Cool and damp, then warm and damp. Yesterday at the BOL was the nicest day of the year. Cool, crisp, sunny and bright. More please.
Did my thing at the BOL in the morning. Tried to do a number of things in the afternoon, but mostly spent it trying to clear a drain.
Today, I’m sleeping in a bit, the back at it.
Dunno what happened to the post, or if I wrote one. Not really sure. Meds kicked in for my back and I went to sleep. Thought I did everything I usually do…
Stack something!
nick
Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, the post is free at last!
It was odd this morning when I opened the chickens’ coop at dawn. The morning chorus was going in the forest behind the house (and a couple on the roofs of the house and the neighbor’s house) while snow was coming down pretty heavily. I cleared the snow off of the bird feeder and made sure there was enough for the poor, starving wild birds. Actually, they probably do need the seed I set out, as the plants have just barely started to come to life and I haven’t seen any insects yet. There were worms on the driveway last week when it rained after several warm days, but that’s different.
I remember one Dragon flight to the ISS had toilet issues and they had to revert to the bag system.
Discover Card sent an offer. 0.9% for 6 months. Instead of 22.49%.
Sneaky little feature: “We may apply the portion of your payments up to your minimum payment due to lower APR balances first, including your transferred balances. Generally, payments above your minimum payment due will be applied to your highest-rate balances first. The minimum payment requirement can cause reduced rate balances to be paid in full prior to the end of the reduced rate period.”
It looks to me like they’ll make more interest from the customer. I don’t carry a balance so this doesn’t matter.
Capita One owns Discover now,
What’s in your wallet?
Only a matter of time before Tuckah! Has his PWHM*
*PeeWee Herman Moment
Difficult to predict what form it will take. I should get on Polymarket and see if there is a prediction that he will try to grow a face merkin.
It was 53F and clear when I got up to get the kids moving. Had to venture out and move my truck as it was parked behind W’s, and she had to go to work.
I don’t like to take the meds, but they do seem to head off the bad part of the back pain if I take them proactively. I lose a day for physical work, but I would lose the day if I was clenched up in pain and spasms too. If I can, I take them early enough to be out of my system by the time I need to get up.
That wasn’t possible last night, and I didn’t sit down and write the post as soon as I took them… so my brain got fogged and I forgot that I hadn’t written the post.
Doesn’t happen very often. Only a couple of times in the last 8 years. F me, has it really been 8 years?
I better get some stuff done.
n
I don’t have an X account. But often one can read there. Anyway. This seems to make a lot of sense.
NATO’s sudden-onset existential crisis
https://quotulatiousness.ca/blog/2026/04/07/natos-sudden-onset-existential-crisis/
or on X
https://x.com/johnkonrad/status/2040976854065049796
Heard on the radio earlier, “If the Earth was flat, the cats would have pushed everything off the edge by now”.
Side Quested: Lunch with a Vulture
https://sidequested.com/page/book2-117/
Nope, not gonna let a vulture eat lunch at a table in my deli.
Even if he is a Death Omen.
https://sidequested.com/page/book2-114/
One more X link:
First line “If you want to understand Trump, you have to understand that he’s not a politician.”
Uh, that’s why I voted for him. Also, he was worth four billion dollars. Who has enough money to bribe him? Anyway.
https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/2008699850326495479
The only President in living memory whose net worth went down during his time in office, I believe.
See also: net worth of national representatives and senators before, during, and after their “service”.
The Iranfukians are putting women and children around power plants and on bridges. The perfect way to end any future generations. I would expect nothing less from stone-age, sub-human, morons. Power plants and bridges are military targets. Putting your own kids and women at them doesn’t make it a “war crime” to bomb them.
See also: taking parts of a downed US stealth jet to the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
See also: emplacing soldiers in a church or mosque and opening fire on a patrol
See also: storing ammunition military supplies in a hospital
They all become valid targets. Each should be destroyed so thoroughly that there’s no sign that a building was ever there.
It is more like “involuntarily chosen suicide”. The Iranian people are sub-human, low IQ, cowardly, scum. Losing a few thousand, or 14 million, is a good start. Those loses will be the result of the Iranian government and the chicken-shirt(-r) male fungus of the society. The government has been warned about the destruction targets and instead of minimizing loses, chose to increase the loses using women and children.
My mother told me if I could not say something nice, say nothing. Well, that is about as nice I can be toward the Iranian fungus brained leadership.
GMAFB.
That photo wasn’t taken by Christina. And there are plenty of others that have Reid, Victor, or Jeremy in a similar pose.
“Seeing lots of articles that Trumps ‘obliterate’ threat are ‘war crimes’. And not just the ‘lefties’. ”
Just goes to show that ignorant gits can write for the internet if they have help from technology and ideological promoters that are not concerned with truth or history.
Money quote:
https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2026/04/07/stupid-progressive-narrative-of-the-day-war-crime-n3813657
and hilarity ensues:
“not just the ‘lefties’. “?
Funny how not a peep was heard from any of these shit-for-brains ideologues when they were busy preaching “not an imminent threat” .
An Unlikely Party Might’ve Just Negotiated A Ceasefire in the Iran Conflict
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/josephchalfant/2026/04/07/an-unlikely-party-mightve-just-negotiated-a-ceasefire-in-the-iran-conflict-n2674065
No more delays.
Open the Strait of Hormuz and we’ll talk.
Otherwise suck hot death from the skies.
And the Paks can suck it, too.
They harbored Bin Laden for years.
And the Brits. Won’t let us use their base(s) in the Indian Ocean because we’d use them for war crimes. Looking back through the centuries, or even just the past 75 years, I’m not sure that the Brits are standing on firm ground when they make that accusation. Regardless, to hell with them. The US might want to accept a limited number of heritage British refugees but otherwise let them sink.
India Helps US Repair ‘Green’ Wreckage
by Vijay Jayaraj
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/04/07/india-helps-us-repair-green-wreckage/
Indian writer with “engineering degree” plays hide-the-weinie with numbers, fails.
60 million /365 = 0.16 million barrels per day average for U.S. refineries
1.2 billion /60 million = 20 years
18 million /132 = 0.14 million barrels per day average for new refineries
18.16 /18 = 1.009
So the new refinery will add a whopping 0.9% to our refinery capacity.
Big whoop.
As I’ve pointed out before, if you want to reduce energy prices, take the strain off the U.S refineries and be “green”, the best way to do it is to deport all the illegals and send them back to their own countries where their carbon footprint is much lower.
“And the Brits.”
And the best way to make the Brits suck it is to sign a treaty with the real owners of Diego Garcia and send the Brits home.
Trump, Hegseth, and Rubio are hitting Iran so hard that Cyrus the Great feels the pain.
But if Trump really wants to destroy Iran as a millennia-old civilization, he should drop a few thousand progtards on them.
Start with Obottom and Valerie Jerrett, who did more than any number of Iranian scientists to move Iran toward having an atomic weapon.
“Why President Trump’s Threats Against Iran Are (Likely) Purely Strategic”
https://jdrucker.substack.com/p/why-president-trumps-threats-against
“Either a lovely trap is about to be sprung or the President has gone in a very concerning direction.”
“Like turning on the lights in a dark and dirty room, President Trump’s threats were intended to make the cockroaches scramble for cover.”
“This is not a new tactic. It has been the playbook of asymmetric warfare in that region for decades. What is new — and frankly remarkable, if my read is correct — is the degree to which this administration appears to be turning that playbook against its authors. The threats are the operation. The rhetoric is the weapon. And the IRGC may already be reacting exactly as intended.”
“The Three Likely Targets”
“There are only three categories of target that the United States will likely strike. Each is militarily decisive, each is proportionate to America’s stated strategic objectives, and each is defensible to the American people.”
“Target One: Kharg Island”
“Iran’s primary oil export terminal. Striking it cripples the regime’s primary revenue stream and applies catastrophic economic pressure; if boots do hit the ground in Iran again, this is one of the places they’ll be.”
“Target Two: Strait of Hormuz Weapons Capabilities”
“Anti-ship missile batteries, naval mines staging areas, and fast-boat attack squadrons. Neutralizing these removes Iran’s most credible conventional threat to global energy markets and U.S. naval assets simultaneously.”
“Target Three: Nuclear Materials and Equipment — and This Is Where the Misinformation Comes In”
“It is entirely possible that U.S. intelligence believes Iran’s enriched uranium is not all buried in hardened bunkers. Some of it may be hidden in power plants and other civilian infrastructure — precisely the facilities Trump’s rhetoric has been threatening. By broadcasting those threats loudly and publicly, the U.S. military can watch, in real time, to see if anything of interest gets moved out of those facilities. The threatening language is also an intelligence collection operation.”
One wonders how many lookdown satellites we have above Iran right now ?
Hat tip to:
https://thelibertydaily.com/
Welcome to another “Taco Tuesday”.
Who let the troll out. Woof! Woof! Woof!
Downvoted my post, which is OK. His right and his opinion.
My experience with totalitarian governments, military conflicts, disregard for human life, most assuredly exceeds his/her/shim experience. I was in the military during Vietnam. I have seen people killed, maimed, torture results, humans used as shields by sub-human people with no regard for human lives. I have zero sympathy for the results of destroying such regimes, messy as it may be.
Not just the regimes. Sometimes an entire culture needs to be destroyed.
Genocide isn’t always a bad thing.
“Elon Musk’s Terafab is coming, and you’re not ready”
https://www.theblaze.com/return/elon-musk-s-terafab-is-coming-and-you-re-not-ready
“The announcement of Terafab was made at a decommissioned power plant, reflecting Elon Musk’s understanding of stagecraft: The ruined infrastructure of one era makes a convenient altar for the next. On March 21 and 22, 2026, at the Seaholm Power Plant in Austin, Musk presented Terafab. It is either the most ambitious semiconductor manufacturing project in history or a very expensive project that may not come to be.”
“Terafab is a plan to build vertically integrated chip-manufacturing capacity in Austin, combining under one roof the design, fabrication, packaging, and testing of advanced semiconductors. Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI are the collaborating entities. The announced investment figure is $20 billion. The stated long-run target is one terawatt of compute capacity per year, a number that converts the language of performance into the language of power.”
Is there anything that Musk cannot do ? And has infinite resources to build ?
The Boring Company’s tunnel from South Padre Island to Boca Chica.
Run a profitable company without government subsidies or carbon credit regulations?
Your theory is no more valid than mine.
SpaceX and X make money don’t they?
n
Taco Tuesday? Dang. I forgot. Maybe I’ll remember next week. But I did eat the avocado I bought on Friday. Some plastic lemon and black pepper. It was perfectly ripe with no horrid brown spots. Tomorrow would have been too late.
I have some computer oddness. I installed PiCorePlayer on the new Raspberry 3b+ for a OS to run LMS. I did have the Raspberry desktop OS installed but I broke it messing with settings to mount the external drive at boot. I started over with a blank SD card. The music server software used to be SlimServer. Logitech bought the company. Changed the name to Logitech Music Server. Logitech abandoned the whole ecosystem after a few years. Now it’s called Lyrion Music Sever. I don’t know why other than they can still call it LMS.
Anyway. I play in Random mode. The default setting is a list of 21 tracks. 10 for history and 10 for future. It can be changed but I never saw a need. I got this all set up and it works. But it plays the list of 21 and stops. On both the Squeezebox 2 and on the Radio. I looked at settings today. Re-booted the OS. Tried to play a tune on the Boom. Can’t find the path? Ok, re-scan the library. LMS proceeded to delete everything. I see the USB external drive is not showing a blinking activity light.
Re-booted the Pi again and had to re-scan the Library. It all works. Including Random play. For now, anyway.
I have no idea why the USB drive did not mount. I really have no idea why Random play now works as it should. As it did on XP and Win7 and Win11. I had about decided it’s some Pi power saving setting.
It’s almost 72f in this room. Everything is just a tiny bit above room temperature. I think the Pi-hole, the Raspberry Pi Zero (red case with white lid) is a tiny bit warmer.
Tomorrow I’ll turn the Radio on and see what happens. And the Squeezebox2 in the EDC.
Eighth Circuit: Schools Don’t Owe Kids Access to Sexually Explicit Books
“The First Amendment does not guarantee students the right to access books of their choosing at taxpayer expense,” an Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled on Monday.
A coalition of LGBT groups, free-speech organizations, authors, and publishers is challenging an Iowa law requiring schools to ensure that books are “age-appropriate.”
Senate File 496 explicitly refers to books with “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act” and says school libraries cannot hand them out to kids.
This upset Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, and HarperCollins, who all really want to place pornographic books in front of kids.
However, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a preliminary injunction against the law, holding that schools have a “legitimate pedagogical” interest in which books are accessible to kids during the day.
Judge Ralph Erickson wrote in the opinion:
Judge Erickson seems to have omitted parents and taxpayers from the list. Note that these are the people paying money to operate the public schools and the libraries therein, whereas those listed are taking that money and act at the direction of the taxpayers. It is inevitable that some individuals in that position, especially NEA members steeped in the twin purposes of destroying families and western civilization, will resist taking the direction of the taxpayers, which I suspect is the raison d’etre of the bill.
Did a little bit of surgery to my office PC. The backup hard drive has been upgraded from a WD White 8 TB hard drive from 2017 to a WD Red 18 TB hard drive. I had 50 GB free on the 8 TB and it was way past time for an upgrade.
Our LAN backup performed nightly is growing at 20 GB a day and I do not know where 15 of those GB are coming from. So we are burning backup hard drive space.
I built this PC about three years ago and I have totally forgotten about the case latching quicks. I did get to use my vacuum cleaner big time on it.
I need to swap my main 27 inch monitor for a 32 inch monitor now but I am going home, leaving the new backup hard drive building itself to about 6 TB.
The new backup drive in my office pc is up to 1.77 TB now. Looks like it is going to take three days to populate the new backup drive across the LAN.
Directory of D:\
5 Dir(s) 16,230,264,004,608 bytes free
I need to call the vet. Like, do they make house calls? Or can I bring Penny in the van and they come out to the parking lot?
She’ll be 14 and 7 months old end of April. She eats. She seems normal. She pees and her poops look normal. TMI, maybe. But her hind legs are getting weak. Maybe it’s just been sort of cold the last couple of days.
Wilma’s hind legs went bad. Arthritis. Wilma was half Chow half German Shepard. And she had tenderness when rubbing her legs. They hurt. One day she looked at me it I swear she said it’s time.
Penny doesn’t act like she hurts. It’s just her hind legs are failing. I don’t have the feeling that she’s ready.
Oh well. Life.
It was odd this morning when I opened the chickens’ coop at dawn. The morning chorus was going in the forest behind the house (and a couple on the roofs of the house and the neighbor’s house) while snow was coming down pretty heavily. I cleared the snow off of the bird feeder and made sure there was enough for the poor, starving wild birds. Actually, they probably do need the seed I set out, as the plants have just barely started to come to life and I haven’t seen any insects yet. There were worms on the driveway last week when it rained after several warm days, but that’s different.
Snowing in April ? Can you see the North Pole from your house ?
Wait, Al Gore said there would be no more snow in the lower 48 states a decade or two ago. Are you sure that is snow falling down ?
@paul, there are mobile vets. And if it hurts her to move into and out of the van, a good vet should be willing to meet you in their parking lot too.
n
SpaceX and X make money don’t they?
So does Tesla.
“Victor Davis Hanson Breaks Down Why U.S. Must Rethink NATO Strategy”
https://thelibertydaily.com/victor-davis-hanson-breaks-down-why-us-must/
“(DCNF)—Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson warned Monday that the United States cannot continue to carry the weight of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alone.”
““I think we need to clarify what NATO is basically saying. In the case of Spain, particularly in France and Turkey, they were almost siding with Iran. But the other countries that didn’t let us, like the U.K. and Italy, as well as those three, they were saying, ‘Well, this wasn’t our war,’ but they don’t realize that we got involved in a lot of their unilateral events. Falklands was not our war,” Hanson said. “We helped the British. They would not have been able to retake the Falklands without U.S. logistical and resupply. Chad wasn’t our war. The French wanted to go in there to their post-colonial interest and get out the Islamists. That wasn’t our war. Serbia and Kosovo. Kosovo was not a NATO member. It was attacked by Serbia. They told us it was on the doorstep of Europe.””
Looks to me like NATO just broke up.
So does Tesla.
– but tesla does it with the carbon credits and rebates.
n
“Branco Cartoon – While Britain Burns”
https://comicallyincorrect.com/branco-cartoon-while-britain-burns/
“A.F. Branco Cartoon – King Charles snubs Easter and Christianity while praising Islam in Britain as a religion of peace.”
I found this to be incredibly strange given that the King of England is the Defender Of The Faith, a legal title.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defender_of_the_Faith
Does this mean that Charles is eschewing the title ?
So does Tesla.
– but tesla does it with the carbon credits and rebates.
n
A business model is a business model. If Tesla was losing money still they would not be in business, they have made many changes to their business model to keep with a changing business environment worldwide.
Besides that, people are buying electric cars right now, especially in California, due to the higher cost of gasoline or availability concerns, especially in California. Even though the federal subsides have gone away.
Out of around 2,300 Fortran subroutine files with over 5,000 subroutines for my data regression tool and calculation engine, I have now converted over 300 of the files to C++. I am in the flow !
I successfully reached Proof of Concept #1 over a month ago, I hope to hit Proof of Concept #2 in a week or two.
To me, it is comparable in effort for converting two million words from German to French. Others may disagree.
I guess Iran blinked.
2 weeks free passage of the Straits.
n
That’s what Solyndra said!
My best dog* was like that. Seemed mostly ok but had trouble getting up from lying down and in her last few days couldn’t make it up or down the four front steps to go out. Brought her to the vet, who said there was nothing to be done, she was just old and on the final down slide and I was lucky that she was declining in a way that didn’t hurt her.
* Almost all of my dogs were my best dog.
I don’t think that Xitter is profitable. Depends on how you define “make money”, I suppose. What I can find online without spending much time at it says that EBITDA was nicely positive but interest payments on the tens of billions in debt which Musk was forced to take on** pushed the bottom line into the red from acquisition at least through 2024.
I thought that SpaceX got substantial federal subsidies but either I was wrong or it’s no longer the case. A very large portion of its revenue comes from government contracts, but that’s fee for service and demonstrably a much better value than giving the money to NASA.
** Technically, Musk decided to complete the purchase without being ordered to but Judge “Kathaleen” McCormick had suggested that she was going to force Musk to buy Twitter even after it was demonstrated that management had grossly lied about their finances. I wouldn’t call it “buyer’s remorse”, as it was commonly declared, when it could be shown that both revenue and debt had been misstated. But then, I haven’t been hit in the head with a hammer enough times to be a Delaware*** chancery court judge.
*** Not directly related to the case, but Delaware’s agent of consent for females was 7 until sometime in the mid-1960s. You read that right: 7. Not 17. It’s possible that this is why Gropey Joe thought it was ok to fondle children and preteens. It also suggests that there’s something wrong with the people of Delaware.
Going thru stuff on my desk, and that means identifying things I’ve purchased, looking for supplies or parts, and d/l-ing manuals.
I picked up this for $5.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/205548150149
The modern Jet tool is a close copy, if not exact.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/389608844570
Mine is missing the tool rest. The grinder is used by knife makers extensively but also wood and metal workers. I’ll make up a tool rest at some point. The machine runs, so I need to order some belts.
My goal with my shop is to be able to build or repair anything small enough to be done with ordinary tools. This will give me more flexibility, and D2 wants to shape some knives…
—–
The Millermatic 200 welding machine I picked up for $80 has a cracked selector switch for the optional ‘pulse’ control. I think there is a direct replacement on amazon for <$20. If not, I can just bypass the ‘pulse’ module. My other welding machine doesn’t have it, so I won’t miss it. There is also a lot of dry rotted insulation on the ground cable, and the electrode power cable. I can use part of another ground cable to replace the dryrot section (only about 2 ft.) And I have a ground cable from another purchase at the BOL with my stick welder. Once I have those things fixed, it should be safe to test it. I’m pretty confident as they were one of the best and most durable models of its time.
That will give me a wire feed MIG welder at the BOL and at home. Or sell it to finance something else when I condense shops.
——-
I don’t really need more projects but these are both “a minute here and a minute there” type of fixes.
n
And now, I’m a minute away from bed.
n