We only ever had outdoor cats when I was a kid. Including one that made it to 17 and could still take down a squirrel blind in one eye, half blind in the other and eat up with arthritis. We fed her. She just liked to keep in practice I guess.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder as they say. Or yellow vs green in this case.

On the yellow side of yellow-green.

Have there ever been elections without interference, both foreign and domestic? Anywhere in the world at any point in history? Is such a thing even possible?

It’s real easy to right every wrong when you get to socialize your costs for doing so.

When you need a bridge…

https://youtu.be/5pMeb4ZSHh8?si=OHdTOMZs8-_oMSK-

There’s a difference between living somewhere, legally or not, and being part of the community. Just moving in doesn’t give you that. My area is going through large scale migration right now. Citizens moving in from 1,000s of miles away. All legal. My family has been in this county for 300 years. Well. It will be 300 years in 2045. I don’t figure to be the one to leave. Even if people are ruining it. I figure that all dries up as the current financial system becomes less and less able to build 1,000 homes at a go and sell them later instead of a few people moving in and building houses as they move. I’ll say it though, when people move into an area and start wanting to raise taxes to pay for more schools and teachers I start to get onboard with not having the vote until you’ve lived in a community for 10-15 years.

Especially if they aren’t allowed a say in who gets to by shares or told they have to let you buy shares.

You don’t but why should the people with a long term generational share in the company trust you or think you should have a say because you bought shares last month.

Those people are like shareholders in a large publicly traded company that want money now but won’t own shares 50 years from now and know it. They don’t mind gutting R and D for money now. Why would they? The consequences of that will be someone else’s problem, they’ll have moved on or will then. Or they’ll support spending money on the wrong things because it will boost profits in the short term. Or because “its the right thing to do” for social justice.

I’m not advocating for anything. Just making an observation. If you engage in non peaceful behavior as a form of protest you better be ready to be violent because when it’s time to be violent it’s time to be violent. Also the second you start to show violence towards people, and their property, that were neutral in the conflict you increase the likelihood of not liking how they choose to enter the conflict. Take the BLM stuff. Are there problems with policing in America that need to be fixed? Absolutely. Does that take burning down a police station or three maybe with the cops inside? Maybe. You burn down private property you just lost me and millions of other people. Why? I got property and it’s real easy to picture that happening here. I also start to think about whether or not I’d engage in certain behavior against those people if I caught them in the act. From 5-600 yards away. It didn’t by the way, the BLM protest by me consisted of people walking down the sidewalk carrying signs with local businesses staging bottled water for them and a couple of restaurants setting up grills in their parking lots and cooking for them. On an unrelated note, it’s legal to drive around with a loaded handgun in your glove box or center console here. No permit needed and most of the population does.

He has to. It’s also why he can’t fix the problems even if he wanted to. That would mean admitting he was wrong for 50 years. That’s something most people don’t have in them.

The house I grew up in and where my parents still live? My great grandfather and his brothers built it. My father’s mother and uncle were born in that house. There’s always a next generation in the clan that will need housing.

My father’s parents built a small house and then added rooms as they added children. I’ll grant you this was probably helped by the fact that they had a brick house and my great uncle and his brother were brick masons. We’re also the kind of family where everyone shows up to work on a house, chop firewood or harvest the garden. I suspect that sort of thinking and way of doing things would make a comeback under that type of financial situation.

I don’t think people are arguing against it per se. I think a lot of people want something that can only be achieved that way at least anytime soon, aren’t willing to contribute if they aren’t going to make money and then wonder why they don’t have the thing. Like a bank or credit processing system that doesn’t report gun purchases to the government. You probably need a bank owned by shareholders that specifically opposed to policies like that and the only way to get that is probably for those people to get together in the millions and chip in 50 bucks a piece and then lock in ownership. Not have it be a publicly traded company and you probably won’t get funding from the feds or the fed. So yeah. Making money? Probably not happening anytime soon. It did a better job of achieving your ends than spending the same money in politics would have though. And how many of those people donated more than 20 bucks a piece to political pro gun organizations to do that, to no effect.

Want a bank that will loan money to buy non traditionally shaped houses or look at the value of the soil on two different farms and charge based on that instead of just the value of the house and the amount of land? Same thing.

Ah yes. The draft. With a last name like mine glad I’m 36 now.

Eh. I think you could make it work in excess of that number as long as your still at a point of I don’t know you but I do know 3 of your cousins. I think the biggest problem is people thinking it’s ok to forcibly take resources from others for their own safety. Paying the police and military and so forth. It might be necessary but no one wants to be the bad guy so they contort themselves mentally to come up with a way that they aren’t a thief and if anyone was killed resisting a murderer. Worse yet if they weren’t a trigger puller for the government or an elected official but just a voter they’re a coward who contracts their dirty work out by means of secret ballot on top of being a thief and murderer.

And yes. If you believe taxes are theft this is the only way to look at your neighbors who don’t or the ones who think it is but decide we have to do it anyway. Even if you shouldn’t say it because those people are the bulk of your society. Does it make them a bad person? Are you a bad person if you survive a plane crash, have no survival skills and break into a remote hunting cabin for shelter and food? Does it change if the cabin is occupied and the owner doesn’t want you there or to share his food so you get into a fight and kill him? How is that any different at scale when it’s a large collection of individuals doing it through the government?

You can’t get good output with bad input and most people have chosen to use a system of bad inputs because they think it’s a better system.

One time a buddy of my dad’s had cancer, couldn’t work and needed money. He sold my dad a pistol for 300 bucks. My dad’s more of a revolver guy so he sold it to me for 300 bucks. Fast forward 4-5 years the guy is back on his feet and wants his pistol back so I sold it to my dad for 300 and he sold it back to his buddy for 300. Then I went out and bought one just like it for 400.

I think that works in places where you know the people involved or at best if you don’t know them you know their cousin. There’s other things involved. If you go to someone who doesn’t know you from Adam they don’t have that personal connection so that’s a non starter because they’ll always have something else to do with their resources if the possibility of profit doesn’t exist.

My pet idea is that the Libertarian Party and its dues paying members would have been better off starting their own bank and credit processing system than wasting the money in politics. The response is typically I would be interested in that if was profitable. Why would profits come into it? You aren’t receiving a return on your investment in the libertarian party. So you’ll waste money on politics but because it’s a business you suddenly have to make money instead of just breaking even or even never seeing that money again but now there’s a system in place that does more for your ability to do business without the government shutting you down with a simple email to your bank instead of taking your bank to court, than 70 years or 700 years of playing politics was ever going to get you.