Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   the Russians are destroying podcasts
Sunday, November 18 2018
I gathered five backpack loads of salvaged firewood today, starting with more of that dry maple from above the Stick Trail in the Chamomile ravine, then getting more from the felled oak on the terrace just east of the Stick Trail's Chamomile crossing. There's been a large fallen oak down in the ravine below that for at least a year, and today I cut several pieces out of it. I was delighted (though not surprised) to find it dry and ready to burn. That's how it is with fallen chestnut oak. Other species dry in other ways. For example, my third pack contained nothing but bucked pieces from a standing dead white pine just west of the Farm Road near the house. Normally dead white pine, if thin enough, are bone-dry through-and-through. But if they're above a certain thickness, even dead white pine will be wet when split. This white pine trunk was about seven inches thick at the stump (which I consider a smallish tree), but when split, the wood was damp. I actually knew it was going to be damp just from the weight of the load; normally white pine of that volume would've been light, but this was not.
My fourth load was more of that dry oak from the terrace above the Chamomile and then my fifth load was a mix of small dead trees only a couple hundred feet south of the house and east of the Stick Trail. These were unusal firewood species, the bulk of it being ironwood (Ostrya virginiana: a mesic species that rarely grows a trunk more than six inches thick). Ironwood gets its name from the density of the wood. The pieces I cut were indeed heavy, though some of that weight turned out to be water when I went to burn it. Evidently dead ironwood, unlike dead chestnut oak, holds onto its water (or absorbs it from the environment).

As I worked, I listened to the latest Kunstlercast podcast, which was made just after the midterms. I despaired at what I thought I was hearing. But before I get into that, we need a little background. For those who don't remember. James Howard Kunstler is a writer who has drawn attention to how cheap oil destroyed the American landscape by misallocating resources to something, the affordable private automobile, that is probably a historical fluke. It faces the looming threat of finite global oil supplies (fracking being a temporary and unsustainable drilling method resulting from cheap credit and gullible investors). All of that is sound theory, and Kunstler is a good and often hilarious writer. I've enjoyed his podcasts, especially when Duncan Crary was the technical brains behind the operation. But in recent years, particularly after his amiable separation from Crary, Kunstler has slowly seemed to go off the rails. The first signs of this might've been his obsession with hoarding gold. True, as a rare metal, gold will always have value no matter what the economies do around it, and it will tend to retain its value even as fiat currencies fail. But hoarding a resource, particularly when others are doing the same and driving up the price, is foolishness. When the American economy fails to collapse and gold goes back down to half the price it had at its peak, goldbugs like Kunstler look silly. And his podcasts obsessing about gold (and even underwritten by sellers of gold) look even sillier. I'll grant that this obsession is, in Kunstler's case, understandable; he thinks the collapse of the global economy will happen "any day now," and on some level he's right. But things are clearly taking longer to play out than he expected. Meanwhile, as an aging Baby Boomer, it makes sense that he would appreciate the satisfaction of his predictions coming true in his lifetime.
But then, both before and after Trump was elected president, Kunstler's podcasts kept making the point that the Democrats and Republicans were essentially equivalent in terms of how bad they are for the future of the country. Kunstler seemed to have a special loathing for Hillary Clinton, which may or may not be rooted in the kind of casual sexism (and even, at times, racism) one hears in Kunstler's rants. But to put her (or even, for that matter, Jeb Bush) in the same category as an obvious kleptocrat like Donald Trump is absurd. And to think that the Republicans aren't any worse than Democrats on environmental or energy issues is demonstrably false. True: people in both parties accept the stupid status quo of car culture, endless economic growth, and cheap crap from China. But Democrats clear a pretty low bar by, for example, accepting the science of global warming. Republicans, meanwhile, want to shrink the government so small that America becomes an essentially feudal state.
This all brings me to what I heard on Kunstler's latest podcast. It was an interview with Raul Meijer, who runs the Automatic Earth website. Both Kunstler and Meijer seemed pretty much in agreement on a series of issues, which suggested that the underlying problem now affecting Kunstler might also be affecting Meijer. More on my theory of what that might be in a bit. My dismay began with a low-information analysis of the midterm elections, with Meijer saying they were somehow inconclusive because, while the Democrats had taken the House of Representatives, they'd failed to prevail in the Senate. I can understand someone who doesn't know anything about this election drawing such a conclusion, but those of us who have paid attention know that the electoral map this election was badly tilted against the Democrats, forcing them to defend marginal candidates in deep red states. Indeed, even to win the house (as they did) they had to overcome gerrymandering with a 7% better performance at the polls. But okay, even smart people occasionally draw dumb conclusions. Sadly, it wasn't long before they agreed on the next stupid point: that James Comey had tried to engineer some sort of deep-state-coup (they didn't bother to elaborate and I didn't know what they were alluding to, since I do not watch Fox News and Kunstler had never mentioned such a thing in the past). Kunstler then said that he was more worried about what the Democrats are up to (presumably with the deep state and Robert Mueller) than he is with Donald Trump. Again, he didn't elaborate. But apparently Kunstler thinks the Democrats (who barely have any actual power) have something up their sleeves more threatening to the American republic than discrediting the free press, countenancing despots, separating parents from their children at the border, encouraging white supremacists, violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, and appointing a series of incompetent hacks and grifters to important government roles. From there, it was as if Kunstler and Meijer were going down some paranoid alternate-reality checklist, the only item of which making sense being the unsustainability of fracking. When Kunstler cast aspersions on the Euromaidan Revolution (a successful effort to depose a kleptocratic Russian-backed puppet in the Ukraine) and then said good things about how Putin is running Russia, I figured out what the problem with James Howard Kunstler must be. He'd lost so much money buying gold at the peak of the market that he's been forced to rely on Russian propaganda money to make ends meet. I've heard this has been happening, and in this case there's really no other logical explanation. As Donald Trump might say (were he not in the same position), "Sad!"

After finishing my firewood gathering for the day, I drove with Ramona to the Brick Mansion to take another swing at the motion-sensor light above the landing (between the doors to the second and third floor). Unfortunately, I forgot to bring the 50 feet of bare copper water I'd bought for this project, but it turned out I could make do by extracting 10 gauge conductors from an orange coil of Romex on the floor of the Subaru's backseat (mixes with reusable shopping bags, copper fittings, bolts, and all sorts of other useful things). With some effort, I was able to push a piece of copper wire down out of the electrical box containing the motion sensor such that it would come out from behind a plaster wall in the abandoned stairway on the other side of that wall. That abandoned stairway is now used as a chase for wire and pipes, and I was able to climb up into it from the basement and pull the wire out of the wall and bring it into contact with copper pipes (I'm simplifying here; this took a few tries). When I then went to check on the occupancy sensor, it was working correctly! The ground to that box had evidently gone bad somehow.
On the way back home, I took the long way so I could pay a visit to the Tibetan Center thrift store. There I found two digital cameras, though one was so pathetic in every way (it had a tiny LCD and a proprietary USB connector) that I only wanted the other. It was all taped together and looked like shit, but it was 8 megapixels and had a 6X optical zoom, which is never going to be a cheap feature. When the crazy lady in front of me left with her $30 of stuff, I went to the counter with the camera I had selected. The woman wanted to know why I would possibly want such a piece of shit. So I made up a story about rebuilding it into a surveillance camera (which is one possible application). She said I could have it for a dollar, which (knowing her particular prices) seemed cheap to me. But when I only had a $20, she said I could get her next time. I told her that that was what I'd been told last time I came. "Keep a tab!" she said.

When Gretchen and Neville got home from working at the bookstore, it was almost time to go to our next thing: dinner at Ray & Nancy's (also attended by Sarah the Vegan). Ray had made a pasta dish of cooked spinach, Gimme Lean faux sausage, and big tubular pieces of pasta (rigatoni?). There was a surprising amount of gossip over dinner, mostly from Ray and Gretchen, the two of our crowd who interface with the public on a regular basis. Sarah also had a few stories, but they were mostly about yoga, the rapey founder of "hot yoga," and the food she likes to eat after yoga. (Among these things, she admitted she has a crush on the guy who owns Lucoli Pizza in Red Hook.) Conversation kept coming around to various lecherous or borderline-rapey Woodstock men, and I eventually proposed that someone create a Roger Tory Peterson Field Guide to the Creeps of Woodstock.
Ray and Nancy recently completed a small kitchen makeover, which consisted mostly of painting the cabinets and walls and installing new pulls. It sll looks fresh and cheerful and easy to keep clean. They were helped by the fact that their cabinet doors are simple slabs made of undecorated wood. (Painting our cabinets, with their "kuntry kitchen" accents routed into their surfaces, would've been impossible.)


Neville in Ray & Nancy's kitchen this evening, sitting on "the vortex," a kitchen rug. You can see the painted cabinets on the left behind Neville.


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