Barn Raisin

There is an audio recording linked through this article's title. It is hosted at Google Docs. Please note that the recording says "right here in Salt Lake City", but when listening, fill in the name of your own community, since the idea is to do this in every city!

If I have two apples, and I give you one, we each have an apple. If I have two ideas, and I give you one, I still have two, and now you have one more.

I went out for a walk yesterday (2009/03/19), to face the insanity, and brought along my digital audio recorder. I think you'll enjoy sharing this trip with a few others. It's kind of a long and rambling shaggy dog story... just the kind of thing to play on a long drive on down the Interstate, oil-k?

The man playing the banjo is Airon Kallins (not shore how he likes to spell it), and of coarse, I'm Karl Hegbloom. Please, share this freely... It would be most awesome...

I had an interesting idea today... I saw a sign at the LDS temple South Visitor Center that had the word “Holiness” written on it... What if you broke the words differently... You know how fast spanish sounds when you don't knaw it well yet? So you can't always tell where the word endings are? How about “Ho Lines[s]” instead? Does it change the meaning? Hoe a row!

When I was a boy growing up in rural Wisconsin, we had a family cow, shared with an Aunt and Uncle across the road from us. It was my job to milk her after school. She was a Jersey cow, and we milked her with a Surge milking machine — the kind with a tank under it that hangs from a strap and bail hung over the cow's back. It operated off of an electric vacuum pump.

One winter there was an ice-storm that knocked out the electrical power for a weak ore sew, and sew, in order to milk the cow, we had to plug the vacuum pump into a gasoline engine driven generator. The ventilation was not quite adequate, so Buttercup and I had to breath a certain amount of the exhaust. After a day or so, everyone in both families noticed that the milk tasted like car exhaust.

It makes you wonder, doesn't it? Here we are all breathing about “five packs a day” of exhaust. I wonder what's in Mommy's milk?

The Church of Shreiking Cripes and the Lazy Driving Slobs

I was musing about what LDS stands for...

I mean, as an acronym — or the initials that stand for some three letter title of some sort. Here's a few forkloads of them, and please put-on a snazzy arm-punch shield and activate your dichotomy detector with false dilemmas enabled. Everyone does, of course, have the right to choose which of these to stand for. If you're taking too many on the chin, please stop wearing your mentality on your sleeve.

• (Fat)^* Lazy Driving Slobs
• Lazy Dilapidated Stinkers
• [[Help: ? =T=T=T= compatible with life ?]]
• Lady Dipping Swingers
• Legally Dyslexic Students
• Lovers of Downhill Skiing

... and I'm still hoping that it all stands to reason and that many others think over what civilization they choose to belong to. Is it sustainable beyond my own lifetime? Do I even care? Spend it on smoke and fuel, or clean wind and steel rail? Unveil this city from the smoggen shroud that mires her like a cesspool rank with petrol laden cuckah.

Instead of wallowing up to your hocks in your own car-cuckah, you could be breathing clean air in a wind-generated electric transportation age. Is the LDS Hercules up to the task? Can he divert the cleansing winds into the sail arms flailing guardian of clean tilth? Can that electrically powered residential service trolley system be built, to begin with, by design, with enough capacity to carry all of what is now carried by petrol-snorting pollution carking p-u's?

[Ob. Draft: Opposite "Lazy Driving Slobs", I want to hear one or two that are more aligned with wind and solar energy powered residential service trolley installed and maintained by the citizens of =T=T=T= than with driving stinkers.]

* “FLDS” is “Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints”, IIRC. You can think of fat as passing for healthy, a symptom of affluenzia, or as wasted leg fuel, and your choice of self-righteous highway.

The (LDS) Word Of Wisdom

The LDS Church has issued a “Word of Wisdom” that strongly suggests that members abstain from the use of caffiene, tobacco, and alchohol. It's not really about “religion”; it is really about health:

The Word of Wisdom is a basic law of health, in other words, it is a good starting point. Add to this the “body is a temple” scripture found in the Bible and we begin to have a clearer understanding of the Church's emphasis on being vigilant of what we ingest and on the wellbeing of our bodies. The standard works have many scriptures admonishing us not to defile the mind or the body. “The promises associated with the Word of Wisdom are considered both temporal and spiritual. The temporal promise has been interpreted as better health, and the spiritual promise as a closer relationship to [Goodness].”

Ok, so they are telling you that if you overwhelm your body's little ecosystem with booze, smoke, and crank-water, it will eventually break down and you'll suffer a decline in your health, right? Ok, so then tell me, why do Mormons who won't drink, smoke, or use caffeine think it's just fine to drive automobiles? I see a few obvious contradictions here. Can you see them?

Somebody told me that they believe in reproducing prolifically, to ensure that one will “enter the kingdom of heaven” or some-such typical Christian dogmatic nonsense. On the one hand, they seem very concerned about sustainable civilization and personal and social health and well-being, yet at the same time, they will drive around town in their p-u's, happily polluting the air, happily supporting an industry that blatantly poisons the health of the very planet we live on — the living thing we are a part of. The auto and oil industry promotes contention for fuel resources, and that contention creates conditions that bring about warfare to “secure” more of that resource.

That shows little concern for the health of the planet beyond their own lifetimes, right? It also shows little concern for maintaining peace on earth. It seems to me that they, in fact, don't really care for anything but their own personal comfort in this lifetime. If that's the case, why bother to reproduce? Caring for children is a huge burden, and hardly conducive to maximizing one's own personal ease-of-living... Except that maybe they are producing cheap labor for the empire? Following the ancient Roman “lex pop-ewe-la poop-ewe-lie”?

I saw a car the other day with a license-plate frame advertising “Hinckley Auto.” So, is that the same Hinckley that was the LDS Church president? Is that an indication that they are in truth rotten to the core? Maybe it explains why I was arrested when I attempted to speak to Mormons leaving Conference regarding the =T=T=T= idea? (Really it's probably not why; I'll tell that story differently in a future blog.)

Think about why people will smoke and drink. A primary reason is that they see it as normal behavior, since they see other's around them, in their social circle, doing it. Ever heard that joke that asks “How do you keep a Mormon from getting drunk on a fishing trip?” The answer is, of course, “Bring two Mormons.” Or, how about that old adage about “the very thin edge of a long, long wedge”?

Let's see some commentary on this, folks. What do ewe oil think?

Auto Beggars

Have you ever seen an old bum on the street... one who smokes continuously until there's orange-brown stains on his fingers; and he's all rough and leathery; consumes ethanol daily and pisses himself stinky. There's no way to hide that. You can't cover it with a fancy new shirt and make it go away. People who have learned to live like that don't change overnight into clean, healthy, intelligent members of the social community. They'll lie, cheat, and steal to get more to drink, more to smoke.

You can't give money to a wino beggar, because if you do, he'll just spend it on wine and tobacco, making the situation even worse. Your money's better spent on building and funding a bum cleanup facility. Why waste your money on smoke when you can buy something more permanent with it?

Ok, so what about that auto industry bailout? Isn't the auto industry like that bum? It smokes and pollutes. It begs the question... and the fools who buy into their false dilemmas think war and more polluting cars is the answer to the problem. They think they can just switch from petrol to ethanol. But there cannot be enough of that. That magical corn-u-cope-owe-yah is not bottomless. Think about soil depletion.

I wonder how many of them spent their tax kicker check, aka. "economic stimulus payment" on gasoline? Money to burn, right? Even if you finally broke down and bought a bicycle with it... Reminds me of my ex. She wanted more child support money. I thought about it, and wrote a letter outlining the cost of cigarettes, beer, snorting gas hogging mullet-mobiles, and other loud and crassly unnecessary "living" expenses. She replied that she doesn't spend the child support on those things; she spends her own money, that she earns, on it.

How many men paying support wish they could control how it's being spent? There should be rules about where it goes... Money should be spent according to laws, not according to women, right? ... Or, maybe all of those people who got nice fat tax cuts are responsible with how they spend it. Buying a new SUV "stimulates the economy", right? I can almost hear the techron trickling down the well pipe.

I think that it's obvious that instead of bailing out the auto industry, we should simply allow it to collapse under it's own weight. Face it. Automobile transportation does not scale to this level and will not scale any much farther. It stinks and pollutes. We are pumping a finite natural resource out of the ground and wasting it by burning it up into puffs of smoke that... well, we wish it would blow away.

Instead of pissing away the money on the auto and petroleum industry, it should be spent on railing up our urban transit systems. We ought to be sharing the ride with other members of the social community in residential service trolley cars powered by clean wind energy. The drivers need to quit smoking and guzzling.

The auto and petroleum marketroids are going to try and sell you (hand waving) "natural gas". It's the same problem all over again. They are pumping matter out of the ground. For every mole of natural gas you burn, you produce a mole of CO2 and a mole of H2O, plus other byproducts of incomplete combustion of an impure gas. It's adding matter to the atmosphere. What is that causing?

There are too many people burning it in cars and it will overwhelm the ability of the planet to clear it. Don't let their PR hacks fool you when they farce claiming that most of the CO2 emissions comes from big industry. It's kiking out of your own bottomless tailpipes, plain and simple. It's not fuel you're looking for.

I suggest that instead of burning the "natural" gas as fuel, it should instead be utilized in other ways, perhaps for producing direct reduced iron to be used for the rail and rebar we'll need to install that shiny new infrastructure. Think of how long your investment will last if you spend it on steel rather than on smoke.

...=T=T=T= >> ?