The Inevitabilites

I don't know anything about death except that it's claimed too many people I love.

About taxes I know a little more, starting with my forced study of economics as it was understood by Keynes speaking through Paul Samuelson as taught by an academic  drone too dense to know why you pour piss out of a boot and too lazy to do it if he did. My education continued as a taxpayer who also had the professional  fortune to rub elbows with politicians, high and low.   To a man and woman  they loved the power to tax. They differed only in the power groups they wished to buy off.

Until an unlikely libertarian utopia flourishes, they're necessary to a limited extent. Defend what borders are needed. Support a court system of final resort. Enforce laws prohibiting the  initiation of violence including the  intellectual equivalent of violence, which is fraud. (You'll note the steal from Ayn Rand on the last point. No apologies; it is a thought too little discussed)

If there is one economic point to be drilled into the still educable  souls we run across, it is this:  Somewhere between most and all of our troubles result from the decision of governments that their taxing powers should not be limited by actual utility, that they should use their extortion  power to create social justice.

Pass this along to some statist redistrbutionist you know. If he can identify the politicians qualified to define "social justice," I shall recant.

Quick Take on the Zombie Threat

I am not sure we do our libertarian selves a great favor in perpetuating and laboring the Zombie metaphor. If and when TSHTF,  the enemy will be healthy and well-dressed hordes (three regiments per horde) of  lively anti-Constitutionalists.

It was fun for a while, like knock-knock jokes.
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The Lethal Leaden Stash

(That's the book John D. never got around to writing.)
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The pot has been hot off and on for two days, and a couple buckets of wheel weights are now potential lethality. This pile is the last of about 120 one-pound ingots produced in time swiped from catching up on mowing and trimming after the two solid weeks of rain.

Combined with the pre-existing inventory, this new batch represents enough processed metal to take care the bullet needs around here for years, so  I can stop being a  foundry monkey. It is well worth the effort, but it is unpleasant work. Actual bullet making is more fun.


The WW mix is laced with linotype and 50/50 bar solder to  approximate Lyman No. 2 alloy.

The first few bullets cast from it look pretty good; they're 230-grain RNs  from a Lee mold and some Lyman 200-grain SWCs that I've always liked.

Wildlife in the Heartland

Froggy Went  Courtin' and He did Ride...

If you're old enough,  that will make you think of Burl Ives. So stop humming and ponder  this  endangered species  --  once endangered, at least, according to one of our senior local ecological worriers.

About four years ago Miss Jayne spent the better part of a summer enhancing her reputation for rilly rilly caring  by ragging us  unmercifully about the fate of the little jumpers.   It seems she discovered that we mere humans were driving them to the fate of the Dodo.

In the first place there weren't many of them any more. Worse, we were turning them  into mutants. Frogs with two heads, or five legs, or the back ones misplaced so they bumped their butts on landing.

That sort of  horror. She pleaded with us to "do something." Or stop doing something. She didn't say exactly what, so we were confused.

(Well, yeah, Miss Jayne's dire warnings moved me to quit running  them down and injecting them individually  with PCBs and  DDT and farm chemical residues. But that hadn't  been all that much fun lately anyway, and advancing age meant I wasn't quick enough to catch all that many of them.)

Something bigger did occur, though, because neither she nor anyone else has been publicly bemoaning the death of the leopard frog population recently, and today I can personally testify  Camp J is flush with spotted hoppers.*

I swear that I am severely slowed in lawn trimming by having to shoo the little jumpers out of the mower path.  This one landed in a leaf pile under the  old burr oak on the east fence line. He held still for the picture, and I suppose that's his way of showing gratitude for the part I  played in saving him from the  great Jaynestinction. However we did it.

I feel so proud. I almost feel like kissing one and seeing if it turns into a senator from California.

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*Or, as we sometimes call them, "bass bait."