Greetings from Our Third-World Hell-Hole

I've been amazed at the asinine comments that Ernie has persistently and consistently received from a number of people from the homesteading forum since we decided to go off-grid. Amazed, because they seem fairly freakin' anti-homesteading. Amazed, because they seem to be fairly ignorant of living conditions in various parts of America. Amazed, because they don't seem to understand what basic terms such as off-grid and sustainable mean.

And I've been offended. We're now living about two hours from my family, two hours from where I was born and grew up. Imagine my surprise to hear that we're living in a hell-hole, that it's practically child abuse to bring my "poor" children to such a place.

Amazed. And people, you just shouldn't tell born Texans that their state is a hell-hole. It's just not smart.

This morning, while standing in front of my stove, reading my Kindle and making my morning batch of hot cocoa (a very nutritious drink, sugar-free and made with eggs), Ernie read off of his smart phone a comment he'd received. This was how I learned that I'm living in third world conditions.

I think the previous paragraph points out the absurdity of the accusation all by itself.

At the same time, we're accused of being worldly because Ernie still works, and he's accused of being less than a man for not taking care of his family.

I think the absurdity there is also fairly obvious. Ah, I hate arguing with people who don't even attempt to follow the rules of logical discourse! I can use reason, but it has no effect on emotional outbursts and petty ad hominem attacks.

And yet, there's no other way to have discourse, so I shall endeavor to define a few terms, an exercise necessary for thinking individuals to have reasonable discourse.

First, off-grid. Off-grid means that we have not connected to the government sponsored monopolies which provide water, gas, and power to the majority of people in this country. Their lines do not run to our property. Off-grid does not mean that we live without electricity. We have solar power, which we purchased.

Separate from the world means not dependent on the world and its systems. Dependent means needing it for survival. We are striving to reduce our dependence on the world to become a sustainable farm, a farm which returns to the land at least as much as it removes so that it can continue to thrive without bringing in chemicals, etc., from outside. Unless we actually move into a completely uninhabited portion of the world (do such places still exist?) and begin from the beginning--creating the wheel, and then a spinning wheel, wearing nothing but animal hides from animals we killed with our bare hands until we get the whole spinning operation started, going through the various ages until we can produce a real metal axe all by ourselves, etc.--then we will always be part of the world to a degree. Ernie says that there are those who will call us hypocrites for saying we're trying to separate from the world unless we're naked and starving, and if we're naked and starving, they'll smugly tell us we just need to get back on the grid.

The word absurd comes to mind again.

Ernie feels called to live this way, and I can't claim the same. I agreed to try off-grid living, though, because it's logical--the only way to live without an income is to own the land and reduce outgoing expenses. Our necessary (needful for survival) expenses continue to get smaller so that in time, Ernie will be able to completely leave the corporate world.

Pay attention to this part because it's important: Ernie's job has allowed us to buy the land and build the house. It's allowing us to dig a pond, put up fencing, and buy animals. It's allowing us to build a sustainable homestead that doesn't require a large income to maintain, and because of this, our children should not find it necessary to go out into the world to earn a living (become wage slaves).

Having a job is not a sin, but being dependent upon a constant source of income for the basic necessities of life means that someone else has the power of life and death over one at all times. Why else would they call it stress?

Five months into this experience, I can't imagine going back to an on-grid house. Sometimes the transition has sucked, as transitions often do. However, we live a better, simpler life now. My children are happy, I'm less stressed, and my husband is doing what he feels called to do. If you choose to live differently, that's your business.

It's Official

Operation: Get the Hell Out of Dodge is officially underway. The movers are scheduled. The packing continues. The man doesn't do the Bunker Index on the weekends anyway, so I won't have to hide his computer. Probably.

Look out, Texas! We're coming home!

All You Need is Logic

Many people worry if they can't homeschool their children. They are, rightfully, concerned about the ideologies inherent in the public school system as well as the quality of the education. Many people choose to do after schooling, having their children do extra work after school, on weekends, and during the summer. I personally think this can be tricky. The public school system works against the parent trying this. Children are already working too many hours with too few breaks; adding even more to already overloaded schedules may not be the best decision.

I say go for the subject that gets no attention at all in modern classrooms, the one that will provide some protection from those ideologies: Logic.

In 1984, one of the key elements in squashing dissent was simplifying the language so that people no longer had the words to disagree. Names are important. When people lack the names, instead of arguments, there are only niggling doubts which remain unvoiced all too often.

In The Lost Tools of Learning, Dorothy Sayers said:

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.

Studying logical fallacies gives children a measure of protection. When they know the names for bad arguments, instead of being frustrated about an argument that just doesn't seem right (or even worse, swayed by it), they will instead be able to name it, claim it, defeat it. The child who has studied logic is more likely to spot the emotional ploys that pass for arguments these days and mount a defense.

With the popularity of classical education, there are a number of logic texts on the market these days written for parents who were never taught logic themselves. We personally like the logic books from Classical Academic Press. These books sometimes have examples that are a bit over the top, but overall, they offer much knowledge for a relatively small investment of time.

It's hard to look at all of what we consider "education" and pick out bits to emphasize over others. I would that every child grew to adulthood in an atmosphere that encouraged the reading of quality literature and the ability to write well. But it's logic that helps children to interact with those ideas from literature, and logic that helps them to form those written arguments. It's logic that prevents them from being battered by those words, words, words.

Destroying the Lie

Most of us grew up here in the United States during the last half century, give or take a decade or so, and as such, most of us attended modern schools. Whether public or private, religious or secular, we sat in classrooms for more than a decade where we absorbed a number of lies. The biggest lie we absorbed came merely from sitting in that classroom:

Sometimes, the government needs to force people to do what's best for them.

We absorbed this lie in a number of ways, in a number of classes, but we all absorbed that lie just the same. The day we all fully understood this lie (though we probably didn't understand it was a lie at the time) was the day we found out that our institutionalization was a government requirement. Our parents could not merely let us stay home or they'd be punished.

In Uncle Eric Talks About Personal, Career, and Financial Security, Richard Maybury states:

This is why the American Founders were so intent on protecting freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion. They did not want anyone controlling the flow of information because they knew controlled data leads to controlled models, which yields controlled behavior....

This is why all tyrants try to keep an iron grip on their school systems. When a government controls the schools, it does not need to control the press; it already has control of the people's models. Without realizing it, the people automatically ignore information the tyrant wants them to ignore because models inserted into their minds when they were children tell them this information is unimportant.

Abraham Lincoln said something very similar:

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

So did Hitler:

When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.

But no matter the source, people do not give up their models easily, no matter the facts.

Bastiat explains the purpose of The Law:

For, remember, that law is force, and that consequently the domain of the law cannot lawfully extend beyond the domain of force.

When law and force keep a man within the bounds of justice, they impose nothing upon him but a mere negation. They only oblige him to obstain from doing harm. They violate neither his personality, his liberty, nor his property. They only guard the personality, the liberty, the property of others. They hold themselves on the defensive; they defend the equal right of all. They fulfil a mission whose harmlessness is evident, whose utility is palpable, and whose legitimacy is not to be disputed....

But when the law, through the medium of its necessary agent--force, imposes a form of labour, a method or a subject of instruction, a creed, or a worship, it is no longer negative; it acts positively upon men. It substitutes the will of the legislator for their own will, the initiative of the legislator for their own initiative. They have no need to consult, to compare, or to foresee; the law does all that for them. The intellect is for them a useless lumber; they cease to be men; they lose their personality, their liberty, their property.

Thomas Jefferson stated the same ideal rather more succinctly:

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.

But, there is still the lie, that the government has to force people to do things for their own good. The government must protect us from our own folly, and protect children from the folly of their parents.

The sad thing is that so many people don't even understand that they are still living under this lie, but it becomes evident when instead of talking about REFORMING public education, we talk about ABOLISHING it. It becomes evident when instead of talking about REFORMING health care laws, we talk about ABOLISHING them. It becomes evident when instead of talking about REFORMING drug laws, we talk about ABOLISHING them.

"No, no! The system is flawed, to be sure, but the system MUST exist. On their own, people will make bad decisions!"

And we're supposed to ignore the fact that sometimes, quite often in fact, the government forces bad decisions upon us.

If you believe in drug laws, allow me to ask: Are you really only not a meth addict because it's against the law? Have you been so seduced by the romantic lifestyle that you think to yourself that if only it weren't illegal, you'd certainly try that? And would meth even be around today if it were not for the laws that made other drugs so hard to obtain?

It took me days to wrap my head around these ideas when I read Vin Suprynowicz's Send in the Waco Killers. I had absorbed the lie, and I did NOT want to let go of it. That change in How I View the World was my final step towards being an absolute radical by most people's definition.

Freedom has always been a radical concept.

There is no such thing as a crime against society. That's another lie. Crimes are committed against individuals, sometimes groups of individuals, but not against society as a whole. Therefore, if no one was injured or had his property encroached upon, then there was no crime.

The entire notion of "victimless crimes" is a lie.

Vin points out that one of the most violent periods of our history was during Prohibition. The alcohol did not cause violence, the law forbidding it did. The violence ended when Prohibition ended. When you drop the lie and look at facts, it's easy to see, and to see the same thing happening with drugs. Illegal goods cost more because of the risk involved in obtaining and selling them. Because of these artificially inflated prices, it becomes much more difficult to obtain the money to keep up with the habit by legal means, making drug related crimes much more likely. Violence breaks out to protect territory and profit margins. And all of this rides on the back of the law.

Believe that drug users will automatically commit crimes? Fine, then arrest them when they've actually committed a crime against another person. It's not like drug laws have stopped the crime, and the prisons will have plenty of room once we clear them of people who have never committed a crime against other people. Believe that legalized drugs will put drugs into the hands of minors? It's not like drug laws have stopped minors from obtaining drugs.

Bring up any objection that you like to legalized drugs, but be prepared to explain how drug laws have ended the problem. If the laws haven't ended the problems, then you can't cite the problems as a good reason to have the laws. Circular reasoning won't fly.

Of course, this post isn't merely about drug laws. It's about how the lie has robbed us of our freedom. Once the majority of people accept that it's okay for the government to force us to do what's best for us, then we devolve to discussing WHICH things the government should force and which things we should be able to decide for ourselves-- that is the heart of the argument between modern conservatives and liberals.

The parties are nothing but groups of people who have also absorbed the lie, and each follows its own agenda regarding which things we should force people to do. As Ernie once put it, today we have conservatives who don't conserve and liberals who don't liberate.

Each party is holding a slave collar. Do you want the red one or the blue one?

"I'm a Chicken Hawk!"

Spring means foxes and fall means young hawks out for their first kills. A couple of years ago, our oldest son could actually call crows--Ernie said he must have managed to hit on the exact sound of an injured crow because they would come sweeping in when the boy cawed. These days, though, "the boy" is now "the young man," and the voice change destroyed his crow call. It's almost impossible to count freely ranging chicks, but we think our young Henry Hawk has only gotten one. He was diving in for a kill the other day when Mother Hen poofed herself up and jumped into the air squawking at him and scared him off. Once again, nature teaches the lesson: No matter how helpless Mama looks, best not mess with the babies.

The Cleaning Continues

House cleaning has suffered this past year, there's no doubt about it. It's been a tough year, with such joy, and such grief, that it was often hard to contain the emotion.

I'm not too hard on myself about doing the bare minimum this past year. Being pregnant at 40 is much harder than being pregnant at 25. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that it's more exhausting. For that reason, I slept through a large portion of this last year.

Just when I hit the third trimester, when women typically regain some energy, my brother died. I can't even begin to explain that kind of grief. I can only hope you haven't experienced it yourself, though I guess all who love will eventually. In any case, this sent me back to bed as I slept and mourned and finished growing a baby.

Then our beautiful baby girl entered the world, and she's been quite the little handful.

So no, I'm not at all hard on myself when I realize that some tasks may not have been performed as often or as well as they should have been performed this year. I just move forward, taking care of tasks which are long overdue and others which need to be done before the move. One of yesterday's tasks fit both categories--cleaning out the freezer.

No, I'm not hard on myself about this last year. Still, there's really no excuse for the ham that had been sitting in the freezer since 2008.

The Law and Unpasteurized Milk

The Complete Patient has a PDF up for download of a recent Wisconsin court ruling concerning raw milk. Here's what the National Review Online had to say about it:

As the judge explained in a clarification of his ruling, the plaintiffs’ argument boiled down to pointing at a bunch of other “rights” the courts have invented...

The text of the law that authorities are using to crack down on unpasteurized milk says “sell or distribute,” not “consume”; Wisconsin has traditionally interpreted the law to mean that people who own cows can drink the milk without pasteurization. At issue here is a farm that set up a “membership” program through which people could partly “own” the farm and therefore consume the milk — a questionable move that skirts the law.

~National Review Online: On the ‘Right to Drink Milk’ Case

Here is a typical conservative reaction. He does not care to drink raw milk himself, so he decides that there is no fundamental right to do so, and therefore, people should just obey the law and not engage in "questionable" activities that "skirt the law."

The PDF linked above states that the legislation clearly articulates why the production of milk is a statewide concern, and it quotes:

Regulation of the production, processing and distribution of milk and fluid milk products under minimum sanitary requirements which are uniform throughout this state and the United States is essential for the protection of consumers...

What? But what about the raw meat that was voluntarily recalled recently? If we're only concerned with the protection of consumers, then shouldn't we be concerned about the actions of the meat industry, whose products actually killed people?

...and the economic well-being of the dairy industry, and is therefore a matter of statewide concern. [emphasis mine]

Ah, I think now we can see what the real issue is.

We have been screwed as a nation on the dual fronts of protecting industry and inventing entitlements. Liberals and conservatives all have in common the belief that they know best, and they should therefore legislate personal decisions to the rest of us.

The NRO makes the claim that the plaintiffs made poor arguments, including a reference to Roe vs. Wade and the "right" to abortion. But the thing that conservatives like to ignore is that Roe vs. Wade got it half right: A woman should be able to do what she wishes with her own body. The problem with that ruling is that the courts forgot that there were two bodies involved. The line is quite clear. The point at which I'm no longer allowed to swing my fist ends at your nose. When should the government stop people from doing what they want? Only when it infringes upon the rights of others. In a free society, that should be the only litmus test for legislation and court cases: Do/did the plantiffs actions infringe upon the rights of another? If not? Then there's no case.

What I'm Not

First of all, I'm not a lunatic-crazy-extremist, even if I did mention Ron Paul and silver in the same post.

I'm not a Republican, nor have I ever been a Republican. A decade ago, I considered myself a socialist. Over the years, I've learned what socialism actually means, as opposed to what I was taught in school about political thought. In the course of educating myself, thinking and reading on topics of freedom, some of my views have changed completely, and some not at all, but I made the trip without taking any breaks under the Republican umbrella.

I'm not a Libertarian, with the capital "L" indicating membership in the Libertarian Party. I'm not a Libertarian because, while I agree with most of their ideals, I remain opposed to their views on abortion ("it's the woman's body") and homosexual marriage. These are simple matters which have nothing to do with my religious views. On abortion, scientifically, there are *two* living bodies involved. If anyone ever convinces me that it's okay to kill people whom I consider an inconvenience... Well, let's just say the political scene in my local area will change dramatically. And regarding homosexual marriage, I really don't give a rat's ass about what consenting adults choose to do. However, it's also not the government's place to give it a seal of approval or to force others to accept homosexuality as a valid moral choice. And we've already seen the results of such laws, both in the US where at least one Catholic orphanage was closed because they refused to allow anti-discrimination laws to dictate their morality, and in other countries where similar legal battles have been fought. On the other hand, I wouldn't have a problem with marriage being a completely private arranagement and the government keeping it's opinions to itself.

I'm not a feminist, not by today's definition of the word. The word has been co-opted by those who are anti-woman, by those who have a different set of shackles ready for women to wear, by those who would murder a woman's children in the name of making her equal to the man who can bear none. But I am an old-school feminist. I remember that while the word was co-opted, the original feminists such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton fought against very real injustice. They fought for legal equality and recognized abortion as one of the greatest abuses against women. I believe that we must be careful not to let the pendulum swing too far and forget the very real problems that women have faced and continue to face in the world.

I'm not an inferior to any man on the planet. I don't need a college degree (though I have one), a high paying job (could have had one), or a bunch of liberals (sneer) to tell me these things while simultaneously trying to put a new set of limitations on me. My value--my worth--is that I'm made in the image of God.

What I am is a radical, as my Lord commanded me to be. Jesus preached a radical message, and He died for it. His disciples continued His radical ministry, and many of them died for it. It was never a political message, but it has always and continues today to scare the oppressor.

If I Wasn't Married to Ernie...

...I'd probably propose to Vin Suprynowicz. Reading his book Send In The Waco Killers helped me to make that final leap to a true libertarian mindset. A common phrase going around lately is, "You can't reason a person out of a position they weren't reasoned into." This is partially true; when one holds tightly to emotional positions in defiance of all reason and logic, little can be done. However, we don't get to choose our starting positions. Vin was one of the people whose logic helped me see where my views were still hopelessly emotional and infantile.

Today's post, Ridiculing easily established facts, is interesting because of how often I see the types of arguments he's discussing.

In the latest example, Alexandra Petri, a member of the Washington Post’s editorial page staff, columnized last week that “gold bug” Paul is so wacky he “actually named his son Rand,” and further that he “believes that a silver dime can pay for $3 (worth) of gas.”

“Believes”? Do we generally refer to something being “believed” when its accuracy can be easily ascertained with a few clicks of the keyboard?

Go to http://www.kitcosilver.com. Here you can easily ascertain that silver was selling, when I wrote this column, at $39.68 per ounce. (It had dropped close to $30 in the Sept. 22-23 panic; it will likely be up again this week.)

I see this with increasing frequency. In our modern world where nothing is accepted as True, we've now reached the point where facts which do not support that which is already believed can be discarded, mocked, and ignored. The silver dime can demonstrably purchase $3 worth of gas, but it sounds silly to the uninformed who then belittles what she can't understand.

Which leads to another book suggestion. If I had my druthers, everyone in the country would be forced to get a lesson in basic economics from Uncle Eric's Whatever Happened to Penny Candy? Eldest son and I read through this a few years ago, and I learned from a book geared towards middle school children all those things that the government sponsored high school economics class didn't bother to mention. Not that it's surprising--he who causes the problem is hardly going to point out what he's doing.

In Case of Zombie Apocalypse, Break the Glass

It probably says a lot about us that our oldest son once asked if we could loot the library if civilization ever collapses. Our response? Duh. Of course we said yes. Our second son reminded us that we'd also want to loot for more guns and ammo.

We have our priorities lined up. We love books. (And guns, but this post is about books.) Oldest son and I counted our books about six years ago, just out of curiosity. We had counted more than twelve hundred before we decided we didn't need an exact number.

Today, though, has been a day for downsizing the home library. "Downsizing" is our theme and motto, almost our raison d'etre, during Project: Moving Home. Now, if you're a book lover, this isn't really as bad as it sounds. We have three Kindles in our home so far. Since the arrival of the first one a couple of years ago when they were still ridiculously priced (Ernie's cheap, but I'm persistent), our physical library has been slowly shrinking. In some cases, I replaced a book immediately with the Kindle edition. In other cases, just knowing that the book was available for Kindle was good enough.

I took that attitude and kicked it up a notch today. Eight Nine boxes of books are destined for the never ending library sale. The first box was a little difficult, but gradually, I got into the swing of things. Now, at the end of the day, books that I wouldn't have considered getting rid of this morning are sitting in boxes, and I've only replaced a few of them with Kindle editions. (And Ernie told me to stop that and just make a list, for crying out loud, since we're conserving money for the move. Sometimes, he's a real pain to live with.)

Sometimes, we hold onto possessions out of habit. It's good to periodically remind ourselves that we can live with far fewer.

And the Kindle is one of the better possessions out there.

The Sustainable Lifestyle

Part of having a survival mentality is staying healthy. It's hard to get off grid or live a sustainable lifestyle if you're kicking back four prescription drugs every morn with breakfast. The good news is that the foods that makes us sick are also the ones that are the biggest pains to grow and harvest.

Worried about cavities? Then quit eating sugar and grains. Heart disease? Then quit eating sugar and grains. Diabetes? Then quit eating sugar and grains. Alzheimer's? Then quit eating sugar and grains.

Are you starting to notice a trend here? Collectively, most of the health problems in our society are known as the diseases of civilization. Every time a group of previously healthy people begins to eat a modern western diet with all the sugar, grains, and starches that we consider "staples," they begin to develop those same diseases.

However, if you think getting an unwilling spouse to help you with prepping is hard, you should try getting said spouse to change his diet. Ernie says I can have his potatoes when I pry them from his cold, dead fingers. But that's what cast iron skillets are for: unconscious will work just as well.