missouri Road.  It was a one-story frame building, and I had the front bedroom to one side of the front entrance.  The windows were the old-fashioned crank kind, that looked out on the large front yard.  I'd bought my little pistol by then, and kept it on the nightstand beside my bed.  I also let my cats go in and out through the bedroom window.

One summer night, it being hot as Arizona usually is, and the house having only evaporative cooling, I was sitting in bed reading, with the window open.  I barely noticed, through the window, that the light over the front door was out;  that was unusual, since Ozzie usually left it on all night, but I thought nothing of it.  Then I heard a rustling outside the window, and thought it was the tomcat wanting to get in, so I got up and cranked the window open a little wider, leaned out and called: "Kitty-kitty-kitty" as usual.

The rustling came again, but now I saw that it came from a man -- middle-aged, middle-sized, wearing nondescript clothes -- who was crouched by the side of the entryway.  He saw me and lunged toward the window, so I promptly ducked back and began cranking it closed.  You cannot crank a window closed quickly, and he got there before I finished -- and stuck his arm through the window and wagged it in a particularly threatening way.  I promptly let out a fine string of outraged curses, because I recognized that gesture.  I'd seen that movie, too!  It was a pretty-damned-sexist thriller about a stalker that threatens a feather-headed girl who hasn't a clue how to protect herself.  I was furious that this creep thought I was anything like that fluff-brained fool!

Undeterred by my unexpected reaction, the perv pulled his arm out and instead stuck his weenie through the window and shook it.  Infuriated, I grabbed his weenie -- good and hard -- and pulled it, and part of him, through the nearly-closed window.  I also reached for my gun on the nightstand, but couldn't quite reach it.  He, naturally, pulled back.  We had a brief tug-of-war with his weenie as the rope, until -- his dong being uncircumcised -- the skin slid on the core and pulled out of my grasp, just as my fingers closed on the pistol.  I promptly leaned out the window and aimed at him, but he was running away.  I remembered to angle the shot downward so it wouldn't go out of the front yard, and fired.  I might have creased him across the buttocks, but there was no sign of it;  he only ran away faster.  In another second, he was out of sight in the shadows.

I would have let it go at that, guessing that my grip would cause him difficulty p!ssing for the next few days, which might make him reconsidere his pet sport, but I realized that somebody in the neighborhood must have heard the shot.  That meant some neighbor was most likely reporting "gunshots" right now, and I'd best beat them to the cops.  So I got on the phone, dialed 911, and explained: "If anybody has reported a shot being fired in this neighborhood, don't worry;  it was only me, chasing a weenie-wagger out of my bedroom window."

Well, as I might have expected, the cops soon showed up.  I recited my tale, and when I got to the bit about grabbing his weenie and pulling it, the cops had trouble keeping their faces straight.  They asked for a description, which I gave -- and then I added that, considering how hard I'd grabbed him, he probably had finger-sized bruises up and down his dong, which they might find in a "short-arms inspection".  The cops were hard put not to crack up at that.  One of them managed to say that, yes, they'd had similar complaints of a weenie-wagger in this neighborhood.  The other tried to scold me about firing a shot in a crowded city neighborhood, but he kept snickering while he did it.  I claimed that yes, I understood that, which was why I had angled my shot downward and therby probably missed.  They asked if I were sure that I'd missed, and I explained that I might have creased him across the buttocks, but certainly didn't stop him from running away faster -- and the cops snickered again.  I also mentioned that he had probably unscrewed the front light-bulb, so his prints might well be on it.  The cops agreed, handed me the formal papers they usually hand out to crime witnesses, and went outside to collect that light-bulb.  I could hear them laughing all the way to their cop-car.

Well, I was never called as a witness, so I guess that either they caught the perv and didn't need my testimony, or else -- after a few days of painful p!ssing -- he decided to give up weenie-wagging.  In any case, I never heard of him bothering anybody in my neighborhood again.  For that matter, we didn't have any problem with burglars, either.

This is why I encourage everybody -- and especially women -- to get themselves firearms and become competent with them.  It also helps to cultivate a bold attitude -- and a strong grip.

--Leslie <;)))><   )O(    

        

  

The Most-Filmed Manhunt in History

(I had originally planned to tell the funny tale of the Weenie-Wagger in the Window, but current events took precedence.  I'll get to the Weenie story next week, promise.)

                                                       

The bombing of the Boston Marathon managed to do the almost-impossible;  it broke the media's (and several unscrupulous politicians') carefully-nurtured four-month hysteria campaign, using the Newtown school shooting to push for more federal gun-control laws.

This shift isn't surprising, considering how totally insane the bombing was.  I can't think of any activity more apolitical, religiously neutral or inoffensive than the Boston Marathon.  The only possible reason for bombing the race would be to harm as many innocent people as possible, and who on Earth would want to do that?

Well, I can make some guesses. 

Though nobody publicly took credit for it, foreign correspondents reported Hamas, Hezbollah, Al-Qaida, Islamic Jihad and other Jihadist groups in the middle-east publicly celebrating the attack, handing out candies and dancing in the streets, and howling "America is ruined!"  "Boston is paralyzed!"  "Allah is making the West suffer!"

The physical evidence also showed ties to Jihadist terrorists;  the bomb was an IED of the type commonly used by Jihadists in Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel.  As the Boston police commissioner announced, after describing the nature of the bomb, "Draw your own conclusions."  That conclusion wouldn't be difficult, seeing that Jihadists are notorious for attacking innocent and politically totally-unrelated targets – often for no other reason than to shock and dismay, they hope, whole populations.  American politicians and media know better, which is why they've been doing their damndest to deflect America's rage and demand for vengeance away from anything remotely Muslim. 

That's probably why the Boston police commissioner didn't say anything more than that;  no doubt he was muzzled by his political bosses.  The Liberal news pundits, and politicians, promptly tried to blame the bombing on "domestic anti-government groups", sometimes going to ridiculous lengths.  Chris Matthews noted: "(It's) Tax Day…  But of course it's Patriots' Day.  It's also the Boston Marathon.  And would you as an expert be thinking domestic (terrorists) at this point?"  House minority whip Steny Hoyer (Democrat, Maryland) blamed the bombings on "irrational" security cuts caused by the "sequestration".  MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell claimed that "lobbyists from the NRA have made it harder for the FBI to find the murderer who planted the bombs…" because "The NRA has successfully blocked any requirements for such (identification) taggants in gunpowder" – and this last was said after the Chechnyan brothers had been identified as the bombers. 

Even after the suspects had been respectively shot and captured, even after the FBI announced that the elder and dominant brother had spent six months of 2012 in Chechnya, even though it's common knowledge that the population of Chechnya is predominantly Muslim, government agencies and the media scrupulously avoided saying the word "Muslim" anywhere near any mention of the brothers – even though the public can readily draw its own conclusions. 

Also interesting is that the Boston police thanked the public for its assistance in identifying and capturing the bombers, while the FBI and the media made no mention of the civilians' immense role in the manhunt.  In fact, it was all those cameras – security cameras in stores along the marathon's route, video-cameras and cell-phone cameras in the hands of all those watchers, thousands of them, voluntarily given to the police – that picked up images of the Chechnyan Brothers planting those bombs in the mailbox and trash-can, thus allowing the FBI to identify them and post their pictures on the news.  From that feedback, it was the civilian who owned the boat that the younger brother took refuge in, and who reported it to the police, that resulted in the capture.  Thanks to all those pictures, this manhunt was amazingly short: less than five days, from start to finish.  This was certainly the most-photographed crime, and manhunt, in American history – thanks to thousands of civilians – and that's what made it one of the shortest manhunts in history.  You'd think the federal government would acknowledge that fact.

Instead, politicians and media are still trying to drag popular attention back to its deflated argument for new federal gun-control laws.  They may find that difficult, now that the Newtown hysteria has been wiped out by the marathon massacre – and its vivid proof that gun-control does nothing to guarantee the public safety. 

--Leslie <;)))><   )O(    

Killing the Money Game

There's a marvelous little video on YouTube -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk -- that explains the difference between Hayek's and Keynes' ideas of economics: "free" markets vs."managed".  Now anybody who's studied history can tell you about the disasters of a "managed" economy -- whose ultimate expression is/was the Soviet Union.  Likewise, history shows what happens when a "free" economy's big boys -- usually the banks -- are allowed to do whatever they please;  this led to the crash of 1929 and the resulting Great Depression.

Now understand that I never took an economics course in my life.  All I know about economics comes from my own experience running a small (very small: just myself, my guitar and my word-processor) business, but I've observed that the basic rule of economics is the same as the basic rule of physics: you don't get something for nothing.  I've also observed that if you live beyond your means for very long, the creditors will come and strip your bones -- so don't do it. 

I've also seen that all real wealth comes from just two sources: physical materials that come out of the earth, and people's work on them -- and of those two, people's work is the greater part. 

Example: suppose you're strolling through the wilderness -- land that nobody (except maybe the national government) owns, land that nobody works, land that's maintained entirely by Nature -- and you happen to come across a big healthy fruit-tree, loaded with fruit and about to drop it.  Well, this is what the term "windfall" comes from!  Here's all this lovely fruit, free for the taking;  you can gather it and eat it yourself, or make it into jams and jellies and fruit-wine, or sell it to the neighbors -- either bartered directly for other things you want, or traded for a "trade standard" (money) that will buy you other things you want.  The fruit is free -- or is it?  You have to put in the labor of gathering the fruit, taking it home, washing it off, storing it safely, processing it into those other foods, then advertizing it to the neighbors and carting it to where the neighbors can buy it.  In other words, even if you can get your raw material (or finished product) for free, you still have to put work into it. Labor is the greater part of real wealth.

The "economic problem" started after money -- the uniform trade standard -- was invented, and certain clever and unscrupulous folk realized that they could get rich by playing games with the value of money, rather than by making real goods or real services.

The most common means of playing games with money is by unscrupulous lending -- and I don't mean just by charging outrageous interest, which keeps people paying off debts five or ten times over (common with village money-lenders in Asia and South America).  And I don't mean just lending the same money to several different people at the same time (invented by early bankers in the late Middle Ages).  I also mean deliberately lending to people whom you know can't or won't repay, so you can foreclose whatever property they put up for collateral, and also collecting lender's insurance on the "lost" loan.  I also mean borrowing money at low interest rates, then turning around and lending it to someone else at high interest rates.

And then there's speculation, including playing the stock market, which is an elaborate form of gambling, that I've gone into elsewhere.  And never mind the trick of hoarding money so as to make it scarce to the public, or likewise putting a lot of money out into the market with the deliberate intention of making it cheap. 

All of these are playing games with promises and obligations and the perceived value of money.  They create no goods or services, but only inflate the value of money -- under false pretenses -- which eventually deflates, with a bang.  This is what causes booms and busts -- and ruins lots of innocent people who really do work at creating actual goods and services.  The people and businesses that play these games are nothing more or less than parasites, and dangerous parasites at that.

The Money Game itself must die.

How do we kill it?

Well, I have an idea that might at least be a step in the right direction.  Whether by federal law or nationwide custom (which would include anything from expose' and massive boycott to mobs armed with tar and feathers), forbid anyone -- individual, group or corporation -- to lend money to the public unless he/she/it/they has first owned and managed a business (likewise doing business with the public) that has produced enough profit to cover the loan.  Said business shall not include banking, brokering, insurance, mortgages, or any other "financial institution".  Instead, think of "Joe's Bank and Grill", or "Ford Motors and Loans", or "Mor's Furniture and Mortgages".  Having to manage a real business, and therefore having to suffer fluctuations in the market along with everyone else, would make such money-lenders a little less inclined to damage that market with money-games.

What do you think?  Can anybody come up with further ideas?

--Leslie <;)))><  )O(                    

Waste Lands

The darker side of the trip to LunaCon:

'Twas late at night on my second day of travel, after we'd finally gotten out of Texas and were rolling north through Arkansas, and only a few of us in the last car -- and the lounge car -- were awake.

The first thing we noticed was a slight thump under the wheels.  Then the train put its brakes on and stopped.  Then we noticed train attendants getting off and hurrying toward the back of the train with flashlights.  One man who got up to look out the rear window saw "lights, and chunks of meat between the tracks".  Then more train attendants came up into the main passenger section and taped paper over that rear window, with stern warnings not to remove it.  The train stayed parked where it was for three hours, and the only answer we could get out of train attendants was: "There was a slight collision".  Only later, at the stop in Little Rock where the train changed crews and the outgoing crew was willing to talk, did we find out what had really happened.

A man had deliberately run onto the tracks as the train was coming, committing suicide by train.  Of course the engineer had to stop the train and call the nearest sheriff as soon as he saw what had happened, and the sheriff showed up with a sizable posse and the coroner to pick up the "chunks of meat", and the forensics team (I got an image of CSI techs swapping blood off the engine's drive-wheels), and the train was understandably delayed.  One of the attendants added: "Dammit, this is the third time in the last month."

Third suicide-by-train in a month?  Ye gods, what's in the water in Arkansas, anyway?!

I pondered that question while we rolled on through the night, and the only answer I could think of was -- economics.  Arkansas never was one of the richest states in the US, depending mostly on farming and its support industries;  certainly the current Depression must have hit it hard, destroying thousands of jobs and making it hard for businesses to survive.  The state welfare system, never very well-funded, would have broken down early, and stopped taking on any new clients.  Even the soup-kitchens wouldn't be enough to feed all the jobless. It's understandable that jobless people, especially if they couldn't even raise the money to get out of state and job-hunt elsewhere, might get desperate enough to choose a fast death over slow starvation.  ...But then, why should anyone starve in a farming state?  Farmers would be all too willing to swap food for work.

Then the sun came up, and I saw at least part of the answer.  As far as the eye could see from the train were empty fields, fallow land: not planted, not grazed, not even managed as timber-land -- or even wilderness park.  The trees I could see were all second-growth, none more than 20 years old, and mostly leafy softwoods: worthless for anything but making charcoal, or cheap paper at best.  Everything else was weeds and brush.  Yet the soil was good;  it was all dark brown crumbly loam, and well-watered, with small streams everywhere.  As we drew closer to towns I saw some fields that were worked -- planted with pasture-grass and grazed by fat cattle -- but also abandoned urban lots, all too often strewn with trash.  I asked my fellow passengers, and the only answer I got was that the soil wasn't really as fertile as all that;  it had been overworked and couldn't grow much of anything.  I privately questioned that;  as an Arizonian, I'd seen plenty of land -- hardpan clay, with never enough water -- that had been made fertile by determined farmers, or at least grazed by sturdy ranchers.  Hell, give me topsoil like that (even a city lot-full), and I could make it yield.  I'm planning to reconstitute the soil in my back yard and grow fruit trees in it.  Why was that land really lying fallow, left to trash and weeds, that could have been growing crops or at least livestock, and providing jobs or at least food for all those desperately unemployed people?

I got another answer when I reached the convention and asked various fans.  "It's the soil bank," one local fan said.  "The government pays the farmers not to grow food."  Why, I wondered;  just to keep food prices high?  "To save for planting in case of emergency," he said.  Well, gee, what would you call our current economic mess?  Food prices are too high already, which doesn't do us or even the farmers any good, and too many of our own people are jobless and desperate.  "Those unemployed are city people," another fan argued;  "They won't take farm-work jobs."  What, they'd rather throw themselves in front of trains?!  From what I've seen, and I've lived all over the US, there is no such thing as a job that Americans won't take;  there are only wages that Americans won't take, and there are rather few of those these days.  So, for me, the mystery still remains.

I have a dark suspicion that maybe those lands are kept fallow for another reason;  the federal government and the banksters are planning to use them to pay off the US' monstrous debts.  It wouldn't bother them at all to sell big chunks of our land to China, regardless of what that would mean for the rest of the country, or the people in it.

Can anybody come up with a more likely reason?


--Leslie <;)))><   )O( 

              

Madly Busy, Here and There

Hi, team!  Sorry I've taken so long to get back to you, but it's been a really busy two weeks.

First, for all those of you who wished me a happy birthday, I spent that day -- and the next two -- on assorted Amtrak trains, riding from Arizona to New Jersey, then a few hours riding, car this time, into New York state, and finally to the Rye Hilton for LunaCon.  Then there were three days of the convention, then another three days riding back to Phoenix.

And once I got home, if ya please, Rasty and I had to scramble back and forth across the Valley of the Sun -- a good 50 miles each way, and his Bronco is a gas-gulper -- trying to get moved into the new (well, actually old: 1947) house.  There was the fun-and-games of getting the water hooked up, which meant getting a good plumber (who, it turned out, lived even further away than we did), replacing the stolen water-heater, turning on the water and finding a lot of small problems which will have to be dealt with over the next week.  Then there was the even wilder fun-and-games of getting the electricity turned on, which involved lining up one electrician and two bureaucracies -- the county inspector and the local power company -- all on the same day.  And in the midst of this Rasty's truck blew a rear-left brake disc, which will take a whole day's work and roughly $800 to repair.  Arrrrggghhhhh!  But at least, bit by bit, we're getting moved in.

There's a lot I could say (and will!) about the long train-ride and the local scramble, but I'll start with the easy part: LunaCon.

I was invited as Filk Special Guest by the concom's filk liaison, Marc Grossman, who was talked into it (with not much difficulty) by a lot of east-coast fans and old friends who hadn't seen me in years -- since Pennsic War 8 years ago, IIRC.  I spent most of my time in the filk-room, singing and singing and...well, you get the picture, and the rest of it bouncing between the con-suite (lots of decaf drinks), the guests' green room (lts of tasty finger-food), the hotel restaurant (where I did a long interview with a writer working on a biography of the late great Isaac Bonewitz), the dealers' room (where I did a book-signing that wound up autographing lots of albums too), and my hotel-room (which was one of the few places where I could quickly get outside to smoke, since the whole hotel was piously "smoke-free").  This caused some timing problems, since the Rye Hilton is another of those infamous hotels that may have been designed by Escher, and I couldn't get through it without a map and guide.  That means that I didn't get to see much of the rest of the convention, but from all I heard it was lively fun: a pretty large convention with an impressive number of programming tracks.  Oh yes, I'd recommend it highly.

Marc recorded all the filking, starting from even before the opening ceremonies, in hopes of coming up with a convention album, and I sincerely hope he succeeds.  I know that my performances weren't the best, since I was recovering from a cold that had wiped out my entire upper octave a week before.  I'd been trying to exercise my range back up, but it's hard to do vocal exercises on an Amtrak train.  I managed to get through the traditional Dawn Patrol on Saturday night, but I didn't get my total range back until the last day of the con, and my tone wasn't great.  I didn't look my best, either, after 3 days in the coach-cars of 3 different trains.  At least I got the beginnings of a song out of it:

"Three days on the train, and I look like hell,
But it beats flying, anyway.
I didn't get X-rayed, didn't get groped, or robbed by the TSA.
The food is better and the seats are bigger,
So even if it's slow,
When it comes to long distance over land, the train is the way to go."

More later.  Gotta get to sleep early and up early tomorrow.  *Sigh* 

--Leslie <;)))><   )O(