The Zenzoid Files

Talking with Ted about the “progress” of humanity through history. I challenged the basic premise of the Progressive Lie.

“You know the story about the Israelites wandering the desert for 40 years? We today are fundamentally the same fallen, broken people as them.”

Ted replies, “I think there’s a huge difference between us today and the Israelites wandering the desert.”

“How so?” I asked.

“Because the Israelites would go on genocidal rampages and kill a bunch of people,” he replied.

“Oh,” I said, “You mean like Iraq, Afghanistan, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki?”

Ted shakes his head in a manner that said, “Oh, you poor simpleton, you just don’t understand the truth of Progressivism.”

“The only difference between us today and the Israelis of the OT,” I continued, “is that we have indoor plumbing. You’re confusing advances in technology with advances in the fundamental nature of man.”

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Talking with Alex and Ted after Liturgy tonight. I asked, “If a government reserves the right to initiate force against people, how can you call it legitimate?”

Alex said, “Because the citizens vote to delegate that use of force to the government.”

“But I didn’t! What about me?” I asked.

“Well, the citizens have voted on the laws of the land,” he explained, reciting the gubmint propaganda pounded into his head in the gubmint indoctrination facility commonly known as “public schools.”

“But I didn’t vote for that! Are you saying I have no value as a person?” I asked incredulously.

“Well,” he began in his most condescending tone, “you can vote with your feet and leave.”

“Oh, I see,” I said, newly illumined, “so rather than address the principle that I raised, we’ll use the old redneck line, ‘If you don’t like it, you can leave.’ I am so enlightened now, thank you for your compassionate and Christ-like wisdom.”

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When was the last time you tried to hire a skilled and competent tradesman? Seems you either can’t get anyone to call you back or the ones that you can reach you wished you hadn’t. Why is that, Capt. Ron? As usual, Zenzoidman has the answer. Open your skull and let the light of wisdom shine inside that empty space betwixt your ears.

I’ve been saying for years that there are just too many over-indulged, pampered progeny going to college. The ample supply of easily-available, low-interest, gubmint-backed student loans has spawned hordes of puffy little cherubs trotting off to college ostensibly for “higher learning” but who actually spend most of their time in laboratory studies of intemperance and concupiscence. This is when “college” becomes “collitch.”

As Charles Murray, at the American Enterprise Institute (a group usually too neo-connish for my tastes), correctly points out:

Government policy contributes to the problem by making college scholarships and loans too easy to get, but its role is ancillary. The demand for college is market-driven, because a college degree does, in fact, open up access to jobs that are closed to people without one. The fault lies in the false premium that our culture has put on a college degree.

For a few occupations, a college degree still certifies a qualification. For example, employers appropriately treat a bachelor’s degree in engineering as a requirement for hiring engineers. But a bachelor’s degree in a field such as sociology, psychology, economics, history or literature certifies nothing. It is a screening device for employers. The college you got into says a lot about your ability, and that you stuck it out for four years says something about your perseverance. But the degree itself does not qualify the graduate for anything. There are better, faster and more efficient ways for young people to acquire credentials to provide to employers.

The “over-educated idiot” is a cliché in our overindulged society. We all know people who went to collitch, graduated with a degree in something like African Percussion Interpretation but, hmmm, just can’t seem to find a job. Either that or they hate their job and feel stuck working for Da Man and so lash out by voting to take Da Man’s money through taxation, gubmint-mandated minimum wage increases, or various other hare-brained wealth-redistribution schemes right out of Marx’s imbecilic Manifesto.

So why aren’t kids going into these trades? Simple: pretend you’re an overindulged 18 year-old snot-nosed punk with no clear vision of what you want to do with your life or what you would even study in collitch. In your 18-year old brain, your impression of working in the trades is to work for someone like Cheeky the Repairclown (or, worse yet, to end up like Cheeky!). And suppose that you had the choice of working for Cheeky or enjoying four years of drinking and carousing in collitch on someone else’s dime (i.e., low-interest, gubmint-backed student loans, Mommy and Daddy, grants, etc.). Which would you choose?

Another problem is that parents have this goofy notion that their spawn has a “right” to go to collitch and, by God, to collitch they will go! Nevermind that the only thing this kid has any intention of studying is the bottom of his beer mug and his girlfriend’s chest.

The result is that the poor kid will struggle through collitch (in between parties) and then, if he’s lucky, end up in some miserable Dilbert job on a cubicle farm wishing he’d gone to work as an apprentice for Uncle Joe, a Master Electrician. He would have had his own Master Electrician license by now and been in a position to either buy Uncle Joe’s bidness or start his own. Guess that degree in Underwater Basketweaving wasn’t such a good investment afterall. Go figure.

But, despite not learning very much that matters during his collitch career, the kid will certainly pick up the usual collectivist claptrap from the last remaining Marxists on the planet, the collitch faculty, about how more gubmint is the answer to all our problems from global warming to jock itch. In most cases, collitch of today has devolved into nothing more than a factory cranking out swarms of gubmint-loving, liberty-hating voters who don’t understand the free market and are actually scared to death of it. These are the people who will vote themselves, along with the rest of us, into slavery.

I have always maintained that these misguided souls would be much happier and wealthier learning a trade. Instead of all this spite, envy, and disgruntlement, these very same people could be living the good life as successful entrepreneurs running their own trade bidness and getting a taste of the Ameedican Dream.

What, exactly, is this Ameedican Dream of which I speak? It is running your own life the way you choose and controlling your own destiny. It’s having a work situation where the amount of moola you earn is dependent on your efforts and not on Da Man counting out the beans and saying, “You can have this many, the rest are mine.” In the Ameedican Dream, YOU Da Man! In today’s economy, the easiest way to get there is by running a bidness in one of the skilled trades.

According to my state-of-the-art prognostications, here are some of the trades I see as the most viable and valuable both now and in the forseeable future (in no particular order):

• Plumber
• Electrician
• Nurse
• Carpenter (rough and finish)
• Mason
• Pest Control
• Diesel Engine Mechanic
• Auto Technician
• Industrial Equipment Technician

You may have noticed the conspicuous absence of appliance repair technician. I don’t consider appliance repair to be one of the long-term viable trades because the mega-trend for appliance repair techs has diminishing opportunities for an in-home service bidness; the shining exception will be servicing high-end appliances.

So, if you’re a collitch student majoring in Effing-Up, do the world and yourself a favor by dropping out and learning a trade instead. You’ll thank me in a few years.

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Without doubt, major problems are brewing in our country. America’s finances are eroding badly, the government is dismantling our constitutional freedoms, and our foreign policy is becoming increasingly delusional.

So, given this situation, what can any of us do? Can any of this be changed? How does one live a moral life in the midst of the chaos? How do we raise our children, run our businesses, and prepare for the future?

Good questions, all.

And for many of them, there are no easy answers.

Nevertheless, after some introspection, I offer the following suggestions:

[...]

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… according to these dudes.

But I ain’t giving up my morning, afternoon, or evening coffee. Besides, I bet those dudes are a bunch of panty-waist pooftas trying to turn all us burley, coffee-drinking he-men into effete little juice-drinkers, like them.

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This should come as no surprise once you remember that public education in the USA is a government monopoly. Don’t like your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it’s good or bad. That’s why government monopolies routinely fail their customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse.

[...]

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Eating a very low-calorie yet nutritionally balanced diet is good for your heart. Studying heart function in members of an organization called the Caloric Restriction Society, investigators at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found that their hearts functioned like the hearts of much younger people. The researchers report their findings in the Jan. 17 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

[...]

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Results of a new study provide the first clear proof that global warming is causing outbreaks of an infectious disease that is wiping out entire frog populations and driving many species to extinction.

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The frogs are dying, there awwta be a law! Gubmint has to do something about that!

Even IF global warming was a phenomenon that we humans had any control over, government solutions would be guaranteed to only exacerbate the problem (for those of you educated in government schools, that means “to make it worse”).

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Sweet dreams…

[S]leep deprivation impairs spatial learning — including remembering how to get to a new destination. And now scientists are beginning to understand how that happens: Learning spatial tasks increases the production of new cells in an area of the brain involved with spatial memory called the hippocampus. Sleep plays a part in helping those new brain cells survive.

Learning new things, at least in the case of spatial memory, quite literally keeps your brain young by ensuring a better survival rate for new brain cells in the hippocampus. However, not getting enough sleep eliminates the potential benefit of new learning on the hippocampus by suppressing neurogenesis. “Mild, chronic sleep restriction may have long-term deleterious effects on neural functioning,” according to the paper.

[...]

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From those liberty eagles at Rational Review:

In the wee hours of the morning of Jan. 17, another man will be put to death by lethal injection in the state of California. This comes exactly 36 days after the execution of Stanley Tookie Williams. But where are the protesters? With just a few days to go before the scheduled execution of a 76-year-old blind and deaf man who uses a wheelchair, there has been no public outcry of support for clemency for Clarence Ray Allen, who is white. There have been no planned protests and celebrity read-ins in support of saving an old man’s life. Community activists and civil rights leaders aren’t organizing statewide tours to bring attention to Allen’s execution. There hasn’t even been one ‘Kill Clarence Ray Allen Hour’ from KFI-AM’s ‘John and Ken Show.’ Which raises the question: Was the community cry for clemency for Williams because he was a black man, or was it because the death penalty is immoral, inhumane and cruel?

[...]

[editor's note: The same question, in reverse, could be asked of those Democrats who loudly protest the War now, but who were absent during Bosnia! - SAT] (01/08/06)

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Posted at a Chicago cafe called A Taste of Heaven, it’s made the national media and any number of mommy blogs in recent weeks because parents are warned — ready for a shocker? — that children will have to behave decently, and speak in reasonably quiet voices, inside the eatery. Moms are so insulted at the thought that anyone could be so “child unfriendly” that many are boycotting.

That’s fine with the eatery’s owner, who was fed up with parents who ignored their children’s wilder moments. Not your basic kid stuff of chanting “Mommy” loudly 50 times over 30 seconds until they get parental attention, or playing under the table. These children were brazenly running headlong into display cases, screaming full throttle and spreading themselves on the floor in the path of customers carrying hot coffee.

The owner’s not the only one noticing a perplexing lack of manners — not just in children but in parents, who either can’t be bothered to interrupt their coffee or shopping to tame their progeny or who think the word “limits” is synonymous with “repressive regime.”

[...]

I wonder if other people’s unpleasant spawn are annoying to parents who likewise have annoying kids? Or are parents of annoying kids blind to the ill-mannered behavior of each other’s reproductive units? Or just how does that work, anyway?

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The apocryphal tale that you can’t grow new brain cells just isn’t true. Neurons continue to grow and change beyond the first years of development and well into adulthood, according to a new study. [...]

Thank the pot-bellied, buck-toothed, cross-eyed Buddha! There’s hope for us children of the “better living through chemistry” revolution.

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[P]rolonged exposure to loud music from portable-media devices can lead to significant hearing loss. Northwestern University audiologist Dean Garstecki has issued a warning to the roughly 37 million iPod owners to turn down their tunes — or else.

“We’re seeing the kind of hearing loss in younger people typically found in aging adults,” Garstecki said. “Unfortunately, the earbuds preferred by music listeners are even more likely to cause hearing loss than the muff-type earphones that were associated with older devices.”

Garstecki and other audiologists want music listeners to adopt their so-called “60 percent, 60 minute” rule. The solution, they said, is to spend no more than one hour each day listening to an MP3 player or iPod with the volume level lower than 60 percent of the maximum.

“If music listeners are willing to turn the volume down further still and use different headphones, they can increase the amount of time that they can safely listen,” Garstecki pointed out.

Earbud users can avoid permanent hearing loss in the middle ranges, the range necessary to hear a conversation in a noisy environment — such as a restaurant, for instance — by replacing them with safer, old-school style headphones that are larger and rest over the entire ear. Or they can try using noise-canceling headphones that Garstecki fears won’t be a likely choice because of their cost and ungainly appearance in contrast to the inexpensive, diminutive earbuds.

“Unlike earbuds, noise-canceling headphones quiet or eliminate background noise, Garstecki explained. “That means listeners don’t feel the need to crank up the volume so high as to damage their hearing.”

[...]

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Microsoft plans to use the Firefox browser’s Really Simple Syndication (RSS) icon in the next version of its Internet Explorer browser, according to the company’s Internet Explorer team blog. [...]

Mozilla: godzilla
Firefox: orange bullocks
Internet Explorer: another whorer

Safari is the best browser made today. If you’re stuck on a Windows platform, my condolences; if you have a choice, and you still chose a Windows platform, kindly flush yourself out of the gene pool. I’ll wait… Thank you.

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I’ve been running my appliance repair website as a blog since May 2002. As you’d expect, eventually a copycat would come along and rip-off my concept. The copycat’s website is ApplianceBlog and he started it up almost a year ago. Well, as karma would have it, I discovered something interesting and disturbing about the guy who runs the ApplianceBlog site.

I was searching Technorati for blogs about appliance repair; I came up with mine and copycat’s sites:

http://technorati.com/blogs/appliance repair

Online, he uses the names Jake, JakeTJ, John Lucier, and Jacob.

Out of curiosity, I clicked on Jake/John/Jacob’s profile link, and, saw that he runs another site besides ApplianceBlog:

http://www.blogyouth.com/

And from there, you you’ll see a prominent link to yet another one of his sites:

http://www.youthtalentgalleries.com/

(I’ve not made these clickable because I want to avoid giving link credit to these sites. To see them, copy and past the URLs into your browser address bar.)

And just to make sure that the above site is really his, I looked up the Whois record for Youth Talent Galleries.

Some background information on Jake/John/Jacob. He’s an almost 40-year old single appliance repairman with no known professional affiliation with the movie or modeling businesses.

After viewing these sites, I pose the question: why would a middle-aged, single man apparently spend a large chunk of his spare time collecting photographs of little boys wearing nothing but underwear and doing provocative poses?

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Drink coffee; it’s good for you!

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I’ve never trusted this junk and have been hounding my wife for years to quit drinking any beverage that contains any amount of Nutrasweet (she’s a habitual, but moderate, Diet Coke drinker). Now, new research is validating my deep suspicion of this toxic waste.

All soda is junk anyway. Real men drink black coffee.

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Had an interesting phone call today.

“I got a Kitchenaid wall oven and the door is locked closed after I ran the clean cycle. I called Kitchenaid and they said to call you.”

Since I’m the authorized Whirlpool/Kitchenaid servicer in the area, Kitchenaid referred him to me.

“Yes, I can fix this for you. May I have your name, sir?”

He told me his name. I remembered him from another job I did for him previously. An older guy and his wife. She seemed ok, but he was a real peculiar sort. The kind you read about in Tales from the Dark Side. I replaced the condenser fan motor in his Sub-Zero refrigerator.

“I had another fellow out here a while back,” he continued, “but I didn’t want to call him again because I don’t think he knew what in the hell he was doing!”

“Really?” I replied. “What did he work on?”

“He did something to my Sub-Zero and since then it’s been running too long.”

Now this was a rare opportunity to get a glimpse into the mind of a customer. He obviously didn’t remember me but, oh, how I remember him. I was there twice, once to diagnose and then returned with the fan motor to do the repair. Each time I had one of my kids with me (I usually take one of my kids with me on service calls). They still shudder when the they think of walking in that house. How to describe it; let’s see, ever been in the back room of a mortuary, where they embalm the bodies? That’s what this house felt like. We were all a little creeped out by it.

“Running too long?” I queried. “Well, why didn’t you call me back to see if it was something related to the repair I did, which was to replace the condenser fan motor?”

After a bit of a pause…

“That wasn’t you, was it?” he asked, sounding a little unsure of himself. “We were very upset with you!”

“It certainly was,” I replied. “I remember the job vividly. You called me out because your refrigerator was making a loud vibrating noise. I found the condenser fan to be bad and replaced it. Are you telling me that the refrigerator is making noise again?”

“No,” he replied, “it just seems to run too long.”

“‘Seems to run too long?’ And so rather than call me to even ask me about it, you just stewed on it and bad-mouthed me to everyone you know. That about right?”

“Well, everytime you come over you charge us just to walk in the door,” he exclaimed, sounding defensive.

And he should be defensive because now he was flat-out lying.

“Mr. Stanley, you know that’s not true,” I declared. “I charge one flat fee for any repair that’s completed to your satisfaction and I tell people that fee right on the phone, when they call for service. The only thing added to that fee is the cost of parts. And I warranty my work for one year, parts and labor, with a lifetime warranty on workmanship.”

A longer pause…

“So, what about my wall oven?” he finally asked.

“I’m afraid you’ll need to call someone else to take care of that for you,” I replied. “You’re obviously a customer who can’t be pleased. And I’m not going to give you another thing to bad-mouth me about. At least this way, the worst you can say about me is that I refused to come out. But I’m telling you that straight up instead of weaseling out. Most appliance techs have been so abused by customers like you who put them under the witch hunt the moment they walk in your house that they no longer have enough self-respect to just say ‘no’ to customers like you. So they’ll either grovel in a futile attempt to please you or tell you they’ll show up, but don’t, and then not answer the phone when you call to find out where they were. Have a nice day.”

And I hung up.

This conversation reveals everything that’s wrong with the appliance repair trade. Appliance techs are already behind the eight ball the moment they walk in the customer’s house. Most people have been conditioned by 60 Minutes and other tabloid TV shows to view appliance repair techs as morally deficient cretins whose main objective with a service call is to screw the customer.

Granted, there are lots of charlatans and cretins out there, like this jive-turkey from Sears A&E. I get horror stories everyday by email or in the repair forum. But overwhelmingly, the vast majority of independent appliance servicers are conscientious and highly skilled tradesmen who’ve invested thousands of hours learning the basic skills, keeping up with the new models, and honing their craft in the field. In fact, to be good at appliance repair, you need both excellent mechanical and electrical skills. To do it right, you need a more diverse and technically demanding set of skills for appliance repair than you do for any of the other skilled trades.

But the problem is one of perception; some of it self-inflicted, but most of it just a cultural thing. Plumbing and household electrical wiring are all hidden behind walls and so are mysterious, almost magical things. But people work with their appliances everyday and so acquire the false sense that they must be easy to fix. They don’t know what they don’t know. Think about that: most people don’t know what they don’t know, but think they know it all.

The other factor working against appliance repair as a viable trade is the “how much is a new one?” syndrome. People look at what it costs to buy a new appliance and, in their muddled little brains, use that as the measure for what it should cost to fix it. Any ‘tard can see that banging out a washer in a prison-camp factory in China has nothing to do with what it costs to have a skilled and trained appliance technician drive to your home and fix it. Ah, but facts are stupid things, as the Gipper used to say.

But perception is reality and it’s that perception, along with the super cheap appliances available today, that have doomed the appliance repair trade. I said “have doomed” because it’s already done; the rest is just a long, slow swan song. I’m going on record here and now to declare that the appliance repair trade is dead.

The next mega-trend in appliance repair is do-it-yourself. The Internet has made this possible. Sites like this one and excellent online parts houses, like RepairClinic empower almost anyone with a pulse with the know-how to repair their own appliances. But even this do-it-yourself trend will extinguish at some point. Without skilled and experienced techs, you wouldn’t have do-it-yourself websites– how could you? Who’s gonna be around to write pearls of wisdom or answer questions from grasshoppers in the repair forum?

But, dontchoo go frettin’ none– as long the fermented nectar is flowin’, I’ll keep right on goin’. Yee haw!

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ecto: what’s the payoff from giving this software access to my hardrive?

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