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Category: politics

Wednesday, 5 November 2014

09:56 – Colin voted yesterday, although he won’t tell us who he voted for or how many times he voted. Either way, Democrats were crushed, as expected. I just hope the Republicans realize that most of the people who voted for them did so not because they like Republicans but because they hate them less than they hate Democrats. Not that it’ll make a bit of difference. As The Who said, “Meet the new boss, the same as the old boss.” I’m kind of looking forward to that day when we decide and the shotgun sings the song. And I’m still campaigning for an open season on politicians, to run from 1 January through 31 December each year, with no bag limit (on bucks or does). Taxidermists would have a field day. Can you imagine how many people would love to have politicians’ heads mounted over their fireplaces?

I got another email this morning from those morons at WalMart. This one says that my order has shipped and will arrive by “Mon., Dec 1”. Shipped how? By wagon train? Oh, yeah, and the item that they don’t have and have no idea when it’ll be back in stock? That one is scheduled to arrive next Monday. Morons.

11:54 – Barbara frequently tells me I’m not funny, to which I always respond, “Then why have women been laughing at me all my life?” Which is true. I’ve consciously cultivated that, because I realized even as far back as high school that women tend to be afraid of me because of my size and general demeanor. I am also very calm, speak quietly, and move very quietly, all of which for some reason scare a lot of women.

She’ll deny it, but Barbara also thinks I’m funny. Sometimes she laughs out loud at one of my comments. This morning, for example, I was making coffee. That’s unusual for me. Barbara doesn’t drink coffee–although she’s usually the one who makes it–and I drink very little. But I was doing research for the prepping book (how much coffee can you brew from a pound?) and I couldn’t find the coffee grinder. So I called her at work to ask where it was. (Just as she answered the call, I found it next to the coffee filters, of all places.)

So Barbara was telling me where the measuring spoons are and how much to use per pot. I told her that I was going to weigh the coffee, and she started to laugh. What’s so funny about weighing coffee beans on an analytical balance, anyway? (For this test run, I ended up using 50,013 milligrams of coffee beans and 1.226 liters of water, for a ratio of about 40,794 mg/L, not counting the water absorbed and retained by the grounds.) From the research I did, the “normal” ratio is 55 to 60 g/L, but I’m working my way down to see how little coffee I can use and still have the brew taste like reasonable coffee. My guess is that it’ll be somewhere in the 20 to 25 g/L range. If so, that’ll be around 20 to 25 liters per pound, call it 16 to 20 10-cup pots per pound.

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Saturday, 11 October 2014

09:09 – As of yesterday afternoon, gay marriage is finally legal in North Carolina. I predicted last year that it’d be legal in all 50 states by the end of 2014, and it looks like my prediction will be accurate. Only the radical Religious Right politicians are even bothering to talk about it anymore. It’s a done deal, and long past time. SCOTUS should have prohibited gay marriage bans when they ruled against miscegenation bans in Loving v. Virginia in 1967.

Once the acceptability of gay marriage is officially the law of the land, I hope the activists won’t sit back on their laurels. The next step should be to overturn plural marriage bans nationwide to legalize any form of plural marriage, particularly line marriages. The ultimate goal should be to eliminate government interference in marriage, period. Two people (or 20 people) should be married because they say they are, not because any government sanctions it.

Barbara called yesterday from the Gatlinburg area to tell me they’d stopped at the Bush’s Best Baked Beans Museum and outlet store. Who knew there was such a thing as a baked beans museum? I told her that if they sold by the case at a price better than the $8.28 per case/8 that Costco charges she should pick up a dozen or two cases on their way home. Alas, the outlet store sells only individual cans.

Kim’s African Grey Parrot disappeared or was birdnapped yesterday around dinner time. The bird lives in a very large cage, big enough for Colin to fit into, and Kim had the cage out on the driveway behind the house to let the bird enjoy the nice weather. When she went down to bring the cage indoors, the bird was missing. The door was closed and latched, so the bird didn’t get out by itself. Half the neighborhood was out looking for it, including a bunch of kids on their bikes, but no one spotted it. Kim was out driving around until well after dark looking for it, but no joy.

I know that some species/breeds of pets are frequent victims of kidnapping by thieves who resell them, but I don’t know if African Grey Parrots are one of those. Our neighbor Mimi thinks one of the neighborhood kids opened the cage door to pet the bird and was then afraid to say anything when it escaped. The bird’s wings are trimmed, so it can’t fly very well, just well enough to flutter up into a tree. I told Kim last night that my guess was the bird had flown up into a tree, tucked its head under its wing, and gone to sleep. Kim is out again this morning looking for it, and Colin and I also looked on our morning walk. If the bird isn’t found, it’ll be a major loss for Kim. She’s had the bird for a long time. I think it’s about 21 years old, the same age as Kim’s daughter Jasmine. African Greys can live 75 years, so Kim expected the bird to outlive her. She sure wasn’t prepared to lose it.

11:04 – The bird is back home safely. As I expected, she’d flown up into a tree and slept all night. This morning, her calls gave away her position. She mimics sounds that she’s heard and (apparently) liked. She does several telephone rings, including a cell phone ring tone that causes many people to reach for their phones. Her backup beeper sound causes people to look for the truck that’s backing up. And so on. So there she was this morning, sitting in a tree in Kim’s next-door neighbors’ back yard, making an assortment of noises that shouldn’t have been coming from a tree.

Kim’s sister tried to lure the bird down with a lollipop attached to a long stick, but the bird wasn’t having any. So another of the neighbors brought over her husband’s tall stepladder and a long stick and used it to nudge the bird until she fell off the branch and fluttered to the ground. Kim and Mary had a very bad night, expecting the worst, but everything worked out well. Incidentally, I’ve known Kim since she moved to Winston-Salem from NYC in 2002, and I’ve never heard her call the bird anything but “Birdie”. As it turns out, the bird’s real name is Jessica.

16:08 – Hmmm. I just took a six-question quiz on CNN, Quiz: What city is right for you? Here’s my result:

Screenshot from 2014-10-11 16:01:12

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Wednesday, 1 October 2014

10:02 – I got a fair amount done on the book yesterday, including reformatting it using the O’Reilly/MAKE stylesheet. Not that I think O’Reilly/MAKE would be interested in publishing a prepping title, but their stylesheet has lots of useful features, such as pull-outs for Notes, Warnings, and Sidebars. And, if it does turn out that they’re interested in buying the print rights at some point, the manuscript will already be properly formatted for their production folks. If O’Reilly/MAKE doesn’t want it, I’ll just self-publish the paper version on Amazon CreateSpace.

Poor Don, our UPS guy. He doesn’t know it yet, but I ordered a few thousand rounds of ammunition, which UPS is supposed to deliver Friday. That order includes 1,200 rounds of 5.56mm and 600 rounds of .357, which aren’t light, but the real killer is the 1,000 rounds of 12-gauge shotgun shells. Of course, there’s all the 7.62mm, .44 Special, and probably a couple more I’ve forgotten. Oh, yeah, and the 100 rounds of .22LR, which is all they allow in a single order.

12:43 – This makes for some scary reading, particularly since I believe Mr. Warner is optimistic: Mass default looms as world sinks beneath a sea of debt

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Friday, 12 September 2014

08:02 – Next week’s vote on Scotland’s independence from the rest of the UK (rUK) has a lot of people running scared. There’s a great deal at stake, not least the stability of Europe as a whole. If Scots vote in favor of splitting from the UK, it may well be the first in a row of toppling dominoes. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s article is worth reading: Only Germany is holding together as separatists threaten to rip Europe apart

My guess is that Scots will vote to remain a part of the UK, but it’s likely to be close. Put simply, Scots would be crazy to vote for independence. Scotland is poor. The rUK subsidizes Scotland to the tune of several thousand pounds per year for every Scottish man, woman, and child. With independence, that subsidy disappears and the Scots’ standard of living immediately plummets. The only real asset Scotland has is the North Sea oil and gas fields, whose output peaked 15 years ago and is rapidly declining. It’s unlikely that the EU will accept Scotland as a member, nor will it be able to adopt the euro. All of the UK political parties have said that Scotland could not continue to use the UK pound, other than in the sense that Panama uses the US dollar. Scotland would end up alone and isolated, and the economic consequences would be disastrous. None of which guarantees that Scotland will not vote for independence.

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Monday, 28 July 2014

09:56 – I’m building and shipping science kits, which will be the story of my life for the next couple of months. We’re in pretty decent shape on kit inventory. As of this morning, we have 40 of the CK01A chemistry kits in stock, with subassemblies on hand to build another two or three dozen; about two dozen of the BK01 biology kits in stock, with subassemblies on hand to build another 30, and bunches of labeled bottles that need to be filled and made up into chemical bags for various kits. We’re running short of a few chemicals, but I just placed an order Friday with Fisher Scientific for those, as well as bulk amounts of some of the chemicals we’ll need for the AP Chemistry kit. By “bulk”, I mean items like 4 kilos each of anhydrous sodium carbonate and anhydrous calcium chloride and a kilo or two each of several other chemicals.

Watching the developing Ukraine situation is like watching the proverbial slow-motion train wreck. Economically, the EU in general and the eurozone in particular are weaker now than they have ever been, even at the height of the crisis. One major shock is all it will take to collapse everything like the house of cards that it is. Tier III economic sanctions against Russia should be more than enough to get the ball rolling, and unless Putin backs off big-time it appears that those sanctions are very likely to be implemented. I admit that I am amazed that the eurozone appears unanimously to be supporting strong sanctions against Russia. I never expected Germany or France to support such sanctions, let alone the Eastern European EU members. I expected the US and the UK to go it alone in terms of implementing sanctions, with at best lip-service from the rest of the world. Just the US would have been sufficient, of course, because the US government has absolute control of the entire world’s banking system. Every foreign bank–including Russian banks–understands that it will be crushed like a bug if it tries to ignore orders from the US government. But with the UK and apparently also the EU on board, Russia doesn’t have a prayer.

12:47 – I was just unpacking and shelving some chemicals when I was struck by a Cunning Plan. I thought about those Stop Aging spams I sometimes see in my junk folder, and realized that I could start selling genuine Stop Aging pills that I could absolutely, positively guarantee to be 100% effective. They could probably be sold for a lot of money per pill, and they’d be very cheap to produce. The only active ingredient would be 1000 milligrams of potassium cyanide. In addition to being a big money-maker, it would also improve the gene pool. Not many products can say that.

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Thursday, 5 June 2014

08:07 – Public schools have been in the news here lately. With the Republicans firmly in control of state government, big changes to public education are in prospect.

Legislators are doing their best to do away with tenure for public school teachers. That suffered a setback recently when a liberal judge ruled that the state couldn’t take back something that had already been granted. I expect the state supreme court will reverse that decision. And North Carolina is withdrawing from Common Core, which the state just began implementing recently. A review panel has been set up, tasked with adopting new state curriculum standards, with the provision that Common Core is not acceptable even if the panel determines that it is the best available alternative. And legislators have carefully crafted a new law to get around US Supreme Court decisions on restricting religion in public schools.

The real problem is that the politicians have set their sights far too low. The fundamental problem is public schools, period. The North Carolina constitution requires the state to provide an elementary through high school education to all children. But the constitution doesn’t specify how that is to be done.

The solution is to establish an educational voucher system. A real one, one that is available to all students’ families rather than just a tiny percentage. And one that is funded directly by the pool of money allocated to public education. Those vouchers should be for the amount the state currently spends per student, and the amount of any voucher redeemed at a private school should immediately be deducted from the budget allocated to the public schools in that student’s district.

It’s also important that the state implement absolutely no requirements or standards for private schools, including any restrictions or requirements concerningn secular versus religious, teacher certifications, and so on. It should be entirely up to the private schools themselves to set their own policies and to the parents and students to decide what constitutes an appropriate education.

The immediate result of such a true school choice program would be that public schools would have to compete efficiently and effectively in an educational free market if they want to survive at all. Most would not, and that’s all to the good. Would some students receive very poor educations? Of course they would, but almost certainly fewer than currently receive very poor educations in our existing public schools.

15:05 – I’ve been making up solutions and filling bottles all day, hundreds of bottles. And I just got to the next item on my to-do list, which is methyl red solution. Methyl red, AKA 2-(N,N-Dimethyl-4-aminophenyl)azobenzenecarboxylic acid, is extraordinarily insoluble in water. So much so that the solution we use, 0.02% w/v, exceeds the solubility of methyl red. That’s 0.2 g/L. If I simply add 0.2 g of methyl red to a liter of water, about 90% of it (at a guess) remains undissolved.

Fortunately, there’s a way around this. The sodium salt of methyl red is considerably more soluble than the free acid. Unfortunately, I wasn’t thinking about that when I ordered what amounts to a lifetime supply of the free acid. So I need to convert the free acid to the sodium salt. That’s easy enough to do: simply dissolve the methyl red free acid in a (very) dilute solution of sodium hydroxide to form a solution of sodium methylredate. (I lay claim to creating that anion name; Google finds zero instances of it.)

Just how dilute? Well, the stoichiometry says that one mole of sodium hydroxide reacts with one mole of methyl red. The molecular mass of the free acid is 269.30 g/mol, while that of sodium hydroxide is 39.9971 g/mol. But making up a liter of 0.02% methyl red requires only 0.2 g, or 0.00074+ mole. Accordingly, for a 1:1 correspondence, I need about 29.7 milligrams of sodium hydroxide. The standard 6 M sodium hydroxide solution that we supply with many of our kits contains 240 mg/mL, so I’d need to add about an eighth of a milliliter of that solution per liter. The plastic pipettes we buy 10,000 at a time deliver about 33 drops/mL, so call it four drops.

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Sunday, 29 December 2013

09:15 – Cool, rainy days yesterday and today. Our official month-to-date rain is about 5 inches (12.5 cm), but according to our own rain gauge we’re up over 7 inches.

Interesting article in the morning paper: The world braces for retirement crisis

The mainstream media is belatedly realizing just how bad things are. Even now, many people can’t afford to retire at 65, or even 70. As the years pass, this is going to get worse, much worse. With more and more older people expecting fewer and fewer younger people to support them, something has to give. Particularly since more and more of those younger people have crap jobs or no jobs, a phenomenon that is exacerbated by many of those older people hanging onto their jobs for dear life.

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Saturday, 21 December 2013

08:16 – With Christmas so near, kit orders have tapered off a lot. We shipped only three kits yesterday and have only one outstanding order so far today. Orders should pick up again the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, presumably because people have Christmas money to spend. Last December we did about 25% of the month’s business in that period. Meanwhile, we have a bit of a breather.

10:11 – It’s been a bad week for bigots. On Thursday, gay marriage became legal in New Mexico, and on Friday it became legal in Utah. Gay marriage is now legal in a third of the states. I suspect it’ll be legal in all states by the end of 2014. Let’s hope so, anyway.

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Monday, 2 December 2013

08:15 – Happy Birthday to Barbara, who turns 20:39 today.

Our D-Link DIR-615 router/WAP has started dropping the WAN connection sporadically, so I ordered a D-Link DIR-826L to replace it. I hooked it up yesterday, and it didn’t work. Didn’t work as in wouldn’t even recognize that the cable modem was providing a WAN link. So the DIR-615 is back in place until I figure out what’s going on with the new unit.

I just read a big article in the morning paper about Common Core. The article couldn’t say enough good things about Common Core and its emphasis on “critical thinking”. The real problem with Common Core, which the article failed to mention, is that many students are not capable of critical thinking. Nor are many teachers.

The fundamental problem is that the powers-that-be refuse to recognize that there are very real and very large cognitive differences between the best, the average, and the worst students, which simply reflects the population at large. Remember the old saying: One can’t teach calculus to a horse. But these cargo-cult thinkers apparently believe that any student can learn any subject, regardless of difficulty, if only they’re given the opportunity. If only that were true, but it’s not.

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Thursday, 14 November 2013

07:50 – I just read a disgusting article in the morning paper. A local woman was just sentenced for starving her little dog to death. She left it in a crate, with a bag of dog food inches away, and just didn’t bother to feed it. The autopsy said the dog had literally starved to death, ultimately digesting its own bone marrow. What’s particularly horrifying is that the woman obviously had been giving the dog water because otherwise it would have died much sooner. She just didn’t bother to feed it. Although such animal abuse has been a felony in North Carolina since 2010, the judge sentenced her to community service and suspended all but 30 days of the jail sentence for the felony. He even let her serve just nine days in jail now, with the other 21 days to be served at her convenience over the coming months. If I’d been the judge, I’d probably have sentenced her to 30 days in jail to be served consecutively. Oh, yeah. She could have all the water she wanted, but no food for 30 days.

10:14 – Can Obamacare survive an enraged middle class?

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