Hello fellow glibertarians! I saw the bat signal from Swiss indicating that the hopper was empty, so you get the highest quality post pulled from my stream of consciousness!

I haven’t been around as much lately, but I still pop in from time to time to see how yall are doing. Life is much more peaceful and slow here in the middle of nowhere in the Ozarks. My neighbors are cows, and not the blue haired Biden voter kind.

  • We have been doing homeschooling with both the 3 year old and the 6 year old. It’s amazing how much the 3 year old absorbs from the 2nd grade curriculum we’re teaching. The idea that kids need to be fed particular concepts at particular ages seems to be overstrict at best. Of course, some things build on other things and of course some things are easier to pick up when you’re older, but reading, writing, and arithmetic are not those things.
  • My dad recently visited and it was very interesting to see how his perspective has diverged from mine over the years. I see the root cause being our differently founded worldviews. He’s perhaps nominally Christian, but in reality founds his worldview on secular conservative Americanism. I’m an active, devout Christian whose perspective on secularism, conservatism, and American patriotism has shifted significantly since my conversion 12 years ago. He and I identify many of the same issues in our society and in the world, but the resulting reaction is very different. He has become somewhat of a doomsday prepper, with a focus on being ready for nuclear weapons, economic crash, social upheaval, etc. The concern/fear in his perspective was palpable to me. The phrase that embedded itself in my memory was “when the stuff hits the fan, we’ll be able to survive, unlike most people.” Meanwhile, my wife and I are focused on building a more sustainable, self-sufficient lifestyle, and one of the second order consequences is increased resiliency to societal chaos. We’re not afraid of such things happening, and we’re not afraid of dying if we happen to be insufficiently prepared for such things. Why worry about tomorrow when today has enough things to worry about?
  •  The longer I’m off of social media (YouTube is my one major exception) and not watching TV, the less I have in common with my laptop class coworkers and the more I have in common with my blue-collar neighbors and church community. Turns out that folks around here aren’t screen addicts to the same level as elsewhere, which is a welcome relief.
  • I had a good discussion with my wife about voting. She’s for trying to change the system by electing better representatives. I’m for sitting on my hands until the electoral system is modified to be verifiably accurate. Her main point was “how do you expect to fix the system if you won’t engage in it?” My response was “I don’t expect the system to be fixed regardless of my participation, so I may as well stop wasting my time lending legitimacy to a corrupt system.” I likened the electoral system to a button on a vending machine. I’ve pushed the button enough times to deduce that it’s not connected to anything. I don’t have the key to open up the machine, so I may as well stay home rather than coming back every day in the hope that somebody fixed the button overnight.
  • There are 1000 resources out there for “optimizing your taxes with a side gig”, and I’ve not encountered one that has been worth the read. They all point to the same 5 tactics and those tactics are all fine for what they are, but don’t really address how to structure the business. I’m sure a tax accountant could help.
  • There are rumors of state reps trying to get rid of personal and corporate income tax here in MO. Count me as enthusiastically in support of that.
  • How long until the state of TX flips blue? I know the TX democrats have had some cringy attempts to flip the state in the past, but the demographics are shifting in a way that brings a whole lot more single/divorced/soon to be divorced suburban women into the state. That group seems to be the core constituency of the left these days.
  • The initial start with chickens was a disaster. The coop (more like a shed) was much more drafty than I thought and we lost 10 of 28 birds in the first week. Since then, we brought them inside for a couple weeks, acquired 6 more birds (wife thought they were cute), and moved them back out once the temps came up a bit. We haven’t lost one since. I had to rescue a few from under the coop, but I put a hardware cloth skirt on the coop to fix that problem. 3-4 months until eggs start!
  • Biden, Trump, both, neither? At the end of the day, does it really matter? I’m increasingly convinced that the politicians are kept within a paddock of acceptable thinking by the Intel community, and a large portion of this Trump nonsense is the Intel community trying to get a rogue sheep back into the paddock.

Apologies to TPTB for the spartan article. I tapped it out on my phone while listening to some legal education courses.