What did you accomplish today?

tangerinegreen555

Well-Known Member
I watered my potted tomato plants 3 times yesterday. They start to wilt in the sun if they don't get water.
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Now it's been raining all day so they're happy.
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BLT season is almost here.

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My 5 little golden rain trees are getting their golden rain rained off today. Flash flood buzzing alerts hammering my phone.

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Tiny toads are hopping around somewhere, if the tiny snakes didn't get them.
 

BudmanTX

Well-Known Member
eh what a nice day so far......hope everyone is having a good one.....or at least trying....

woke this morning not bad at 79F with low humidity....gonna be in the upper 90's today....it's all good....

for the people along the Texas/Louisiana border...think it might be time to leave with the way that storm is coming......8 tp 10" inches in New Orleans yesterday...eeek......

space tomatoes are re-veggin nicely surprisingly.....
 

tyler.durden

Well-Known Member
I have very mixed emotions about these alerts. First in CA we are mostly disarmed so self-defense options are quite limited (legally). Next we've had every tax grab excuse there is to put cameras at every intersection and every place else that do facial recognition instead of traffic and simple security as they initially started out. We also have license plate scanners everywhere. We have electronic snooping and other means of tracking and tracing the populace. We even have planes and drones in the air above us watching us and cataloging everything.

Why do they need our eyes? Aren't these expensive systems capable of doing this job? So we see something and report it. Response time is abysmal. So what about some folks who might be tempted to intervene. I can't count the number of Good Samaritans we've attempted to patch up after a well meaning intervention went bad. As well as the ones their families had to bury.

I don't believe they need our help and I have darker suspicions about the use of that equipment that has nothing to do with these alerts. But I'm old and suspicious and cranky.

I've always liked this excerpt from Étienne de La Boétie's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude in the 1550's:

"The fundamental political question is why do people obey a government. The answer is that they tend to enslave themselves, to let themselves be governed by tyrants. Freedom from servitude comes not from violent action, but from the refusal to serve. Tyrants fall when the people withdraw their support."

"Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives. All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you.

"Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves? You sow your crops in order that he may ravage them, you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows – to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made the servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto hard labor in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the stronger and the mightier to hold you in check. From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free.

"Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces."
 

cannabineer

Ursus marijanus
I assume the GF will be there? Be careful and keep the secondaries apart. I'm serious. Keep sis further away too, don't want your wife to feel outnumbered/pressured. This is a delicate time and can go south in a heartbeat. Do not get or allow emotions. I've been in this position, trust me lol
I'd listen to this man ... black belt in Marital Arts

I've never been in the situation, but my advice is to refrain from asking for nudes yet.
fify
 

curious2garden

Well-Known Mod
Staff member
I've always liked this excerpt from Étienne de La Boétie's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude in the 1550's:

"The fundamental political question is why do people obey a government. The answer is that they tend to enslave themselves, to let themselves be governed by tyrants. Freedom from servitude comes not from violent action, but from the refusal to serve. Tyrants fall when the people withdraw their support."

"Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives. All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you.

"Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves? You sow your crops in order that he may ravage them, you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows – to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made the servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto hard labor in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the stronger and the mightier to hold you in check. From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free.

"Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces."
The bolded sentence is where his discourse failed for me. You obey the government because the cost of disobedience is so punitive as to be unbearable by the normal citizen acting individually or even in groups. Hence where rebellion comes from. Our voting system, until it was co-opted, was meant to save us from the arbitrary rule of kings and dictators. Unfortunately it appears it did not save us from becoming a corporatocracy. They have no compassion or compunction about punitive rule and it is well distributed to make voting out the entire problem near impossible.

I have no solution only frustration.
 
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