I received the renewal notice from BoatUS for GANNET’s insurance. Included with it was a statement that the company evaluates risk by, among other things, checking credit reports and because they could not find my credit history, I am not entitled to their lowest rates.
As regular readers know, I have no credit history because I have not owed any money since I paid off EGREGIOUS in 1973. You will find on the ‘wit and wisdom’ page of the main site: Debts are chains. Although I am aware that many very wealthy people disagree, I believe it to be undeniably true. Of governments as well as individuals. They are just comfortable living with big chains. I won’t live with even a little one.
So I pay BoatUS more than if I were in debt.
Perhaps a valid commentary on modern life.
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We have been watching on Netflix the excellent and most expensive non-English language television series ever made, Babylon Berlin. A police drama set in 1929, this is not about Nazis, but clearly depicts the conditions that gave them the opportunity to come to power.
Netflix has the sixteen episodes of what were in Germany seasons one and two. A third season is being developed.
Google and you can find out more, including universal critical acclaim, but I wouldn’t bother because of the danger of spoilers. If you have access, just give Babylon Berlin a try.
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I am not one of those who hate New York. In fact I lived there on the very outskirts at City Island for most of a year. But as we rode the taxi from LaGuardia through Queens on a dreary winter evening, I shuddered at the site of row after row of ten or twelve story tenements with grimy, blind windows facing their mirror images across ugly streets. Soul destroying, I thought, perhaps because the contrast was so great from where we had just come. People in those tenements probably couldn’t afford to live on Hilton Head Island, though property values there are modest compared with New York and California and Auckland and Sydney and London. But I could escape those mean streets, and would have, on a $9,000 boat. Or, if necessary, a $1,000 boat.
I noted in an entry last month that since 2008 more of our species live in cities than rural areas. Yesterday an article in the GUARDIAN states that by the end of this century, 80-90% of us will live in cities, and that one, Lagos, Nigeria, may be the biggest city in the world with a population approaching one hundred million, the vast majority of whom will I expect be living in slums compared to which the Queens tenements are mansions.
I do not long for ‘the good old days’, but we may be living in them.
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I am on the record as not believing in democracy.
Democracy does not work and never has, except perhaps on a village scale.
The United States is a plutocracy and always has been in which the monied nobility maintain their control by political contributions and lobbyists, while giving the masses the illusion of the vote.
Thousands of years of history are ample proof, but if more were needed Cambridge Analytica provides it.
Nevertheless I donned my winter parka—right at freezing here today with a strong breeze off the lake (I could not resist peeking and find it 71º on Hilton Head)—and walked a few blocks to vote.
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As a footnote I add a simple, self-scoring I.Q. test:
Do you get your news from social media?
