You guys understand light bulbs? I’m in the midst of a complete breakdown over light bulbs. We had a bulb go out in our kitchen area. There are 17 light bulbs of the same type throughout the kitchen, hall and living room area, by my count. Apparently they don’t make this particular light bulb anymore because of some government mandate of some sort and the replacement looks different.
It appears the only solution is to replace the one light bulb by replacing all 17 and that seems insane, but pretty consistent with the current world in which we live.
I guess I could have non-matching lights for a bit, but that begins to aggravate my obsessive-compulsive traits. The saddest part is that our politics are such a mess anymore, I can’t decide who to blame this on. Is it the “lefty” Democrats trying to save our earth one light bulb at a time or is it some rich Republican group that vacationed in Italy on GE’s dime? I have no idea.
Speaking of government in our lives, all of us who lived through the housing crash of 2008 have been a little perplexed by a lack of the same recently. The error in that thinking is that we failed to fully understand that the government and federal reserve have basically socialized housing without telling us. The government owns or backs an outsized percentage of the mortgages in this country now and they have developed strategies that includes forbearances, extensions and swapping bad loans from one program to another to prevent widespread foreclosures and drastic falls in the overall housing market.
It’s a “kick the can down the road” methodology that I assume works until the road ends.
I don’t want farmers all getting mad at me, but it is a similar setup that has happened in agriculture. Farm crises of decades past have all but been eliminated by government programs that backstop the entire system. From favorable taxation to outright crop purchases and government mandated land controls, the government has quasi socialized agriculture and housing. If you’re a Reagan Republican that thought we defeated socialism over the last 40 years, sorry for the bad news, we moved closer than further.
“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” remains a good quote, so don’t be sad. It just might have ended up being more literal than figurative in terms of world impact.
I don’t know about you guys, but I miss Farm Aid concerts and those tractor strikes in the city. Those were good times. You gotta admit that 80s era farmer strikes and tractors descending on the city’s was safer than the COVID era “protests.” Farmers never started the cities on fire. Spit a little Beech Nut on the sidewalks but that was about it.
John Mellencamp is an underrated performer of our time. Sad that the government made him change his name from Cougar to Mellencamp.
I guess they still have Farm Aid concerts. That’s what Google just told me. Who knew? Not sure what they fund these days, I suppose corporate hog confinement farms or something.
Kind of sad that the government pushed them out of the family farm aid business.
Speaking of hog confinement operations, how many light bulbs do those things require? I guess that’s a problem for another day. Pray for them.
(Guy Speckman can be reached watching John Cougar perform at Farm Aid 1985)