Sunday, April 16, 2023

No Tablets on this Mountain

From the lake Kadizzle is back on the mountain. The nights have been the perfect temperature and the Garden of Delight is progressing. Landscaping the backyard is a big project and has required many wheelbarrows of gravel, and money. The mate has transplanted many desert plants from the wild to the yard. 

Down at the lake Kadizzle encountered a couple walking. A long discussion ensued about the state of the campground. The campground complex at Lake Roosevelt is by far the largest and most complex Kadizzle has seen anywhere. The facilities were built in 1990 with 40 million dollars of 1990 money. 

Now for the sad part. Like so many great undertakings the money was there to build the complex, but not to maintain it. The original planners imagined that thousands of campers would flock from Phoenix. It never happened. A major problem is the facilities are not that well known. Fishermen love the place. Strangely one of the most popular places is the large beach on the west end of the lake. It is now under water, but most of the time it is crowded with campers. 

Republicans are the root of all evil and in order to provide the rich with tax breaks federal agencies have been starved. The rich do not go to National Parks, they do not play were the working people do. What does this mean. The wealthy don't use the interstate highways, so why maintain them. The wealthy don't use public golf courses, so why keep them up, the same with the public pools and all the other things the peasants use. 

Nothing has changed since the good old " Let them eat cake" days. Public schools fall apart, teachers cannot make a living, and on it goes. Peasants are a nuisance and taxing the trust babies to care for them is just too costly. 

When official slavery went out of business the plantation gang quickly came up with share cropping. It was just slavery without the beating. Nothing has really changed. The CEOs get 350 times what the line worker does. Sound familiar. The company store has been replaced with the casino where the fieldhands voluntarily hand over their pay checks. The modern Klan wears Trump hats, and has the Klan meetings in churches. 

How can you tell when things are going bad? The gas gauge on your car sends you a message. The gas gauge for a country is the gauge that shows income inequality, childhood poverty, high school graduation rate, and the cost of child and health care. The needle shows we are going backwards losing altitude. The needle show the bank account of the top ten percent is skyrocketing. Forget those gauges just keep going the car will let you know when you are out of gas. 

This brings up a little story. A thousand years ago when Kadizzle was working underground as a coal miner the boss told him to drive his shuttle car away from the usual path. The shuttle car ran on an electric cable, which meant it could only go so far and then the cable would be pulled out of the reel and the shuttle car would be stranded. To prevent this catastrophe the boss sent another employee to walk ahead of Kadizzle and monitor how much cable was left on the reel. As the lumbering giant piece of equipment went through the tunnel all of a sudden the lights went out. The fellow said " Your out of cable".  This was not the plan. The dolt was supposed to warn Kadizzle when there was only one or two wraps of cable left. This is how our democracy will end. Hoopleheads don't do statistics, and gauges. Hoopleheads just do emotions. Pilots learn not to trust their senses, but to believe the instruments. The Hoopleheads never learn. The instruments say the casino will impoverish you, the cigarettes will kill you, and the Republicans will rob you, but right now I have plenty of beer and a whole pack of smokes, so who should I believe?

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