Meander 1.
An article at Curbside Classic pictured the S&H Green Stamp dispenser that used to be common in gas stations and grocery stores. The clerk dialed up the quantity of stamps justified by your purchase, and a string of stamps emerged.
Why didn’t thieves just dial up some dollars? Easy answer. Pro criminals need instant gratification. Stamps were for savers. You couldn’t get anything meaningful without preserving and collecting for a while.
I was fascinated by Green Stamps. As a natural saver I enjoyed the feel and taste of licking and carefully applying the stamps in the book. Value that involved the senses and muscles! Mom, a natural spender, was happy to let me do the task.
Before Wall Street resumed its bombing in 1980, society was shaped to encourage and reward savings in many ways, not just interest on accounts.
I’m still fascinated by different physical representations of value, like Postal Reply Coupons, telegraph money orders, and federal savings bonds. When savings bonds switched to all digital I didn’t like it, but they finally offered some real interest after the long era of Bush financial terrorism, so I bought them again.
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Meander 2.
A housefly is buzzing around the house today, constantly taunting me by staying near my face. I no longer pretend to be a moral vegetarian but I try not to kill critters indiscriminately. A small insect that isn’t swarming or harmful, or a spider that stays in its corner, can live here. Houseflies are harmful AND annoying, no compunction. So far this one has escaped my slaps.
DDT did a great job of eliminating harmful insects like mosquitoes, and DID NOT eliminate bees or kill birds, despite the hysteria that led to its banning by RFK-style loonies. Bees were plentiful then. Bees got rare in the 80s, and the RFK loonies blamed everything from radio waves to Roundup. It turned out that commercial bees, not wild bees, were in trouble because Big Beekeeping was getting too big and centralized. Hives were gathered in a few massive factories, in the same way that chickens and other crops are gathered now. When all life is in a few massive megacities, one fungus or microbe can wipe out half the population fast and easy.
Whoopsie!!!! After the facts were known, the hysteria INSTANTLY died down. Haven’t heard anything about pollinator collapse since then. Environmentalism is a tool of the demon billionaires, like everything else in this fucked world.
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Meander 3.
The worst propagandists of all are the Good Citizen advocates who insist that everyone MUST be well-informed. We MUST keep up with all the toxic shit that spews from media. We MUST listen to “both” “sides.” In hard reality our informed-ness is utterly irrelevant. No matter how much we know and respect “both” “sides”, the only real side will continue doing what it wants to do. A few people have enough power to move the only real side, but they don’t need to watch the “news” because they’re creating the “news”.
For the rest of us, “informed” simply wastes a huge amount of energy and strength that we could otherwise be using productively and creatively for our own god-given unique purposes. Needless to say, the only real side wants us to be wasting our precious energy.
Polistra's Mill 