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Category: politics

Thursday, 8 June 2017

09:01 – It was 53.5F (12C) when I took Colin out around 0645 this morning, overcast with about 9/10 cloud cover.

Herschel from Shaw Brothers showed up early yesterday morning and got all the plumbing stuff finished and checked out. While he was here, the drop-ceiling installers showed up. They finished the drop ceiling by mid-afternoon. Barbara is happy with it, so I’m happy with it.

At some point, the electrician is supposed to show up to install the overhead lighting, followed by the painters. The last step will be the floor installers. Unfortunately, they’re backed up, and it’ll be early next month before they can get here to install the floor. Still, we’re making progress.

We finished watching season four of the Australian series The Doctor Blake Mysteries last night, and continued with Outlander (UK title; my US title is Lots of Cuties with Really Good Dresses).

The auction sign went up yesterday in front of Bonnie’s house. The auction of the house, contents, and land takes place on Saturday, 15 July. Frances and Al plan to come up for the auction. They said they might buy the place, but I don’t think they were serious.

With the downstairs all torn up and stuff piled all over the place, it’s been hard to build science kits. We got things reorganized the other day to the point where we have an open flat work surface to bin subassemblies and can at least get to the shelving that holds the thousands of chemical bottles. We’re getting low-stock on all of the kits, and need to get more batches built.

There was an article in the paper this morning about a new concealed-carry initiative that would allow conceal carry with no permit anywhere that open carry is now allowed, which is to say most places. Unfortunately, our Republican governor lost last November to a prog Democrat, who will probably veto the bill. Given that some of our republican legislators opposed the bill, it’s likely they won’t be able to override a veto. We’ll see. Constitutional Carry is spreading across the US, and with every muslim outrage it gains more support, sometimes even among Democrats. I do wish that Trump would simply render state laws that restrict CC moot by announcing that the federal government will, upon request by any citizen at any US Post Office, issue a federal concealed + open carry permit that is valid for any location in the US, including local, state, and federal government buildings and property.

The dominoes are starting to topple. Puerto Rico is now effectively bankrupt, although they can’t use that word, and Illinois is about to follow. At this point, there’s simply no alternative. Holders of Illinois government bonds are likely to take a 100% haircut, and pension funds are almost certain to be controlled by receivers. If I were expecting an Illinois government pension, I’d expect to see a small fraction of what I’d been promised, if that. My guess is that Illinois pensioners will see a ceiling put on pension payments. Everyone will get at most $1,000/month or whatever, regardless of what they’d been promised. Illinois government and pensioners and unions will be screaming for a federal bailout, of course, but with Trump and a Republican congress, they’re unlikely to get much, if any, federal money. And Illinois is just the first of many mismanaged states that will end up standing in line at the federal trough. I have no sympathy for any of them.

 

 

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Sunday, 7 May 2017

09:48 – It was 39.3F (4C) when I took Colin out at 0645 this morning, sunny and with a stiff breeze. We have the air conditioning on, so the house temperature overnight had fallen to 67F (19.5C), which is a bit cool for me. We won’t bother to turn the heat on, since the house will warm up during the day. With spring temperatures as they are, we won’t bother running heat or air until things warm up enough to make it worth running AC.

We got a bunch of chemical bottles filled yesterday, with a bunch more to do today and the rest of this coming week. For now, we’re building stock of shelf-stable chemicals in preparation for the busy time in late summer and early fall. For example, Barbara just finished filling 240 bottles of ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) tablets, which are shelf-stable for years. We keep much smaller quantities of the less stable chemicals on hand, making them up only as need to build kits on the fly.

We also have a fair amount of bulk food that needs to be repackaged. Last week, Barbara brought home 50-pound (22.7 kilo) bags of white rice, white sugar, and white bread flour from Costco. Until now, we’ve been repackaging that kind of stuff in PET bottles with oxygen absorbers, but I think we’ll do this batch in one-gallon 7-mil LDS foil-laminate Mylar bags, again with oxygen absorbers. Packed that way, the rice and sugar will remain good indefinitely, and the white bread flour for at least 10 years and probably 20.

I’m kind of following the French election. AP would be amusing if they weren’t so evil. They consistently describe Macron, who’s ultra-left, as a mainstream “centrist” candidate, and Le Pen, who’s moderate left, as “hard right”. They wouldn’t know a right-winger if he bit them in the ass, which may very well happen, and a lot sooner than they’d believe possible.

 

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Thursday, 4 May 2017

09:09 – It was 48.2F (9C) when I took Colin out at 0645 this morning, cloudy and breezy. After a beautiful day yesterday, cooler weather, rain, and possible thunderstorms are to move in today and persist through Sunday.

When I sat down to work yesterday after lunch, I found a dead mouse on my desk. I picked it up by the tail and took it to show to Barbara. She screamed and levitated onto the dining room table*. Fortunately, I had a spare USB mouse on the shelf, so I plugged it into the hub. I coiled up the dead one’s tail, secured it with a twist-tie, and stuck it in the dishwasher to see if that’d revive it. I should probably stick my keyboard in as well.

Ever since the election, Kurt Schlichter has been taunting lefties about their massive fail and claiming that Trump has been winning at every turn. In his column this morning, he finally admits that Trump not only isn’t winning, he’s losing big-time. His only real success to date has been the confirmation of his SCOTUS candidate. Otherwise, he’s backed off or reversed himself on nearly all of his promises. He’s done nothing about his wall, expelling illegal immigrants, or even refusing to accept more of them. He promised to repeal ObamaCare as a top priority, and has done nothing. Sanctuary cities continue to mock him. We’re not withdrawing from NATO, nor even forcing other NATO countries to pay the costs of their own defense. We’re apparently not withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord. In short, as I expected, Trump is just more of the same-old-same-old. The deep state is still running things, and will continue doing so until this country undergoes a complete reboot.

* Not really. She doesn’t much like real mice, live or dead, but USB mice don’t scare her.

 

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Sunday, 23 April 2017

08:54 – It was 45F (7C) when I took Colin out at 0715 this morning, gray and drizzling. We’re to have heavy rains today and tomorrow, with a flood watch in effect through tomorrow evening. Our property is high enough that we don’t have to worry about floods. It’d have to rain for forty days and forty nights for us to be under any real threat.

We had fudge as an evening snack yesterday. I’ll give this effort a C. It tasted fine, but it didn’t actually set up into a dry fudge. Instead, it was goopy. The next time I make it, I’ll cut down on the liquid significantly.

I was just reading an article about ISIS slavers. If this article can be believed, and I see no obvious reason why it shouldn’t be, ISIS actually publishes a printed price list for Christian and Yazidi girls and women. Prices range from $43 for a woman aged 40 to 50 up to $172 for a girl aged 1 to 9. If you’re a resident of Turkey, Syria, or the Gulf States, you can buy as many as you like. Residents of other countries are limited to a maximum of three slaves per order.

This obviously isn’t our problem, but it’s still more evidence (if any is needed) of why no sane citizen of Western countries should treat muslims as anything other than the scum that they are. Of course, what can we expect from any so-called “religion” and “culture” whose founder took a nine-year-old girl as a wife?

islam has been at war with Western civilization for a thousand years. It’s time we recognized that we’re at war with them. Not with “muslim terrorists” or “muslim radicals”. We’re at war with islam itself.

 

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Tuesday, 18 April 2017

09:16 – It was 53.7F (12C) when I took Colin out at 0645 this morning, gray and drizzling. Barbara is out today, at a volunteer meeting this morning and then the bookstore this afternoon.

We had chicken fried rice for dinner yesterday, all from LTS food. In the normal course of things, we don’t have rice that often, maybe three times a month. But we do like it and it’s extremely flexible, so I keep a metric boatload in our LTS food pantry. A pound of rice, a small can of chicken or other meat, a few dehydrated vegetables, soy sauce, and other incidentals, and you have enough fried rice to feed a full meal to four people. It can also be added to soups to bulk them up, used as the basis of a casserole or a rice pudding, and so on. And it’s cheap and stores forever. If your LTS food storage goal is a one-year supply, you should probably have at least 100 pounds of rice per person stored.

Speaking of LTS food and cooking, I called Blue Ridge Co-op yesterday to arrange to have our propane tank topped off. When they delivered and installed the tank last December, they were out of the 250-gallon tanks so they installed a 325-gallon tank instead. They fill propane tanks to 80% of nominal capacity and they deliver the tank already filled. Our 325-gallon tank holds 260 gallons, but instead of filling it to 260 gallons they filled it to the 200-gallon level appropriate for a 250-gallon tank because their computer wouldn’t let them transfer any more than 200 gallons into what it thought was a 250-gallon tank. So we’re currently at 200 gallons less however much we’ve used for the propane cooktop since December. I’m guessing that’s maybe 20 gallons, so topping it off should be maybe 80 gallons worth. Running the largest burner in our cooktop for an hour or so per day should consume about one gallon per week, which means a full tank of 260 gallons is about five years’ worth. Even in a long-term emergency we should be good for at least a full year, and probably two, assuming we’re cooking for more than just the two of us plus Colin. And, of course, in that situation, we’d also be using solar ovens heavily to minimize propane use.

I see that Japan has about 70,000 citizens currently in South Korea and the government is taking steps to evacuate them back to Japan. And the Hawaii state legislature is concerned about North Korean launching a nuclear attack on the islands. Hawaii formerly maintained a strong shelter and civil-defense program, but allowed it to lapse from lack of funding. The last time shelters were inspected, food stocks replaced, and so on was in 1985. A legislative committee has unanimously recommended that the shelters be updated and emergency supplies replaced.

Even assuming funding is made available, doing what needs to be done will take months. My take is that doing so is a good idea, although I think the probability of the Norks launching a nuclear attack is nearly zero. Not that they wouldn’t do so if they could, but just as military leaders must act on an enemy’s capabilities rather than his perceived intentions, there are times when action should be taken on perceived enemy intentions rather than perceived capabilities. In other words, if we think the enemy intends to attack OR is capable of attacking, we should take steps accordingly. Hawaii is particularly vulnerable because it imports most of its food.

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Sunday, 16 April 2017

09:41 – It was 53.7F (12C) when I took Colin out at 0715 this morning, sunny and with a slight breeze. It’s now up to about 72F (22C).

FedEx showed up yesterday with a bunch of boxes from an order I placed Thursday afternoon. As the guy was unloading the boxes, I told him I was glad they’d shipped FedEx instead of UPS. Maybe 50% of the boxes we receive via UPS appear undamaged, but the other half are invariably bashed up, ripped, crushed, and so on, sometimes so badly that items have actually leaked out through the gaps that UPS reseals. That isn’t unique to where we are now, either. It was the same in Winston. Basically, USPS almost never damages shipments, FedEx damages maybe 10% of them, and UPS damages them as often as not.

At any rate, we now have several hundred each of beakers, 10 mL and 100 mL graduated cylinders, red and black alligator clip leads, etc. etc. to get checked in, inventoried, and packed away. We’ll do that this afternoon, because there are three more even larger shipments due to arrive over the next few days.

And I see that things continue to heat up on the Korean peninsula. The Norks had yet another failed test missile launch yesterday, but if the world continues to allow them to test ballistic missiles, they’ll eventually get it right. The Chinese have already threatened to use force to bring NK back into line, with some rumors saying the Chinese are even considering using nukes. One way or another, the Kim regime needs to be toppled, even if that means China annexing NK. At least there’d be adults in charge if that happened. As things stand, the Norks are basically rabid dogs, and there’s ultimately only one solution for rabid dogs. You kill them before they attack someone. But this isn’t our problem. The Chinese, Sorks, and Japanese need to deal with it before it gets even further out of hand.

 

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Thursday, 30 March 2017

09:54 – It was 53.3F (12C) when I took Colin out around 0715 this morning, foggy and drizzling. Barbara’s mulch showed up yesterday around lunchtime, so while Barbara watched, I* spent the afternoon hauling and spreading 80 or so wheelbarrow loads of mulch along the edges of the driveway to cover up the bare red clay fill we’d spread after we had the driveway laid. Here’s the house, looking southwest, with most of the mulch already in place and Colin supervising.

We’ll work indoors today. We have chemicals to make up, bottles to fill and label, and subassemblies for kits to make up. At the moment, this March is running about 15% ahead of last March in revenues, not including any orders that arrive today and tomorrow.

Speaking of kit sales, I shipped an order to Ontario, Canada on the 21st. I got email yesterday evening from the customer, who’d been following the USPS tracking information and wondered why his package was now sitting in Paris, France. Good question. I checked the detailed tracking information and found that it had arrived in Canada, been processed and passed by Canadian customs, who then handed it over to Canada Post, who apparently for some reason sent it to France.

Things with Trump are working out pretty much as I expected. The only difference between him and the powers-that-be in DC is that Trump is a moderate leftie with proggish tendencies, versus the rest of them, who are hard left and committed progs.

I could have told John Adams and the rest of his damned Federalist buddies that this was going to happen. Too bad they didn’t listen to Sam Adams, Tom Jefferson, and the rest of the Anti-Federalists. In fact, it’s too bad they adopted the Constitution at all. We should have known what was good for us and stuck with the Articles of Confederation. Then Lincoln came along and killed the Constitution completely, leaving us with a federal system that rapidly became intolerable. I say we need a complete reboot. Unfortunately, if/when that happens it ain’t gonna be pretty.

* Well, I spent about half an hour hauling about 10 loads of mulch, while Barbara spread it. She hauled and spread the rest while I did other stuff indoors.

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Friday, 24 March 2017

09:27 – It was 40.1F (4.5C) when I took Colin out around 0715 this morning, with a stiff breeze. Barbara got home about 1330 yesterday and we got all the Costco stuff unloaded and put away.

This site and Barbara’s site were down yesterday evening for at least an hour or so. I finally gave up and went to bed. The site isitdownrightnow.com claimed this site was up and available the whole time, but I couldn’t get to it. Several readers emailed me overnight to say they were having the same problem, so I’m not sure what was going on. There’s nothing at all on dreamhoststatus.com about connectivity or server issues, so something weird was going on.

I see that the big news overnight was about the Republican catfight about how much lipstick to put on the Obamacare pig. Other than Rand Paul and a couple of others, none of the GOP congressmen wants to flat-out repeal it. Trump says take or leave the current proposal, and that if Congress doesn’t accept it he’ll just drop the whole repeal thing and move along. Then we can just watch Obamacare collapse, as it’s already doing.

Roughly a third of the 3,000+ US counties have only one insurance company issuing ACA policies, and several have none at all. Our county has only one currently, BC/BS, and it seems likely that BC/BS will stop participating in ACA by the end of 2017, leaving us with nothing.

The problem is that about 99% of the congress insists on keeping the two adverse-selection features that doomed Obamacare. Allowing people up to age 26 to remain on their parents’ policies is bad enough because it dramatically reduces the number of young, healthy people who are paying into the system. The ban on refusing to cover pre-existing conditions is much, much worse. It’s adverse selection in a nutshell. The proposed GOP bandaid fixes do nothing to change that. Insurance companies can’t stay in business if they’re forced to insure people who are uninsurable. It’s like forcing a home insurance company to issue policies on homes that are already on fire.

So it’s going to be interesting to see what happens. My guess is Obamacare will be left pretty much as-is, allowed to collapse of its own weight and leaving us with nothing.

And people wonder why we continue prepping. What’s happening now just makes the slow slide into dystopia a lot faster, hastening the inevitable ultimate collapse. Stock up now, while you still can.

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Sunday, 19 March 2017

10:47 – When I took Colin out around 0730 it was exactly freezing with a stiff breeze. The snow flurries/showers forecast for overnight never showed up, other than as a very light dusting. Still, Ray’s Weather does a pretty good job of forecasting. It’s notoriously difficult to predict weather at all, and harder still for a location sitting on top of a mountain.

Speaking of which, I never particularly trusted the National Weather Service forecasts. As it turns out, I had good reason. The latest scandal is the NWS concealing an updated forecast, supposedly for the common good. The great blizzard they predicted for the Northeastern US turned out to be a squib. Areas they’d forecast 18 inches of snow for actually ended up getting three to six inches, and some areas for which they’d forecast heavy snows ended up getting little or none. One could write that off to forecasting being inexact, but the problem is that they had an updated forecast that was much more accurate but they chose not to make it public because they apparently believed that reducing the forecast amount of snow would cause people to disregard the dangers.

I’ve seen various estimates that cluster around $3 billion as the total cost to people, businesses and governments of acting on that obsolete forecast. Businesses closed needlessly. State, county, and city governments spent a lot of their snow removal budgets needlessly. And millions of people made needlessly pessimistic decisions based on bad information.

There’s never any excuse for government failing to disclose what should be public information. Now that Trump is taking the ax to CPB, NEA, NEH, and so on, perhaps he should consider eliminating the NWS entirely.

We encountered a major problem yesterday as we were making up chemical bags for biology kits. A few days ago, we’d made up 90 bottles of 6M hydrochloric acid in 30 mL amber-glass bottles, capped them, and taped the caps (as required by USPS regulations). When we were building regulated chemical bags for biology kits yesterday, I opened the ziplock bags of those bottles and found that several of them had leaked. Not good.

We’d had another leakage problem a few weeks ago, but that was Kastle-Meyer reagent in forensic kits, which we produce in relatively small numbers. I found out about that one when I got email from a customer reporting a bad leak that had destroyed the labels on most of the chemicals in the forensic chemical bag.

I didn’t think much about it at the time. These things happen, although very infrequently. So I sent him a new forensic chemical bag that I pulled out of an already-built kit. A few days later, I got email from him that the second bag had the same problem. Shit. So we went back and opened all of the forensic kit chemical bags and found that several of them had KM reagent bottles that had leaked. Double shit.

So we replaced all of the damaged bottles in those bags and pulled out and discarded the KM reagent bottles. I made up new KM reagent bottles, but this time using phenolic-cone caps rather than the standard caps. We’d been using PC caps only on bottles that contained iodine solutions, because iodine vapor penetrated the seal on the standard caps. (Iodine vapor penetrates just about any seal. It really wants to be free.) We use the phenolic caps only when necessary, because they cost about $0.35 each, versus about $0.05/each for the standard caps.

We’d also made up 90 bottles of Lugol’s iodine solution a few days ago, using the phenolic caps as we’ve been doing since we found out a couple of years ago that they were necessary on iodine bottles. I was very surprised to find that there was a problem with those bottles as well. Over just a few days, enough iodine vapor had escape to turn the labels light brown. That’s really only a cosmetic issue; there was no actual leak. Everyone has this problem with iodine solutions. Here, for example, is an image on the Home Science Tools website of their iodine solution, brown stains and all.

So we’re replacing the standard caps on the undamaged hydrochloric acid bottles with phenolic caps. As a belt-and-suspender measure, I decided we’ll also package both the hydrochloric acid bottles and iodine bottles in individual sealed plastic bags. That means we need to go back and open every chemical bag that we have in stock and make that change. It’s probably several days’ work, but it has to be done.

I don’t expect our bottle vendor to do anything about the situation. I’ve determined the problem is with the amber-glass bottles themselves. I suspect a production issue. We’ve used the standard caps for a long time. They’re literally from the same bag of 5,000 that I ordered long ago. And there were never any problems with them until recently. We buy the bottles themselves in small quantities, but this problem has showed up with bottles from several different cases/batches. I think they’re doing something different recently with the bottles themselves.

I’d hate to change vendors. I’ve been happy with our current vendor for the five or six years we’ve been using their bottles and caps. But this goes far beyond the cost of the bottles and caps themselves. We’ve discarded a lot of those because they were ruined, and it’s certainly costing us a lot in terms of chemicals, labor, and so on to fix that damage, not to mention postage costs on replacing damaged shipments. One bottle leaking can mean we have to replace the 20 or 30 other bottles that were in the same bag. But the real cost is in damage to our reputation among our customers. One customer who received a damaged shipment may tell lots of his or her friends. That one unhappy customer could end up losing us a dozen or a hundred potential customers.

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Wednesday, 15 March 2017

09:40 – Beware the Ides of March.

When I took Colin out around 0745 this morning it was 10.5F (-12C), with winds gusting to 40 MPH (64 KPH). As usual, our morning paper hadn’t arrived yet. Until the end of last year, it arrived reliably. Even when I went out at 0630, it was already there. Then, around the first of this year, we apparently got a new carrier who thought nothing of delivering the paper at 9:00 or 9:30, when she delivered it at all. When she did deliver it, half the time it ended up blowing across the road because she hadn’t bothered to put it in the box under our mailbox and I’d have to go off in search of it. It seems that we now have yet another new carrier. This one puts it in the box, but thinks nothing of delivering it at 8:30 or even later. For us, that’s just annoying, but for someone who has to leave for work in the morning, this carrier has basically converted a morning paper into an afternoon paper.

Barbara is at the gym this morning, and is then going to visit Bonnie to make sure she’s doing okay. Today is going to be a good day to work inside. I’ve printed labels for several hundred specimen envelopes, which Barbara will fill and label today while she watches some streaming shows that I don’t watch. She wears headphones on the Roku remote, so I can work here at my desk without being distracted by the audio.

The more I read about TrumpCare, the more it looks like it just puts lipstick on the pig that was ObamaCare. It’s pretty obvious that the Republicans intend to keep all of the worst features of ObamaCare. The real losers are going to be people who are 50 to 64 years old. TrumpCare allows insurers to charge up to five times the base rate (versus three times with ObamaCare) and reduces subsidies dramatically for this age group.

Trump should have done what he promised–abolish ObamaCare–and not replace it with anything. Let the private market offer policies under whatever terms they wish, and let private individuals choose to buy those policies or not. Instead, we’re back where we were, with the government conflating having health insurance with having access to medical services. It’s not the same thing, even remotely.

FedEx showed up yesterday with my three gallons of peanut oil from Walmart, a day earlier than promised. The case of twelve 28-ounce cans of Keystone pork should show up today. Speaking of which, Barbara is making pork barbecue sandwiches for dinner tonight, using a can of Keystone pork and the leftover homemade barbecue sauce we made up the other night.

And after dinner I’ll load and run our current dishwasher for the last time. Herschel is supposed to show up tomorrow or Friday to install the new dishwasher and haul off the old one, so in the meantime I’ll just hand-wash the dishes. The only thing I’ll salvage from the old dishwasher is the utensil baskets, which may come in handy.

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