Published at 10:56 on 1 October 2014
Another town house near the ferry landing unexpectedly came up yesterday. It’s in one of the (by my standards) most desirable developments on the Island. On the minus site it is barely far enough back from the street to be suitably quiet. Far enough, but just barely.
Still worth an offer because such things are super-scarce and the particular development has basically all I want and nothing I don’t want. And the latter is important when buying any sort of condo, lest you be foreced to pay (via your home owner’s association dues) for stuff you have no interest in ever using.
So, offer made. It’s a strong offer, and the first offer made, but it does have the standard contingencies, and I’m not interested in participating in a feeding frenzy that leads to buyers competing with each other to be the seller’s doormat.
We’ll see what happens. It could easily go either way.
Published at 17:38 on 25 September 2014
I wanted a second fountain pen for my desk, so I can keep the first one I bought a year ago, a Pelikan Pelikano, in my pack to have handy at work.
I’m still a total cheapskate about such things, so I did some searching and found that Overstock.com sells discontinued models Parker Vector pens for very reasonable prices. The one I got was $12, about $8 less than I paid for the Pelikano. And darned if the new, cheaper pen doesn’t write even more smoothly than the old one (which in turn is much better than the one I used in college).
As a further plus, the traditional blue-black ink is readily available for Parker pens in the USA. (Not so for Pelikan pens, at least if you use cartridges.) Being able to use that ink color midway between blue and black (something not available for ballpoints) was one of the things I liked about writing with that old Shaeffer pen.
I’ve heard some griping about their shipping, and they were on the slow side to notify me that it had shipped, but it ended up getting here two days early. So, no bad experiences here.
And that’s probably going to be the extent of my collection. I have more than enough stuff accumulated in my life, and two fountain pens are definitely all I need, and probably bordering on overkill. I don’t write all that much.
Published at 21:59 on 5 September 2014
After a half-year of keeping a close eye on the market, it’s becoming increasingly evident that housing available for purchase on Bainbridge Island breaks down to roughly three categories:
- Large homes on large lots. More home and more lot than I could ever want or need, in fact.
- Condos built one atop another, typically in a brutally modernist style (which I dislike) and with all-electric kitchens (I strongly prefer to cook with gas).
- Townhomes of the sort I would like, but only a tiny number, demand vastly outpaces supply, and I have no interest in participating in a real-estate feeding frenzy that leaves me no time to do due diligence on my purchase.
In short, nothing suitable seems to really exist. Maybe I’ll get lucky and find something, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that any such result depends on getting lucky, i.e. the odds do not favor it.
There’s really no rentals that have everything on my list, but that’s not so important for a rental, because rental housing doesn’t come with the long-term commitment that owned housing does. And there are rentals that have more of what I want than my current rental does. They’re pretty scarce, but one comes on the market about every quarter.
So it’s looking increasingly like the Island is neither a short-term solution nor a long-term one but a medium-term one. That’s about what a better rental that still falls short of what I’d really like is worth.
Still better than Seattle proper; each time I visit, my general impression of Seattle tends to be that I’m glad I escaped that mess, and this impression is particularly strong every time I have to contend with the freeway system there or think about what an onerous budget obligation Seattle is getting itself into with their multi-billion-dollar boondoggle of a highway tunnel under downtown.
Not only will the latter cause taxes to be high (for something I didn’t want built in the first place), but the it will also sap the ability of Seattle to spend money improving its long-neglected mass transit infrastructure. So it seems inevitable that Seattle will continue to be lacking in what a city needs to be a livable place for me in the decades to come.
Thus, despite the advantages of there being more social activities of interest (which does have its temptations), it’s still not the sort of place I’d wish to live.
Published at 09:06 on 4 September 2014
Recently, those involved in the campaign for higher wages for fast-food workers have started employing the rhetoric “whatever it takes”.
It’s a sentiment that’s been sadly absent for too long on the Left in the USA.
Because, really, those in the ruling elite are always doing whatever it takes to continue their rule. That includes often ignoring the same rules that they themselves wrote to their advantage in the first place.
If you’re not willing to use whatever it takes to get the sort of world you want, then you’re a sellout and a fraud who places more priority on obeying the ruling elite than on your own principles.
Published at 08:45 on 1 September 2014
By “civil unions for all” I mean the idea, floated by some, of getting the government out of the marriage business entirely and only issuing “civil unions” to couples. Existing state marriages would be converted to civil unions, and all rights granted to the married under the law would be transferred to those in civil unions.
“Marriage” would become a term used exclusively to refer to religious and other non-state ceremonies, which the private organizations conducting the ceremonies would be free to define the parameters of. Its advocates promote it as a way of defusing the Right’s concerns about “marriage being redefined.”
It almost certainly wouldn’t work. The Right is not interested in compromises here. They want existing privileges and injustices to continue, and one of those injustices they want to preserve is the oppression of non-straight people.
I can see hear Sean Hannity now: “So, am I correct that you actually support the proposals currently being advocated by militant homosexuals to remove all recognition of marriage from our law books?” At this point, the guest will either try and rephrase what’s being proposed with a more complete and accurate description (at which point Sean will shout at him for not answering his “simple question” with a “yes” or a “no”), or the guest will say “yes” (at which point Sean will launch on a long tirade of how evil and un-American the Left is). Or something very much like that.
What won’t happen is the proposal being received as a potentially reasonable compromise on the marriage debate.
Published at 08:59 on 29 August 2014
I’ve long known about things like the King David Hotel bombing, which proves that the Zionist side in the Israel/Palestine conflict is itself no stranger to the use of terrorist tactics.
But until recently, I never realized how creepy the roots of the Israeli Right — which has held power in that country for basically the past quarter century — really are. It’s far worse than your garden-variety greed-based conservative movement.
The Stern Gang actually saw a natural affinity between its values and those of the German Nazis and the Italian Fascists (at least initially, before the full magnitude of the Final Solution became known), and tried to ally itself with the Axis powers circa 1940.
And Menachem Begin, the founder of the modern Likud Bloc, was the leader of a right-wing party called Herut or Tnuat Haherut, whose methods were so fascistic that in 1948 Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and about two dozen other prominent Jewish intellectuals wrote a letter to the New York Times denouncing Begin and encouraging him and his movement to be shunned.
It’s pretty shocking stuff that’s detailed in the letter, and well worth a read. And it probably all helps explain why the present-day right-wing Israeli government acts like it does.
Published at 22:14 on 23 August 2014
First, capitalism unleashed the industrial era which set the stage for the unfolding catastrophe.
Second, as a system capitalism is uniquely ill-suited to addressing a problem like climate change. Reason is, its worst effects won’t happen until everyone presently alive is dead, so there is very little self interest for anyone to address the problem today. And capitalism is all about the pursuit of self-interest.
To the contrary, what self interest there is lies in denying the existence of the problem and opposing any action intended to address it, as is illustrated by the actions of the Koch Brothers and others.
Published at 08:23 on 31 July 2014
So, this is now the sixth time that Israel has targeted refugees in Gaza. Can all such incidents be waved off as either accidents or because Hamas was using the refugees as human shields by putting missile launchers in those same refugee centers? Highly unlikely, particularly when UN officials themselves have typically reported otherwise.
Over 1,200 have now been killed in Gaza. Due to the nature of the Palestinian armed struggle, which is not organized into a formal army with formal military bases, it’s impossible to say how many of those 1,200 are civilians in the true sense of the world (i.e. not combatants). But let’s be very generous to Israel and assume 50% of those dead were in fact fighting for Hamas.
That leaves 600 civilian deaths. Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 had less than half that number aboard when it went down over the Ukraine. The West’s reaction to Russia’s arming of the separatists, accused of firing a missile that downed that plane, has been to order Russia to stop arming the rebels and impose sanctions until Russia complies.
The response to the deaths in Gaza is quite different. While there has been a measure of hand-wringing in public about all the killing, arms shipments are being made to Israel so that it can continue its murderous actions. Actions, as the old saw goes, speak louder than words.
There is no moral high ground to be found in the ruling elite of West when it comes to any objection to the destruction of innocent life. None whatsoever. Any assertions otherwise are an insult to the intelligence of any thinking person.
Published at 18:32 on 23 July 2014
What’s Torre David, you ask? It’s one of the tallest buildings in Caracas, Venezuela, still incomplete despite construction commencing in 1990. In recent years it’s been occupied by squatters who have at least been putting the structure to some meaningful use for the first time in its life.
The establishment BS is that it somehow represents “the failure of the late Hugo Chávez’s experiment in socialism”. That, despite the boondoggle being the result of completely capitalist action (it was capitalists that decided to start building it, and then failed to complete it). That, despite construction grinding to a halt in 1994 and Chávez not being elected until 1999.
Of course, the putting of the structure to meaningful use wasn’t the result of Chávez’s state socialism, either: it was grassroots action. The Chávez government at least did that effort the favor of doing nothing and letting it happen (as opposed to the more traditional governmental role of repression).
Yes, it was a dangerous place to live. And yes, there should have been better housing alternatives. No arguments there. But trying to blame a boondoggle that came to full fruition five years before Chávez was elected on Chávez is more than a little dishonest.
It’s all ending this month, because the Venezuelan government has cut a deal with Chinese state capitalism to complete the building. And yes, skepticism about the State’s promise to adequately house the displaced is completely justified.
But it should be possible to express skepticism about the Venezuelan government (something I’ve done here many times, by the way) without blaming it for boondoggles which happened well before the Bolivarian movement even came to power.
Published at 14:14 on 21 July 2014
Really, how can anyone believe the hogwash about destroying the infiltration tunnels being the reason for Israel’s attacks on Gaza? Those tunnels have been being built for years. I’m sure the tunnels are being destroyed by Israel as part of its current military operations, but it wasn’t existence of the tunnels that prompted this latest round of attacks: it was the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers last month.
So, it’s effectively a form of blunt retaliation, whereby over 500 Palestinians — none of whom have been proven guilty of the crime being retaliated for, mind you — have been murdered in return for the murder of the three Israelis. Collective punishment at its worst.
