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Category: politics

Thursday, 10 November 2016

10:16 – The civil unrest and rioting have started, although so far they seem relatively restrained. Vandalism is rampant, some streets and highways have been blocked by rioters, a few police cars burned, and some isolated shootings. My guess is that riot organizers were caught unprepared by the Trump victory. It took them the better part of a day to get anything rolling, and even then it’s been limited to large cities. Maybe the special snowflakes, overwhelmingly girls and women, are too busy crying, wailing, pulling their hair, and gnashing their teeth. If someone is trying to get boots on the ground, millions of special snowflakes don’t give them much to work with, other than as cannon fodder.

The progs are claiming that Clinton won the election because she got more votes than Trump. That’s true, but only if you count the millions of votes that were cast by dead Democrats, illegal aliens, people who don’t exist, people who voted more than once, and others who were not actually entitled to vote. Without those votes, Trump would have had an overwhelming majority in the popular vote and probably more than 450 electoral votes.

The progs also claim that people with college degrees supported Clinton, implicitly and sometimes explicitly suggesting that smart people voted for Clinton and only stupid ones voted for Trump. It would be more accurate to say that people who underwent four years or more of progressive indoctrination tended to support Clinton. Not to mention that college degrees are by no means equal. My guess is that people who have college degrees in real disciplines like hard sciences and engineering–which is to say the really smart ones–broke strongly for Trump. The ones with degrees in non-rigorous non-disciplines like social “science” and education–which is to say the ones who are stupider than average–broke strongly for Clinton. Or, in short, smart people, whether or not they have a college degree, voted Trump. Morons voted for Clinton.

Barbara commented on her journal yesterday that she was very happy this election was over. The problem is, it’s not over. It’s just beginning. The progs haven’t given up. They never give up. The political ruling class–nearly all Democrat politicians, the vast majority of Republican politicians, Wall Street bankers, large corporations, and so on–and their underclass clients will fight tooth and nail to obstruct the new administration, and the prospect of violent civil unrest remains high for the foreseeable future. Stay prepared, and keep your powder dry. We’re in the very early stages of what may turn to be a violent civil war, if not a full-blown revolution.

It’s odd that anti-progressives are so happy that Trump won. Trump is, after all, what not long ago would have been considered a liberal Democrat. It’s come to this, that so many of us are happy that the President-elect is not as bad as he might have been. Not good, not even acceptable, just not as bad as he might have been.

So we’ll keep preparing here, in the expectation of bad (worse) things to come. Today, I’m going to order a propane cooktop to replace the electric cooktop.

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Wednesday, 9 November 2016

09:24 – I hope our political class appreciates the meaning of this election. The major political parties are spent forces. Unlike every presidential election in living memory, this one was not about Democrats versus Republicans. This one was about Normals versus Progressives, and the Normals kicked ass even with all of the vote fraud committed by the Progs. People didn’t so much vote Republican as they voted against more-of-the-same Progs. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a slate of Normals to vote for, so we ended up voting for the lesser Prog-y candidates. Every Republican, including Trump, and every Democrat who was elected should understand that. They all need to internalize the reality: that people have had enough.

My advice to Mr. Trump is that the first thing he should do following his coronation in January is make a public statement that he recognizes that he has been elected President, not King, and that his will not be an imperial presidency like those of his recent predecessors. He should immediately issue an Executive Order that voids all previous EOs that have been issued since the founding of the Republic, and pledge to issue no more EOs for the duration of his presidency. Law-making is Constitutionally the role of Congress, and Trump should return things to that state.

Second, Mr. Trump should invite the members of the Supreme Court who voted to support Obamacare to resign, effective immediately and should then appoint new Supreme Court justices who unreservedly support the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Third, Mr. Trump should gut all agencies within the Executive Branch, starting with EPA, DHS, and IRS, and then running roughshod through Justice, and Treasury.

Fourth, Mr. Trump should withdraw all US armed forces stationed abroad and sever diplomatic relations with all muslim theocracies.

Fifth, Mr. Trump should expel all illegal immigrants, inviting them to leave voluntarily to avoid the unpleasantness of being rounded up forcibly and air-dropped on their native countries.

And that should be enough to keep him busy for his first week in office.

Mr. Trump needs to understand and remember that he was not elected because he ran as a Republican. He was not elected because people liked him. He was elected because Normals perceived him as the only alternative to more of being ruled by the progressive/left political class. Not the best alternative, but the only available choice.

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Tuesday, 8 November 2016

09:03 – With zero days left until the election, we’ll just make popcorn tonight and watch the game. If the vote is counted honestly, Trump should win in a landslide. Of course, the chance of an honest count is near zero, so the supposed outcome will depend on how successful Clinton supporters are at stealing votes.

I just realized yesterday that I no longer had the means to prepare sterile culture media or agar. In Winston, we were at about 800 feet (244 meters) elevation. In Sparta, we’re at about 3,000 feet (914 meters) elevation. That’s a huge difference for sterilizing things in a pressure canner.

The pressure canner I used down in Winston is a cheap Walmart unit that tops out at 10.7 PSI. That was fine for working at 800 feet elevation, but it’s totally inadequate at our current elevation. So I just ordered a pressure canner on Amazon that will do 15+ PSI. In addition to sterilizing culture media, the 15 PSI unit can be used safely to home can meats and other low-acid foods, which the older unit cannot. We’ll just re-purpose the older unit as a large cooking pot and pressure cooker (versus canner).

I thought about ordering an All American pressure canner. They’re US-made, built like tanks, and if we were going to do a lot of canning I’d have bitten the bullet and paid the price for one of them. They cost more than three times as much as the Presto 23-quart unit I ended up ordering. This unit can process 7 quart jars or 18 pint jars at a time, and is more than sufficient for our needs. I will need to order some spare parts, like a gasket, pressure regulator, and pressure gauge. Even with all of those, the Presto unit comes in at just over $100 total.

As regular readers may remember, I’m not a big fan of home canning for general food preservation. It’s very expensive in terms of equipment, supplies, fuel, time, and effort. For veggies and other low-cost foods, it makes more sense to dry them or just to buy them in cans to start with. I mean, what’s the point to using a $0.75 canning jar and lid, along with all the work it takes, to preserve a can of vegetables that you could buy for $0.60?

One place home canning may make sense for some people is in preserving high-value foods like meats, particularly if you buy them in bulk when they’re on sale. Versus commercial canned meats like those from Keystone (via Walmart), it’s about break even cost-wise, but the real advantage to home canning meats is that you can can stuff that’s not readily available commercially. For example, white-meat chicken is readily available commercially canned, and indeed we keep a fair amount of it on-hand. But Barbara and I also like dark-meat chicken, which is very difficult to find in commercial cans. And then there’s bacon. A pint canning jar holds about a pound of meat, and a quart about two pounds. That means that with six or eight dozen wide-mouth quart jars, we can keep 150 to 200 pounds of home-canned meats on hand.

The danger with home-canning meats is botulism. The bacteria itself is destroyed by boiling, as is the toxin that bacteria produces. But the spores of that bacteria are destroyed only by extended heating at temperatures well above boiling, which is why proper canning is essential for meats. The spores themselves are not dangerous to consume, except for infants (which is why infants should never be fed honey). The danger is that in an improperly canned container of meat, those spores may germinate, producing deadly botulinus toxin. That’s why all responsible authorities always note that home-canned meats should always be cooked very thoroughly before consumption. If they are tainted by botulism toxin, cooking them thoroughly renders them safe to eat.

Our 400W off-grid solar power starter kit showed up from Amazon yesterday. Now all I need to do is get batteries to charge and an inverter large enough to drive the well pump. Before I finalize plans, I need to get a well guy out here to look at our well. I have no idea how deep the well is, how deep the pump is, or how deep the water table is. I’d like to know all of that, and perhaps get him to install a new pump. I’m assuming the one in there is quite old and probably over-sized. This well was here long before the house was built, and no one seems to know anything about it. There’s not even a plaque inside the well casing, which is a pretty good indication by itself that this well is very old.

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Monday, 7 November 2016

09:02 – With one day left until the election, we’re settled in here, awaiting developments. Federal authorities have said there’s a heightened likelihood of attacks by muslim scum in Texas, Virginia, and New York today, and there have been other calls by muslim scum leaders to attack tomorrow to disrupt the election. Authorities are also on heightened alert nationwide for attacks by BLM scum, progressive scum, and other scum. Just as an aside, I noticed a possible solution yesterday when I picked up a bottle of household cleaner. Right there on the label it says, “Removes Scum”.

There’s been a lot of talk about how this election has meant the death of the MSM. No one on either side believes them any more. They’re talking to themselves and precious few other people. But this election may also mean the death of political polling organizations, whose results have been all over the map. Many people, again on both sides of the divide, no longer believe anything polling organizations have to say. They perceive, correctly in most cases, that polling is now purely politically motivated and that, rather than accurately forecasting results, the goal of polling organizations is now to provide an advantage to one or the other side. Everything is now political.

Tomorrow is not really the election, as most people think. Tomorrow is the first day of an election that’s likely to be drawn out for weeks. Whichever side “loses” tomorrow is very unlikely to concede and get on with normal business. There are likely to be an ongoing series of appeals, court cases, and possibly violence before this thing is settled. Oh, well. We’re prepared for the aftermath, come what may. We’re living in an area that’s as safe as any, where we can just sit back and watch what happens. Unfortunately, at the end of it all, whatever happens, it’s going be Meet the New Boss, The Same as the Old Boss.

There’s a lot of bad information in prepping literature about long-term food storage, both in terms of methods (no, freezing will not reliably kill insect eggs) and in terms of nutrition. Much of the advice is simply a repetition of something someone read somewhere.

With regard to LTS nutrition, many sources claim that you need to store x amount of various categories, including honey/sugars, fruits, vegetables, and so on. All of that is wrong. One can survive quite comfortably without any of those items. A human requires exactly three macro-nutrients (foods consumed in relatively large quantities) and numerous micronutrients (vitamins and minerals, elements, salt, and other things consumed in relatively small quantities).

Calories are an umbrella measure of overall nutrition. A human needs a certain number of calories per day, which varies according to that person’s basal metabolic rate–how many calories you need for basic body functions, assuming you’re just lying around and not doing any work at all–sex, weight, age, amount of work being done, environmental temperature, and many other factors. A small older woman who is not doing any heavy labor, for example, may need 1,400 calories/day, while a young man who is engaged in heavy physical labor may need 4,000 calories/day or more.

All of the three macro-nutrients contribute to caloric intake. Fat contains about 9 calories/gram, while carbohydrates and protein both contain about 4 cal/g. The Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Sciences publishes a list of Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs) that provides the Acceptable Macronutrient Distribution Ranges by age range. That information is summarized here:

Assume that you’re calculating nutrition needs for an adult who requires 2,000 cal/day. Fats should provide 20% to 35% of those calories (400 to 700 cal/day). Since fats average 9 cal/g, you’d need about 45 g to 78 g of fats per day for that person. Carbohydrates should provide 45% to 65% of those calories (900 to 1,300 cal/day). Since carbohydrates average 4 cal/g, you’d need about 225 g to 325 g of carbohydrates per day for that person. Protein should provide 10% to 35% of those calories (200 to 700 cal/day). Since protein averages 4 cal/g, you’d need about 50 g to 175 g of protein per day for that person.

Unfortunately, you can’t go to the store and buy a container of fats, carbohydrates, or protein. Well, you can, kind of. Vegetable oil, lard, shortening, and so on are essentially 100% fats, sugar is essentially 100% carbohydrates, and eggs or meat is mostly protein. But most of what you can actually buy is a mixture of two or all three, in varying proportions. Flour, for example, is mostly carbohydrates, but has a significant amount of protein and a tiny amount of fats. Most dairy products contain large amounts of fats and lesser amounts of proteins and carbohydrates.

And the amino acid balance of proteins is also important. Because different vegetable proteins have different balances of specific essential amino acids, one can starve to death eating only grains or only beans. Eating some of each provides complete protein. That’s why our ancestors for a million years have been eating a mix of vegetable proteins, such as rice and beans or wheat and beans or corn and beans. Animal proteins are inherently balanced, so if you can store lots of meat and eggs and dairy you needn’t worry about amino acid balance.

Of course, most people don’t want to deal with all these calculations. The simple way to balance things out is to store 30 pounds of grains (flour, rice, oats, pasta, etc.) per person per month, 5 pounds of beans per person per month, and one quart/liter of lipids (oils and fats) per person per month. Add half a pound of iodized salt and 30 multivitamin tablets per person per month to take care of micronutrient (vitamin/mineral/elements) needs, and you’re set for iron rations, at a cost of maybe $30/person-month.

Of course, that diet would get very old very fast, so assuming you have money left over, you can supplement it with things like a lot of canned meats, soups, vegetables, and fruits, a good stock of herbs and spices, cans of powdered eggs and butter and TVP bouillon, cans of powdered milk, and so on. It’s important to be able to continue eating whatever the situation.

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Sunday, 6 November 2016

08:46 – With only two days until the election, a lot of people are on-edge. I clearly remember every presidential election for the last 56 years, and with the possible exception of 1968, this one has the most potential for violent civil unrest. No matter which candidate “wins”, there are going to be tens of millions of people who won’t accept the result. If I had to guess, I think there’ll be scattered outbreaks of violence if Trump is declared the winner, but those scattered outbreaks could easily coalesce into nationwide looting and burning in the cities. Kind of like 1968, but much more extreme and wider-spread. If Clinton is declared winner, the likelihood of immediate violence is much lower, but the built-up resentment of us Normals isn’t going away. It’s like bringing a pot to a boil with no means of pressure release. When it blows, it’s going to be epic, and it is going to blow. Maybe not next week, next month, or even next year, but it’s impossible to avoid in the longer term. Normals, who are mostly WASPs, are very slow to anger and slower still to take extreme measures, but that patience has its limits. And those limits are very close to being exceeded, if they haven’t already.

Barbara and I are just going to settle in, watch the news, and see what happens Tuesday evening and the rest of the week. It’s extremely unlikely that there’ll be any real problems up here in the mountains, at least short-term, but events in the cities will tell the tale.

11:41 – For future reference: We had a #10 can of Augason Farms Potato Shreds that was down to only 125 grams (~ 4 servings) left, so I transferred the remaining food to a ziplock bag, tapped the can to clean it, and refilled it with Walmart Great Value macaroni from a 5-pound bag. The can holds 3 pounds, 14 ounces when filled very near the rim. I wanted to see what would happen if I added an oxygen absorber to the can and replaced the original snap-on plastic cap. My guess is that as the oxygen absorber works and creates a partial vacuum in the can the plastic lid will pop and lose its seal, but we’ll see. There’s no indication on the lid what plastic it’s made of, so it may be quite permeable to air.

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Saturday, 5 November 2016

10:03 – Rats! Barbara and I early-voted Thursday, and she won’t let me go to vote again. I figured I’d go vote again yesterday, today, and Tuesday, for a total of four votes. I thought that was my duty, to help offset the number of dead people that will be voting for Clinton. But Barbara says once is enough, and refuses to go vote again or even let me go vote again. Oh, well. According to my poll figures, Trump is the certain winner anyway.

With only three days left until the election, things are really starting to get tense. Trump will win if there’s anything near an honest count. Everyone knows that, and the FSA/BLM terrorists are no doubt champing at the bit awaiting the opportunity to go out and riot, loot, and burn. Fortunately, although Barbara pointed out an article in the paper yesterday that reported that one sixth of the population of this county is on food stamps, we really don’t have any FSA/BLM problem here. But I sure wouldn’t want to be down in Winston or any other large city on Tuesday or the rest of next week. Things may get a bit exciting in urban/suburban areas if Trump is declared the winner.

If you aren’t yet prepared for civil unrest, which there’s a very good chance of, now is the time to get prepared. You have the rest of today through Monday to do so. With gangsters running the country and millions of their clients thick on the ground in urban areas, we Normals have to be prepared for any eventuality. So go out to vote, early and often, and then head home, load up, and batten down the hatches. Nothing major may happen, but then again it might.

I keep thinking about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Right up until the barbarians started streaming through the gates, most Romans thought everything was completely normal. They were shocked when they found themselves being run though with barbarian spears. The point is, collapse happens very quickly. That’s not to say that this country is imminently in danger of complete collapse, but the prospect is there and if/when it does happen it will come as a complete surprise to most people. Don’t be one of those.

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Friday, 4 November 2016

10:06 – Updated polling results. Last time, I surveyed five people, of whom only four were likely voters. The results were Trump 100% and everyone else 0%. But that was when Barbara had told me she wasn’t going to vote. Yesterday, she changed her mind because not voting would essentially be a vote for Clinton. So, with the sample size now five, the results are now Trump 125% and everyone else 0%. Even with a large margin of error, things are looking dim for Clinton.

Barbara called me on her way back from Winston yesterday when she was about half an hour from home. She suggested picking me up on the way past and heading into Sparta to refill her gas tank and vote. Gas had gone up Monday from $2.13 to $2.19, and it was still at that price. No line. So we filled up and headed for the early voting place downtown. No lines there, either. We voted and headed home, all within ten or fifteen minutes. I was pleased to see that, although the voting machines were electronic, they produced a paper audit trail.

As we got in the car to return home, I commented to Barbara that the last time I’d voted Republican was for Nixon in 1972. Barbara and I were among those millions (or tens of millions) of “hidden” Trump voters. Not that we like Trump. Both of us despise him, but he’s infinitely better than Clinton. It felt very strange to me to be marking the Republican boxes instead of the Libertarian boxes, but there it is. I mean if I, as a radical anarchist libertarian and a former member of the Libertarian National Committee, voted Republican, how many votes can the LP expect to get? My guess is that a huge majority of those who are either large-L Libertarians or small-l libertarians will be voting for Trump.

The Colonial pipeline fire was still not completely extinguished as of late last night, but Colonial is still saying they expect Pipeline One to be back in full service as of this Sunday. They obviously know things that I don’t, so at this point I’ll believe them. Of course, even once they start pumping again, there’s a lot of empty pipe between the break and the tank farm in Greensboro. They’ll have lost a week or so of transfer, but I’m assuming the gigantic tank farm has enough capacity to buffer that loss and continue distribution uninterrupted. If so, the disruption may be minimal.

Barbara made a small Costco run yesterday on her way out of Winston. The only food she picked up was two boxes of Ritz crackers, two dozen cans of Kirkland green beans, and two 3-liter bottles of Kirkland olive oil. FedEx showed up here yesterday morning with my Walmart order. That included a gift Barbara wanted for her sister and four 2-pound boxes of Alpo Variety Snaps for Colin. As usual, I filled in with dry staples to get to the $50 minimum for free shipping, so we also got a 5-pound bag of store-brand macaroni and ten 1-pound bags of egg noodles. The macaroni was indistinguishable visually from the name-brand stuff we get in one-pound boxes at Costco, and we already knew that the store-brand egg noodles from Walmart are indistinguishable from the name-brand ones Barbara gets at the supermarket. Everything was in plastic bags and had best-by dates from 18 months to two years out, so I’m not going to worry about repackaging it.

I also ordered a 400W off-grid solar power starter kit, which gives me four panels and a PWM charge controller. For a functional system, I still need to add a couple of deep-cycle batteries and an inverter, which I’ll do shortly. And the good news is that all of this solar stuff is eligible for a 30% federal tax credit and possibly a state tax credit as well, so our actual out-of-pocket cost will be only a small fraction of the total cost.

And I see that the FBI has issued an alert. They’re apparently expecting muslim terrorists to pull something on Monday in New York, Texas, and/or Virginia. As alway, keep your eyes open, and stay away from urban areas and crowds.

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Monday, 31 October 2016

20:20 – Go fill up your gas tanks now. Colonial Pipeline #1 just blew up near the break from a couple weeks ago. My Trooper has 6 miles on the trip. Barbara’s car was down to half a tank, so she just now headed out to fill her tank.

09:27 – I got my Fire HD7 updated to Fire OS 5.x yesterday. The current version of the Silk browser is still pathetic, but at least it’s better than the 4.x version. I installed Adguard, which seems to work well in blocking ads.

There’s little point to visiting news websites right now. All of them, from MSM to Alt-Right, are focused on the election, and none of them has anything useful to say. Polls, polls, polls, Comey, Comey, Comey, Weiner, Weiner, Weiner, blah, blah, blah. Who gives a shit?

I did see one interesting post by a Tennessee state senator who took a drive through his district and into SE Kentucky to look at the autumn leaves and political signs. He spotted two Clinton signs and 56 Trump signs. Granted, that area, like most of the US, hates Clinton, but even so. I also saw an article about someone dumping a load of cow shit at an Ohio Democrat headquarters. That seems only fair, returning their property to them.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view), no one seems to be shooting politicians yet or committing other violent acts. I have noticed that the muslim scum seem to be very quiet lately, which leads me to think they’re Clinton supporters. One or two terrorist bombings/shootings would probably shift a lot of votes to Trump.

I’ve had a lot of emails from people concerning their plans for election day. Most of them, particularly those in small towns and rural areas, plan to treat it as they would any other day. A fair percentage of those who live in larger towns and cities plan to stick pretty close to home next Tuesday and Wednesday. I don’t expect any widespread violence, but I’ve been wrong before. And, sitting where we are and as prepared as we are, that’s easy for me to say. If we lived in an urban/suburban setting, I’d be a lot more concerned. If that’s your situation, you now have a week left to make at least minimal preparations.

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Sunday, 30 October 2016

12:01 – I’m getting very tired of Amazon’s walled garden for the Fire. Some time ago, I downgraded my Fire HD7 from FOS5 to FOS4 because I couldn’t stand the control icons in landscape mode being fixed at the bottom of the screen rather than on the right side. But I’ve really had it with Silk, which is the worst excuse for a browser ever, and now that Opera is a Chinese outfit, it’s not suitable as an alternative either. I could find no way to get Firefox installed and stable on FOS4, so I just upgraded my Fire to FOS5. I had Firefox running on it before and thought it’d be easy to get it running (with uBlock Origin for adblocking), but it turns out that Amazon’s walled garden is making that very difficult. When I have time over the winter, I’m going to blow away all things Amazon on this Fire and install Android. Amazon says that voids the warranty, which has expired anyway. Never doubt that Amazon always, without exception, puts the interests of the customer in far-distant last place.

I’ve gotten really, really tired of seeing all these headlines about election polls, none of which agree on anything. So I decided to run my own poll, which I absolutely guarantee is accurate, and the last poll you’ll ever need to look at. I surveyed five people who are registered voters. One doesn’t intend to vote, so I excluded her from the results. Those results are:

Trump — 100.00%
Clinton — 0.00%
Johnson — 0.00%
Stein —- 0.00%

The margin of error is ±70%, give or take. This is very, very bad news for Clinton. Someone needs to wrap a baseball bat with barbed wire, name it Lucille, and beat her to death with it so that she can avoid this embarrassment. Or, since she really is Walking Dead, they could just ram a piece of rebar through her face and out the back of her head. They’d be doing her a favor, and the rest of us a huge favor. (Barbara was walking around the kitchen yesterday, making sounds like a Walker. I shouted in to her to stop trying to do a Clinton impression.)

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Friday, 28 October 2016

09:54 – We got more flour repackaged yesterday. Today we’ll finish up repackaging rice and oats. The oats will use the last of our 3-liter bottles. The rice will go into 2-liter bottles because rice flows very freely through the narrower mouths of the 2-liter bottles. Any additional fluffy stuff (flour, oats, etc.) we repackage will go into LDS 1-gallon foil/Mylar bags. We’ll continue to use 2-liter bottles for free-flowing stuff like sugar and rice.

When Lori, our USPS carrier, stopped by yesterday to pick up a shipment, I asked how she was doing on repackaging the bulk staples she’d picked up at Sam’s Club last weekend. She’d finished repackaging the sugar and rice, but was waiting for her brother to deliver more 2-liter bottles for the bagged flour. I told her we had plenty of empty 2-liter bottles and that she was welcome to a trash bag or two full of them, but she said she didn’t need them right now. I offered to lend her a flexible silicone funnel with a stem that’s a slip fit for the inside of a 2-liter bottle and makes it much easier to transfer flour. She accepted with thanks. I asked if she was using oxygen absorbers and she said she intended to order some on Amazon. I told her we had plenty and offered her some to use with her repackaged flour and rice. She insisted on paying me for them, although I told her that I bought them in packs of 100 from the LDS on-line store, and they only cost twelve cents each. I then gave her a small Mason jar of the oxygen absorbers and a one-minute tutorial on how to use them.

Barbara and I have been trying different main courses that can be made exclusively with LTS food. Last night, we made a skillet dinner with one pound of ground beef (we actually used frozen, but it would work just as well with the Keystone canned ground beef we keep in stock), one pound of macaroni, one can of green beans, two cups of Augason Farms cheesy broccoli soup in four cups of water, and three tablespoons of onion flakes. It was quick and easy to make, and turned out very well. In fact, we’re having the leftovers for dinner tonight and decided to add it to our main meal rotation. Barbara did suggest dropping the onion from three to two tablespoons, but she’s not a big fan of onion or garlic. These ingredients make sufficient to serve as a main meal for four to six people.

We’re spending some time today and tomorrow on inventorying kits and components. We’re at a comfortable level of finished goods inventory for this time of year, when we’re shipping an average of only one kit per day, but I want to get ready to build a lot more as kit sales ramp up in late November and through December and January.

Clinton and Obama’s wife made a campaign stop in Winston-Salem yesterday, at the Lawrence Joel Veterans’ Memorial Coliseum. The front-page article in the paper this morning said the crowd was estimated at 11,000, with a vast majority being women, but I have my doubts. The photograph they ran with the article showed Clinton and Obama on-stage with maybe a hundred people in the stands. There was a large section of empty seats visible, and a few populated rows of seats with a large curtain blocking off the seating behind them. My guess is that actual attendance was probably a few hundred people. Clinton rallies are notorious for being lightly attended, while Trump rallies are invariably standing room only.

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