07:52 – It was 60.0F (16C) when I took Colin out at 0630, partly cloudy.
Barbara is due back from Winston later this morning, at which point we’ll get back to work on building more science kits. We finished building a batch of two dozen of the CK01B chemistry kits yesterday, so we’re in good shape on those for now. Same with biology and forensic kits. But I have four more of the CK01A chemistry kits awaiting pickup by USPS this morning, and we’re down to only three of those in stock. So the next priority is building another two or three dozen of those.
Email from Kathy overnight. She and Mike read the comments yesterday, and Mike has abandoned his plan to build an ad hoc cold storage room in the basement. He told Kathy that, in his defense, he HAD proposed it as a “cunning plan”.
He came up with the idea after seeing what we’d done here with our old refrigerator, re-purposing it to extend the shelf life of canned meats, sauces, dried eggs/butter/cheese, and so on. After reading what the commenters said yesterday, he agreed with Kathy that it was a dumb idea. Oh, well. That’s why the hive mind here is so useful to them (and to me).
I was just thinking about two contrasting views on allies: “If you’re not with me, you’re against me” and “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”. I think we’re seeing a significant shift among pro-freedom people, Normals, from the former to the latter viewpoint.
In the past, even groups that seemed to be natural allies–say libertarians of different camps–fought each as viciously as they fought statists, if not more so. The same with conservatives, or any other groups considered right of center by the current definition of that term. Leftists, on the other hand, made Common Cause, so to speak.
What I see now is the right coalescing into a single group, willing to put up with each others’ different beliefs in the interests of presenting a common front against the statists/progressives.
After Charlottesville, for example, I actually found myself having some sympathy for the neo-Nazis/skinheads, something I would never have believed possible. I still deplore nearly all of their beliefs, and they’re still leftists, but at least they were out there fighting the progressive leftists.
And you see that alliance among the frequent commenters on this blog. We have a wide range of people, from devout Christians to radical atheists, and from traditional conservatives to hard-core libertarians. And yet we all seem to get along pretty well. I know I’d be comfortable with any of these people watching my back, and I’d hope they feel the same. We can beat the leftists first, and only then argue like hell about our differences. But, as they say, we’re at the point where we all hang together or we all hang separately.
So I spent some time watching videos made by a young woman whom, not all that long ago, I wouldn’t have spent any time listening to. She goes by the name of Patriot Nurse, and we have a lot of differences. She’s a traditional conservative, I’m a radical libertarian. She’s devoutly religious (Jewish, although it took me a while to realize that because she so often quotes New Testament scripture) and I’m a committed atheist. She’s an anti-vaxxer and I’m a scientist. She’s an ovo-lacto vegetarian (or perhaps a vegan; she reports her food preferences differently in different videos) and I’m an omnivore tending toward carnivore. She’s into some woo-woo medical stuff, while I insist on evidence-based medicine.
But instead of focusing on our differences while I watched her videos, I focused on what we have in common, which is a love of freedom, a commitment to the Constitution, and sympathy for the anti-Federalists and the Confederate States of America. I found that she’s worth watching.
YouTube put this video in my recommended list, so I watched it, followed by half a dozen more before this one came up.
I have never before sensed the intensity of suppressed rage that I did while watching this video. This is not a woman I’d want to have pissed at me. Her rants are more intense than I’ve ever seen. She lives three hours or so down the road from us, and I suspect there are tens of thousands of others like us between Sparta and Knoxville.