Month: March 2021

Shelter

Architecture, Real Estate

And then we have this plaudit, following the Chinkvirus lockdown(s):

Shelter in place has us focused on the characteristics of a home that makes us happy. What makes us happy in a home has not changed, but since we are spending more time in a home than ever, we are focused on what makes us happy in a home. Neighborhoods become more important during shelter in place. Here is a home that exudes the elements of a home we enjoy when we shelter in place. Architect Max Levy designed this home that is immersed in nature, enjoys the shared greenways of the neighborhood, and is surrounded by vibrancy.

And this “immersion in nature” looks like this:

You know where this is going, right?  Let’s look at the interior:

It would not surprise me if the cushion coverings were hiding concrete blocks.

This excrescence is part of a series of five houses which inspire us to shelter in place, and only one of the five does not inspire me to load up the Molotov cocktails and go for a little drive down some “shared greenways”.  Here it is:

…and to the surprise of absolutely nobody, this house was designed IN 1939.

All the above are located in Dallas (not renowned for anything classical, architecture least of all), but I do know the real estate market around here quite well, and I can truthfully say that the only houses I’d consider buying in the city would be the few still standing which were built before WWII.

All the rest are either foul beyond words (“mid-century modern” aaargh ) or else ultra-modern carbuncles like the ones above.  The newly-built ones, by the way, all look like they’re owned by Russian oil oligarchs, retired Cowboys footballers, Arab oil sheiks or Colombian druglords.  (And that’s not just my opinion, by the way:  Mr. Free Market, who has been on several tours of the area conducted by Yours Truly, has even worse things to say.)

Here’s one in Plano which exemplifies the type:

At least it looks like something a little classical.  But the supercars parked oh-so casually in the driveway give the game away.

It makes me not want to buy lottery tickets, if that’s all that obscene amounts of money could buy me.

Mourning The Queen

Bad News, Drive Time

It bothers me that raddled old Commies like Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein can live to a ripe [sic]  old age, but wonderful women like Sabine Schmitz get snatched away from us far too early.

“Sabine who?”  you ask.

There was no one like Sabine Schmitz, the Queen of the Nurburgring, and I’m not sure there’ll ever be anyone quite like her.

Whenever she was due to appear on the old Top Gear show, I made sure never to miss it, because she was the real deal:  taunting, teasing, mocking, shouting, screaming and in general, making utter fools of all the Top Gear hosts — especially Clarkson — and then backing it up with matchless displays of driving skill around one of the world’s deadliest racing circuits.

Here’s a tribute to Sabine from, well, everyone who ever knew her professionally.  And here’s Part 1 and Part 2 of her audacious challenge:  that she could drive around the Ring faster in a Ford Transit van than Jeremy Clarkson had done in a Jaguar.

I loved loved LOVED Sabine Schmitz, and I am going to miss her terribly.

Isolated

Resistance

I forget where I got this (sorry), but SOTI I saw this, as the mindset of the Deep Swamp towards us conservatives:

“We don’t like things as they are, and so we’ll make it really, really expensive for certain people to enforce their rights. We’ll make them fight every day for what should be rightly theirs for free. We’ll take away their birthright. We’ll screw with their businesses and screw with their wombs and screw with their assumptions about what the courts have guaranteed them, and some of them will give up, and some of them will make mistakes, and we’ll just make sure they have many bad days, and eventually they’ll get tired of fighting with us and we’ll get a team of brutal lawyers to take them down and put them in their place.”

At American Greatness, Max Martin has this rather withering comment to make:

At this moment [conservatives] are the weaker side in this asymmetric struggle. Right now, we are 80 million couch potatoes and keyboard warriors with rifles in our bedroom closets. This is not a force to be reckoned with.

Read the article to get the argument that leads him to that depressing conclusion.  Not part of his analysis, by the way, is that a large number of the so-called 80 million are a bunch of old bastards like myself, who have neither the health, energy nor will to do all the stuff he suggests we do to avoid being buried by the liberal ruling elite.

So what’s left?  DO we just resign ourselves to the fact that at some point, if we refuse to give in to the feral [sic] government, its rules, regulations and apparatchiks, we should just wait in our homes for the sturmtruppen  and Stasi to come for us, and then surrender meekly to be led off to Room 101?  Or, for those of us who have nothing to lose, resist with violence rather than just resign ourselves to our fate?

Let’s face it:  if the American Revolution was actively pursued and fought (by some estimates) by only 13% of the then-population of the soon-to-be United States, that means that the other 87% were either British loyalists or the 18th-century equivalent of couch potatoes.  That being the case, who is going to form the 13% of conservatives (10 million?  we should be so lucky) who would actively form the resistance against the fucking establishment?

Here’s the late Joseph Sobran on the topic:

“By today’s standards King George III was a very mild tyrant indeed. He taxed his American colonists at a rate of only pennies per annum. His actual impact on their personal lives was trivial. He had arbitrary power over them in law and in principle but in fact it was seldom exercised. If you compare his rule with that of today’s U.S. Government you have to wonder why we celebrate our independence…”

And if I may be so bold:  what’s facing us, as the de facto  survivors and supporters of the principles that formed our republic, is a far more formidable foe than George III.

  • They aren’t thousands of miles away over the ocean, with no communication other than written letters and ship-borne transmission.  They are right here, and their military force, communications and even media support are far, far greater than anything the British king had at his disposal.
  • Whereas George III and the British population may have had a relatively benign attitude towards those pesky columnists, our modern-day opponents actively hate us and think we should be exterminated — whether by shunning (of our voices and our access to communication), or in some extreme examples, killed.  (Lest I’m accused of being overwrought on this issue, let us remind ourselves that nobody dreamed that the oh-so civilized Germans, with their cultural history of Goethe and Schiller, would be capable of mass murder and genocide — except that they were.)
  • The Revolutionary army of 1776 was well armed for the time.  We have a few thousand committed riflemen, to be pitted against a modern army.  We can’t even drink beer when threatened by Meal Team Six, let alone withstand a sustained assault against our lives by a federal army such as FBI SWAT teams, DHS ditto, or even IRS agents.  They can concentrate their forces against us;  we can’t do the same against them.
  • Forget that shit about the U.S. Armed Forces being composed of supportive conservative warriors.  They aren’t any more, at least at the officer level.  If the government decided to use them against us, they will.  They’ve walked all over the Constitution in terms of our freedom of speech and they continue to do so on our right to bear arms;  so if you think a little thing like Posse Comitatus  is going to stand in their way, I have a New York bridge to sell you.
  • Most importantly of all:  we have no leaders.  Even if we did, the modern state can dispose of them with absolute ease and little fear of retribution:  our equivalent of John Hancock, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington wouldn’t last a day without being muzzled, arrested and imprisoned under the various anti-terrorism laws.

I wish I had something more upbeat to say about all this, but the reality is that I’m in the grip of a profound sense of gloomy foreboding.

Feel free to add your thoughts in Comments.  And if you’re afraid to be candid because of the possible consequences… then that is precisely what I’m talking about.

Education Funding

Education

From Insty:

Among other things, education money should go to parents, not to schools.  Public schools should have to compete with private schools and homeschoolers for students and funds.

I know what happens when this kind of thing is proposed:  “ZOMG the parents will just spend the money on cigarettes / booze / [insert indulgence of choice] !”

And some would. But a vast majority wouldn’t — so once again, the many are punished for the stupidity of the few.

A better idea might be instead to lower tax rates so that people could keep more of their own money, and spend it on the education of the children.  Of all the baleful “benefits” first instituted by Napoleon and Otto von Bismarck, “free” schooling (subsidized by the State) is one of the worst.

Kim’s Top 15

Travels

Inspired by this article (“The 15 best places to live in England and Wales revealed“), I decided to stick my neck out and list the top fifteen places to live in the United States.  Before I do that, though, I need to frame the discussion somewhat.

I have traveled around the United States a great deal, mostly on business but also on vacation and (with Longtime Friend Trevor) on trips to remind me just why I fell in love with this country.  A lot of my memories may now be irrelevant, changed by events and time, but there ya go.  (I loved Portland, for example, when I spent a week there back in 1990, but I believe it may have changed quite a bit since then.)

Also, one may love a place for different reasons.  The DM  article is very careful to state that their top 15 list is based on natural- and architectural beauty.  As we have a great deal of natural but not much architectural beauty Over Here, that’s a bit of a speed bump.  As a general rule, I’m not one to spend hours and hours at a beauty spot in awe of the countryside and whatever — I’m more likely to be found enjoying a local pub or restaurant.

Many beautiful places in the United States have hopelessly fucked-up governments, whether state and/or local.  If one were to live there, one would have to weigh the place’s benefits with the downsides.  (Carmel CA for example is one of the most beautiful places on the planet, but given the government of California, its totalitarian attitude, its iniquitous taxes and its shitty gun laws etc., would it be a great place to live?  Only if the place’s beauty is worth more than one’s personal freedom.)  Most of the government-related issues above can be referred to as “The Shit”, and I’ll be doing so as we go along.

In parallel vein, many wonderful places to live have been infested by Californians, New Yorkers, Bostonians, Chicagoans and the like, who bring their horrible habits and screw up Paradise everywhere they settle.  I’m going to try and ignore that phenomenon as much as I can, although the baleful effects of these ticks on places like Colorado, northwest Wyoming, Maine (and, well, you know the rest) can make a once-attractive place unbearable.

I am not a “country” kinda guy, to look at another aspect of all this, so living 10 miles outside Fuck, Nowhere doesn’t much appeal to me.  I like my drive to a decent supermarket to be less than 30 minutes, and the restaurant choices to be varied and fairly exotic, for example, so a town or area where “Bob’s IGA” is the only supermarket choice and “fine dining” is solely of the Applebee’s variety would not suit me.  That “not country” thing extends to beaches and the seaside in general, mostly because of the concomitant heat and humidity which bedevil places such as Florida — although there are a couple of exceptions to this, as you’ll see.

I’ve lived most of my life far away from water, whether the sea, a river or a lake — Johannesburg and Dallas, to give examples — and even when I lived closer to the sea (New Jersey) or to a lake (Chicago), I never actually saw the water, as such.  (My old apartment in Lakeview looked out over Lake Michigan, but I only lived there for less than a year.)  So I wouldn’t mind a bit of water to look at, not at all, and if no water, then I’d like a few hills sprinkled around — after northern Illinois and north Texas, I’m pretty much done with flat.

And all this assumes that I had the wealth necessary to live there — not lottery-type wealth, just sufficient funds to get by in that area.

I’m not going to rank my top 15, because while I’ve picked them, I’m very aware of their downsides as well as their attractions.  There is no absolute #1 or even #2, because all these places have significant problems for me personally, or else I’d be living there right now instead of flat, hot north Texas.  So here they are, as I think of them.

The Maine coastline, or “Down East” (as the locals call it) is one of my top choices.  I know that the winters are long and dreary, but fall and summer are priceless in this northeast corner of the continent.   The scenery is quite lovely and the ambiance is terrific, and best of all for me, if I feel like getting a little bit of foreign culture, cuisine and food, Montreal is just a few hours’ drive away.  (For the same reasons, I could live in New Hampshire, although only in a very few specific areas.)  If I’m going to be specific, I like York, Boothbay Harbor and the area around Camden — also Portsmouth NH which is strictly speaking not in Maine, but it’s not in Massachusetts either.

I’ve spoken of my fondness for northwest Michigan before — and as with Maine, there is that winter warning — but the area around Petoskey and Travis City is exquisite.  Across Lake Michigan, there’s

Door County, Wisconsin.  Although much of Door County is overrun with FIBs (Fuckin’ Illinois Bastards, as the locals affectionately call them), it’s incredibly beautiful all the same.  My only issue with DC as that the nearest city is Green Bay, and ugh.

Cannon Beach, Oregon.  I know, it’s Oregon;  but Cannon Beach is far enough away from Teh Crazies (I think) to make it a worthwhile choice.  It’s one of the very few places I’ve been to in the U.S. where I actually stopped to look at housing prices.  As was:

Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.   The city itself is not that great, but good grief, the surrounding countryside is incredible — not to mention all those lakes scattered around.  Trevor and I once actually looked into buying a cabin up there together, as a “writer’s retreat” kind of thing.

Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  All my reservations about Floriduh notwithstanding, I rather like FL, FL.  Most of all, I like the restaurant choices (seafood, steak and Cuban!) and because so many wealthy people either live there permanently or vacation there, it’s not a podunk city by any means.  Further up the coast is Boca Raton, also a decent place.  Over on the other coast, I rather like Naples, although the real estate prices are eye-watering, almost Californian if you want to live anywhere with a sea view.  The best thing about Florida is that you don’t have to run away from the weather (except of course in the case of the occasional hurricane), and July and August are in their own way as bad as January and February are in the Frozen North, so there’s that.

Afterthought:  I’ve been to several of the Daily Mail ‘s top 15;  and of all of them, I’d pick Bradford On Avon.

In a heartbeat.  That’s one place where I’d put up with all The Shit just to live there.