comrade simba

I’m framing up a tres ceiling in the stairwell of the burned out rental house job and I was waaaaay too stoned to pay much attention to the maths in high school trig class. It was more fun to throw some bizarre question at Mr. Offenbacker at the start of class and watch him immerse himself in equations on the blackboards ’till the bell rang… both hands chalkin’ up a storm and a floor mop for an eraser heh heh.

So after scribbling circles and lines and triangles and chords on a piece of paper wondering if selling loose joints on the school parking lot was time well spent, 30 seconds on Google yielded http://stardazed.com/octagons.html

Once you know the width of the octagon, the length of each side is
L = 0.4142 W where L is the length of the side.

Laying out the octagon. An easy usual way is to first layout an accurate square the same width as the desired octagon, then make marks 0.2929W and 0.7071W in from one side (the side of the octagon takes up 0.4142 of the width of the square, leaving 0.2929W on each side; 0.7071 is 0.2929 + 0.4142)…

As long as I can multiply 66 inches x .2929 with a carpenter’s pencil on a piece of 2×6 I’m okay eh? But then I get 19.3314 inches and I seem to have lost my decimal to inches chart… Lessee 1 divided by 2 is .500, divided by 2 is .250, divided by 2 is .125, divided by 2 is .0625, so .250 and .0625 is .3125

19 5/16ths. Close enough, baby – we’re framin’.

Charlie sounds a bit beat down from his comment on the last post, but it gave me an idea for this one.

Few can just drop out – too plugged in to the system to disengage without a culture shock type meltdown. But there are a thousand small paper cuts that can annoy the piss out of the Big Purple Monster..

You give them their pound of flesh at property tax time, but you cut down on new product purchases to short ‘em on sales tax. You pay for your tags but limit gas consumption taking away as much fuel tax as possible. Work for cash as much as you can leaving their 1040 vacuum nozzle feeling around like a blind worm. You let the bank make their pound of flesh off the overnight float on your deposits and use Bill Pay for everything and make ‘em choke up some stamp change mailing a paper statement… while depriving them of 1 1/2% on every transaction via credit card.

Religiously “tithe” by paying 10% more at a local joint rather than supplicating at Wal-Mart. I spent $120 getting my mountain bike that was down to 3 gears and a half a brake fixed at a local bike shop rather than feed the consumer monster the same money on a new one. In my opinion the Grateful Dead stickers all over it was a factor.

Every bean you cook is a burrito you don’t buy. Every dollar you don’t have to earn is 50 cents straight out of the machine’s ass. We can starve the Beast without making changes too drastic to live with. They’re doing their utmost to bleed us dry – sock it right back at ‘em.

From: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5745

Beyond a Malthusian view, there is another factor that undermines progressivism. It is that complexity costs. In any living system, increased complexity (involving differentiation in structure and increasing organization) carries a metabolic cost. In non-human species this is a straightforward matter of additional calories. Among humans the cost is calculated in such currencies as resources, effort, time, or money, or by more subtle matters such as annoyance.

I’ll put it this way – Bigger and better, more bells and whistles until it ain’t worth the hassle.

Dodging annoyances is the biggest part of changes I make. Sure, fuel mileage is a consideration, but I take the slow ass back roads just to not have to deal with asshats behind me in a big hurry. I stopped going through drive thru’s where the kids can’t ever get the order right until I stopped going to fast food joints altogether – I’ll build a sandwich out of ingredients in a cooler if I gotta pack a lunch. 15 minutes tossing stuff into a grocery basket and checking out is less hassle than the “fast” in fast food.

On a more macro scale, my whole life has been a dodging of the annoyance of the workplace. Comrade’s maxim of life # 2 is It’s so much easier to spend less than it is to make more – I have time and again opted for the bed of a pickup truck over paying rent for a place to sleep. Now and then I have to corral the pigs when they break out of their pen and rampage around the farm, but that’s easier than trading labor for cash for pork products and paying The Man his pound of flesh on each transaction. “…such currencies as resources, effort, time, or money…” – progress has simply gotten out of hand.

Brooms and wood floors are simple; carpet and vacuums are complex. The wife is all fired up about getting rid of this wall to wall carpet that was a pre purchase requirement for buying this place. Looking at it one way lots of work went into the garden this growing season, but it sure is easy waltzing out there to pick dinner. I can kill, pluck, gut and toss a chicken into a pot faster than I could get through Wal-Mart picking up a sack of fried chicken. I got one simmering while I crank out this post! And it probably won’t surprise any of you that I don’t have a cell phone…

Our civilization may have reached Peak Annoyance – the place where trying to hold onto the norm becomes just so much aggravation. Maybe Voluntary Simplicity is just a nice way of saying “fuck it”.

I was listening to this guy bitch about the rich so I had to ask him why he put forth 100% of his efforts into fattening their portfolios. He’s not a dimwit – just clueless, so I had to point out a few things. Don’t expect me to repeat it verbatim, but here’s a version of my standard screed to the unenlightened:

You get up in the morning and immediately funnel money into the electrical corporation. You eat factory food, jump in your corporationmobile and drive to your place of wage slavery. Half your check is going for taxes to feed the gov’t machine – a machine that has gotten real good at passing out dollars to the top 1% and everybody else gets next to nothing in lousy services. 70% of what’s left over goes towards interest for your mortgage, car payment and credit card usury fees. And all you really want is a bigger TV.

There’s a fat corporate pig making a cut off of that TV. Some suit made a wad off your car “purchase”. Your mortgage lender (did you know “mortgage” means Death Pledge?) sure enjoys those interest dollars. Every single dime you scrabble around to amass ultimately winds up at the top of the social food chain, and shit rolls downhill. You live this way? You must actually love the people sticking it to you.

Maybe if the guy heard this from every other person it might penetrate. I’m just a lone crackpot – easily dismissed. I don’t know why I try to help the guy see through the lies – I ought to punch him in the jaw for working so hard for the Man – complicit in the monstrosity that’s trying to eat me. And that’s what awaits me every time I have to leave the Redoubt and go into Plasticland – a mob of consumers madly pickin’ cotton; I can visualize an ethereal vortex of sweat and labor converted into little green pieces of paper flowing into a greedy maw of a Big Purple Monster controlled by that pudgy Monopoly Banker Guy. They’re all lovin’ it. I, on the other hand, want EMP now, please.

The day after tomorrow I give the “Back 2 Basics” community group a demo on “alternative fertilizers”. Yep, gonna roll out the Thunder Bucket^TM and show ‘em how they ought to deal with their own shit rather than flinging it off for aquatic life forms to cope with. Yes, I enjoy making people uncomfortable. Look what they do to my world…

Go here:

http://www.fredoneverything.net/FOE_Frame_Column.htm

“It also makes me poisonously, bottle-throwing angry…” – what a great line.

There were quite a few comments on the last post – Dark Perspective, and I’ve been giving it further thought. I zorched three comments that were unfit for publication – may those posters waste away in a FEMA camp.

John, I take “The Western capitalistic corporate run governments of the world killed the third world.” as given. If you look to the east every morning you’ll come to the realization that the sun rises in that part of the sky every day. If you only look west, you’ll never see the sun rise. If everyone around you never looked east, the concept of a sunrise wouldn’t even exist. That’s how I view the culture we live in today. We can’t recognize a culture other than buy buy buy, steal steal steal, kill kill kill.

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, as to be hated, needs but to be seen; yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, we first endure, then pity, then embrace. –ALEXANDER POPE

Substitute civilization, and in particular western type corporate driven capitalist societies for the word “vice”, and there you have it. I discovered how my reality tunnel wasn’t wide enough to see anything but western style civilization being the normal and best way to live – and that’s not an easy task. From there it’s move beyond what a shame we have done such a lousy job on a human level with all the Earth’s bounty at our disposal, to putting up with all the asshat consumers without gleefully envisioning their suffering when the food trucks stop rolling in to the Wal-Marts. All the while being half scared about what collapse may bring.

Civilization is a monster, eating everything in its path from that first patch of einkorn in Mesopotamia to the invasion of Iraq for oil. Six billion human entities on this planet – our biomass is only exceeded by the ocean’s krill that appear to be declining at an alarming rate from acidification of their environment. We champion our very existence.

We say our job sucks. We hate the car payment. Store bought tomatoes taste like nothing and cost an arm and a leg, the smell of diesel fumes choke us out at a traffic jam, kids have lost the ability to write a complete sentence (lots ezr 2 txt) and multiply 473×7569 without a calculator. I can’t call my local telephone company with my 1948 rotary dial Bell telephone because I don’t have the option of pressing “1″ for English.

But the masses keep choking in traffic jams, to a job they hate to pay for a car they don’t want and battle the walmart crowds for food unfit to eat day after day. The ones who have more than two neurons firing will tell you the Congress passes laws not for the good of the people they “represent”, but for lining the coffers of their corporate donors(masters). And most still vote, be it habit, duty, or the insane belief that a lesser evil is something to support.

An etheral Corporate Pig gargles out a mwuhuhuha every time a card is swiped though a checkout line, every click of a turnstile, every punch of a timeclock, and every electronic transaction of a mandatory direct depositing of a paycheck. I pay an electric bill for the pleasure of posting this – I feed the Pig. The same Pig that will have me arrested for liberating a hundred pounds of produce out of a supermarket dumpster. Feed me or else.

So wanna grow my own food. So far the pig lets me as long as certain conditions are met – like supporting the concept of private property and the tax stream on which it stands. One parcel, one county, one state, one nation, one world order. The Order of Civilization.

I got a rocket stove building demonstration coming up in a week at the local farmer’s market. Gonna cob one up in about an hour right before their eyes, boil a pot of water in 20 minutes and pump heat laterally 10 or 15 feet using junk bricks, scrap sheet metal, mud and an old barrel. Show them you can heat your home independent of utility corporations with stuff people send to the dump or burn off in piles.

I’ll send twenty bucks to to a Bon Monastery and feed a three foot high monk. http://www.tibettruth.com/sponsorchild.html if somebody at that demo actually builds one for themselves. With the same cheery attitude I’ll have when I till up 90% of the community garden and broadcast cheap winter wheat since nobody claimed a fall garden patch. The first bum I see gets my loose change.

I want a donut.