Workin' on the Railroad

Due to a particularly acute bout of sloth yesterday, I woke up this morning to a pile of embers in the wood burner and an empty wood box. This sent me outside to snag an arm load of  snowy billets from the pile, and that for some reason got me thinking about a recent chat with a friend -- a railroad buff --  who now works in the small city where I spent my boyhood.

Me: "When I was a little kid we could see poor Fort Dodgers carrying gunny sacks down on the tracks east of the Illinois Central depot to gather coal-car spillage. The railroad dicks left them alone."

Him: "I've heard about that. Now they'd just run down to the welfare office."


Yes, many of them would.

Then I wondered what we could say about the obvious statist objection that some people would, by superior strength or diligence or intelligence,  get more coal than others. Who would regulate the coal recovery workers in the named of fairness and equality?

The best answer I could conceive at this early hour is the coal pickers themselves, resulting in some ramshackle homes being warmer than others.

It isn't quite as cruel as it sounds. The very old and the incapacitated  always seemed  to get heating fuel. Might have been friends, churches,  Boy Scouts, Oddfellows -- all sorts of compassionate people feeling compelled to recognize the commonality of interests in helping one another, even before we sold our souls to the redistributionists.

Only those who suffered too many bouts of acute sloth were frozen out, rendering to Darwin his just due.

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You don't have to use this small personal recollection to arrive at any grand macro conclusions about the way we do things in these latter years. But if you want to, it's okay by me.

Just a quick note about what I watched on my electric teevee a while ago.


The Fox news kids worked themselves into an orgasmic state guessing who would be the new White House press secretary.  They actually seemed to believe it matters.

Bigger and Dumber

Roberta is doing a nice little riff on the Goldwater/Reagan line, "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have."


Recalling an Iowa story from about five years back.

State law at that time permitted slot-like gambling devices about everywhere, and a few of them turned up in ice cream shops and the like, prompting a holy outcry about teaching our children to gamble away their lunch money.

The gambling interests, however thug-like the breed may be, followed the law and invested millions in the machines. The political storm moved the governor to call for banning them everywhere, leaving that segment of the gambling industry twisting in the wind.

The guv's most cogent public comment on the matter was, "The Government giveth and the government taketh away."

Such pearls of wisdom elevated him to high national office where he is now the man in charge of takething away your money and givething it  to the likes of Monsanto, the Farm Bureau and assorted other ag interests hiding behind the sacred purity of the American family farmer.

I suppose it is okay, though, because as previously reported by the TMR, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack developed unimaginable agricultural expertise growing cherry tomatoes in a five-gallon bucket on his deck when he was mayor of Mount Pleasant.

The north Pacific blue fin tuna weighed 754 pounds and sold in Tokyo for $396,000. 


The record-setting price translates to a whopping 95,000 yen per kilogram, or about $526 per pound.

Or, in other words, about the same price  Bernanke, Geithner, Obama, and the ethanol mafia  have in mind for a pound of bacon.
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