Trego's Mountain Ear

"Serving North Lincoln County"

Category: Community

  • Venn Diagram and DSM

    I’ve seen this Venn diagram on several pieces of social media. It doesn’t give a comment about everything in it coming from the psychologist folks Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, so I thought I should add that. The intersection of all sets is interesting: Unable to take criticism, Lack of empathy, Manipulative, relationship difficulties. Sounds like exactly the type of people I want to have making decisions for me.

    The entire post, which explains things more, is at https://x.com/JDHaltigan/status/2009849734840655980 I’m no psych, and I found this intersection between the four diagnosed personality disorders interesting. I guess I prefer the simple, layman’s analysis of “just plain nuts.”

    The first time I saw the acronym LARP used, I had to look it up. Live Action Role Play. An email from Julia took me further down the path – to look at the deportation protests as a game. Forty years ago, I watched the deportation game – then it was played by two sides – the mojados and la migra. And, from what I saw, there were some informal rules that both sides followed. Of course, 40 years back, folks weren’t interfering with the immigration agents. And I doubt that there was any Live Action Role Play more serious than the Society for Creative Anachronism or the Civil War reenactors. Neither group was famed for its women being Cluster B mental cases.

  • When Castro Was Cool

    I wasn’t yet ten, and Castro was cool. From 1953 on, he was a revolutionary, fighting to remove Fulgencio Batista from Cuba’s presidency. In 1938, speaking of Nicaragua’s president Somoza, FDR described the dictator with the phrase “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” President Roosevelt died before Batista took power in Cuba, so we don’t know how he would have evaluated Batista – but my bet is about the same.

    I turned 9 after ‘los barbudos’ (the bearded ones) came from the mountains into Havana – so I was probably 7 when I started watching the news about the Cuban revolution. Castro was cool – he was a pitcher. At 7, the world was open – I too had pitching potential. By the time I was 10, like everyone who watched me, I knew better. But Fidel Castro had tried out for the Washington Senators (the story was he almost made the Yankees, but the truth was impressive enough for a 7-year-old).

    Each weekend, ‘los barbudos’ would capture another town – after the newspapers with Sunday comics came to town. Like me, ‘los barbudos’ read Al Capp’s Little Abner comic strip. I could understand the need for a skirmish to get to Little Abner – as my family’s new reader, I got the comics section after Dad got his chance at it, and often after Mom.

    And, naturally, ‘los barbudos’ were cool. The only revolutionaries I had heard of at that time were the American revolutionaries – and they were the good guys. In 1957, I had no idea that revolutionaries could be bad guys. I guess I had a lot left to learn.

  • You Have To Beat Darwin Every Day

    There are Darwin Awards out there – and you have to win every time you’re in a spot to get a Darwin. (The Darwin awards are in recognition of removing oneself from the gene pool by one’s own foolish actions) Darwin, like Malthus, only needs to be right once. Winning means not getting a Darwin award.

    It’s why stupidity, according to Heinlein, is a capital offense. Martin Luther King said “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” Jennifer Lee Carrol described it: “Stupidity makes you dangerous to yourself and everyone around you.”

    Perhaps John Farnam’s rule of stupid is what we most need: “Don’t go to stupid places; don’t associate with stupid people; don’t do stupid things.” In Minneapolis, we saw Farnam’s rule violated – and then, seeing the results were not what they wanted, the folks against deporting illegals doubled down, even more came out of the woodwork, with a story that denied Good’s contribution to her death. Then ICE doubled down and sent in another thousand agents.

    Some of our mojados survived the trip through the Darien Gap, the rest of central America, Mexico and across the Rio Grande – others died on the way. I think of Gonzalo’s mother – a pregnant teen, sixty years ago, going north from Yucatan so her baby would be born in the US and Gonzalo would have opportunities that she didn’t. She took the risks knowingly, won her gamble, and was promptly deported back to Mexico, with newborn US citizen Gonzalo. That was a different, calculated decision.

    In the woods, don’t hang out under widowmakers. I have one here on the place, that my father pointed out to avoid over sixty years ago. I’m looking forward to sharing it with my grandsons – let’s see how many generations can share that hazard. There’s a reason to wear a brainbucket when you’re using a chainsaw.

    Hanging out with stupid people can be hazardous – the type of friend that says or does exactly the wrong thing and gets the entire bar PO’d at two or three people. Come to think of it, part of that may include going to stupid places and doing stupid things. Right now, the news kind of focuses me on Minnesota and ICE – but there are a lot of other opportunities to go to stupid places and do stupid things with stupid people. The point is to avoid them – and at 76, I’ve probably been lucky more than skillful. Not having a Darwin Award for the wall is a good thing.

  • Computer Repair by Mussolini

    My cat decided my laptop needed to be kicked to the floor. Everyone who has a cat has experienced it – the cat jumps to a flat surface, and makes the decision that whatever is there needs to be pushed to the floor. While cats have a tendency to land on their feet, laptop computers have a tendency to land on their corners. And on most laptops, two of the four corners include the hinges that let you lift the screen.

    So my laptop had the right hinge still connected, and the left side of the screen was hanging free. There are an amazing number of problems in using an HP where the left side is loose – all sorts of shut down and start up problems occur because that’s the corner with the switch. I thought of epoxy – but hinges have to move, and generally, anything I fix with epoxy needs to be thicker than the original piece or it will break again.

    I pulled out the dial calipers – a handy tool. The computer, at the spot where it was broken was just under half an inch. So I started looking through the scrap for a chunk of aluminum with a half-inch channel. No such luck. I couldn’t find the piece that did what I needed. Then remnants of my early years struck my mind – could I find a piece of metal in the clutter of a half-century of gun repair and modification. Maybe an old Carcano or Steyr clip? The Steyr clip was angled, but Cartridges of the World told me that the rim diameter was0.470 – the right size, but the angle wouldn’t work well. On the other hand, the Carcano rim was .450 – and if memory served, the clip was all right angles. It was a question of looking through 40 years of collected miscellaneous junk for something that looks like this:

    Well, it took a while to find it – (I haven’t had a Carcano around in over forty years. Nice enough little carbine, but less practical than an M1 carbine. Thought I was doing great when I swapped it off.) Took a grinder and removed the right side, and I had my brace to repair the broken computer. It took a lot longer to figure out the part I could repurpose and then find it than it did to modify it and fix my computer. And if the cat gets ambitious and breaks the right hinge, I still have one more perfectly original Italian Carcano clip on hand to use for one more repair. I am sure that Mussolini never expected that parts for the rifles he used to invade Ethiopia would be used to repair computers.

  • Getting Alberta Oil to Market

    I saw this map on Small Dead Animals (when you’re this close to the border, following Canadian blogs makes sense):

    The map suggests that the challenges involved in holding Canada together may be greater than I had realized. Saskatchewan is looking at a similar route to get their fertilizer to the Pacific – though that may wind up being truck and rail.

    I’ve seen a poll taken on the Alberta separatist movement – while I have no idea how good the pollster is, results of 19% for Alberta independence and 75% who want to stay Canadian seem pretty solid. We shall see – they’re gathering signatures for the election, and I am sure it will occur. Who knows – they may even get a pipeline that runs through British Columbia.

    Ten days later – and before I got back to this map and Alberta’s resources, the Venezuela strike came along. I don’t know a whole lot about the oil business – but the little I do know tells me that Venezuela’s thick crude isn’t a whole lot different than Alberta’s oil. Heck, Venezuela’s oil was being refined in the US before World War II. It’s back.

  • Parties On Economics

    This Gallup poll had a simple question – do you have a positive or negative image of socialism, then the same on capitalism. The graphs may explain some of our differences:

    I can’t help remembering that Karl Marx was more a critical student of capitalism than socialism as I look at these graphs. Thing is, I live in a mixed economy – part capitalistic, part socialistic. I live in an area where the county government builds and maintains the roads – in other places toll roads are an option (though they are often still government operations). Roughly 3/4 of the county land is government owned. I have socialized garbage collection. My health insurance is Medicare. If I make too much money this year, my payments go up next year. I like owning my own house and cars. My electric power comes from a co-op that was developed as a social program. My world, or at least my state and nation, are a blend of capitalism and socialism. Some aspects of socialism are many steps beyond what I regard as tolerable, others make life easier.

    A dislike for Capitalism usually boils down to a dislike for monopolies – and, as we can see in Venezuela, Socialism changes the people who have the monopolies. Under Capitalism, the rich become powerful; under Socialism, the powerful become rich. It seems like we could all agree that what we hate is Authoritarianism in all forms? I guess that’s just too simple.

    I’m viewing polls and articles that tell me the younger generation dislikes both political parties – and I can’t help believing that’s a good thing.