House of Eratosthenes

Having a bit of a “Wish I’d Said” moment with regard to some argument I had somewhere with a bunch of liberal twits about the Obama stimulus. Like most of the population of the continental United States, I live within a hop-skipana-jump from the nearest site of Obamastruction. It’s a $22 million project to widen Folsom-Auburn road, of which the Reinvestment Act kicked in just $1 or $2 million, enough to push it over the hump. They just finished it; it did need to be done; if it took a full two years just now, it probably would have taken two years any other time, so what’s my beef with it?

Just that it’s idiotic to be doing this to all the roads in the country at the same time. This is construction that is not in your way, too much, unless you’re going from anywhere near downtown Folsom to anywhere near downtown Auburn. And then you can’t get around it. Anyway, the dialogue looked like:

Morgan: If it’s about economic stimulus, how does it make sense to be doing work on all these roads at the same time?

Liberal dimbulbs: Because, roads have to be maintained from time to time, you idiot. (Nightmarish, Mad Max scenarios involving unmaintained roads…)

Morgan: Uh, you need to go back and read the last four words of my question again.

In Obama-land, “END CONSTRUCTION” might as well mean “CONSTRUCTION AHEAD SOMEWHERE IN THE NEXT THIRTY MILES.” Liberals are trying to convince me it’s a good thing, by showing to me how difficult it is to tell them anything. As for the economy, it’s been sputtering along about as well as you’d expect any economy to do, in a country where it takes 50% longer to deliver something by truck. From anywhere, to anywhere.

Anyway. I was flashing back to that discussion when I read about the British expats having a tough go of it in their adopted country of…Greece:

Last month, I dropped off my two-year-old daughter Nicci Alise at her nursery during a downpour that lasted barely an hour. But this being Athens, that’s all it took for many of the shoddily maintained roads to flood. As I navigated the five-minute drive home, stinking bags of uncollected garbage sailed past in the torrents.

It could have been a scene from Slumdog Millionaire, except that I was driving past multi-million-euro mansions with gilded gates and cascading bougainvillea in one of Athens’s most affluent suburbs. The imagery was potent. Greece 2011: a country that has allowed itself to be capsized by its own accumulated waste.

It’s been barely a fortnight since new prime minister Lucas Papademos was parachuted in, and Greece’s so-called ‘national unity’ government has already devolved into a Mexican stand-off over the crucial signing of the eurozone rescue deal. But regardless of any new political scenario, Greece’s citizens still face years of brutal austerity when, even now, there are so many who haven’t been paid in months.

On that rainy day, the city’s refuse collectors were on strike, as they had been for the past fortnight, along with a good proportion of Greece’s labour force. We were in the grip of a 48-hour general strike. Airports, state schools and banks stopped working. They were joined by bakers, doctors, customs officials, taxi and bus drivers and even judges. Clothes shops and tax offices shut down, but the beggars who clog Athens’s road junctions cleaning windscreens were still hard at it.

Every night, my husband Dimitri and I log on with foreboding to the strike website that has the most reliable information on the next day’s industrial action. That’s right: we have chosen to live in a country where we must consult a website devoted solely to strikes. It is dawning on us that we must be crazy.

The truly dangerous thing about liberalism is its cozy relationship with anybody who can help it with its own P.R. Its representative icon is the freshly-resurfaced road, or the newly-opened bike path, or Thumper and Bambi cavorting away in a protected habitat somewhere. Piles of uncollected garbage would be a more fair and accurate emblem. Tidal waves of red ink. Bloated, exorbitant pension plans, and web sites devoted to strike activity.

This part is a bit weird:

‘The first thing to go was our boat,’ says British expat Tessa, a mother of three from Cheshire whose Greek husband has been forced to leave the family behind and relocate to Dubai after losing his lucrative civil engineering job here. ‘Then the Maserati and then the Volvo. Now I’ve just got the Mazda,’ Tessa laughs, aware of the contrast between her family’s concept of hardship and that of the average Greek.

Liberals ought to be able to agree that if liberalism brings eventual results that are identical to those that arrive from anarchy, or whatever worst-case they imagine to be involved with responsible, minimalist government, then liberalism must be a fail. They won’t agree to that, of course…but they should.

Smartly maintained roads, filled with stinking trash. And big fat bills for the roads that were maintained before, that cannot be paid. In fact, from all I’ve been able to see of it, wherever someone’s made an issue out of health and retirement benefits for “The Workers,” there lies a dangerous sinkhole of insolvency. But hey. I’ve yet to hear of anyone complain of potholes in Greece. Maybe that’s our future. Nobody complains of potholes, nobody knows if the potholes are there, nobody can get their cars down the roads to find out because the trash is piled too high. Maybe the garbage collectors are on strike again, check the website…

I guess, as they say, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. With some awesome retirement benefits for the paving-people. After the strikes are over, that is.

Update: Bleaker and bleaker…but the print media manages to get some stories out of it, so it can’t all be a bad thing huh?

Wow! What a dim-wit.
The LAST thing to go (if it’s big enough) should be the boat, from the ports of Greece.
Just ask the community of English ex-pat “yachties” seeking tax “refugee” status in the warmer “exotic” areas of the planet, (ahem) formerly under the never-setting sun of British “economic” rule.
- CaptDMO | 11/28/2011 @ 09:20
There are no (and never have been or will be any) government solutions. Period. Whatever the intent is, the exact opposite will happen.

BTW, I live at the Folsom end of that road and I thought that job was way over engineered. Wow, I mean wow…
- BillW. | 11/28/2011 @ 15:53
I am an Over The Road Trucker. Yeah. That means I haul an 80,000 pound, 75 foot long monster all over the Interstate system of the United States.

There is construction going on all across the country on the interstate system and tollways. From the New Jersey Turnpike to San Antonio Texas and anywhere else you can think of.

Where they need to hurry up and get the work completed (New Jersey Turnpike) It drags out forever. Where it doesn’t seem to be necessary, they are building immense ramps and causeways over massive expanses of open land in Texas and other places.

Unless maybe the powers that be know stuff we don’t WANT to know.

I hope to post more pictures to my blog regarding this stuff. http://www.thecompostfiles.blogspot.com
- Moshe Ben-David | 12/01/2011 @ 23:17

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Picked the Wrong CountryMonday, November 28th, 2011

Picked the Wrong Country
Monday, November 28th, 2011