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Category: politics

Thursday, 13 October 2016

09:00 – Barbara is due back from Winston sometime this afternoon. Colin and I can’t wait. She’s making a small Costco run on her way back to pick up mostly cold stuff like meat. The only LTS food I asked her to pick up was several 3.25-pound boxes of OreIda instant mashed potatoes. Yesterday I transferred what remained of the 3.25-pound box we’d just opened to 1.75-liter Tropicana orange juice bottles, ending up with one very full bottle and one very partial bottle.

For the last couple of months I’ve been expecting Trump to make a statement on healthcare. Something like:

If you like your Obamacare, you can keep your Obamacare. However, we will repeal the individual mandate and the employer mandate, so no one will be forced to pay for health insurance they don’t want. Nor will the federal government pay any portion of the cost, so whatever coverage you choose you must pay for out of your own pocket. Nor will the government force any insurer to cover any particular person or condition or to provide any particular benefit, which means coverage for those with pre-existing conditions, if available, will be extremely expensive.

It’s definitely autumn here. Cool days and nights down in the 30’s (~ 2 or 3C). We decided yesterday that the new driveway had had sufficient time to cure, so we removed the orange warning tape that had been blocking the drive and pulled the vehicles back into the garage. As I was standing out at the street end of the drive looking toward the house, it looked vaguely familiar. Then I realized that it was about the size of a standard singles tennis court, which I spent plenty of time on when I was in my teens and 20’s. A standard singles court is 27 feet wide by 78 feet long, with 21 feet between the baseline and the fence at each end, for a total of 120 feet. I got out the tape measure and measured the new drive. Sure enough, it was 25 feet wide and about 126 feet long. Now the only thing we need is fences and a net.

Being a serve-and-volley player with an overwhelming serve, I always loved fast surfaces. My absolute favorite surface was polished hardwood, because the speed and low bounce of the surface meant I served clean aces more often than not. My next favorite was grass, which was almost but not quite as fast as wood, and didn’t provide a much higher bounce than wood. My third favorite was concrete like we just had installed. It was a noticeably slower surface than wood or grass, but still much faster than Har-Tru or similar grippy hard court (green/blue/red) surfaces, and immensely faster than clay. And it had a very high bounce, usually higher than the net, which meant I could use a full Western grip off both sides and hit full-power flat ground strokes, and approach shots didn’t need to be chipped.

For future reference:

o A 1.75 liter Tropicana orange juice bottle holds at most 1 pound 15.4 ounces of Ore-Ida instant potato flakes if you tap it well to pack it down.


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Tuesday, 11 October 2016

09:55 – Last night was the first of the season where our low got down into the 30’s (~ 3C). When I took Colin out first thing this morning, the breeze made the wind chill below freezing. Our first night below actual freezing is normally on 10/31. We may beat that this year.

With four weeks to go until the election, things are getting messy, as was predictable and predicted. As Buffalo Springfield sang nearly 50 years ago, “There’s battle lines being drawn…”. Literally, not figuratively. Trump, who not long ago would have been considered a moderate left Democrat, is bizarrely now the right’s last best hope. The Alinskyite/Trotksyite progressives now own both the Democrat and Republican parties. Candidates who not long ago would have been considered middle-of-the-road are now cast as hard right, if not outright Nazis. Something’s going to break, and break badly. Meanwhile, we Normals stand aghast watching this Kabuki theater, without a candidate to call our own. We’re a patient, well-behaved bunch, but patience has its limits. We can be pushed too far, and that point is rapidly approaching, if it hasn’t occurred already. I’m seeing one sentiment expressed more and more often: “Is it time yet to start shooting?” I’m afraid for the more radical Normals, the answer is becoming, “Yes!”

You’ll know it’s happening when you start to see news stories about left-wing politicians, which is to say nearly all of them, being assassinated. There must be a million or more Normals with the equipment and skills to take down a human-size target at 300 yards or more. If even 0.01% of them start shooting, things would get very interesting very fast.



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Monday, 10 October 2016

09:17 – Barbara was out doing some work in the yard yesterday when she was attacked by our black walnut tree. The winds were gusty, and walnuts started dropping in droves. At least one nailed her. There are hundreds of them down in the yard now, with hundreds still remaining on the tree.

I’d like to harvest the walnuts, but I have no idea what the best way to proceed is. I vaguely remember back in the 70’s visiting a friend of a friend who had walnuts. IIRC, he’d collected them and put them out to dry. He had a steel plate with walnut-size holes in it. After filling the plate with raw walnuts, he’d smack each one with a rubber mallet to drive it through the hole and de-shell it. But we have no such plate, and I’m wondering if there’s an easier way to go about harvesting them.

Barbara’s at the gym right now. When she gets back, we need to build another batch of the CK01B chemistry kits. Once that’s complete, I’d like to get more bulk staples repackaged, including several 50-pound bags of flour, sugar, and rice. Also, Barbara has commented a couple of times now that the one-gallon jugs of pancake syrup are awkward to handle, particularly when they’re nearly full. I have several of the flip-top 89 fluid ounce (2.63L) orange juice jugs that we’ve cleaned and dried, so I’m going to transfer pancake syrup from the one-gallon jugs into those. Once cleaned, those one-gallon jugs will be useful for storing bulk staples.

I didn’t bother watching any of the debate last night. Watching two psychopaths going at each other isn’t my idea of a good time. Unless, as I’ve suggested, they arm both of them with helmets, shields, and short swords and let them go at it that way. I think Trump could take her. Not that it’d make much difference. Whichever one wins, we Normals are screwed.

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Sunday, 9 October 2016

10:25 – The effects of the hurricane are mostly gone up here, other than a stiff breeze with strong gusts. The temperature this morning was in the mid-40’s (~ 7C), but the wind chill was down below freezing. I don’t worry too much about wind unless I see cows rolling by in the field behind us.

We filled bottles yesterday of things we’re short of. Six dozen each 15 mL bottles of barium nitrate solution and potassium ferricyanide solution, and four 3,000 mL bottles of bread flour. Those last were some leftover bread flour we’d packaged temporarily in gallon ziplock bags when we ran out of clean PET bottles. I wanted to get them transferred to a better LTS container, and 3-liter bottles fit the bill. Using a cut-off 2-liter bottle as a large wide-mouth funnel made it easy to transfer the flour. It took only about a fifth as long to make the transfer to 3-liter bottles as it would have taken transferring it to narrower-mouth 2-liter bottles. At some point soon, we need to get another 250 pounds of flour, rice, and sugar transferred to PET bottles. We’ll use 2-liter bottles for the latter two, which are free-flowing enough that the 2-liter bottles work fine.

It appears that the gloves have come off in the Trump/Clinton war of words. I suspect Clinton will lose this battle. She’s an incredibly nasty piece of work, but she’s not the street-fighter that Trump is. Clinton releases a pretty innocuous audio tape and claims that Trump is anti-woman. Trump responds by hauling out the big guns, and accuses her husband of being a literal rapist, with testimony to back that from some of the women who accuse Bill of raping them. So Trump is proven to be crude, which all of his supporters already knew. And Clinton is accused of not just enabling but actively assisting her husband in raping multiple women, which all of Clinton’s supporters also already knew. But I suspect Trump hammering on this is going to damage Clinton by making many of her female supporters think again about the role she played in her husband’s despicable and criminal behavior.

With a month until the election, I suspect that things are going to get a lot nastier. A lot. Given the Clintons’ alleged habit of murdering opponents, if I were Trump I’d be hiring a phalanx of steely-eyed security men who were beholden only to me. And I wouldn’t eat or drink anything that had been out of my sight.

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Saturday, 8 October 2016

09:41 – We’re up to 2.4 inches (6 cm) of rain since Thursday night. It’s been light but steady the whole time. The breeze has picked up this morning, but a gentle rain and a light breeze are the only effects we’ve seen from Hurricane Matthew. My guess is that the sprinkle and breeze will continue through tomorrow afternoon.

I keep seeing articles about Trump supporters being poor, lower-class, poorly educated, and (implicitly if not explicitly) stupid. Obviously, none of those fit the Trump supporters who comment here. No one comments on the fact that it’s simply mistaken to equate a college degree with being educated. Most of the people I know have a college degree. In fact, most of them have a post-graduate degree. But those degrees are in real subjects. Calling someone who has an undergraduate degree or even a doctorate in non-disciplines like psychology or sociology or education “educated” is just flat-out wrong. The media are using “educated” to mean people who have undergone four or more years of progressive indoctrination, and by that definition it’s no wonder that “educated” people are more likely to support Clinton.

Several commenters yesterday warned me to expect 4H to require a background check before accepting me as a volunteer. My first reaction was simply to refuse. I’m not a pervert. The only time in my life that I’ve been stopped by the police was 30 years ago, when I was ticketed for driving 40 MPH in a 35 zone. I’m 63 years old, married for more than half of those years, and own a home locally. If you chose a random universe of 10,000 people like me, maybe one would be a pervert. Insulting all 10,000 in that group to catch maybe one pervert is ridiculous.

When I mentioned this to Barbara this morning, her only comment was that in this day and age she didn’t think a background check was unreasonable. Which is true. Someone commented yesterday that this insanity may not have reached our rural area, and that’s probably true for local organizations. But 4H is a national organization that’s administered locally by the state Department of Agriculture. So it’s quite possible that they will require a background check. I’m undecided as to what I’ll do if they do insist on it. And, in this day and age, I’m actually more concerned about protecting myself than I am about protecting the kids. I want to make very sure that I’m never in a position where a kid could accuse me of something perverted. Obviously, that means never being alone with a kid, particularly a girl. That’s a sad commentary on how far we’ve let things get.

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Tuesday, 4 October 2016

09:40 – Five weeks until the election, and the pot is bubbling. I suspect we’re going to see a lot of nasty stuff on both sides as the election gets closer. Barbara brought home a sample ballot yesterday. The front side lists partisan races; the reverse lists non-partisan races. That seemed normal, until I noticed that most of the “non-partisan” races listed two candidates, one labeled “Republican” and the other “Democrat”. I may, for the first time in my life, vote straight-ticket Republican. I remember my mother telling me, fifty years or more ago, “A Republican will never steal as much as a Democrat will give away.” That’s as true now as it was then.

The guys finished pouring the driveway yesterday. It took four full concrete mixers and a partial load on a fifth. We were able to walk on it last night, but they told us not to allow any vehicles on it for 10 days. The weather was ideal for concrete work yesterday and overnight, cool and dampish. I was going to go out periodically and spray the surface to keep it damp, but it looks like that won’t be necessary.

We had a bulk order yesterday that wiped out our inventory of the smaller CK01B chemistry kits, so it’s a high priority to get more of those built. We also have an order likely for a dozen full forensic science kits that we’ll need to ship as soon as we get the purchase order. Our stock on those is reasonable, but if that order comes through we’ll need to get started on building more of them. I also got a query yesterday from the editor of a magazine targeted at high-school and college forensic science teachers, asking for permission to reprint a couple of the labs from the forensic science book in their next issue. I of course granted permission, which really wasn’t even necessary since the book is published under a creative-commons license. The magazine has 18,000 subscribers, so we’re likely to see increased order volumes on the forensic science kits.

With everything else going on, prepping still continues. We have 45 three-liter bottles that I rescued when we moved up here from Winston. Those need to be cleaned and sanitized before we fill them. The 3-liter bottles are good for flour and other fluffy stuff, which is a PITA to get into the narrower-mouth 2-liter bottles. Each 3-liter bottle will hold about five pounds of flour, so the 45 we have on hand are enough for more than 200 pounds of flour.

Preparing them for use is pretty straight-forward. We’ll fill both sides of the kitchen sink with sudsy water with some chlorine bleach added. After a quick run through both sides of the sink, we’ll invert the bottles to let them drain. We can air-dry them or use silica gel beads or dry white rice to get rid of the last vestiges of moisture in them and then use a funnel we’ll make from the top half of a 2-liter bottle to fill them. After labeling them, we’ll stick them on the LTS pantry shelves.

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Tuesday, 27 September 2016

10:13 – I can’t remember for sure the last time I saw any of a presidential debate. I may have seen part of the 1980 debate, but the last time I remember for sure seeing part of a debate was Kennedy versus Nixon in 1960. I watched a few minutes of last night’s debate, and now I understand why I waited so long. I don’t intend to watch another for at least 56 more years.

I watched it on the Roku box on CBS (I think; I installed the ABC/CBS/NBC/Fox/PBS channels on the Roku yesterday and then just picked whichever one was at the top of the screen). What immediately struck me was that Trump seemed normal while speaking, while Clinton’s mouth was moving out of sync with her voice. I suspect someone was standing behind the curtain with his hand up her back, making her mouth move. It reminded me of Chuck and Bob on Soap, except that Chuck and Bob had better lip sync. I suppose Clinton’s rictus was supposed to be a smile, but she reportedly actually smiles so seldom that she was in danger of breaking her face.

UPS showed up yesterday with my Walmart.com order. One of the boxes was only slightly dented, which for UPS is doing good, but the second box was crushed and ripped. We opened that one while the UPS guy was still there. Surprisingly, given the condition of the box, nothing was missing or damaged. There were two one-gallon plastic jugs of pancake syrup, two five-pound paper sacks of corn meal, and four four-packs of 16-ounce canned chili beans. As usual, Walmart used a box that was too large for the contents, giving those four-pack bowling balls lots of room to bounce around and crunch anything else in the box. They made their usual concession to packing materials by tossing a small piece of bubble-wrap and one small air bag into the box. Just enough to be gratuitous without actually helping to pad the contents.

Not for the first time, Barbara remonstrated with me for ordering stuff from Walmart, asking why on earth I’d order from a vendor who did such a horrible packing job. I told her that sometimes they packed stuff well. For example, the last time I ordered Bertolli Alfredo sauce, they packed all dozen of the jars individually within the box, presumably because they’re glass and even a moron knows what’s going to happen if you ship a dozen glass jars loose. But the real reason I order from Walmart is that they offer a lot of things that aren’t available elsewhere, and that their prices are considerably lower on many items. Amazon might carry the same stuff, and they would pack it well for shipping, but they’d also charge a lot extra, often 50% or more.

Email overnight from Jessica, which is the first email I’ve gotten from her other than her request to get her hooked up with Jen and Brittany. In the past, it’s been her husband, Jason, I’ve exchanged email with. Since Jason and Jessica are both on-board with prepping, that’s unusual. Most email I get from newbie preppers is from women, I think because they’re much more open to asking questions about things they’re not experts on.

Jessica said one of the things that she’s concerned about that hasn’t been talked about much here is nuclear radiation emergencies, whether from a nuke plant meltdown, a terrorist dirty bomb, or a full nuclear attack. I sent her links to several useful on-line documents. She asked specifically about potassium iodide or iodate tablets, and I recommended that, given their ages, these are something they should stock. Iodide or iodate tablets protect against one very specific risk: thyroid cancer caused by ingesting or inhaling radioactive iodine. The tablets provide an excess of non-radioactive iodine, which floods the thyroid and prevents uptake of the radioactive iodine. Because thyroid cancers are very slow-developing and because there are downsides to high doses of iodine, authorities recommend taking iodide/iodate tablets only if someone has been exposed to radioactive particulates and only if that person is under 40 years old. There are also considerations for taking them during pregnancy. I sent Jessica links to information about all of these issues.


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Friday, 16 September 2016

09:59 – Barbara is leaving today to drive up to Cape May, New Jersey to spend several days visiting with friends. It’ll be wild women and parties for Colin and me while she’s gone. Or it would be, if I knew any wild women. Unfortunately, Alleghany County and Sparta are really just a big Basket of Deplorables, and wild women are very rare in a BoD.

Another flurry of emails from Jen and Brittany, both of whom independently decided that, with the approach of colder weather, what they’re both shortest of is firewood. Both of them have trees and the means to fell them, but both decided just to order in a good supply of dry firewood. Like me, neither of them expects anything catastrophic to happen with the election but, also like me, both of them think there’s a small but real chance that something will happen. Better to be as prepared as possible against that.

The closer we get to the election, the worse things look for Clinton. A couple months ago, it looked like it’d be a slam-dunk for Clinton. A month ago, Clinton still had what appeared to be an insurmountable lead in the polls, but now things appear to be just about tied. The momentum definitely favors Trump, and that’s even without an October Surprise. And I think we Deplorables are underrepresented in most or all of the polls. I think a lot of mainstream Democrats and Independents are going to end up holding their noses and voting for Trump.

A white police officer in Columbus, Ohio shot and killed a black armed robbery suspect who pulled a gun on him. Based on the reports of the incident, there’s no doubt that it was a good shooting. After the fact, it was determined that the dead suspect, Tyree King, was 13 years old and that the gun he pulled on the cop was a very realistic-looking BB pistol. That cop had to assume that it was an actual Glock, and that he, his colleagues, and innocent bystanders were at risk of being shot. I have no sympathy for the dead suspect. Think of it as evolution in action. One has to be incredibly stupid to pull a gun on a cop, let alone a toy gun. No reports of rioting so far, but it wouldn’t surprise me if riots occur. I’d think that any reasonable person would conclude that this kid deserved to be shot, but BLMers are not reasonable people.

.



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Wednesday, 14 September 2016

09:33 – We’re working on science kits today. We’re down to four of the full CK01A chemistry kits in inventory, so yesterday we made up 28 of the CK01A regulated chemical bags and 13 of the unregulated chemical bags, which in both cases was all we could make up because of limiting quantities on the two chemical bottles that we were short of. So we’ll build 13 more CK01A kits today, and then get to work on making up more of the chemical bottles we’re short of. After that, we’ll make up a good-size batch of forensic kits, followed by biology kits.

Large bulk orders are way down this year compared to prior years, when we had a fair number of orders for batches of 20 or 30 kits. Fortunately, small bulk orders are way up this year, with quite a few people ordering four, six, or eight kits at a time, presumably for use by home-school co-ops.

I just read an article in The Atlantic about large numbers of Democrats from Western Pennsylvania who are going to vote for Trump. These are folks who’ve been registered Democrat since they were old enough to vote. Their parents were also registered Democrat, as were their grandparents, and great grandparents. They’ve never voted for a Republican in their lives, but they’re jumping ship this time and voting for Trump (and for the Republican candidate for Senate). I think they’re realizing, even if they’re not consciously aware of it, that Trump is what would until very recently have been a Democrat. Clinton is what would until recently have been considered a fever-swamp Socialist or, more accurately, Fascist.

Even without all her crookedness and health issues, Hillary is not a candidate for mainstream America merely because of her politics. I think the momentum is shifting strongly in favor of Trump, and that’s likely to accelerate with the October Surprise when Assange releases her emails and other damaging data. Or perhaps Clinton will do the right thing and just drop dead.

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Friday, 9 September 2016

11:06 – Barbara is off to the gym and supermarket. More kit stuff this afternoon.

Two months until election day. I’m not really expecting any widespread violence, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it occurred. I sure wouldn’t want to be in a city of any size on that day or the day after, particularly if Trump wins the election. It looks as though North Carolina is going to be in play. I’m not much on voting for the lesser of two evils, but in this case Trump is analogous to a common cold, while Clinton is ebola. So I’m going to vote in the national elections this year, and I’m going to vote for Trump. I suspect Barbara will do the same. I just wonder if the Libertarians will draw enough votes to prevent either Trump or Clinton from gaining a majority. Ordinarily, I’d expect that if the election went to the House they’d vote straight party-line, but with the dynamics this year it’s hard to say what would happen. Other than whoever was awarded the election would not be recognized as legitimate by his or her opponents. This could end up a real mess.

Speaking of time passing, I see that our average first low in the 40’s (<10C) is a week from now, and our average first low in the 30's (<4C) is a month from now. Autumn is definitely imminent here in Sparta. All the cattle ranchers are bringing in the autumn crop of hay. Lori, our USPS carrier, has been working on her hay for the last couple days. She said this morning that her brother brought over his roller yesterday, so all her hay is now rolled. She's leaving it out for now because it was still a bit green, but another couple days in the sun should dry it sufficiently that it'll be safe for her to put it in the barn without worrying about burning down the barn.



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