"SERVICE ! SERVICE ! SERVICE !"

Yesterday and today: spring cleaning with the John Deere 316 tractor and a chainsaw. That's a workout that I'm not used to. Coming out the back end of a cold, it's been hard. I got a lot done, though, including a pretty damned good fire last night. It finally rained, but I had reduced a large pile of tree limbs and assorted brush rot to nothing before it did.

Toward the end of it last night, I broke a PTO drive belt on the tractor. Dammit. Well, today, I called the local John Deere joint and asked the person on the phone for that belt. He had it in stock and I ran right over to the 'ville to pick it up. I got it installed, and I could describe all the little things that told me that it wasn't right, but just take my word for it: it wasn't right. I called the guy again and described the problem, and he asked, "Has that mower deck been replaced?" Hmm. In fact, it had been about fifteen years ago. "Oh," he said, "well that's it. It needs a different belt."

Believe me when I tell you, dear reader, that it was ever so gently that I suggested to him that it might be helpful to ask about a detail like that with prospective customers in the future. "I know," he said, "but I don't replace a lot of belts for this model and it's not something I think about."

He actually said that.

So, I went out and took the deck apart again to get that goofy belt out and drove back into town. The young man with whom I'd dealt got right to work on setting up the exchange. I also asked him about another part that I had in mind, and we had a small but inconsequential dispute about it, and he pressed on. As he did, I told him, "I could get John Deere parts shipped in from Timbuktu. I come here for two reasons: convenience and expertise. You failed me on both of them this afternoon."

He got himself puffed up and whinnied, "Well, if you'd have told me that it was an updated deck..."

I began to point out to him what he'd said on the telephone, and he started doing a yapping-mouth mime-thing with his right hand, letting me know that he didn't want to hear it. I just looked him in the eye, and he stopped. I asked him whether he was in the habit of running customers out of his shop with this sort of an approach to service, and whether he would be satisfied to know that I would be happy to tell everyone I meet about him. He just shrugged and kept scribbling on an invoice.

His father walked up to the counter to deal with another customer. As he bent over the counter to write something, I asked him, "Did you raise this kid?"

"Absolutely."

"Are you proud of him?"

"Absolutely."

"Well, I guess that's your problem."

"Absolutely."

This all took place in front of maybe a half-dozen people. That man never once looked up at me.

At this point, the kid handed me the canceled receipt and the money for the wrong belt, and said, "Get out of my store. Now."

I laughed on my way out.

I drove over to Polkville, where I was treated like a major stockholder by pros. I would crawl over broken glass twice the distance to that place before I dealt with those hicks in Dryden, ever again.

Mem-O To K-Lo

They richly deserve it.

To hell with them.

At Least They Didn't Burn Him At The Stake

" 'I get a call the middle of the day from head of supervisor of substitute teachers. He says, "Jim, we have a huge issue. You can't take any more assignments. You need to come in right away." I said, "Well Pat, can you explain this to me?" "You've been accused of wizardry." Wizardry?' Piculas said."

Land O' Lakes, Florida

I don't doubt a word of it. Wouldn't surprise me one bit.

Live And Learn

"I myself was spared the intellectual humiliations of a college education."

(H. L. Mencken, April 3, 1927, Trenton, New Jersey Sunday Times)

Uh-Oh...

I think McPhillips is headed off the reservation.

What You Pay For

"If it was 7.8 million on a revenue stream of 114 million, nobody would say a word. But change 'million' to 'billion' -- the percentage is the same -- and everybody gets upset, because it is a big number."

That's John Hofmeister, President of Shell Oil, throwing down some facts of reality in the face of lies and bullshit designed to have you on your way to mo-betta phat Endarkenment by the end of the year. And there's lots of 'em (facts), too. Glenn Beck segment at YouTube. Watch the whole five-minute thing. Wladimir Kraus linked that.

Hofmeister says that we're twelve to fifteen years away from seeing significant domestic production increases at the pump. It should not be difficult to understand that the greatest part of that lag is located in Washington, where prissy little scribblers backed with main force presume to stand in the way of men of action who would get out there and produce in exchange for our production ("division-of-labor economy", kids) denominated in money. There is no telling how much of the cost of end products -- at least half a generation away now -- will have been devoted to "negotiations" and "partnerships" with these slugs: corporate legal departments living cheek by jowl with them for whole careers, accounting departments forced to count their bloated and rotten beans, not a single boot set anywhere without first referring to every sort of creep with a "mandate" and "authority" to make sure that some legislative committee hearing won't sling his ass on an election-year whim. All of that Rube Goldberg effort has to come from somewhere, but at least it's not a "windfall profits tax". You're going to pay for it, though. That's the price of not exterminating parasites.

Still, you'd be a lot happier now if they had let people produce oil for you here in America instead of acting like comic-book dingbats with all the guns in the world for more than a whole generation now, even if people like John Hofmeister had to go them begging with hat in hand for permission to go to work. (The very idea: outrageous.) And now, you're going to wait another half a generation for any of it to get going, if it ever happens at all.

I wonder if anyone here can understand my blazing contempt for anyone who calls any of this a "market".

Criminations, On Point

Oil: $120 a barrel today.

Run over to the Heritage Foundation blog to see what Jay Leno thinks, in general.

How many people actually remember that The Lying Bastard of The Ozark Long March vetoed ANWR development?

I wish that creepy shitbag would wake up with a severed polar bear head in his bed: every single morning for the rest of his life until he got sick & tired of it and just died.

Memo To Karen De Coster

"The Postrel years were awful, but under Welch Reason has become worse than awful..."

(Karen De Coster, remarking on Reason magazine)

Could somebody check me on this? Welch didn't join Reason until this year. Nick Gillespie was the editor-in-chief for seven years before that. Welch has been in the driver's seat for less than six months. I'd like to see someone attempt the argument that Reason has only gone down the shitter in the last six months. Go ahead: try it.

I concluded that Gillespie was a bloody twit a long time ago, and Postrel's blog has been bookmarked in my "Pretensives" category since I first laid eyes on it.

Reason hasn't been seriously worth reading for longer than I can remember, now. To try to lay this at Welch's feet is absurd.

Enough, Already

As I post this, it is thirty-six degrees of Fahrenheit temperature here in Daisy Hollow. May 5. I'm sure that's probably happened before, but I wouldn't know when. In five years of its operation, I have never run the coal-stove so far into the year.

Item:

"On April 24 the World Wildife Fund (WWF), another body keen to keep the warmist flag flying, published a study warning that Arctic sea ice was melting so fast that it may soon reach a 'tipping point' where 'irreversible change' takes place. This was based on last September's data, showing ice cover having shrunk over six months from 13 million square kilometres to just 3 million.

What the WWF omitted to mention was that by March the ice had recovered to 14 million sq km (see the website Cryosphere Today), and that ice-cover around the Bering Strait and Alaska that month was at its highest level ever recorded. (At the same time Antarctic sea ice-cover was also at its highest-ever level, 30 per cent above normal).

The most dramatic evidence, however, emerged last week with an announcement by Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that an immense slow-cycling movement of water in the Pacific, known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), had unexpectedly shifted into its cool phase, something which only happens every 30 years or so, ultimately affecting climate all over the globe."

(linked from Samizdata)

I only wonder what it would take to get that unconscionable asshole Al Gore to throw himself off the highest available bridge.

The Whip Of The Week

...already, and it's only Sunday:

"By Hillary's logic, Western Europe and Japan should be suing us."

(Warren Meyer)

"Give Peas A Chance"

The most hilarious thing I've seen, well, today for sure:

"I've heard the screams of the vegetables
Watching their skins being peeled
Grated and steamed with no mercy
How do you think that feels?

Carrot juice constitutes murder
Greenhouses prisons for slaves
It's time to stop all this gardening
Let's call a spade a spade"

YouTube.

Everybody can have a good laugh at Switzerland now.

(Reynolds-links, the both of them)

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the "transvaluation of values" ("Twilight Of The Idols", 1888), with both feet planted on the doorstep of madness. With the Weekly Standard article about Switzerland, you can draw a line through history from this nonsense back to Nietzsche. The author cites "Our accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian world view, which upholds the unique dignity and moral worth of human beings, is driving us crazy." Not one word about Enlightenment evaluations of human beings without resort to religion. (Note: Rousseau is disqualified, here.) Let me only point out that religion is not reason, and it is the lapse of reason that results in this sort of horseshit: this is the exvaluation of values. Not what Nietzsche had in mind, but of course he barely had a mind at all by the time he attempted his point of ethics. It makes no serious difference, though, because madness can be categorically dismissed as useless to human culture, and here are two peas in the same pod.

The Endarkenment rolls on.

Murder

Good Christ. I am just ridiculously sick & tired. This house ought to be a hospital. Just now walked in from The Coots' gig at The Haunt. Have you ever given some terribly exhausting endeavor more than you have?

I just ain't got good sense. I am a fool for a loud guitar.

I'll pore over audio and video tomorrow, maybe, and see if there is anything worth shoveling out over the weekend.

I've dropped two Advil on general principles, and I'm going to go fall down now.

Flying Tykes

"The faithful at Solapur have been throwing their infants off this fifteen meter high tower for five hundred years."

(Viddie at Reuters)

Sounds pretty touristy, to me. "Hey, Honey look! They're having the baby-drop! Let's go see!"

I'd probably go watch that.

A Most Unbecoming Snivel

"Republicans want to vote for Republicans: who knew?"

Johnathan Pearce posts insightful and penetrating analysis of The Swooner, Andrew Sullivan. Here is what the latter wrote:

"It's extremely depressing that the first major national black politician who takes on the victimology of Sharpton and Jackson is greeted by the right with the kind of cynicism you see at Malkin or the Corner or Reynolds. It reveals, I think, the deeper truth: the Republican right only wants a black Republican to do this. They are not as interested in getting beyond the racial question, in changing the hopes and dreams of black America, as they are in exploiting it for partisan advantage. Their response to the first major black candidate for president tackling the old racial politics? 'We don't believe him.'

Brendan expresses dismay at Glenn Reynolds. But Reynolds voted against Harold Ford. There's no black Democrat who could ever pass muster. Because they're Democrats."

Okay. The ways that these people write must leave a reasonable person at-sea over the actual referents of their words. (See his blockquote of Brendan Loy, resplendent with hopey changey embracements of promise, and all this after a call to cut the "bullshit".) For all that, however, we ought to be able to discern some sort of broad-stroke differences between "Republicans" and "Democrats". Even if you wouldn't call them "principles", the people who adhere to one or the other of these two parties hold some differences in ideas serious enough to do that: adhere to one or the other party. Note to Sullivan: this is what "partisans" do, dummy. They join "parties".

It disappoints him that some people will not subordinate their more general political ideas to the particular issue of race.

Okay, then. Who are the racists in all this?

Sick As A Dog

I didn't even make it through my blog rounds, this morning. A cold has come out of nowhere and knocked me on my ass.

Let's see how much I can pull together before the Coots gig on Friday.

Yee-hah! Ain't we got fun?