Final Dispatch from the West.

We Think We Made It!

The Goats finished munching down one side of our Colorado hosts driveway last week, so we moved them to the other side. At this rate we should be heading out of Colorado towards Missouri soon and we hope to be in West Virginia for the fall. We want to be somewhere solid before our Goat Does start kidding (Oct/Nov timeframe TBD...)

We are looking in West Virginia because it is the best we can afford. It also has good brush for Goats, so it is a win win overall.

Let us retell the story of where this all began . . .

About a year ago my Wife Jennifer decided she finally had it with her home state of California. She was born there, but the trash everywhere, lack of opportunity for our kids, everyone living in Gated communities while immigrants do all the cooking and hard labor, while simultaneously everyone complains about the young native population not working (gee I wonder why?), rampant roadside fires, high costs of fuel coupled with crumbling roads, lack of rain & water and literal trains being built to nowhere, while a true lack of housing being built because of overburdensome rules, well it all finally got to my wife. . .

I was not born in California, so I was ready to go. I really only moved to the left coast for a new job back in 2014 to get out of Massachusetts and the own trap it is for some of the same reasons. Sure in Massachusetts, the land of Mass-holes, the public schools are better, literacy rates are better, the general welfare is better, but it is still burdened by the same thinking, the same policies, the same over-regulation, the same hard getting by unless you work for the system or specialize in some money making scheme like engineering or lawyering or doctoring. But then you get the joy of dealing with the local mentally diverse populations or making some stupid robot vacuum cleaners i(robot) or Raytheon to make doomsday rockets.

Massachusetts is 6th or 7th in military spending depending on who you ask, California #2. For such peacenik states they sure do build a lot of doomsday weapons while promoting there superior GDP powers because of it.

Now a lot of states in America come with this great feature of having to work so much that you never see your family because the cost of living and desire to keep up with the Joneses is so high. Are these even American values? Christian values? Check with the Amish.

There is also no reason to retire in a state with such high taxes and high costs. There is a reason when I open my goat rancher magazine there's not a single goat breeder in the state of Massachusetts. There's just no way farming and agriculture would pay the bills in a moonbat blue over-regulated priced out state like the one I was born into. Farms don’t pay for the big fancy Universities in the NorthEast. ESG scores and Patriot missiles do.

Property taxes in Massachusetts are 1-2% on top of an overinflated home value. At least California is only 1% thanks to some stubborn voters. But really, why are home values so over inflated in California and Massachusetts? Because they aren't building many more houses. It is too costly to do so. These utopian states built out Grand Universities, Grand infrastructure projects, tempted and invited immigrants to come to their great panaceas, but then they didn't allow the building of housing for anyone in any reasonable sense. So the whole experiment fails for anyone who wants a home. The Young and the poor have no choice but to leave or suffer to get by. Is it any wonder San Francisco has a mental health crisis and syringes and feces line the streets? Being homeless and not having a bathroom drives one to shoot up and poop in the streets in seems. Or maybe it is the other way around. Who knows really?

West Virginia property taxes are 0.55% and the home prices aren't overinflated because they do not have a housing crisis. Mostly because no one is flocking to West Virginia. They don't have jobs either, at least they aren't such a massive moving piece of the Military Industrial Complex as some more progressive states are. So they lack in some areas of high wage employment. These poor states have little to offer you if you worship money, materialism and the Religion of Mammon.

Well enough of that, when you're with nature all the time it really tends to make you just not care about such bagatelles anymore, especially when they are so easily avoided by moving elsewhere. The world becomes so much clearer when you are a farmer. So much easier to get by. I know that sounds crazy but it is true. I just had always assumed as a young cynic that I had grown up in the type of world run by such graft and corruption and I must run that hamster wheel too. No you don't. You can drop out at any time and build out you own Parallel Society of Abundance. You reap what you sow, simple as. . . If the Amish with an 8th grade education are so much smarter than the rest of us, what does that tell you about our over-education?

Well last year we fixed up our farm, closed out our permits, finally got an occupancy permit after living there illegally for years and started renovating this 2006 Keystone Fifth wheel so we could sell our farm and move out with two livestock dogs, 30 goats and a horse trailer.

More Fifth-wheel renovation pics in the link.

GENETIC SUPER-POWERS & ROAD-BLOCKS

My goat mentor has culled down to a low number of goats several times and it has only bettered his goat genetics tenfold each time. We sold over a hundred goats and kept the best of the best. We found a private buyer for our farm from someone who we had sold a livestock dog to a few years prior and away we went! Good luck to them and their new home and sawmill business. Good luck to you California & Massachusetts! Like a frog in slowly boiling water.

Now, not to say it was Easy... In California the Local Government and regulations tried to thwart us at every turn. Even tried to halt our exodus and ability to sell our home based on some weird technicality around manufactured homes and permanent foundations (I wrote on this a bit here but it was actually even worst in the end than when I wrote that article). Despite us buying and permitting and them approving our permanent foundation, some engineer still claimed that we did not have a permanent foundation per some federal HUD guidelines, when we most certainly did, so our buyer could not get a loan for a moment. We had to pay off some other civil engineer to push it through with his engineering stamp power.

Money money money, it's all the Government and Big Banks really want folks. They need money to make bombs and tanks so they can kill Russians while the children burn in Maui. We all need Ukrainian flags on our social media profiles but we still don't know what a Hawaiian flag even looks like. Reminds you of some song about some Rich Men North of Richmond. Really bizarre stuff when you think about what a Banana Republic this country has turned into.

Ouch Knut, that really hurt. Stop it already you Nobel Laureate you.

We have heard from our Hosts in Colorado that it is the same here. They are running into similar issues here with the local county government. They bought this old 30 acre farm for some crazy amount and they're trying to split it into three lots so they can recoup their investment and the county is saying that they have to bring this 100+ year-old farm up to code in order to subdivide it. Imagine that! All they can do is pay lawyers and hemorrhage money while sitting on the project not doing anything, and that is partially why they needed our goats to help clean it up to build some road across it the county is making them build, even when it already has a road on the other side of the property. Each new house needs it own road? WTF? In order to bring the old farm house up to code they have had to bulldozer a chicken coop and soon a small apartment that the previous owner had rented out. They searched and searched for old pictures to prove that the shacks existed back in the past but twas a waste. The government had no record of it ever existing so they must tear it down. Folks, that old “Let them eat cake” mentality has never really changed. This is what some states are doing to people. They're making them hemorrhage money just in order to manage their own properties and the government is working to reduce, yes REDUCE local housing, and keeping the local home values and property taxes propped up because of it. What else could we expect from those older folks in power that bought homes 30-40 years ago, held to some antiquated code which has changed a lot since, while young folks have to meet the 2023 NEC CODE YOU SUCKERS! These folks like Biden that have been in charge for the last 50 years won't be out of power until the mid-2030s. Alas we all must bide our time and wait it out...

We hope it's different in more freedom loving and less diverse states of disorder and chaos, but who knows. I am sure it's all sorta the same everywhere to some extent. Voters gotta vote, Politicians gotta rule, and disparate groups of Bolshevized minorities need to lord over the majority until they become the minority.

Democracy is so much better than anything else tried, amiright?

We made it though. We are so happy we made it out of California. The state with the worst homeless problem and wealth disparity, the most drug overdoses, couches and appliances on every street corner, women being beaten and dragged through the streets, it’s just another day in Oakland.

It's no wonder that the native population cannot afford their own home nor to have children. More wealth, at least in California, seems to breed more poverty. More regulations seem to breed more chaos and never-ending change. More tax revenue seems to lead to less trimming of the grass and bushes on the sides of the roads and more fires because of it. Did they arrest my old neighbour yet or what? California is suffering in its own misery of self created version of a Tijuana shootout.

In Colorado we see a bit less homeless, a bit less graffiti, a bit more kids and more local young folk doing more jobs, but the writing is on the wall. California is just the canary in the coal-mine of what rest of the Country will be in ten years if it does not stop it. When your formerly high trust society gets turned into a low trust one it sucks for everyone. . . This is something the Amish surely know how to avoid.

We are off to the great state of Missouri next. We found a goat farm that has an uncle of one of our great goats and so we are going to stay there for a week. Our hosts have been great all along the way, everyone loves our kids, our goats, our dreams of building the best darn Goat farm East of the Mississippi. Everyone is so tired of all this fake and gay shit that rules over our society.

West Virginia is high on our list because you can still find old beaten up farms for $3,500 an acre. We will see how our Goat Dreams all pan out in the end. . .

Good-bye West...