Rug over bridge

Build it and they will come - day 1

Can climate change mess things up any more than this for believers?

Now climate change is going to mess up the next election: see this 

Diversity and Mother Nature And BIG word for the day

Question for the day: If Mother Nature believes in diversity why is snow only white?  

BIG word for the day:  The albedo of an object is a measure of how strongly it reflects light from light sources such as the sun. (source Wikipedia).  So when you plant evergreen trees in the name of saving the planet you are warming the earth. 

(note: only use these BIG words when you are surrounded by people who do not know what they mean or you may regret it). 

Grayer and grayer

Was Clarence Thomas a black sheep?

Or how about  Juan Williams or Sarah Palin? Williams is a member of the liberal ingroup  who dared to cavort with Fox News. Thomas was a Republican affirmative action pick who is part of the black person ingroup and Palin is a member of the women's ingroup who went bad. 


"Black-sheep effect refers to the the tendency for members to evaluate a disliked an ingroup member who performs an offensive behavior  more harshly than an outgroup member who performs the same offense". 


source: http://www.psychology-lexicon.com/cms/glossary/glossary-b/black-sheep-effect.html

And thanks to http://blacksheephill.com/ for not having a copyright notice on their black sheep image. 

The grayles of November come early

Poster girl for this election in the Garbin Moraine area

You ought to know right after TWW starts getting Social Security they are trying to take it away. 

A new article in the freeloading series

This is the latest draft of the last article of the freeloading trilogy of articles. It is copyright 2010 by the Warped Woodturner using his real name, It is placed here since TWW believes in the Public Fool Principle (there is no fool like a public fool so the flaws in the article will stand out so they can be fixed before it is submitted to a real magazine)  


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You Can Bet Your Assets

by

The Warped Woodturner

(1900 words)

In several past Countryside articles on freeloading (Nov/Dec 2005 and ?????)) I talked about strategies for mooching from both other people and government agencies. Country freeloading means creative kyping of the three Ms (money, material goods and manpower). The first article was about how you could get more food and other goodies from city visitors and the second was about how you were entitled to free government money. Both of the articles were about you getting something perhaps not for nothing but for doing little in return. In this next attempt to move the theory forward, I went back to basics to search for more ideas for readers to apply to their schemes.

First we need to look at some basics. At its extreme the basic idea of self-reliance means you do it yourself rather than give somebody else money to do it for you. Where are you are self-reliant not needing to exchange with other people and where are you other-reliant where you depend on others to meet your needs? Here are some exercises to try:

• Look at a clock. Now hold your breath for a minute if you can.

• Find someone to hold your breath for you – again for one minute if the person can. You best ask them first what they want in return.
• Now, do this thought experiment (do not really do this at home): Imagine using your computer to design and print some paper money. Next go to the city and take a walk where the panhandlers hang out and when they ask for some money give them your new money.
• Remember back to when you bought your house if you have one. Did you think in the future you would be able to sell it for more money? Why?
• Think back to when you bought your last car. Did you think you would be able to sell it for more money? Why?
• Finally, take an imaginary other-reliant trip for a hamburger after the Fall (included so fellow survivalist readers don't feel left out). Pretend people have lost their faith in the US dollar (or whatever your currency is). An innovative restaurant with golden arches then comes up with a way to keep going. They have little scales on their counters with armed guards and when those of you smart enough to have some gold want a hamburger you can shave little pieces off your gold coins on to a scale on the counter until a bell rings and you get your hamburger.

What does this all show? First, you have a big need for oxygen to stay alive. It is only one of your needs but the most basic. You can buy oxygen in bottles but you cannot get someone else to breathe for you. Some needs cannot be met with barter or money.

Second, other people need a reason to act. In a fair exchange both parties are equally happy or unhappy with the exchange. In most societies today that involves the exchange of money. Money also allows people to get rewarded now but store the stuff until later to trade to get something in return.

Third, people can project their inner thoughts on to money. How did the idea of tricking panhandlers make you feel in the exercise above? They expected something in the exchange and you cheated them.

While these exercises showed me a few things I did not think I had the whole picture so in an attempt to analyze self-reliance and other-reliance compared to exchanges of money, goods or services, I pretended I was a social scientist and created a table comparing them. Right away I learned self-reliant people did not fit into my original table since there are no exchanges when you are completely self-reliant.

Here is some of what else I learned: When you compare other-reliance and fair exchanges you get examples like:

• Buying groceries
• Buying electricity from grid
• Buying a PV system
• Buying seeds or baby animals
• Buying a chain saw
• Buying land

Unbalanced or unfair exchanges of money, goods or services include:

• People helping you with a task with no thought of getting paid back (true charity)
• Welfare (wealth transfer) payments
• Government services where you get more service than you pay taxes or pay more taxes than you get in services
• Scams and thievery

Finally, here are some examples of relying on yourself and not exchanging anything with other people:

• Generating you own solar electricity
• Growing your own food
• Cutting firewood on your land
• Catching rain water
• Gathering food on public property

These exercises also helped me remember a few more things about money.

At this point I thought I was making progress but there must be more. People take a chance when they put money into an asset. They may not get the money back again at all or the future selling price may be less. People buy cars and usually don't expect them to go up in value but buy houses or stock and think they are getting shortchanged when the selling prices drop.

At this point I realized money is more than a medium of exchange. People want their money to be fruitful and multiply. Inflation makes money shrink but what is shrinking?. The paper money does not change size. People don't know what things will cost when they go to spend money in the future. At best it is a guess what the money will buy in the future.

I had long wondered how wealth could disappear when the stock market dropped. Shares of stock have a price when bought and sold. Some people take the daily selling price and think their stock is worth that much even if they do not trade it. Other people come along and add all of these individuals stock portfolio values together and then claim it means something about wealth. When the stock prices fall dramatically you hear how the illusory wealth has then disappeared.

As I continued to compare self-reliance and other-reliance to fairness and better understand money to make sense of all this stuff only got more confused. Something was missing. I then realized money has two faces. It is both a language expressing your side of the exchange and an asset – just like light is sometimes a particle and a sometimes a wave.

An asset is something you own with value stored in it (in your mind at least) or a claim you have on something. Notice money is only one form of an asset, a hill of beans is another form of asset and what someone or something like a bank owes you is yet another. When you try to grow your money you are really trying to grow the size of an asset. Money as a medium of exchange only matters when you go to trade it. Again, money is the way you express what you value on your side of the transaction.

The basic accounting equation is the fictitious glue that holds our complicated business world together. The equation says Assets - Liabilities = Owner's equity. Owner's equity also means your net worth. When you are trying to figure out how big your pile of assets is you need to value them so the equation balances. If you cannot value an asset the equation does not work. Knowing current value is easy with money but imaginary with all other assets. Let's take a look at growing beans in your garden to see more about how valuing an asset works.

Let's say you plant some green beans. What you are really doing here is creating an asset out of thin air, sunlight and your soil. You had to get the seeds usually with money but perhaps by bartering. Let's assume you have planted beans in the past and can predict how big your crop will be and what the market price will be. You plant the seeds in the ground and watch them grow. As they grow you become a bean estimator making an assessment or prediction based on past experience of how much the potential crop will be worth at harvest time. If things work out you put on your bean counter hat and report on how the harvest meets or exceeds analyst's expectations.

But now lets look at a different scenario. There is a sudden drought during the growing season unlike any other rainfall shortage you have ever seen and on top of that green bean eating grasshoppers overwhelm your defenses and invade your garden. All of your predictions based on past performance are wrong and the size of your crop falls way short of analyst's expectations even if prices go up due to a bean shortage.

So, you put your money into something, made periodic assessments of value and when you took the crop out you learned the potential value but could not find the real value until you sold the beans at a farmer's market. The predictions of the future were all on paper and only the actual crop and selling price were real. Nobody forces you to play this game. Unless you sell your beans they don't need to have a money value. What really may matter to you is if you have enough beans for food to last until the next crop. You really don't need to assign a value to your beans or other assets unless you want to put the numbers into the basic accounting equation. Unfortunately, other people may do it for you because they want some of your assets. Take property taxes on an assessed value of your property as an example.

Money, the values given assets, and the accountant's equation are all social fictions but even without them people still need a way of assigning value to their side of a trade.

So what are the implications of what I learned in my attempt to develop a theory and principles of freeloading? First, you need to identify and court potential donors who do not know the value of their assets so when they donate to your cause the value of what they donate to their eyes is far less than the value is in your eyes. This points to government programs as a good source of donations. Second, you need to decide what you want to do about giving a money value to your assets. Above all else do not make the worth you assign to your assets part of your self-concept. Third, realize the value assigned to an asset is a social fiction until you liquidate the asset by turning it into money (itself a piece of printed social fiction). Then once you have the cash you need to realize it now is also an asset you have to deal with. Finally, the theory of country freeloading was a scam but you already knew that without anyone telling you. When you think money think scam.

Finally, you all have heard about time being money. Is time as real as money? You have just spent your time reading this piece. Was it worth a hill of beans?

Can you find the Penny?

FYI - blog to be put on hold in early December

This blog will not be updated from about December 2nd to December 7th.  After meeting with his spiritual advisor yesterday TWW was scheduled for a rite of passage vision quest (see link for details)  Unlike the link (source of the picture) this vision quest will propel TWW from middle age into old man status.  TWW's spiritual advisor grudgingly said since TWW has such poor spiritual discipline he will be allowed to sleep through the rite of passage and awake as an old man. Upon his return from the wilderness TWW will be surrounded by a team of spiritual associates from the area who will help keep him on the path to oldmanhood for about two weeks. After that he will be on his own again. We hope you enoy the old man insights you will read in this blog later in December. If you would like to sponsor an hour of TWW's vision quest please use the Donate button above.  

Another freeloading success story?

The secret  to successful freeloading is to get people to willingly donate something to help your cause.  You can get them to donate more if they are ignorant of the true value of what they give you. Here are some future cherry bowls. The anonymous donor of this precious raw material thought he only had a  dead tree knocked down by the wind so was glad to get rid of it. The drawback to this approach is the people who donate to your cause know the true value of what they donate and they are correct and you get a lemon. He donated a second tree that was dead and it may not work to make bowls with since it is spalted inside. Win some lose some. 

Loggers finally gone for good

Not sure what is planned for this pile of stuff (alternate energy??)

The trees the family and friends helped plant on the neighbor's land are doing fine. 

Finally it happened

For all the right-wingers whining about how black people are never charged with hate crimes see this link.    Interestingly enough the 'matron' and female bus driver did not seem to do anything to stop or report the 'hate crime'. 


note: pictures of the defendants are not shown here since it is the policy of this blog not to show nonwhite people accused of crimes since it my be misleading. 

Quote from Drudge Report

"A top Ilinois State Board of Elections official tells the DRUDGE REPORT that Mrs. Obama -- a Harvard-educated lawyer -- may have simply been ignorant of the law and thus violated it unintentionally.

"You kind of have to drop the standard for the first lady, right?" the official explained late Thursday. "I mean, she's pretty well liked and probably doesn't know what she's doing."  "


TWW wonders if  this election official was talking about her husband instead of Michele.

Another freeloading success story

TWW wants to thank all of the cabin owners and guests for leaving behind more beer than they consumed over the summer and to cabin management for passing it along to the Garbin. 

Link of the day

Want to see VP Joe's teeth  --  click on this

Public radio pledge week

TWW was listening to pledge week today when he heard about a survey of people who listened to public radio but did not give anything in return (a smart freeloading strategy). 84% of those people said they did not give since they thought other would people would give.  Now lots of liberals listen to public radio. Is there a connection?

Time to go trespassing for life enrichment

Pictures of a walkabout on the neighbor's land.  

 A no trespassing sign welcomes TWW back to his land 

(do as "I say not as I do)

 Neighbor's land to the south showing coppice regeneration of popple 

Rare siting of a barely visible white tailed dear

Quote for the day

Comment on a news story about the California governor's race:  "I say “IF IT’S BROWN, FLUSH IT!” "

For life enrichment drive to Rice Lake

Another crackpot letter to the editor they will not print

Editor: 


Hopefully, the courts will say the federal government has overstepped and cannot require people to buy health insurance but the unwanted side effect of this is to create a class of freedom-loving uninsured freeloaders who will expect medical care if they get hurt or sick.  The answer here is to create the National Op-Out  Registry (NO-OR). When the IRS tries to fine someone for not having health insurance people  should be free to opt out of health care by getting their names on NO-OR.  With NO-OR in place when anyone goes to the hospital the staff will be required to check to insure the person is not on NO-IR.  To protect hospitals it should be illegal to treat people on NO-IR unless they pay for care upfront. If they could not pay the serious cases would get free hospice care paid for by the federal government and people with less serious conditions would be sent home.  Does this sound mean-spirited? Perhaps 'personal responsiblity'  is a better term.

Thanks to all of the donors from the past weekend.

Note to new viewers.  The principles behind this blog were first spelled out in 2005 in Countryside magazine by The Warped Wood Turner who later became TWW. 


See Principles of successful country freeloading.  There is a link to the original manuscript below which may be easier to read than the link above. 

Happy 10 10 10 Day

Have a great 10 10 10 day unless of course you do not plan on reducing your carbon footprint by at least10% today.. If that is the case see  ??????????? 

More love, peace and tolerance from the environmentalists

If you thought the exploding school kids were cool here are some more ads from the environmentalitsts.  (from a list  complied by  Anthony Watts on his blog). If listening to talk radio makes people go out and to violent things (as some people claim) what impact will these ads have on people who watch them?  

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Predictions equal truth - updated

In the old days the priests predicted the future with animal entrails, horoscopes and you name it and the educated part of society was smart enough to know a prediction did not necessarily mean the future would match the prediction.  Then came the global warming religious movement. 


Today, when the climate predicting elites predict the future with their computer models,  supposedly educated people equate the predictions with TRUTH. What changed? Nothing.  For years the end of the world religions have been predicting the end.  Sometimes the cult members go sit in the mountains waiting for the predicted end and the world does not end.  Then they have to figure out what to do next. Today the educated people who despise traditional religions have joined the religious cult of anthropogenic global warming and are acting just like the uneducated believers do. 


The problem with climate predictions is the time frame.  50 years is a long time to wait for the end but all true believers seem to be the same be they religious kooks or liberal kooks until they are forced to admit the predictions were wrong. 


To test this theory TWW predicts a nice day today. We will have to see if the prediction comes true. He will be the first to admit if the prediction is wrong. 

Update at 20:03 Universal Time:  The day was beautiful but the Asian beetles have invaded.  More proof of how our  borders are not effectively being guarded.  So was the forecast true since it was nice weather or false since the forecast did not predict the illegals invading? 

More global warming news

"Coldest winter in 1,000 years on its way

Edited 05 October, 2010, 16:30Published 04 October, 2010, 22:20

After the record heat wave this summer, Russia's weather seems to have acquired a taste for the extreme....Forecasters say this winter could be the coldest Europe has seen in the last 1,000 years."

See:   http://rt.com/prime-time/2010-10-04/coldest-winter-emergency-measures.html

Warning to younger viewers

‘Toasted Skin Syndrome’ Warning For Laptop Users"  - see http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2010/10/04/toasted-leg-syndrome-warning-for-laptop-users-of/

40 degrees F early this morning inspite of what NOAA says

please note: NOAA says "FROST ADVISORIES AND FREEZE WARNINGS WILL NO LONGER BE ISSUED FOR THE DULUTH COUNTY WARNING AREA OF NORTHEAST MINNESOTA AND NORTHWEST WISCONSIN THIS FALL. MOST AREAS HAVE EXPERIENCED A FREEZE...AND THE FROST AND FREEZE HEADLINE PROGRAM WILLRESUME LATE NEXT SPRING."

The NRA's newest ally

"Chavez: Civilian militia should be armed full-time
By IAN JAMES
The Associated Press
Sunday, October 3, 2010; 6:55 PM 

CARACAS, Venezuela -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Sunday that members of the country's civilian militia should be issued weapons to be armed and ready at all times."

see :http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/03/AR2010100303313_pf.html

Hard freeze time