November 2019 Archives

Got nothing for now

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Quiet news day - no scandals. Off to YouTube and then bed.

Great scrap-wood shop heater

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Been researching heating sources for my forge building. Came across this - love the double-wall construction and recycling scrap materials.

And back again

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Chinese food was wonderful - great family-run place. Good food, good people. The Walmart parking lot was packed so did not stop in there - will grocery shop tomorrow at my usual local store. My usual coffee place had a line out the door and the barista was not anyone I really interact with so went to another location of their chain (three stores) - much more bubbly personality there, will try again tomorrow. It is across the street from the library too so win/win.

28°F outside now so a degree warmer than last night. Starting to cloud over so we will lose the radiation cooling.
Forecast for overcast tomorrow with some wind. Planning to get a run up to Bellingham and the farm Monday and Tuesday - start schlepping some more boxes around.

Out for a couple hours

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Dropping some music CDs off at the library (up to 726 individual Christmas tunes so far) and then heading North to Mt. Vernon (food coop) and Burlington (Costco and chinese food for dinner) - swing by the Walmart and if the parking lot is not jammed, I will stop in for some groceries.

Productive day at home.

Strong economy - black friday

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From CNBC:

Shoppers have already spent a record $5.4 billion online on Black Friday: Adobe Analytics
Consumers aren’t waiting until Cyber Monday to shop online this holiday season.

Spending online on Black Friday, as of 9 pm ET, hit a new record of $5.4 billion, up 22.3% from a year ago, according to data pulled from Adobe Analytics, which measures transactions from 80 of the top 100 U.S. online retailers.

This comes as foot traffic appeared to be lighter at shopping malls across the country on Friday, a day that traditionally has been reserved for people to line up outside of big-box retailers and department stores to score doorbuster deals.

Total spending online on Black Friday is still forecast by Adobe to hit $7.6 billion, which would make the day the second-biggest online sales day ever, after Cyber Monday in 2018, where $7.9 billion was spent.

However, Adobe is still expecting spending on Cyber Monday this year to hit an even bigger record $9.4 billion, an 18.9% jump from a year ago.

Two factors - #1) - people have more money and #2) - people think that the future is going to bring more of the same. There is no uncertainty so they are not hoarding their money against a future downturn.

Thank you President Trump for this.

It's President Trump's Obama's fault

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Oopsie - from FOX News:

Progressives decry fake ICE university – turns out it was created under President Obama
Progressives unleashed on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Wednesday over reports that the agency arrested 90 foreign-born students who had enrolled in a fake university, but someone forgot to tell them that the sting operation predates their favorite target, President Trump.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and others reacted to news of the arrests by accusing ICE of entrapping students and implying that the tactic was new under the Trump administration. As it turns out, former President Obama's administration not only founded the fake university, it engaged in a similar operation in New Jersey in 2016.

As this quickly fades from the public eye - doesn't fit the narrative 'ya know...

Hunter Biden in the news - money and baby

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From the London Daily Mail comes this tale of woe:

EXCLUSIVE: Hunter Biden demands his financial records are kept SECRET by court in child support suit following claims of significant debts - but baby mama Lunden Roberts refuses to agree
Hunter Biden has filed a request to seal all financial records in his ongoing child support suit to spare himself public 'embarrassment' amid claims of 'significant debts', DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal.

The 49-year-old filed the motion for a Protective Order of his financial records in the Arkansas Circuit Court of Independence on Wednesday, citing fears that such information would be used 'maliciously' by the media if disclosed publicly.

Well, if he has not done anything wrong, he should have nothing to fear. 

In a signed sworn statement, Biden claims he has been unable to complete the mandatory requirement because he currently lacks the information to do so.

'In an effort to demonstrate to this court my good faith, I attest that I am unemployed and have had no monthly income since May 2019,' Biden's statement reads.

The former Ukraine energy executive goes on to admit he has incurred 'significant debts', partially caused by his April 2017 divorce to Kathleen Biden, which are currently being calculated by his accountants and will be disclosed to the courts as soon as possible.

'For the aforementioned reasons, I cannot complete an Affidavit of Financial Means at the time,' he claims.

He has the money - he got millions from the Ukraine. It is just stashed away overseas somewhere. Time for the IRS to step in an ream him a new one. Plus this interesting twist:

Roberts is demanding for Hunter to pay her $11k legal fees and child support for their baby, who she argues could be eligible for Secret Service protection because they're the grandson of former Vice President Joe Biden.

Emphasis mine - at what expense to the taxpayer? Our money is being used to fund his lifestyle.
A lot more at the site - this guy has zero morals. A scumbag in all senses.

Rebranding global warming

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From advertising website AdAge:

RENAMING CLIMATE CHANGE: CAN A NEW NAME FINALLY MAKE US TAKE ACTION?
As a professional namer, I create names for companies, products and services. After the global climate strike this past September, I found myself thinking about the terms “climate change” and “global warming.” Are these scientific terms too neutral? Do they do enough to grab attention and inspire people to take action?

Scientific terms often fail to resonate in meaningful ways. In the early 1900s, for example, no one had heard of the "hypothesis of the primeval atom." That changed in the 1940s when the term “Big Bang” was coined, which was a simpler, more relatable concept for the masses. This complex scientific concept is extremely well-known today because a better, more tangible term was applied to it. Can we use lessons from the naming of the Big Bang to rebrand “climate change?”

A short history lesson: Scientists once used the term “inadvertent climate modification” to refer to subtle changes in global climate patterns caused by humans. During the 1970s, the scientific community created two new terms: global warming (the increase in Earth’s average surface temperature) and climate change (a long-term change in the Earth’s climate).

Originally, politicians latched onto global warming because it sounded more worrisome (the Earth is heating too fast). But it was too easy to poke holes in because the Earth was also getting colder. During polar vortex storms, skeptics often tweet that it "sure would be nice for some of that 'global warming' right about now." Politicians then pivoted to “climate change.” This concept was less easy to deny, but also less compelling and less actionable.

This leads me to wonder: Is there a better way to convey the urgency of the situation, while also encouraging folks to take action? Could the tools of branding and brand naming create a more resonant, powerful name? Our naming team decided to give it whirl, but first, we set some parameters and guideposts, as we would with any new brand name project:

More at the site. The numbers are not convincing people - maybe a good dose of hysteria will. This has always been a scam and it will be fun to see when the general public wises up to it. The coming cold weather should do the trick.

Heh - millennials upset

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From America's Newspaper of Record - the Babylon Bee:

Millennials In Panic As Outraged Boomers Threaten To Withhold Participation Trophies
The nation’s millennials are in a panic as baby boomers, feeling insulted by such things as the “OK Boomer” meme, have now threatened to withhold participation trophies.

“How am I supposed to know I’m special if I don’t have a trophy?!” exclaimed Brendan Stephens as he stress-ate avocado toast. Stephens currently lives at home with his boomer parents as he’s busy “discovering himself.” “I can’t be left on my own like this. I need constant support to achieve anything,” Stephens continued. “I mean, I’m thirty-seven; I'm not old."

“They’re just mad that we’ve correctly pointed out that they’ve destroyed everything,” said millennial Kaylee Forman, a social media consultant. “Especially the environment, which I’m very, very concerned about. Just look.” Forman scrunched her face so that she looked very concerned. “But they can’t stop giving us symbols of how special we are, because if I don’t get that reassurance every day, I’ll start to wonder if I’m not special! What if I’m not special?! What if I’m not?!”

Baby boomers would not budge, though. “They are not giving us the respect we deserve, and we’re tired of it!” said Ronald Foster, a retired bank executive. “They won’t listen to the important things we’ve found out in an email forward, they call our Minions memes ‘lame,’ and now they got this dismissive ‘OK Boomer’ thing going. I haven’t felt this disrespected since I got back from Vietnam! If they want a participation trophy, then they'd better spend the $10.50 and buy it themselves!” He then added that he was still upset that the country didn't get a participation trophy for the Vietnam War.

Spot on.

Now this looks cute as can be

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Had a train set growing up and loved playing with it. The hobby just got updated:

From their website:

The toy train of the future
For generations, toy trains have brought children joy and sparked their imagination. Intelino smart train makes the train playtime more magical and exciting than ever.

Our smart train combines the intuitiveness of a familiar toy train with intelligent features of an advanced robotic toy. The result - a whole new level of interactivity and fun!

Order online or from Amazon - starter kit for $100 and track extension pack for $25

President Trump and China

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Trade wars work - from agricultural news site Ag Web:

In a China Win for Trump, U.S. Can Now Ship Rice for First Time
The U.S. can now ship rice to China for the first time ever, signaling a win for President Donald Trump in his efforts to reshape the trade relationship just after talks between the nations broke down Wednesday.

Officials from the nations finalized a protocol to allow for the first-ever American shipments, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said Thursday in a statement. China is the world’s biggest rice consumer, importer and producer.

The rice deal comes just a month after China reopened its market to U.S. beef imports for the first time in more than a decade and is the latest in a flurry of trade negotiations between the nations. China is also approving more biotech products and increasing U.S. natural gas imports.

Wrap your brain around this: President Trump just sold rice to China.

Is there nothing that he can not do (except getting the liberals to grow the fsck up).

Got down to 21°F last night

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Which is unusual because I am right on the water. Water usually moderates air temperatures - not last night.

From The Chicago Tribune:

Sen. Martin Sandoval resigns amid federal corruption investigation
State Sen. Martin Sandoval, the Southwest Side Democrat whose statehouse offices were raided by federal agents in September, is resigning his legislative seat effective with the new year, State Board of Elections officials said Wednesday.

Sandoval, in his 16th year as a state lawmaker, had previously resigned his chairmanship of the powerful Senate Transportation Committee. He has been a member of the leadership team of Senate President John Cullerton, who is retiring in January.

“It is with a heavy heart, I, Martin A. Sandoval, do hereby resign the office of state senator” effective Jan. 1 at 12:01 p.m., Sandoval, who has not responded to requests for comments since the raids, said in a letter to the office of the secretary of the Illinois Senate.

And not just his statehouse offices:

Federal agents raided Sandoval’s Springfield office on Sept. 24 with a search warrant seeking a vast array of information involving construction, transportation and power company officials, lobbyists, gambling interests, a red-light camera company and at least three suburban mayors. Agents also were at his Cicero office and his home. The Sandoval raid was quickly followed by federal law enforcement actions in McCook, Lyons and Summit — all towns in the senator’s district.

Sandoval's fingers were in many pies. And not just him:

The raid also was the latest action by federal agents investigating corruption nearly a year ago when FBI agents descended upon the City Hall offices of Ald. Edward Burke, Chicago’s longest-serving City Council member and the then-powerful chairman of its Finance Committee.

While there has been no indication that the raid on Burke was connected to the later Sandoval raid, the action of federal investigators has unnerved many Democrats.

In addition to Burke, who has pleaded not guilty to corruption charges, federal agents have separately indicted state Sen. Tom Cullerton, D-Villa Park, over an allegedly no-show union job, and former state Rep. Luis Arroyo, D-Chicago, over allegedly attempting to bribe a state senator to support gambling-related legislation. Arroyo resigned after his indictment.

More at the site. Chicago is just plain corrupt. Dirty.

Getting colder all over - San Francisco

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From the San Francisco Chronicle:

San Francisco ties cold record as Bay Area freezes
If you thought Thanksgiving Day was unusually cold this year in San Francisco, you were correct. In fact, it tied a century-old record.

The high temperature in the city on Thursday was forty-eight degrees. That tied a record high temperature for the coldest date for San Francisco in the month of November. That record had stood unchallenged since November 27th, 1896, when it last happened.

According to the National Weather Service, the coldest high-temperature day ever in San Francisco was a freezing thirty-five degrees on December 11th, 1932. That day also holds the distinction for the coldest record low temperature ever recorded in the city, which is twenty-seven degrees.

What global warming. When the change in public perception happens, it will happen over the course of a few weeks and a lot of people are going to be looking very very stupid. Can't wait.

Getting colder - 27°F

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Last night, it was 32°. Tonight when I pulled in, the temp was 27°F. Gorgeous clear skies but it is going to get really cold in a couple of hours.

Was planning to work at home today but went up to Bellingham to bring some stuff to the condo. Staging the first of several very large garage sales - hold it in a couple of months. Tools.

Met up with another person from the arts association this afternoon - she brought over a bunch more music CDs of Christmas tunes. Getting quite the collection going... One of them was Kenny G - not a big fan. I love Pat Metheny's rant on Kenny G - big fan of Metheny.

Stopped in for my usual two beers before heading home and the television was airing wall-to-wall advertisements for Michael Bloomberg. The ads were targeting low-information voters. His tenure as NYC Mayor has been horrible. He had a great idea once, 50 years ago. That idea made him a billionaire. Great luck there and am not jealous. Having one great idea does not translate into expertise in other fields or corporate or political leadership (Dunning Kruger effect).
He would be horrible.

Out for a bit - coffee &c

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Heading out for the day - nothing catches my eye on the web.

Working at home today - cleaning off the back deck. Looks like gorgeous weather through tomorrow.

Hard frost on the ground - got down to 27°F at 4:00AM this morning.

Interesting - Hong Kong / Canada

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Looks like the oh-so-liberal government of Justin Trudeau is waffling. From Canada's The Star:

Why this official says Justin Trudeau needs his ‘head examined’ over silence on Hong Kong
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should get his “head examined” if he doesn’t think he needs to speak up about the situation in Hong Kong, says an official for Hong Kong’s Democratic Party.

Emily Lau, a pro-democracy and human rights activist, is the chair of the international affairs committee of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party and served 25 years on the city’s legislative council. Lau has been in Canada since last week, here to speak at a security forum in Halifax and accept the John McCain prize for public leadership on behalf of the people of Hong Kong. She said the silence from the Liberal government on events there is concerning.

“There are priorities and this one is a pressing issue, you see it on the news every day,” Lau said. “So, if the prime minister cannot find time to say something about it, his head needs examining.”

About 300,000 Canadians live in Hong Kong, but a recent electoral victory after months of unrest and riots in the city was not commented on by Trudeau.

Last week in Halifax, Lau took aim at the Canadian government, alleging it allows business to determine its China policy. In an interview with Star Vancouver she reiterated her worry that Canada’s government is putting money ahead of democracy and human rights.

At the risk of triggering him and sending him running to his "safe space", I would sugest that Justin needs to "man up" and denounce China for what it is - a totalitarian socialist regieme.

Is Newsweek still a thing?

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Fake news - from President Trump:

NOT - do not like crowds and do not need to buy something I do not need just because it is on sale.

From its YouTube channel:

The 11foot8 bridge is a railroad trestle over Gregson St in Durham, North Carolina and it has earned a reputation for for its rigorous enforcement of the laws of physics. No truck taller than 11 feet and 8 inches will pass under this stubborn piece of infrastructure. Period. On this channel we document the various attempts of hapless drivers trying to get past this bridge. Some try to be sneaky, some try to be quick, some try to argue, but the bridge always wins.  There is a reason why the locals call it the "canopener!"

Last month, the railroad raised it to 12 foot 4. Two days ago (11/26/2019) It claimed its first victim:

Here is a nice story about the guy who films this bridge - from Duke University

THE DUKE EMPLOYEE BEHIND THE ‘CAN OPENER BRIDGE’ CAM
Jurgen Henn was a few weeks into starting his job at Duke when he heard a sound that nearly knocked him out of his seat in his Brightleaf Square office.

“There was this incredible crashing noise outside,” said Henn, an IT manager for the Center for Autism and Brain Development in the Duke School of Medicine. “I wandered down to see what happened. A tractor-trailer had gotten stuck underneath the railroad bridge.”

In 2008, Henn set up a camera on the second floor of Brightleaf Square and one outside of Morgan Imports to capture vehicles getting stuck or damaged trying to pass under the 11-foot-8-inch train trestle, known as the “Can Opener Bridge,” at the intersection of S. Gregson and W. Peabody streets in Durham.

The bridge has a website here: 11 foot 8 but the YouTube channel gets updated more frequently.

I am amazed that this tweet is still up

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From Mark Knoller - CBS News White House Correspondent:

I have saved a screen cap for when this gets flushed down the memory hole. The guy covers the White House for CBS and did not know that President Trump was in Afghanistan. Be sure to visit Mark's twitter account and scroll down and read the comments - brutal. Almost feel sorry for the guy - almost...

The people at The Freedom From Religion Foundation are a bunch of withered up old scolds. Probably haven't had a good time since they were six and still believed in Santa and the Tooth Fairy. From Breitbart:

Atheist Group Calls Kanye West Prison Worship Service ‘Egregious’ Violation of Constitution
An atheist group has gone on the attack against rapper Kanye West for performing his Sunday Service at a Texas prison claiming that the event was an “egregious” violation of the U.S. Constitution.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) blasted Texas Sheriff Ed Gonzalez for allowing the “Jesus Walks” rapper to appear at the Harris County Jail in Houston, Texas, on November 17 in a four-page letter.

Kanye West performed his weekly Sunday Service before more than 500 inmates, both male and female, in two different services at the county jail facilities. The performance was given high praise by Texas Governor Greg Abbott who tweeted out his compliments saying, “If he moves just one person closer to God the world will be a more peaceful place.”

It could possibly be a violation of some law if the inmates were compelled to attend but it looks like attendance was voluntary. As the Texas governor said: “If he moves just one person closer to God the world will be a more peaceful place.”

Buncha idiots - a two-fer. First, from PJ Media:

MoveOn.org Ruins Thanksgiving by Issuing Talking Points to Teach Your Family about Impeachment
The left's war on holidays continues with left-wing MoveOn.org issuing instructions to its pink-hatted rabid resisters on how to "talk to your family about impeachment" over Thanksgiving dinner complete with an inspirational video. They offer step-by-step instructions on how to alienate and anger everyone in your family by turning a nice dinner into a political clown show. "Thanksgiving is Thursday & many of you may be spending the holiday with friends & family members who are uncertain about impeachment.

"Tell them what Donald Trump did was wrong," says a slide in the video provided. Clearly, MoveOn feels this is necessary because no one other than far-left kooks thinks anything was wrong with a US president asking the Ukrainian president to look into election tampering and find out if anything illegal happened with that Biden kid who seems to have been given millions or billions of dollars for nothing. "No one is above the law," says MoveOn. I agree. Hunter Biden is on the short list of people who the law should be looking at.

Second concerns the origin of MoveOn.org - from this entry at InfoGalactic:

History of MoveOn.org
The history of MoveOn began with its opposition to the impeachment of U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1998. MoveOn has emerged as a powerful fundraising vehicle for Democratic Party candidates.

So, this activist organization that is promoting the impeachment of the sitting President got its start seeking to derail the impeachment of another sitting President. Talk about imminent cognitive dissonance.. No wonder they are loony.

Heh - what to bring for a potluck

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Not just Thanksgiving - any potluck:

20191128-potluck.jpg

Mmmmmm... Deconstructed Potato Gravy - yummy!

Stuffed and happy

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They had two turkeys - one smoked and one regular as well as a large spiral ham. Everyone exercised their inner glutton and a good time was had by all. The pie was appreciated.

Cold out - we have already had hard frosts but the air temp was right at 32°F when I pulled in a few minutes ago. First time this year and about a month or two early for that kind of low at only 7:00PM. It will be interesting to see how low it gets. Sky is gorgeously clear so lots of radiation cooling. The forecast is for clear skies for the next two days. Watch for black ice on my way out for coffee tomorrow. Spending tomorrow raking up the driftwood (twigs and small branches actually) that were carried over the bulkhead when the waves were crashing. Got quite far up on the back deck.

Surf for a bit, let dinner settle (ate too much) and watch some videos.

Out the door - dinner

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Heading over to a friends house shortly - they are having about 15 people for dinner. Picked up a Costco Apple Pie for my offering - couple bottles of wine too. Back in a few hours.

Such a good boy!

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Quite the find - from the Beeb:

Siberia: 18,000-year-old frozen 'dog' stumps scientists
Researchers are trying to determine whether an 18,000-year-old puppy found in Siberia is a dog or a wolf.

The canine - which was two months old when it died - has been remarkably preserved in the permafrost of the Russian region, with its fur, nose and teeth all intact.

DNA sequencing has been unable to determine the species.

Scientists say that could mean the specimen represents an evolutionary link between wolves and modern dogs.

Photos at the site - cute lil' guy. Got two of it's great great great grandchildren sleeping at my feet right now.

The Bomb Cyclone

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Really hit California - from the Los Angeles Times:

‘Travel not advised’: California travelers pounded by a cold Thanksgiving-week storm
Regina Valenzuela left her home in Bell early Tuesday bound for Portland, Ore., where she was going to pick up her aunt for Thanksgiving. Or so she thought.

She had checked the weather reports for Northern California. Snow was in the forecast, but it was just rain farther north in Oregon. No big deal, she figured.

By the time she hit Shasta Lake on Interstate 5 about 2:30 p.m., ice was thickening. Cars were sliding. She bought tire chains and kept driving.

Valenzuela made it 42 more miles, about to the Shasta County town of Castella, when traffic suddenly stopped. Thus began a 17-hour holiday nightmare, in which she was trapped overnight in her Honda Accord on the snowy mountain with scores of other motorists.

Much much more at the site. She was stuck near Redding, CA - I know that area and it can be trecherous.
Was snowed-in in Redding once two years before I started this blog - both of us were sick as dogs. Miserable time.

Juan Browne has this video from his Blancolirio YouTube channel:

Global warming anyone?

Tolerance and unification

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A couple headlines for the season:

  • The Hill: How to shut down your Trump-supporting family member at Thanksgiving dinner
  • The Atlantic: How to Talk About the Truth and Trump at Thanksgiving
  • Raw Story: Here are 5 one-liners to fight back against your right-wing family members at Thanksgiving dinner
  • USA Today: Thanksgiving in the age of Donald Trump: 9 ways to avoid political food fights

With reporting like this it is no wonder the media is losing relevance. The pendulum is swinging back and they are out of touch with reality.

Thanksgiving day

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President Trump flew to Afghanistan to be with the troops today. From Town Hall:

Trump Surprises Troops In Afghanistan On Thanksgiving Day
President Trump made a surprise visit to troops in Afghanistan on Thanksgiving Day. The president departed Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday evening to make the 13-hour secret flight to Bagram Air Force Base, arriving shortly after 11 a.m. EST.

According to reports, many measures were taken to conceal the president's unscheduled trip. The president took off from an undisclosed airport in Florida on Wednesday night around 7 p.m. EST. to travel to Joint Base Andrews. He then boarded Air Force One, which had been removed from its usual tarmac location and housed inside a hangar. Staff accompanying the president had their cellular devices collected before takeoff and the White House scheduled tweets from the president's Twitter account. 

His visit:

"There’s nowhere I’d rather celebrate this Thanksgiving than right here with the toughest, strongest, best and bravest warriors on the face of the Earth," the president told the troops.

Trump also announced peace talks with that Taliban have been restarted after the president broke off talks following a bombing in September that killed an American soldier and 11 other people.

And not just him:

Earlier this week, Vice President Mike Pence surprised troops in Iraq with an early Thanksgiving meal. 

The word you are looking for is "leadership" - Trump and Pence have it. Obama never did.

for dinner - ran into this on the web:

20191128-turkey.jpg

So true

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Giving thanks

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Been an "interesting" year at best but things are starting to turn around and I have a lot to be thankful for.

Some words from our first President George Washington:

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor, and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me "to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness."

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be. That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks, for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation, for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence, which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war, for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed, for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted, for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions, to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually, to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed, to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shown kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord. To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease of science among them and Us, and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand at the City of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

— George Washington

Powerful words for a great nation.

Solidarność

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Very interesting - from The Washington Post:

He helped end the Soviet empire. Now Lech Walesa wants to help Hong Kong.
Lech Walesa faced down an “evil empire" and freed his country from the yoke of Communist domination. Now, three decades later, the former Solidarity leader, Polish president and Nobel Peace Prize winner says he is ready to go to Hong Kong and stand with protesters there who are trying win a similar victory for freedom.

The circumstances the Hong Kong protesters face today are eerily similar to those Walesa faced in Poland. In Hong Kong, as in Poland, a grass-roots movement has risen up against a communist puppet government. In Hong Kong, as in Poland, they are menaced by a totalitarian empire across their border that threatens to invade and crush them. In Hong Kong, as in Poland, the puppet regime has cracked down on the protesters, firing at marchers in the streets and arresting opposition leaders. And in Hong Kong, as in Poland, few believe the democratic forces can prevail against the massive powers arrayed against them.

That should not faze them, Walesa told me in an interview. “When I was involved in my struggle, nobody in the world believed we could win the victory. I consulted the big leaders of the world. … and none of them, not even a single one, claimed that we stood the least of chances.”

China needs to grant Hong Kong its independence. It has had a long run under democratic rule and a strongly capitalist economy. It has done well. It needs to be a shining beacon to other nations - what freedom can do.

Quite the collection - Christmas songs

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Picked up a bunch more music CDs from the library this evening. I am now up to 522 individual pieces. New today are Beach Boys, Etta James, the Three Tenors, Carole King, two misc. assortments, and Brenda Lee. The party will be an older crowd so going for the oldies.

They are doing some interesting "in depth" reporting on Sleepy Joe's son. This story:

Strippers used sex toy on Hunter Biden at NYC’s Hustler Club: sources
Hunter Biden spent several thousand dollars at a Manhattan strip club during a pair of visits — including one that sent a staffer scrambling to buy a sex toy so strippers could use it on him, sources told The Post on Wednesday.

Biden — who’s been dogged by a series of strip-club allegations uncovered by The Post this week — was accompanied by a woman both times he went to Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club NYC in Hell’s Kitchen about a year ago, the sources said.

On each occasion, he and his companion holed up in a private room, where they ordered bottles of pricey booze and were joined by several strippers, sources said

The first two strip clubs (here and here) they reported were in Washington DC, this one is in New York City.
Boy gets around. Must be nice having all that Ukranian money to spend.

And don't forget to vote Democrat

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Unreal - from Breitbart:

New York City to Free 125K Accused Criminals, Give Taxpayer-Funded Housing, Job Training
The state of New York is likely to free at least 125,000 accused criminals from prison next year and provide many with taxpayer-funded housing and job training services thanks to criminal justice reform laws.

As Breitbart News has reported, the state’s series of bail reforms will ensure that suspects accused of crimes deemed “non-violent” are not jailed before their trial dates and do not have to post bail.

The list of crimes for which suspects will be freed from prison before trial includes:

    • Second-degree manslaughter
    • Aggravated vehicular assault
    • Third-degree assault
    • Promoting an obscene sexual performance by a child
    • Possessing an obscene sexual performance by a child
    • Promoting a sexual performance by a child
    • Failure to register as a sex offender
    • Making terroristic threats
    • Criminally negligent homicide
    • Aggravated vehicular homicide

In total, at least 125,000 accused criminals are likely to be released from prison in New York City every year, according to an analysis by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Those are at least 125,000 accused criminals who, even if charged with criminally negligent homicide, would be released from prison the same day they were arrested.

re: the list - what is it with liberals and abnormal sexual behaviour and anger management issues. I could almost make the point that liberalism is a mental disorder. Oh. Wait. I reported this here.

Needless to say, more at the site and some interesting reading in the 1,900+ comments

How do you sleep at night

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Great meme from Diogenes' Middle Finger

20191127-sleep.jpg

Quote of the month

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“Truth has nothing to do with the number of people it convinces.”
— Paul Claudel

Paul Claudel here: Infogalactic

Greta just needs to go away. She will be dropped by the people who control her when she no longer is useful to them but in the interim, what a stupid scold. A harpy. A Debbie Downer. From England's The Sun:

WAR ON WHEELS Jeremy Clarkson claims Greta Thunberg has killed motor shows by making young people hate cars
Greta Thunberg has done the impossible – and overtaken cyclists at the top of Jeremy Clarkson’s Most Hated list.

The motoring show host has accused the 16-year-old climate change activist of being a big reason why young people today hate cars.

Speaking exclusively to The Sun, Jeremy, 59, ranted: “Everyone I know under 25 isn’t the slightest bit interested in cars — Greta Thunberg has killed the car show.

“They’re taught at school, before they say ‘Mummy and Daddy’, that cars are evil, and it’s in their heads.”

His long-term sidekick Richard Hammond, 49, agrees: “I hate to say it, but I think Jeremy is right.

“Young people don’t care about cars. How many kids now are growing up with posters of cars on their bedroom wall?”

Things will swing back and people will realize that this whole climate thing is #1) - out of our hands and #2) - completely unpredictable. Our variable sun controls our climate much more than our automobiles.

Heading out for a bit

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Library, dinner, beers

The wind has died down to normal levels. More spew later.

How they were hybridized - Brassica

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Interesting info - I knew they were all related but did not know how:

20191127-brassica.jpg

Do you have an HP Solid State hard drive?

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Check this out - from Hewlett Packard:

Bulletin: HPE SAS Solid State Drives - Critical Firmware Upgrade Required for Certain HPE SAS Solid State Drive Models to Prevent Drive Failure at 32,768 Hours of Operation
This HPD8 firmware is considered a critical fix and is required to address the issue detailed below. HPE strongly recommends immediate application of this critical fix. Neglecting to update to SSD Firmware Version HPD8 will result in drive failure and data loss at 32,768 hours of operation and require restoration of data from backup in non-fault tolerance, such as RAID 0 and in fault tolerance RAID mode if more drives fail than what is supported by the fault tolerance RAID mode logical drive. By disregarding this notification and not performing the recommended resolution, the customer accepts the risk of incurring future related errors.

Atomic Fungus runs the numbers:

32,768 is 2 to the 15th power. Exactly. And so what happened is, some register or counter or something hit 32,767, and when it tried to go to 32,768, BLAMMO.

If you look at it in binary it becomes more obvious what happened:

32,767 is 0111 1111 1111 1111. (Hex: 7F FF)
32,768 is 1000 0000 0000 0000. (Hex: 80 00)

The drive bricks when bit number 15--the most significant digit--goes from a 0 to a 1. I've got a fiver that says that someone used a signed variable when he should have used an unsigned one. Because when you're talking about signed binary numbers?

0111 1111 1111 1111= 32,767
1000 0000 0000 0000=-32,768

...and the software reads out those bits and says "Negative hours! Nope!" and crashes.

Classic PEBCAK error.

The gift that keeps on giving - AOC

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From Vice:

This Solar Energy Company Fired Its Construction Crew After They Unionized
In late April, a group of New York City construction workers, inspired by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s vision for a Green New Deal, voted to form one of the first unions in the solar energy industry. On Monday, their employer Bright Power fired its entire in-house construction crew and announced that those workers, in the midst of negotiations for their first contract, would be replaced with subcontractors.

“We have come to the conclusion that our resources have been spread too thin with so many different kinds of work all being done in-house,” Bright Power CEO Jeffrey Perlman wrote to the company in an email reviewed by Motherboard. “It makes business sense to return to a fully subcontracted solar installation model.”

Get woke / go broke - time after time. Never fails.

Hunter Biden's sterling character

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The guy is a true putz. Yesterday, there was a story about him smoking crack at a DC Strip Club. Now this.
From the New York Post:

Hunter Biden’s ‘baby mama’ Lunden Roberts was stripper at club he frequented
The woman suing Hunter Biden for paternity was a stripper at a Washington, DC, club he frequented around the time he was dating his brother’s widow, sources told The Post.

Biden was repeatedly seen at the Mpire Club in the capital’s historic Dupont Circle neighborhood — where Lunden Alexis Roberts, the mother of his alleged love child, worked under the stage name “Dallas,” the sources said.

“He was well-known,” a source said of Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic front-runner to challenge President Trump next year.

This is a different strip club. A further example of his moral fiber:

Roberts worked there around the time she got pregnant — and when Hunter broke up with former sister-in-law Hallie Biden, the widow of his brother, the late Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, sources said.

Yeah - his brother died and Hunter started sleeping with his wife. He dumped her when he knocked up Lunden.
Nice guy...

Social Justice Warriors at work

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A two-fer - both from the Fort Worth, Texas Star-Telegram. First:

Fort Worth teacher fired after tweets to Trump about ‘illegal students’ wins appeal
A Fort Worth English teacher who was fired after tweeting President Donald Trump and asking him to crack down on immigration at Carter-Riverside High School won her appeal Monday.

Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath ruled Georgia Clark is entitled to get her job back, along with back pay and employment benefits from the time her contract was not renewed. Or, instead of reinstatement, the school district may pay her one year of salary.

“It appears the commissioner ruled the way he did based on a technicality and we are exploring all of our options,” said Barbara Griffith, a spokeswoman for the school district. “This is all we are going to say right now as we have not yet had a chance to review and analyze the entire decision.”

But of course, Social Justice Warriors always double-down. Second:

Fort Worth appeals ruling to rehire teacher who tweeted Trump about ‘illegal students’
Fort Worth school officials will appeal Monday’s ruling by the state education commissioner that they reinstate an English teacher who was fired after asking President Donald Trump on Twitter to crack down on immigration at Carter-Riverside High School.

Georgia Clark won an appeal of her firing when Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath ruled she is entitled to get her job back, along with back pay and benefits. Or instead of reinstatement, the school district could pay her one year of salary.

“The Commissioner’s decision was not based on the merits of the case but rather a procedural technicality with which the District does not agree,” Fort Worth school officials said in a statement. The district said it would appeal the decision within 20 days.

The person pushing for Clark's firing and the appeal against her reinstatement is the Fort Worth school board president is Jacinto Ramos. Any reason he should be favorable to illegal hispanic immigrants?

Wind storm - take two

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Got gusts up to 40MPH last night but woke up to a nice quiet morning. Wind is starting to pick up now - again, from the North. Oregon only has 45 customers without power. PSE is showing 2,882 customers from Tacoma through Bellingham and BC Hydro is showing about 9,000 customers out.

When I went out for coffee, there was a fine dusting of salt all over my car. My driveway is on the other side of the house from the ocean so there was a lot of aerosolized salt in the air.

More Hillary emails released

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Should be interesting reading - from Judicial Watch:

Judicial Watch: FBI Uncovers New Clinton Emails
Judicial Watch today released a court filing that reveals the FBI found more Clinton emails it recently turned over to the State Department for review. In the November 15, 2019 filing, the State Department informs the court that the FBI located additional Clinton emails that potentially had not been previously released:

[T]he Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) recently sent [the State Department] additional documents as part of the ongoing inter-agency consultation process in connection with other FOIA litigation. [The State Department] is working to determine whether that set of documents includes any responsive, non-duplicative agency records that have not already been processed. [The State Department] will promptly update [Judicial Watch] and the Court once that initial review is complete.

The court ordered joint status report was filed in response to Judicial Watch’s May 6, 2015, FOIA lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00687)). Judicial Watch’s FOIA lawsuit seeks all emails sent and received by Hillary Clinton and other records about her non-governmental email account.

We already know that she is crooked. It will be interesting to see if there is anything actionable in this new tranche.

President Trump's Florida rally

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The place was packed:

20191127-rally.jpg

Some interesting numbers from Brad Parscale - Trump's 2020 campaign manager:

One in four people attending the rally were Democrat. President Trump may be a boor and an unpleasant person but he is getting the job done and life is better for 99% of people in America.

From The Gateway Pundit:

Do-Nothing Speaker Pelosi Blows Off All Her Work in DC Will Join Global Warming Summit in Madrid with Greta Thunberg
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Do-Nothing Democrats have done NOTHING for the American people since taking over Congress in January 2018.
NOTHING.

But they have harassed, threatened, abused, cursed and throttled the President of the United States.

Next week Pelosi will continue this trend and push forward with her sham impeachment hearings in the House Judiciary Committee.

And then Speaker Pelosi will join Swedish teen Greta Thunberg at the Madrid Global Warming Summit.

The Madrid summit is just a re-hash of the Paris summit. A bunch of know-nothing losers wanting money.
Scam not science.

Hunter Biden - crack

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From the New York Post's Page Six:

Hunter Biden suspected of smoking crack in DC strip club’s VIP room
Hunter Biden was suspected of smoking crack inside a strip club where he dropped “thousands of dollars” during multiple visits — at the same time he held a seat on the board of a controversial Ukrainian natural-gas company, The Post has learned.

The incident, which took place at Archibald’s Gentlemen’s Club in Washington, DC, late last year, represents the most recent alleged drug use by Biden, 49, who has acknowledged six stints in rehab for alcoholism and addiction that included a crack binge in 2016.

Much more at the site - lots of links to corroborating reports. Hunter is not a moral person.

President Trump was on fire tonight

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The Florida rally was good - Trump is an incredible public speaker:

Mexico - a two-fer

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Both from Breitbart. First story:

Mexican Cartels ‘Will Be Designated’ as Terrorist Organizations, Says President Trump
President Donald Trump told Bill O’Reilly he will designate some Mexican cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) during an interview released on Tuesday.

“The Mexican drug cartels kill more than 100,000 Americans every year by the importation of dangerous narcotics,” O’Reilly said to President Trump during an interview aired on O’Reilly.com. “Are you going to designate those cartels in Mexico as terror groups?”

“They will be designated … I have offered him (the Mexican president) to let us go in and clean it out,” President Trump responded. “He, so far, has rejected the offer. But at some point, something has to be done.”

And Mexico says: WTF? You mean we can't go on playing both sides of the fence? Collecting sweet foreign aid from Uncle Sam and taking bribes from the cartels? That would seriously impinge on our cushy corrupt lifestyle. 

Breitbart again:

Mexico Wants ‘Meeting’ After Trump Discusses ‘Terrorist’ Label for Cartels
Mexico City announced efforts to have a “meeting” with U.S. officials after President Donald Trump’s recent announcement to designate some cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs).
In a prepared statement issued by Mexico’s Foreign Relations Ministry, officials reached out to their U.S. counterparts to explore the consequences that terrorist designations would entail.

“In lieu of the good relations that exist between both countries, the Government of Mexico will seek to have a high-level meeting as soon as possible to present Mexico’s position and to learn the viewpoints of the authorities from the U.S.”

Of course they want a "meeting". President Trump is threatening to take away their rice bowl. The Mexican kleptocrats want to keep the corruption flowing into their pockets.

Dumb and Dumber

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From The Borderline Sociopathic Blog For Boys:

REAL MEN OF GENIUS: LADDER EDITION

This is the dumbest thing I can imagine. No, not the lavender truck. That’s garden variety dumb. No, not the man holding the ladder. Gravity, leverage, fulcrums, friction, it’s all mysterious to him. But most people are like that. He’s nothing special. The guy in the bucket, sort of helping, but not really helping at all, is unexceptional. Most people just stand aside and let other people hurt themselves if they’re bound and determined to try. The man descending the ladder is a dope, of course, but he’s not the dumbest person involved here.

No, the dumbest thing in this video is the guy holding the camera vertically. The rest is conversation.

So true. Even in this day and age people still do not shoot their videos in landscape. They watch them in landscape, they just do not shoot them in landscape. Talk about bonehead...

And back home again

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Went for Thai food instead of the burrito. Beers were cold and wet.

Wind seems to have let up - it is now coming out of the East and is only 10MPH or so. Calm before the storm though.

Oregon is at 2,711 customers without power - up from 1,495 at 1:13PM this afternoon. BC Hydro, PSE and Sno-Pud are negligible - under 300 total.

Feeling tired so surf for a bit and then bed. No wine tonight - need to sleep well.

Out for a couple of hours

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Got some more music CDs waiting for me at the library. Expecting some cables from Amazon and going to get a burrito for a light dinner (had a big lunch).

Got nothing more to do today or tomorrow (except fret about storm surge) so heading out for that and a couple of pints and some socialization.

Department of righteous shooting

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From the Miami, Florida CBS affiliate:

Miami Man In Van Guns Down AK-47 Wielding Robber Because He Didn’t Want ‘To Go Out Like A Punk’
A 60-Year-old Miami man said he was forced to shoot and kill a gunman who had broken in to his van early Monday morning in an attempt to rob him of his jewelry.

“The guy I killed last night, he put an AK-47 to my damn face,” said Donovan Stewart.

Stewart told CBS4’S Peter D’Oench that he had to act quickly because he was worried about the safety of his 11-year-old son and girlfriend who were in the van with him.

“I am from Kingstontown in Jamaica,” he said, “and I am not going to go out like a punk. So I emptied my Glock in his chest. This man tried to get in my van while I was sleeping and he was surprised to see what I did.”

And the dead goblin? He had robbed a couple other people. Police are investigating.

Pausing until the applause dies down.

Obstructionism in the Senate

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From CNS News and Media Research:

Trump: 'We'll Just Blame Nancy' If USMCA Fails
President Donald Trump, in a brief Q&A with the White House press on Monday, plugged the languishing United States-Mexico-Canada trade deal, saying he wouldn't blame those countries for scrapping the deal: "We'll just have to blame Nancy," he said, referring to House Speaker Pelosi.

USMCA = the United States-Mexico-Canada trade deal

USMCA, that's the deal, the trade deal, the great trade deal for the farmers, manufacturers, workers of all types, including union. It's sitting on Nancy Pelosi's desk. She's incapable of moving it, it looks like. She can't--everybody knows it's a great deal. She knows it's a great deal. She said it. She keeps saying she wants to get done, but we're talking about many, many months sitting on her desk, no votes.

And she doesn't have to help with the Democrats because they're going to vote for it, most of them. And I guess all of the Republicans are going to vote for it.

Nancy is the definition of Never Trump. She needs to start doing her job for her constituents and not flinging poo at our sitting President.

They got it right - B-1 bomber

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Interesting bit of history - from The National Interest:

Why All of America's Enemies Should Still Fear the B-1 Bomber
Huge yet surprisingly sleek and agile, the U.S. Air Force’s B-1 Lancer strategic bombers—popularly dubbed “Bones” for B-ONE—circles over battlefields in Syria and Afghanistan like angels of death dispensing GPS-guided bombs from on high. Yet the B-1 started out as an over-priced nuclear bomber that was arguably obsolete by the time it entered service. Thus, a bomber designed to dodge Soviet surface-to-air missiles and interceptors found its niche battling Taliban and ISIS insurgents.

A bit more - America's second-worst President:

Advised that the ALCMs were adequate and that the B-1’s concept was outdated, President Jimmy Carter canceled the expensive B-1 in 1977—believing it more sensible to invest in the top-secret B-2 stealth bomber instead. Four years later, a newly-elected Reagan, who had blasted Carter for canceling the B-1, revived the Bones with an order for one hundred aircraft.

This time, the Air Force sought a cheaper, revised B-1B model which could fly further (6,000 miles!) with heavier payloads but at a reduced high-altitude speed of Mach 1.2 (830 miles per hour) or Mach .95 at low altitude. This was because the aircraft’s four F101 afterburning turbofans nestled into the wing roots were no longer designed to swing back with the wings. There was no longer any pretense that the B-1 would outrun fighters and air defense missiles.

Instead, the B-1B’s aluminum and titanium skin surfaces were reshaped and coated with radar-absorbent materials to reduce radar cross-section to just 2.5 meter, roughly that of a small F-16 fighter. Though far from being a “stealth” plane, the B-1 would not be susceptible to detection and targeting at very long range like a B-52 would be.

Another example of a timeless design. Like the A-10 Warthog and the SR-71 Blackbird. I love those airplanes.

Just wonderful - wind is picking up

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And it is coming right out of the North. High tide is about 90 minutes from now so the back deck is going to get splashed. Fortunately, low tide is going to arrive at the same time as the brunt of the storm so it should not be too bad.

Averaging 15MPH with gusts to 25 - just starting...

Oregon is up to 2,276 customers without power.

Would be fun to be on the coast taking some videos - going to be spectacular.

Staring down the barrel

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Looks like the bomb-cyclone is going to be a big one. From Cliff Mass:

The Oregon Storm is Exploding
The meteorological-bomb storm is not disappointing-- in fact, it will probably be stronger than originally expected.

The visible satellite picture around 10:30 AM shows a beautiful storm developing, with the low center in the center of the swirl of clouds due west of the central Oregon Coast.

20191126-bomb.jpg

One way we can tell this storm is deepening rapidly is looking at the water vapor imagery, which shows the amount of water vapor in the upper troposphere. Blue indicates lots of moisture, red/orange very little. There is extreme dryness behind the storm that is the result of vigorous descent behind the low. Such strong descent only occurs in rapidly deepening, intense storms.

Much more at the site - going to be a big one. Next: Bellingham Herald:

Frigid northeast wind could bring 60 mph gusts, Thanksgiving power outages to Whatcom
Cold Canadian air that brought a dusting of lowland snow Monday in southern Whatcom County could mean power outages from Wednesday to Thanksgiving morning, forecasters in Seattle said.

A high wind warning was issued for sustained northeast winds of 25 to 45 mph with gusts to 60 mph, according to the National Weather Service.

Winds that fierce could cause tree damage and local power outages, the weather service said in its online forecast.

“Fasten loose objects or shelter objects in a safe location prior to the onset of winds,” the forecast said. “Sustained wind speeds of at least 40 mph or gusts of 58 mph or more can lead to property damage.”

The gale warning is in effect from 7:00PM tonight to 10:00AM Thursday

It has not even hit yet but Oregon already has 1,495 customers without power. Here are the outages for Seattle, Snohomish, Bellingham and BC Hydro - nothing to see but handy links to follow through the event.

So true

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Found at Terrierman's:

20191126-churchill.JPG

Impeachment - some connections

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From Breitbart:

Second Adam Schiff Staffer Linked to Burisma-Backed Think Tank, ‘Close Friends’ with Alleged ‘Whistleblower’
Yet another staffer for Rep. Adam Schiff served as a fellow for the Atlantic Council, a think tank that is funded by and works in partnership with Burisma, the natural gas company at the center of allegations regarding Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.

Sean Misko has been described as “close friends” with Eric Ciaramella, whom Real Clear Investigations suggests is the likely so-called whistleblower. Misko reportedly joined Schiff’s staff at the House Intelligence Committee in August – the same month the so-called whistleblower’s complaint was filed after first reportedly interfacing with a staffer for Schiff’s office.

Misko in 2015 was a yearlong “Millennium Fellow” at the Burisma-funded Atlantic Council, which has been under the microscope for its ties to other individuals associated with the Trump impeachment inquiry.

Misko’s former position marks the second Schiff staffer who worked or currently works with the Atlantic Council.

They are all in bed with each other. One goal. Get rid of The Orange Man so they can return to running the deep state.

Great network this morning

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Fun and good training. Not if, when. Most cell telephone networks have one to three days of backup power.

Met up with someone for coffee afterwards - just got home and heading to the dump. Packing up the last of the trash. Doing some email and paperwork today.

Out the door

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Ready to roll - ham radio network this morning.

That is it for the night

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Feeling tired - early day today and even earlier day tomorrow (starts at 8:00AM) Coffee place opens at 7:00AM so I am good there but not liking it.

YouTube and then to bed. Did not get to the dump today - doing that tomorrow. Staying down here in case the wind comes out of the North - might have some flooding issues.

Going to get interesting - bomb cyclone

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From Cliff Mass:

A Bomb Cyclone Will Hit the Southern Oregon Coast
An explosively developing bomb-cyclone will hit the southern Oregon coast tomorrow, with hurricane-force wind gusts, towering waves, and lots of precipitation.

The term "meteorological bomb" is given to a midlatitude cyclone whose central pressure declines by more than 24 millibars (or 24 hPa) in 24 hours (there is a latitude dependence of the criterion, but this is close enough).  This storm is going to blow that criterion away.

Virtually all the models agree on this extraordinary strengthening, so confidence it quite high.  And there are some aspects of this storm that are very unusual. Let me show you the details.

The initial step in the development of the storm, a process called cyclogenesis, is occurring as I write this blog.

Much more at the site. Gale warning predicted for the island tomorrow evening. From weather.com:

Gale Watch for Northern Inland Waters Including The San Juan Islands
From 10:00pm PST, Tue Nov 26 until 10:00am PST, Thu Nov 28

Issued by: Seattle/Tacoma - WA, US, National Weather Service,
...SMALL CRAFT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 10 PM PST THIS EVENING... ...GALE WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM TUESDAY EVENING THROUGH THURSDAY MORNING... * WIND...NORTHWEST 15 TO 25 KNOTS NORTH OF THE SAN JUAN ISLANDS THIS EVENING. NORTHEAST WIND 25 TO 40 KNOTS POSSIBLE LATER TUESDAY NIGHT THROUGH THURSDAY MORNING. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... A SMALL CRAFT ADVISORY MEANS THAT WIND SPEEDS OF 21 TO 33 KNOTS ARE EXPECTED TO PRODUCE HAZARDOUS WAVE CONDITIONS TO SMALL CRAFT. INEXPERIENCED MARINERS, ESPECIALLY THOSE OPERATING SMALLER VESSELS SHOULD AVOID NAVIGATING IN THESE CONDITIONS. A GALE WATCH IS ISSUED WHEN THE RISK OF GALE FORCE WINDS OF 34 TO 47 KNOTS HAS SIGNIFICANTLY INCREASED, BUT THE SPECIFIC TIMING AND/OR LOCATION IS STILL UNCERTAIN. IT IS INTENDED TO PROVIDE ADDITIONAL LEAD TIME FOR MARINERS WHO MAY WISH TO CONSIDER ALTERING THEIR PLANS. &&

Wonder which direction the wind will be coming out of. November is the time for these kinds of storms.

From WNPR in Boston - one of the flagship stations for National Public Radio:

Young People Of Color Are The Most Frequent Victims Of Gun Homicides
Overall crime in the United States has been declining since the early 1990s. But the same cannot be said for gun violence, which has seen a slight uptick in recent years. A new report from Boston University found that uptick has been led by an increase in homicides of young people — particularly of young black and Hispanic men.

Gun Violence Is A ‘Complicated Problem’
Researchers at Boston University, led by Dr. Bindu Kalesan, looked at national gun violence data from 1999 to 2016. From 1999 to 2014, gun violence rates stayed steady. But after 2014, there were increases in rates of both fatal and non-fatal firearm related injuries.

The research showed many differences in how gun violence affected communities. For example, the rates of suicide were high for white men, while black men were more likely to be victims of homicide.

Speaking truth to power. Remove black on black gang violence and the United States gun deaths drop down to zilch.

Gun violence is a lot like a fatal airline crash - very public and a profound tradgedy but actually, when you look at the real numbers, not that common...

Cute price

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Got to wonder if the manager knew what they were doing when they priced it:

20191125-pi.jpg

Pure genius - Buster Keaton

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Advancements in technology - I could use some of these:

Another business bails from the PRC

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That would be the People's Republic of California - a real worker's paradise. From retired journalist Don Surber:

Schwab Inc. leaving SF for Texas
Pooping in the street has consequences.

In announcing it will acquire TD Ameritrade, Charles Schwab and Co. Inc. announced it will move its headquarters from San Francisco to Dallas/Fort Worth.

The San Francisco business reaction:

The San Francisco Chronicle reported, "Charles Schwab has been headquartered in San Francisco since its founding in 1971, while TD Ameritrade is based in Omaha, Neb.

"'We’re deeply disappointed about it,' said Jay Cheng, public policy director at the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. 'We probably will lose significant taxes.'"

Wow has the Chamber of Commerce changed.

It is more worried about the government collecting taxes than companies making money.

Create a business-friendly environment and stand back. Corporations will move there. I really wonder if Boeing is regretting moving from Seattle to Chicago - frying pan/fire. Wonder if they will move to Texas as well...

Great quote

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"Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right to do what we ought."
--Lord Acton

Lord Acton is well known for this one: "All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely"

Another day in paradise

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Ran some errands, picked up two more music CDs from the library for the CAA Christmas Party (Elvis and Ella Fitzgerald), went out for some pasta. Skipping the usual two beers as I have some stuff here that I need a clear head for - writing and some other paperwork. A two-hour meeting is enough socialization for one day :)

Temperature is dropping as forecast - down to low 40's and looking for some hard frost and black ice tomorrow. Got an early emergency communications network tomorrow but it is only about two miles from the house at the local fire station.

And back home

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Great meeting - six people so nice size to get real work done. This was three people from the local community center and three people from the Camano Arts Association. We have always worked together well but we are getting around to forming a Memorandum of Understanding about what each of us will do for the other. Common goals, etc... I loathe unnecessary bureaucracy with a passion but it is good to codify relationships between two groups of people. Members of each group can refer to this memorandum to clear up questions that may arise in the future. This document is not set in stone and can be modified as needed. The corporate DNA so to speak. Management 101

Part of the mission for the CAA recently has been to get more involved in community events and to promote Camano Island as a center for the arts. This is actually happening.

Meeting in a short while

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Out the door - back in a couple of hours.

Impeachment - Deuteronomy 28

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Adam Schiff is in for a rude awakening. So self-centered. From The Washington Post:

Schiff says Democrats will press forward despite lack of testimony from key impeachment witnesses
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) said Sunday that his panel will press ahead with its impeachment report even though key witnesses have not testified, in the latest signal that Democrats are moving swiftly in their probe of President Trump’s alleged efforts to pressure Ukraine.

From Deuteronomy 28:

The LORD shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart. And thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness, and thou shalt not prosper in thy ways: and thou shalt be only oppressed and spoiled evermore, and no man shall save thee. Thou shalt betroth a wife, and another man shall lie with her: thou shalt build an house, and thou shalt not dwell therein: thou shalt plant a vineyard, and shalt not gather the grapes thereof. Thine ox shall be slain before thine eyes, and thou shalt not eat thereof: thine ass shall be violently taken away from before thy face, and shall not be restored to thee: thy sheep shall be given unto thine enemies, and thou shalt have none to rescue them.

Getting downright biblical on their asses...

Happy happy joy joy

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Looks like winter is arriving - from the Stanwood-Camano News:

Cold air — and maybe snow — heading our way
Snow could fall Monday night in the foothills surrounding the Stanwood Camano region as arctic air filters into the area, according to the National Weather Service.

Little to no snow accumulation is expected as lows Monday night will dip into the upper 20s, according to the Weather Service office in Seattle.

"Pinpointing exactly where and when those accumulations will occur is extremely difficult due to the hit/miss nature of the showers," according to the Weather Service. "However, the best odds will be Monday afternoon through Tuesday morning across the north Interior (Island, Skagit, Snohomish, southern Whatcom, northern King, northern Jefferson, and northern Clallam counties) where precipitation may be enhanced by convergence at times, leading to temporarily lowered snow levels and very isolated accumulations of 1-3 inches."

Snow levels could drop to 500 feet, weather officials said. Between Sunday and Tuesday, Stevens Pass could accumulate 8 to 12 inches, according to Weather Service forecasters.

Cold weather is usual. Cold enough for snow this early is not. NASA's Space Weather site has our sun with no sunspots today - the 248th such day this year. Fewer sunspots = lower solar output.

That's it for me

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Didn't find anything with a quick trot around the web so calling it quits for the night.

Got the van loaded up - dump run tomorrow after the meeting and coffee.

Expecting delivery of a new radio tomorrow - Citizens Band radios have come way down in size and price. This unit was very well reviewed by a trusted source and is only $60. I have a Go Kit (here and here for some examples) which is a portable box containing a couple radios, a 12-Volt power distribution system and antenna connections. This unit is tiny - a bit over 4" square and a bit under 1" tall. Fit right in.

This will be a perfect addition as commercial truck freight uses CB exclusively and it will be nice to have that option.
See how the highways are doing.

Check it out: Radioddity CB-27 CB Radio Mobile 40-Channel, AM Instant Emergency Channel 9/19

Doing my emergency communications network Tuesday morning.

Heh - navigation charts

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Been reading the wonderful 1977 biography of Rear Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort (think Beaufort wind force scale). He is best known for the incredible detail of his charts.

The author is talking about the additional data included in his charts:

In one form or another, publication of such non-cartographic data of concern to the mariner has been going on ever since Moses reported fluctuations in the water level of the Red Sea and Homer described certain meteorological and geographical hazards to navigation in the Mediterranean.

Cute turn of phrase...

It's Miller Time

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Heading out for a couple pints at my local.

Got a morning meeting tomorrow so early bedtime. Beans and rice was delicious - lots of garlic and seasonings. Quick to fix, excellent nutrition and dirt cheap.

Here is an editorial published on December 11th, 2015:

Joe Biden Lectures Ukraine
The only applause Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. got while he addressed the Ukrainian Parliament on Tuesday was when he berated Russia. That’s not hard: Russia’s venality — the seizure of Crimea and the support for separatists in eastern Ukraine — is a strong unifying force in Ukrainian politics. By contrast, Mr. Biden’s ardent talk of the need to put an end to Ukraine’s ubiquitous corruption and the power of its oligarchs was met with stony silence.

The editorial talks about the Ukranian corruption and closes with this thought:

Sadly, the credibility of Mr. Biden’s message may be undermined by the association of his son with a Ukrainian natural-gas company, Burisma Holdings, which is owned by a former government official suspected of corrupt practices. A spokesman for the son, Hunter Biden, argues that he joined the board of Burisma to strengthen its corporate governance. That may be so. But Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, has been under investigation in Britain and in Ukraine. It should be plain to Hunter Biden that any connection with a Ukrainian oligarch damages his father’s efforts to help Ukraine. This is not a board he should be sitting on.

The editorial focuses on ethics and ignores the personal gain. Still, they could have been reminding people all through this inpeachment proceeding. It is called Journalism.

So true - election interference

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Found on the web:

20191124-voters.jpg

Happy Birthday to... Oh. Wait.

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From the Washington Examiner:

Queen cancels Prince Andrew’s birthday party over Epstein interview fallout
Queen Elizabeth II pulled the plug on Prince Andrew’s birthday bash as his connection to Jeffrey Epstein continues to embarrass the royal family.

The prince was set to have a birthday bash at Buckingham Palace to celebrate his 60th birthday in February, but his mother has canceled the celebration in the wake of his controversial interview with BBC, according to The Times.

During the interview, Andrew denied that he knew Epstein’s accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accused the Duke of York of raping her while she was trapped in Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking ring. Photographs of Giuffre and Andrew prove that the two had met, but he claimed he would have remembered the encounter if it were sexual.

"And without putting too fine a point on it, if you’re a man, it is a positive act to have sex with somebody,” Andrew said to BBC. “You have to take some sort of positive action, and so, therefore, if you try to forget, it’s very difficult to try and forget a positive action, and I do not remember anything."

It is not a positive action if you have unconsentual sex with a child. What a putz. He is supposed to be representing England and not sticking his whatever into any willing or unwilling vagina.

The cult of Climate Change

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Those that believe in anthropogenic global warming are members of a cult. They are not scientists. Not by any stretch of anyone's imagination. To say that they listen to scientists only shows how much they cherry-pick their talking points. I was typing the word facts just now and realized that they do not deal with facts. Talking Points was much more in line.

From Town Hall:

Climate Scientists Reduced to Hiding from Climate Thuggery in Germany
More than 200 people, including dozens of scientists, are in hiding right now in Germany. I am one of them. I can tell you that I am in Munich, but I can’t tell you my hotel. I can tell you that the scientists will meet on Friday and Saturday to share scientific knowledge, but I can’t tell you where. The meeting, in which scientists will present evidence contradicting an asserted climate crisis, was scheduled to be open to the public, but fascist climate thugs have forced us into hiding. The German government, rather than protecting scientists and free speech, has explicitly refused to protect scientists from the threat of violence.

The lineup of speakers at the European Institute for Climate and Energy's (German acronym EIKE) annual climate conference is impressive. Among the speakers are scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Aachen University of Applied Sciences, University of Bern, Danish National Space Center, Institute for Solid-State Nuclear Physics, Università di Napoli Federico II, and Universität Rostock. Their crime? Delivering talks titled, “The Real Condition of the Great Barrier Reef,” “The Influence of Greenhouse Gases on Climate Research,” “What Role Did the Sun Play in Climate Change,” etc. Seeking to shut down any scientific research and discussion that may endanger a purported justification for its anti-freedom political agenda, a climate activist group calling itself Offenes Antikapitalistisches Klimatreffen München, which is reportedly affiliated with the terror group Antifa, threatened the EIKE meeting, calling on thugs in Germany to mobilize against the conference.

EIKE, to its credit, courageously stuck to its conference plans despite the explicit threat. The Offenes Antikapitalistisches Klimatreffen München—which is roughly translated as the Munich Anti-capitalist Climate Activists—then upped the ante by storming the NH Conference Center in Munich. The group threatened additional action against employees and visitors at the conference center on the day of the conference and on the days leading up to the conference. Citing fears about the safety of its employees and guests, the NH Conference Center told EIKE it would not allow EIKE to hold its conference there.

Having invested tens of thousands of dollars into the event, including travel costs for scientists from around the world, EIKE asked the German courts to uphold the contract EIKE had signed with the NH Conference Center. Instead, a German court ruled the NH Conference Center faced a legitimate safety threat and therefore could violate its agreement with EIKE. A more just and civilized verdict would have been for the court to direct German police to protect scientists’ rights to free speech and academic freedom against fascist street thugs. But this is Germany and the street thugs share the same climate position as the German government. So, street thugs allied with the German government force free speech, academic freedom, and disfavored political views into hiding. And the German government is condoning this fascist thuggery by refusing to deploy police to keep the peace at a specific place and a specific event threatened by fascist street thugs.

Some know-nothing thugs mau-mauing the actual scientists who are trying to figure out what is going on.

Talk about progress...

Just right - brown rice

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Fixing some red beans and rice for dinner tonight. The engineers at Instant Pot are fantastic - my old rice cooker was sold at a yard sale and needed to get a good one. Wanted something a bit better than the cheap thermostatic "click" type of cooker and saw that Walmart had an Instant Pot rice and grain cooker for sale for $40.

It has done white rice perfectly for me a couple of times. Tonight was the first time I tried it with brown rice and it came out absolutely dead-nuts on (machining term: here, here and here)

Our Attorney General

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One of the better ones America has had. From The Daily Sheeple:

AG Barr announces nationwide plan to combat crisis of missing and slain Native American women
Attorney General William Barr announced a nationwide plan Friday to address the crisis of missing and slain Native American women as concerns mount over the level of violence they face.

Barr announced the plan, known as the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Initiative, during a visit with tribal leaders and law enforcement officials on the Flathead Reservation in Montana.

Native American women experience some of the nation’s highest rates of murder, sexual violence and domestic abuse. The National Institute of Justice estimates that 1.5 million Native American women have experienced violence in their lifetime, including many who are victims of sexual violence. On some reservations, federal studies have shown women are killed at a rate more than 10 times the national average.

The Justice Department’s new initiative would invest $1.5 million to hire specialized coordinators in 11 U.S. attorney’s offices across the U.S. with significant Indian Country caseloads. The coordinators would be responsible for developing protocols for a better law enforcement response to missing persons cases.

Montana’s coordinator, a former FBI agent, already has started in his position.

And I love it that this has already started operation. No "planning committees", no "focus groups" They have identified a real problem and are going out and fixing it.

Quite different from the Democrat narrative - do something that sounds good instead of doing something that is effective and actually does good. This is being reported in the mainstream media. Oh. Wait.

...

...

- - - crickets - - -

Heads rolling

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Someone at the Navy defied President Trump and did not do what he was ordered - from Jack Posobiec

Like him or not, he is America's Commander in Chief and to violate a direct order from him is a firing offense.
Ass. Door. Bang.

Off the deep end - CNN

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I had already referenced Trump Derangement Syndrome once today in regards to Adam Schiff. Looks like another case is in the news - from The Gateway Pundit:

CNN’s Brian Stelter Hosts Segment Branding President Trump a ‘Destructive Cult Leader’ Who is Using ‘Mind Control’
CNN’s Brian Stelter ended his Sunday show with a segment claiming that President Donald Trump is a “destructive cult leader” who is “using mind control.”

Sheesh Brian - get a grip on reality...

Things I Won't Work With

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Every so often, chemist Derek Lowe writes about especially "interesting" chemicals - today it is Bromine:

The Higher States of Bromine
Chemists have a familiarity with many elements and many compounds, from having worked with them or studied them in the literature. You get a feel for what’s “normal” and for what’s unusual, and there are quite a few degrees of the latter. Take compounds of bromine, for example. Most any working chemist will immediately recognize bromine (there are exceptions) because we don’t commonly encounter too many opaque red liquids with a fog of corrosive orange fumes above them in the container. Which is good. That’s bromine in oxidation state zero, elemental, and then you have bromide (oxidation state -1), one of the most common anions around. “Chlorides are rabble”, said Primo Levi in one of my favorite lines from The Periodic Table, and he was right about that, but bromides are not of much higher social standing. Every cation has a bromide salt, and it’s usually one of the cheaper ones in the catalog.

So far, so good. But bromine can also go up to +3 and +5 oxidation states, and there things start to get interesting. You can have various mixed-halogen things, all of which are reactive and toxic and are distinguished by their various degrees of vileness. And you can get all sorts of bromine-oxygen species, ranging from the pretty well-known ones like bromate ion (BrO3) all the way up to. . .well, to the stuff described in this new paper., from Konrad Seppelt at the Freie Universität Berlin. It contains a whole list of new compounds that send my chemical intuition completely off the rails.

I have no “feel” for them whatsoever except a strong desire never to prepare any of them. Prepare any of them? I don’t even want to make the starting material. You know you’re in for a bumpy ride when your work needs something like bromine fluorine dioxide (bromyl fluoride, BrO2F); no one can claim that they weren’t warned. There hasn’t even been a reliable synthesis of that stuff until now – Seppelt describes a new one, from the aforementioned sodium bromate, which is fine, and bromine pentafluoride, which is not fine, because it’s a hideous oxidizing and fluorinating agent fit to fluorinate you right into the afterlife and whose attempted use in liquid rocket propellent mixtures was abandoned because it was too foul to work with, and, oh yeah, redistilled pure hydrogen fluoride, which is also about as far from “fine” as you can get. The SI of the paper casually mentions that you can use double vacuum distillation in a metal line to get your HF sufficiently anhydrous for the reaction, and you can go ahead and get cranking on that without waiting for me to show up.

Heh - fun writing and great chemistry. More on the synthesis at the site.

Game on indeed

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This tweet from Charlie Kirk:

I wish they would try it - that would be fun to see.

Great deal on a simple laptop

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From Tom's Hardware:

Walmart's Best Laptop Deal? $249 VivoBook has 1080p, SSD, Ryzen 3 CPU
Remember when you couldn't find a laptop with a 1920 x 1080 screen or an SSD for under $600 (or even under $800)? Thanks to some slick black friday tech deals, you can now get a laptop that has both of these key features in a lightweight chassis for just $249.

Reduced from $349 at Walmart, the Asus VivoBook 15 weights just 3.5 pounds, which is very light for a 15-inch notebook. It packs in premium features like that full HD screen, a fingerprint scanner and 128GB SSD. It's powered by an AMD Ryzen 3 3200U CPU, which is icing on the cake for AMD fans and should be just fine for those who don't take a side in the processor wars.

It is a little shy on RAM but:

The biggest drawback for this VivoBoook 15 is that it comes with only 4GB of RAM. However, both the RAM and storage are user-upgradeable. You can grab a an 8GB stick of RAM for around $30 or a 16GB module for around $60. You can also swap out its 128GB SATA SSD for 256GB or 512GB drive for less than $60.

Cheap to upgrade and it has the available slots. Great deal for a modest machine.

I am a big fan of their in-house brand gaming keyboard: SteelSeries Apex 150 Gaming Keyboard, Black

Heh - get woke / go broke

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From Breitbart:

Report: Not a Single Team Has Called Colin Kaepernick Since Workout
Colin Kaepernick showcased his skills for NFL teams just over a week ago at a workout at a local Atlanta high school.

However, according to a report, he hasn’t received any interest from any NFL teams.

Not a star player - OK but middle-of-the-road. Too political - any team that signs him will have to put up with his divisiveness for the duration. That makes it a big NOPE

Get a life - Schiff

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Excerpted from the transcript of an interview by Jake Tapper on his State of the Union show - aired November 24th, 2019

SCHIFF: We're going to continue our investigation. We are going to continue to pursue the documents.

TAPPER: Even after you have handed in the report, you're going to continue?

SCHIFF: Yes. Oh, yes. The investigation isn't going to end.

Hey Adam - it is over. You have nothing. Time to stop wasting everyone's time with your TDS

As things get interesting - Biden family

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From The Daily Wire:

Giuliani Claims To Have Decades Of Evidence Relating To ‘Biden Family’ Corruption In Latest Tweet
On Saturday afternoon, former Mayor of New York City and President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani sent out a tweet seemingly meant to clarify his recent “insurance” remarks.

Giuliani’s tweet seems to be a reference to at least two recent interviews – one with The Guardian and another with Fox News.

Links to the two interviews at the site. RICO referrs to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act passed in 1970 and used to get at the Mafia and various gangs.

I think that Giuliani was the best Mayor that New York City had - he really cleaned it up.

Out for a bit

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Coffee and post office. Working at home - laundry and sorting the crap I brought down from the farm yesterday. Maybe a dump run if I feel ambitious.

Democrats and African American citizens

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Rep. Adam Schiff and impeachment

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Seems that he has some history on this - from Beitbart:

Adam Schiff Ran Against Impeachment in First Campaign for Congress
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) won his first race for Congress in 2000 by targeting a Republican who led the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

Then-Rep. James Rogan (R-CA) had been selected to be one of the two “managers” who led the prosecution of President Clinton in the Senate in 1999. Schiff, running in 2000, accused Rogan of neglecting important issues in his congressional district.

The Daily Caller News Foundation dug up coverage of the race:

Impeachment as a political issue has all but disappeared from America’s political radar in this election, with even Al Gore refusing to make the partisan death match of 1998 and 1999 a campaign issue in the year 2000. But here, in California’s 27th District, Rogan’s battle with Democratic state Sen. Adam Schiff seems the last bloody battle of the impeachment war,” Anthony York recounted in an October 2000 Salon article.

Schiff “used impeachment as a fundraising tool,” York noted in the article …

The Washington Post reported in May 2000 that while other issues were more important to the race, Schiff had attacked Rogan for leading the impeachment effort: “Schiff’s campaign literature hammers away on Rogan’s role in the impeachment proceedings, while Rogan in his direct mail to donors pleads for an ’emergency pledge of support’ to ‘stand with me as Bill Clinton and his Hollywood liberal friends wage their destructive warfare against me.'”

CNN reported: “Specter of impeachment haunts Rep. Jim Rogan’s re-election effort.” The Center Square recently recalled:

Following the impeachment of Bill Clinton, in the House election of 2000, Democrats made defeating Jim Rogan their highest priority. Adam Schiff was delegated as Clinton’s hatchet-man on the left coast.

When Clinton was acquitted in 1999 of perjury and obstruction of justice charges, the Clintons vowed to take Jim Rogan out. And together with a loyal pack of national leftist operatives, they engineered the biggest funneling of Democratic money into a single U.S. House race in American history. To distance them from Clinton’s affairs, they picked Adam Schiff, a fledgling leftist party lapdog as their pawn to checkmate Rogan’s career.

Much more at the site. Gotta love that line: leftist party lapdog - I bet that he will be thrown under the bus when the impeachment proceedings crash and burn. He is a party tool and when he is worn out, he will be abandoned to the dustbin of history. Right alongside Bill and Hillary.

And that's all folks...

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Got nothing planned for tomorrow so sleeping in a bit. Heading over to YouTube to see what the video faeries drug in.

And she is back in the hospital

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg - from USA Today:

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, four-time cancer survivor, is back in the hospital
Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a four-time cancer survivor, is back in the hospital after experiencing chills and fever Friday night.

Ginsburg, 86, was first admitted to Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington before being transferred to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for treatment of any possible infection, the court's press office announced Saturday evening.

She was treated with intravenous antibiotics and fluids and thereafter improved, the court said. She hopes to be released as early as Sunday morning.

I would not wish anyone ill health or a terminal illness but when she passes, this will be an incredible chance for the Supreme Court to return to its conservative roots and to cease legislating from the bench.

I still find it mind-boggling that she did not retire during Obama's reign - it would have been a shoe-in for another, younger liberal justice.

Happy Fibonacci Day

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From the website:

Fibonacci Day is a chance to celebrate an interesting and ancient concept at the intersection of math, nature, technology, and art.
Math holidays like Pi Day and Pythagorean Theorem Day are a fun way to learn about new topics. You may have never heard of it before, but Fibonacci Day takes place annually on Nov. 23, the date of which was chosen because the first numbers of the Fibonacci Sequence are 1, 1, 2 and 3.

What is the Fibonacci Sequence?
The holiday celebrates the legacy of Italian mathematician Leonardo Pisano Bogollo, better known as Fibonacci (Fibonacci was a nickname that roughly means “Son of Bonacci”). Fibonacci himself was born in Pisa, Italy, around 1170. He’s known for introducing Arabic numerals to the Western world and publishing a work that introduced the called Liber acaci that lead to the introduction of the Fibonacci sequence.

The resulting sequence begins with 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, a pattern of counting where each number is the sum of the previous two. This sequence appears commonly in nature in areas where growth can be measured. It’s found in seashells, plants and other living and nonliving areas. The sequence also is closely related to a number called the golden ratio and, in addition to being prevalent in nature, this type of system is used widely in computer data storage and processing. When we take any two successive Fibonacci Numbers, the resulting ratio is very close to the Golden Ratio, which is approximately 1.618034.

These numbers pop up everywhere and make for very beautiful forms.

From The Hill:

Mark Levin: Schiff awakened 'sleeping giant' with impeachment
Fox News host Mark Levin on Friday said House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has awakened a "sleeping giant" of the American people in the impeachment charge against President Trump. The reference to the famous quote compared the lawmaker to World War II Japanese Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto.

"After we were attacked at Pearl Harbor, Admiral Yamamoto of Japan said, 'I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve'," Levin told host Sean Hannity on Fox News. "You know, Adam Schiff, you are in some ways Admiral Yamamoto: You just awakened a sleeping giant. You threw everything you had at the president, at the Republicans, at 63 million voters who voted for this president."

"This is the best you have? You have nothing," Levin added. "You are the Democratic Party's Yamamoto."

Well said. Indeed. They have nothing - they need to return to their offices and get back to doing the job of representing their constituents. Play time is over - time to be an adult.

More deep-state jerks being named

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This time it is the New York Times doing the naming - kudos to them. From Zero Hedge:

NYT Names FBI "Resistance" Lawyer Under Criminal Investigation For Fabricating FISA Docs
The New York Times has revealed that the "low-level lawyer" under criminal investigation for allegedly doctoring materials used to obtain renewals  of the Carter Page surveillance warrant is Kevin Clinesmith - who worked on both the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the Russia probe, was part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team, and interviewed Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos.

Clinesmith, a 37-year-old graduate of Georgetown Law, "took an email from an official at another federal agency that contained several factual assertions, then added material to the bottom that looked like another assertion from the email’s author, when it was instead his own understanding," according to the report.

The 2020 election is still a long time off - things are going to get interesting before then. Last four months will see a lot of activity - time for more popcorn and another case of Coor's Light.

About that secret whistleblower

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'Ya know, the one that nobody knows their identity? From Senator Chuck Schumer's twitter account:

LTC Alexander Vindman and whistleblowers like him - sure sounds like he outed Vindman as one of the sooper seekret whistleblowers. All falling down around their ankles.

The coup in Israel

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The Democrats are trying to implement a soft coup against President Trump. Liberals in Israel are trying the same tactic.

From Neo:

Charges against Netanyahu: another coup?
Lawfare against Netanyahu has gotten to the point of this indictment:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been indicted on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit announced Thursday, prolonging the country’s political uncertainty as it looks set to head into its third national election in a year.

Netanyahu, who has denied any wrongdoing and said he is the victim of a “witch hunt,” faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of bribery and a maximum 3-year term for fraud and breach of trust, according to legal experts.

“I give my life to this state, I fought for it, I was wounded for it. I have to say this is a very hard day,” Netanyahu said in a nationally televised address on Thursday night. “I think you need to be blind to see that something wrong is going on. This is a political coup.”

If it sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The main differences between what’s happening to Trump in the US and what’s happening to Netanyahu in Israel (besides the details) is that in the US the process is being handled by the correct mechanism for removing a president, impeachment (even though it’s being undertaken in a partisan and unfair manner), and in Israel the removal is being attempted through the court system.

Liberals in both nations have nothing of substance - they are reduced to flinging poo against the wall and hoping something sticks.

An excellent rant

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Andy Havens just got added to the list of sites I check daily. Great rant:

The Hordes of the Invisible
I get a little thrown sometimes when I realize that I don’t know what things are like anywhere else. I don’t know the vibe in New York or the gestalt in Topeka. I don’t know what Floridians see when they walk down the street. I just don’t know much about how people measure their worlds outside of my own, and have to guard against the tendency to assume that what I know about my home applies everywhere.

I do know what it’s like here. And it’s strange. Seattle. It’s like touching something and not knowing right away whether it’s absolutely searingly hot, or skin-shatteringly cold, because there’s hints of both in the pain. We’re awash in activism. Utterly drowning in it. There isn’t a shop window that isn’t plastered with flyers for this march or that proclamation or that protest. Every author reading at every “local” bookstore – nota bene: everything is local, people. Absolutely everything. it only depends on where you’re standing – every reading is this cultural expression or that identity group’s response to something, or a statement of “this is me climbing proudly out of this miserable social/cultural prison.” In every instance it is billed, at least implicitly, in its subtext, as an exception. A rare opportunity. A victory over something. But you can’t have victory without competition, and you can’t have competition without an opponent, and so without realizing it, the movement itself ossifies the necessity of the opponent.

If you’re still listening to the subtext, you know that here it says that none who suffer do so as a result of their own failings. It is that whatever the nature of their suffering may have been – “invisibility” is a popular one, as well as the closely-related “marginalization,” and of course any word with “phobia” trailing from its backside like some undigested serpent that can never quite be pinched free – whatever the suffering, these are people who not only are/were down, but were put there, intentionally and perniciously, and are now rising up in spite of “the dominant culture’s” efforts to keep them down. But this raises a question or two for me:

Good observations, good writing. Much more at the site.

And I am back

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Ran up to the farm today - took the Highlander as I was not doing a lot of moving of large items. Cleared out my ham radio stuff and brought some of my guns and ammunition down - got a secure place to store them now.

Working down here tomorrow and meeting Monday, ham radio network Tuesday.

Nothing out there

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Quiet news day. YouTube for a bit and then to bed - want to wake up early tomorrow too.

Be careful tomorrow - black ice

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Getting very cold. Was supposed to hit Tuesday but it is here now.

Got an early morning tomorrow so will need to watch out for black ice when I am getting my coffee.

Out for the day

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Got a couple of errands to run. Paid bills this morning.

Nothing much happening out there. Out of dog food so heading up to Costco. Making some lima bean and bacon soup for dinner tonight.

Back in a couple of hours...

Yawn - Al Gore

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His fifteen minutes are well over - time for him to leave the public stage and spend more time with his grandkids.
From The Washington Times:

Gore on climate-change threat: 'This is the Battle of the Bulge. This is 9/11'
Former Vice President Al Gore on Tuesday compared the seriousness of climate change to battles fought during WWII and the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“This is Pearl Harbor. This is Midway. This is the Battle of Bulge. This is 9/11. We have to rise to this challenge. We have to change,” Mr. Gore said during a speech in New Jersey after Gov. Phil Murphy laid out his plan to transition the Garden State to clean energy sources, a local CBS affiliate reported.

Mr. Gore made the same comparison on Wednesday during a speech at Vanderbilt University in Nashville promoting his Climate Reality Project.

Chicken little all over again.

I think I will pass - cybertruck

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Great product roll-out - from Zero Hedge:

"Oh My F*cking God": Elon Musk’s Bizarre Cybertruck Unveiling Goes Horribly Wrong
Elon Musk took to the stage on Thursday night to peddle his latest desperate cash grab pile of shit introduce the first Tesla truck model at yet another sycophant-sell-out unveiling "party". In our wildest dreams, we couldn't imagine a more ridiculous revealing of Tesla's new "Cybertruck" than what took place. 

As the old saying goes, "a picture is worth a thousand words".

And here's that picture: a truck with two shattered windows that looks like it rolled out of a dumpster heap at a metal scrapyard, being offered for the low low price of just $39,900. 

Heh - he was touting how tough it was:

At which point another of Musk's assistants gently threw a similar metal ball at the Cybertruck parked on stage. The driver's side window promptly broke.

"Oh my fucking God," Musk nervously said, live on the stream, after the front window shattered into a million pieces. 

Oopsie. The truck looks hideous. Would not be buying it - no cargo room at all.

Off to the tube of you.

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Early morning tomorrow as well.

No rest for the wicked...

I love it - shades of "The Chicago Way" - from Breitbart:

W.H. Spox Gidley: If House Impeaches, Trump ‘Wants a Trial in the Senate’ and to Call Schiff, Whistleblower, and Bidens
On Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “The Story,” White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley stated that if the House moves forward on impeachment, President Trump “wants a trial in the Senate” and to bring up witnesses like House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA), the whistleblower, and Hunter and Joe Biden.

Gidley said, “I spoke to the president about this tonight. … The president did nothing wrong. He wants that plain and clearly explained to the American people. But, he also feels there’s no basis to move forward at all in the House. But if they do, he wants a trial in the Senate. He wants to be able to bring up witnesses like Adam Schiff, like the whistleblower, like Hunter Biden, like Joe Biden. And he says, if the House moves forward with this sham, and they continue to push these fake, illegitimate proceedings onto the American people, then he wants it to go to the Senate, and he wants a trial.”

Chicago Way? The Untouchables

A popular candidate - Patrick Deval

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Another passenger on the Democratic Clown Car - from FOX News:

Deval Patrick campaign event canceled at Atlanta college; only 2 people reportedly show up
A campaign event for former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who launched a late Democratic presidential bid last week, was canceled Wednesday evening when reportedly only two people showed up.

They have nothing to offer. None of them.

California infrastructure

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A couple of stories. First, the Los Angeles Times:

California suffered widespread cellphone outages during fires. A big earthquake would be much worse
When Ted Atz, a 75-year-old retiree in Marin County, learned that his power would go out during the Kincade fire, he texted his loved ones that he might lose cell service.

He was right. For four long days, Atz couldn’t make or receive calls. He’d drive around his hometown of San Anselmo, hoping to find better reception. He had no luck and was frustrated by the knowledge that if he suffered some kind of medical or other emergency, he couldn’t reach 911.

“I would have liked to let family know that I was OK,” Atz said.

Most cell sites have about three days of backup power - after that? Pffffttttt... Seems in Ted's case, the local site did not even have that. (cough... amateur radio... cough...)

This from Glen Reynolds - Law Professor and Instapundit:

Working With the System
We worry about terrorists, and rightly. But even without terrorists, things go wrong. SARS brought a major chunk of the global economy, and global transport network to a halt. The Great Blackout left 50 million without power for reasons still not entirely clear. The heat wave in France produced over 10,000 deaths. And the former Soviet Republic of Georgia suffered its own blackout, affecting millions -- though that one, like the great blackout in Memphis earlier this summer that left over a million people without power, some for weeks, got less attention because media people weren't affected directly.

And the meat of the matter:

But it's clear that this stuff matters. In particular, the cell-phone industry has dropped the ball. The cellphone network isn't just a luxury for rich guys and soccer moms anymore: it's a vital part of emergency infrastructure.

Unfortunately, according to an article in Newsday, it isn't up to the job:

Less than two years after the cellular network faltered following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the cellular system -- which the wireless industry promotes as a safety net during emergencies -- choked again.

The system broke down as a flood of nervous callers overloaded the network for some carriers; there wasn't enough capacity to handle the excess calls. Complicating matters, many cellular sites, which depend on electricity, had inadequate backup power.

Cell-phone carriers say the electrical outage was an event they couldn't possibly foresee.

I don't think that's much of an excuse, and I think that cell-phone technology is mature enough that it's fair to start expecting the kind of robust reliability that we've seen from landline services. This is too important to ignore.

And this from Glen at Instapundit:

SOME KATRINA LESSONS:
We’re going to see a plethora of commissions and inquiries (most about as useful and non-partisan as the 9/11 Commission), but here are a few lessons that seem solid enough to go with now:

1. Don’t build your city below sea level: If you do, sooner or later it will flood. Better levees, pumps, etc. will put that day off, but not prevent it.

2. Order evacuations early: You hate to have false alarms, but as Brendan Loy noted earlier, even 48 hours in advance is really too late if you want to get everyone out.

3. Have — and use — a plan for evacuating people who can’t get out on their own: New Orleans apparently had a plan, but didn’t use it. All those flooded buses could have gotten people out. Except that there would have had to have been somewhere to take them, so:

4. Have an emergency relocation plan: Cities should have designated places, far enough away to be safe, but close enough to be accessible, to evacuate people to. Of course, this takes coordination, so:

5. Make critical infrastructure survivable: I think that one of the key failures was the collapse of the New Orleans Police Department’s radio system. Here’s the story on why:

Infrastructure needs to be robust and bomb-proof. I will be running the Camano Island node of the weekly state-wide emergency net this coming Tuesday (I do it once/month; the net is every week) Even if. ESPECIALLY IF there is no emergency. Practice, practice, practice.

That way, when the shit does hit the fan, our actions will be second nature.

Fun meeting - amateur radio

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Local ham radio club met tonight - some good people there.

It is getting downright cold out - there was frost on the ground when I left at 5PM. Air temp is 34°F - have not measured the ground temp but it is definitely colder. Dead clear skies so lots of radiation cooling. Looking at a hard frost tomorrow morning. Time to buy some Brussels Sprouts - I love them but they need a good hard freeze before they sweeten up.

Quick run to the library

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Two more music CDs are in - Willie Nelson's Christmas album and one from Celtic Thunder.

Not playing every tune - building a playlist of quiet tunes as this will be background music for the pot-luck party. Using the awesome VLC media player from Videolan as it has a nice playlist feature. The playlist can be built and then exported as a text file so I can bring the thumbdrive to the community center, install VLC on their computer and play the tunes I have selected.

Fixing dinner

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Fixing a modified tuna casserole. Drained tuna mixed with black pepper and toasted sesame oil. Boil up some pasta (farfelle) and a couple minutes before it is done, drop in some frozen green peas. Drain and combine - simple and fairly tasty. Good measure of protein and carbs. Fixing a salad too.

Absolutely - impeachment

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From America's Newspaper of Record - the Babylon Bee:

Poll: Majority Want Impeachment Hearings To Continue As Long As Possible So Congress Will Be Too Busy To Meddle With Our Lives
A new poll released Wednesday revealed that the majority of the nation want impeachment hearings to continue as long as possible so that Congress will be too busy to meddle with our lives.

70% of the nation agreed that the House was doing a "fine job" on the impeachment hearings, saying that it's great that Congress is doing something other than pass terrible laws for once. 5% responded to the survey by saying they would prefer Congress stop the hearings and do their jobs, while a strong 25% said they weren't even aware impeachment hearings were going on. This latter group is the happiest of the bunch.

The impeachment inquiry has even sparked something of a revival, as people across the country are praying that impeachment hearings will go on indefinitely so that politicians in Washington will be too distracted by them to bother us very much.

Spot on.

Chicago law - Smollett

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Yeah - that guy is in the news again. From Legal Insurrection:

Jussie Smollett Sues City of Chicago for “Malicious Prosecution”
Guy concocts faux hate crime to gin up national press attention, gets busted, Chicago insists he pay for cost of investigating bogus crime and now guy is suing for “malicious prosecution,” basically.

Back in April, the city of Chicago filed a civil complaint against actor Jussie Smollett, seeking approximately $130,000, which they claim is the price tag for investigating Smollett’s “false police report.”

Now, Smollett is counter-suing.

From the WaPo:

This week, Smollett filed a counterclaim against the city of Chicago after its April lawsuit demanding that he pay $130,000 to make up for the 1,836 hours of police overtime spent looking into the alleged hate crime. In that suit, the city stated its intention to also seek attorneys’ fees and a civil penalty of $1,000 for each of Smollett’s alleged lies. But the actor’s lawyers claimed the city “is not entitled” to any of this.

“Having agreed to accept $10,000 from Mr. Smollett as payment in full connection with the dismissal of the charges against him,” the counterclaim filed Tuesday stated of his bond, “the City cannot seek additional recovery from Mr. Smollett under the doctrine of accord and satisfaction.”

The city sued him for $130K but settled for $10K - I bet they are going to come down on him like a ton of bricks. Should have left well enough alone. Discovery is going to be very interesting.

Heh - money laundering

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From National Public Radio:

U.S. Arrests Money-Laundering Expert For Laundering Money
For decades, Bruce Bagley has been regarded as a leading expert on organized crime in Latin America, particularly on money laundering. Now, the University of Miami professor is in trouble for the way he may have applied that knowledge.

Bagley was arrested Monday on charges of laundering $3 million on behalf of corrupt foreign nationals who collected the illicit funds through bribes and by embezzling from a public works project in Venezuela.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan also accused Bagley of pocketing about 10% of the money — about $300,000 — acquired over 14 transactions between November 2017 and April 2019.

Taking "Practice what you Preach" to a new level.

From the Daily Caller:

‘Bet On The Wrong Horse’ — Fiona Hill Confirms Ukraine Was Currying Favor With Hillary Clinton In 2016
Dr. Fiona Hill testified Thursday that members of the Ukrainian government were attempting to curry favor with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016 with the assumption that she was going to win the presidential election.

Hill made the admission while discussing a 2017 Politico article by reporter Ken Vogel that alleged Ukrainian officials attempted to sabotage President Donald Trump’s candidacy. The article has been used to prove that Ukraine, in addition to Russia, had some role in interfering with the US election.

They have nothing at all. Zero. A big fat nothingburger.

Crap like this is going to make President Trump's re-election in 2020 a slam dunk.

Seattle's solution to homelessness

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Seattle is in King County. Looks like they are really tackling the homeless problem - from The Bellingham Herald:

King County funds program to bus homeless away from county
King County Council has approved $100,000 in funding for a program that would bus the homeless outside the county.

KING-TV reports Council members earmarked the money as part of $450 million in supplemental funding for the 2019-2021 biennial budget.

Useless idea - a waste of money as all the homeless people will just migrate back to Seattle. Seattle is handing out more free stuff than any of the surrounding counties - that is why they came there in the first place.

The KING-5 story is here.

Not surprised - this is Amtrak after all

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The coming ice age

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Two dispatches from the field:

From Polar Bear Science:

Western Hudson Bay freeze-up earlier than average for 1980s for the third year in a row
This is the third year in a row that freeze-up of Western Hudson Bay (WH) ice has come earlier than the average of 16 November documented in the 1980s. Reports by folks on the ground near Churchill confirm polar bears are starting to move onto the sea ice that’s developing along the shore after almost 5 months on land. After five good sea ice seasons in a row for WH polar bears, this repeat of an early freeze-up means a sixth good ice season is now possible for 2019-2020.

From Ag Policy Blog:

Lawmakers Write FERC About Propane Shortages
Members of Congress on Thursday wrote the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission seeking to alert the commission to the need for a continued supply of propane to Midwest states.

Farmers and other rural residents across the Midwest "are facing an untenable situation with limited propane supplies in available in some areas to dry corn coming off the field," wrote the 31 House members from both parties who signed the letter.

Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minn., chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, spearheaded the letter.

"We hope to avoid a disastrous situation with cold temperatures and snow in the forecast spiking demand for residential deliveries just as farmers are needing to heat poultry and livestock barns and crop farmers are facing one of their most frustrating harvest seasons in years," lawmakers explained in the letter to Neil Chatterjee, chairman of FERC.

It is getting colder, not warmer.

Indeed - Mr. Rogers

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Where is the warming?

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After the rest of our nation has suffered from unseasonable cold weather, it is our turn. From Cliff Mass:

The Northwest Will Go Cold Turkey, But What About Snow?
It is now becoming clear that a major cold period will occur next week, cold enough that if you lack enough refrigeration for your holiday meal, you can simply put the food  outside.

Highs will only rise to the upper 30sF on the western side of Cascades and there will be substantial snow in the mountains. But will there be lowland snow? That I will explore later.

The models are now consistent in bringing cold air southward, as illustrated by the WRF model forecasts shown below, which present sea level pressure (solid lines) and temperature about 3000 ft above the surface (color shading). Next Tuesday at 1 PM, cold air (blue colors) is entering the region, pushed southward by high pressure in Canada and a low pressure area off the northern Oregon coast).

I could use some of that global warming right now. Five minutes of your time: Every 172 Years like clockwork:

More here: World Cycles Institute

And I am out the door for an hour or so

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Returning music CDs to the library, coffee, post office, etc...

5 moments - impeachment

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From our President:

They have nothing. This is our taxpayer money that is being used to fund this coup.

Off to YouTube

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Getting tired - time for a few videos and then to bed. Early morning tomorrow.

Bah Humbug - Christmas music

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The local arts group is having their annual Christmas Pot Luck instead of their public business meeting next month.

As a charter member of the Audiovisual Club (was that in high school - once a geek, always a geek) I have been tasked with providing Christmas music. Fun stuff as the library has an amazing collection. Going with the oldies - Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Elvis. Even Bob Dylan did a Christmas album. Burning to MP3 files - this is happening in the background as I surf. Already up to over 210 individual songs and still have a bunch more disks to process.

The Charlie's Angels bomb

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They did yet another remake of Charlie's Angels. It is WOKE and it is totally bombing at the box office.
Chris Lynch has a suggestion:

Movie Idea
Movie idea - a re-boot re-boot re-boot of Charlie's Angels. Hear me out.

The latest re-boot is a "woke" bomb at the box office. But they missed a golden opportunity.

If you really wanted to empower women the right way to do it would be to cast the voice of Charlie and the Bosley character as strong women. They can be smoking hot and smart as hell and they're in charge! Say Jessica Walters as the voice of Charlie and Jennifer Aniston as Bosley with the same attitude she brought to her role in Horrible Bosses.

The Angels could be three men - a cop, a special forces operator and professional male model who also happens to be a world class computer hacker. The three would have who have a hard time making it in today's world because they're too good looking and too macho and too heterosexual.

Also make the villain a hot looking woman and go full Airplane! and Naked Gun on the woke culture and you'd have the comedy hit of the year.

That would be aq fun movie. Nobody is making screwball comidies any more. Blazing Saddles or The Producers would never get the green light in today's Hollywood and we are diminished by this.

Not surprised - Pelosi

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From National File:

VIDEO: Ex-Girlfriend of Nancy Pelosi’s Son Claims He Illegally Uses His Mom’s Office to Enrich Himself
In an explosive interview with National File’s Patrick Howley, the ex-girlfriend of Nancy Pelosi’s son, Paul Pelosi Jr., claims that he uses his mom’s office to lure investors to donate in “shell” companies, and that she has never seen him work a real job.

Karena Feng, Pelosi Jr.’s ex-girlfriend, alleges systematic behavior of fraud, threats of violence, abuse, gaslighting and lies all occurred during her years long relationship with the son of the House Speaker, and provided National File with images, emails, and texts to confirm her story.

In one part of a nearly hour-long interview with Howley, Feng details how Pelosi Jr. allegedly uses his mother’s office to entice investors.

Howley asked, “Did he ever express to you what he does for a living?”

“He has a bunch of strange, shell businesses,” said Feng. “He talks about one company after another after another, and there’s really nothing going on, but he expresses it as if there’s something going on to get a bunch of investors.”

Feng went on, “He’s always on the phone talking to investors and telling them about how wonderful and how lucrative, for example, a marijuana outlet in Canada was going to be.”

She added that Pelosi Jr. is constantly leaving the country for foreign business trips, making unexplained visits to Canada and Greece in 2015. Feng says she is still unclear why these trips occurred.

However, she says that in every “shell business” created by Pelosi Jr., the investors never saw a return, and the business would fold having lost the investors’ money.

Must be nice living high on the hog on other people's money and knowing that your scams are going to get a pass with the FedGov and IRS. Apple not falling far from the tree.

In a nutshell

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Best explanation I have seen so far:

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Tip of the hat to Mostly Cajun

Beer was nice and cold and wet

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Surf for a lilttle bit and then an early bedtime - long day today and long day tomorrow.

Well crap - RIP Larry Korn

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One of the major agronomists promoting no-till farming. He visited the farm I like on Camano for a week last summer and I was looking forward to taking some classes from him next summer. From his Facebook page:

Dear friends, we’ve just learned that Larry Korn our friend, mentor, and “co-conspirator in the One Straw Revolution,” has passed from this life.

Strangely, we heard the news while visiting farmer friends on Japan’s Shikoku Island, the place where Larry spent those critical years with Masanobu Fukuoka. Shocked by the news, Suhee and I both sat for a long while, watching autumn clouds pass through the bright blue sky above the Seto Inland Sea. All we could say was a simple “Thank you, Larry.”

Larry had just visited here in Spring of last year. It was his first time returning to Japan since he left nearly four decades earlier, at the time carrying the manuscript of The One Straw Revolution in his hands. Larry’s work on that manuscript would bring the ideas of Masanobu Fukuoka and Natural Farming to millions of people. It is impossible to understate how fundamental Larrys’ work was to the establishment and growth of the worldwide sustainable farming movement.

So too, was his work fundamental to the course of our own lives. Larry’s deep care, humility, wisdom, and love for this earth were the seeds which made our documentary film possible. His work set the scene for a journey that changed the course of our lives in a beautiful way. To this day, we continue to see people whose lives have been positively changed by Larry’s writings, translations, workshops, and his interviews.

In doing so, we are witnessing the ripple effect which is endless — constantly growing, more today than it was yesterday. As time moves on, such beautiful ideas will only continue to blossom.

Thank you, Larry Korn.

If you want to spend time with Larry and some of these pioneering ideas, we’ve made the 20-minute film Food, Earth, Happiness freely available to all, which features interviews with Larry and other current day natural farmers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEC_qqn6epg

In memory of Larry, we are working on releasing the complete interviews which we filmed with him back in 2012 in Ashland, Oregon. We'll post it here, and at our website when it is released freely to the public.

Too cute

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From the internet:

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Never made it to the farm

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Spent a couple of hours in Bellingham at the condo as well as doing a bit of shopping. By the time I was done, it was too late to drive out to the farm. Meeting Thursday so planning to head up Friday or Saturday for two days.

Gorgeous day today and expected to be even better tomorrow. Heading out for a beer in 15-20 minutes or so.

From the London Daily Mail:

Prince Andrew cast out: How distraught Duke of York was summoned to Buckingham Palace by Queen and Prince Charles and told to 'step down' from royal life amid fall-out from his friendship with paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein
The Queen sacked her 'favourite son' Prince Andrew from Royal duties after discussing the Epstein scandal with Charles and summoning the Duke of York, a well placed source has said.

She took decisive action to contain the fall-out from the duke's disastrous TV interview about his friendship with a paedophile billionaire.

The interview triggered days of catastrophic headlines and caused a string of businesses and charities to desert him.

Following lengthy discussions with the Prince of Wales, who is touring New Zealand, the Queen summoned Andrew to Buckingham Palace and told him to step down.

That is going to hurt. He should have known better - it was his responsibility to think and not act with his dick.

The internet is forever - Eric Ciaramella

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Nobody in the Democratic party will admit to knowing him but he keeps turning up in the darndest places.
From the Washington Examiner:

PHOTO: Alleged whistleblower Eric Ciaramella shakes hands with Barack Obama in Oval Office
A year after Ukraine official and alleged whistleblower Eric Ciaramella left President Trump’s White House, a picture of him shaking Barack Obama’s hand was published on a close friend's wedding website.

The Oval Office photograph, obtained by the Washington Examiner, is circulating among Trump allies who consider it evidence that the alleged whistleblower is biased against Trump and had partisan motivations when he filed an Aug. 12 complaint that sparked impeachment proceedings.

In the photograph, a smiling Ciaramella, then Ukraine director on the National Security Council at the White House, is shown shaking Obama's hand. They are standing in front of a portrait of Abraham Lincoln by George Henry Story.

A Republican close to the White House said the photo was evidence Ciaramella supported Obama and its selection for the wedding website indicated he considered the Oval Office image a "glamour shot." "This photo confirms that career intelligence and foreign service officials serving at the highest ranks of the Trump White House have their own agenda and their own policy viewpoints," the Republican source said.

Busted... The Democrats have nothing.

More fun and games - Hunter Biden

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This is priceless. From the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:

DNA test shows Hunter Biden is father of Arkansas woman's baby
DNA testing has established, “with scientific certainty,” that Hunter Biden is the father of an Arkansas baby, according to a motion filed Wednesday in Independence County on behalf of the child’s mother, Lunden Alexis Roberts.

Biden, son of former vice president Joe Biden, “is not expected to challenge the results of the DNA test or the testing process,” the filing states.

An attorney for Hunter Biden, former Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Wonder what Hunter's wife (his third) and his three children have to say...

Heh - Ukraine

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Looks like they are draining their swamp as well. They had a corrupt government back when Obama was in power. All kinds of deals were cut which lined the pockets of a few politicians but did nothing to benefit the citizens of either the USA or the Ukraine. Things are changing. From Interfax-Ukraine:

MPs demand Zelensky, Trump investigate suspicion of U.S.-Ukraine corruption involving $7.4 bln
Ukrainian members of parliament have demanded the presidents of Ukraine and the United States, Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump, investigate suspicions of the legalization of $7.4 billion by the "family" of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych through the American investment fund Franklin Templeton Investments, which they said has ties to the U.S. Democratic Party.

Connected to Obama much? You decide:

"The son of Templeton's founder, John Templeton Jr., was one of President Obama's major campaign donors. Another fund-related character is Thomas Donilon. Managing Director of BlackRock Investment Institute, shareholder Franklin Templeton Investments, which has the largest share in the fund. It is noteworthy that he previously was Obama's national security advisor," Derkach said.

And this:

"President Zelensky must pick up the phone, dial Trump, ask for help and cooperation in the fight against corruption and fly to Washington. The issue of combating international corruption in Ukraine with the participation of citizens, businessmen and U.S. officials should become a key during the meeting of the two presidents," he said.

Biden, Kerry, et. al. are going down. If I were them, I would be looking at real estate in North Korea. Time to flee the country...

Wise words

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"If we do not maintain justice, justice will not maintain us."
--Francis Bacon

Heading North for the day. Pick up some more stuff at the farm. Stopping in Bellingham.

Meeting down here tomorrow so back to the island tonight.

Posting much later this night if at all.

I mean seriously?

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The American Civil Liberties Union has become irrelevant:

I am also saving a screen-cap of this tweet as I am sure once the adults wake up and see what was posted, they will delete the tweet.

Pure schadenfreude - Clinton Foundation

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I love it. From Summit News:

Clinton Foundation Files $16.8 MILLION Loss
Hillary Clinton’s name is pure poison and no one in their right mind wants anything to do with her.

This is evidenced nowhere more in the fact that the Clinton Foundation has gone from turning over a revenue of almost $400 million in 2013, to actually LOSING almost $33 million since Donald Trump wiped the floor with Hillary in 2016.

Newly released tax records show that the foundation reported a loss of almost $17 million in 2018, to add to the net loss of $16.1 million the previous year in 2017.

The numbers don’t lie.

Total revenue reported for 2018 was just $30.7 million, less than a tenth of what was being pulled in While Hillary was Secretary of State.

Still spending like an entitled plutocrat but, since she lost her mojo, there is no more income to speak of. Time to batten down the hatches. Or just keep spending her way into poverty. Whatever...

Could not be happening to a nicer person.

Two thoughts for today

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So true:

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Follow the money - marijuana sales

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California again...  They legalized it and proceeded to tax the hell out of it. From Sacramento, CA station KCRA

Illegal pot sales outpace legal cannabis in California
California’s marijuana industry is undergoing some severe growing pains -- and it’s much bigger than just licensing permits.

Nearly two years after recreational marijuana became legal in California, the black market is still much bigger than legal sales of marijuana.

At All About Wellness, a Sacramento pot shop, business is thriving. In fact, owner Phil Blurton is planning to expand into a bigger building next month. But, he’s also worried about his illegal competitor who don’t pay taxes.

“Our city license now is $20,000 a year,” Blurton said. “The state license is $96,000. Then we pay 8.75% sales tax to the state."

Blurton said he also pays an additional 4% cannabis tax to the city, on top of an additional 15% tax to the state, “which is making the cost of our product so expensive the black market is booming now.”

It's booming to the tune of $8.7 billion in illegal sales this year. That’s more than double the legal market, according to an industry report released by BDS Analytics.

Yikes - talk about an egregious level of taxation. That is not sustainable for any business unless they jack their prices up to well above "traditional" pot prices. No wonder the "black market" sales are going so well.

Life in a 3rd world nation - California

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Power going out again. From their Pacific Gas and Electric blog:

PG&E Could Shut Off Power for Safety in Portions of 16 Counties on Wednesday; Six Other Counties, Previously Targeted for Shutoff, Will Not Be De-Energized
Customers in portions of 16 counties have been given a 24-hour notification by PG&E about a potential Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) starting Wednesday morning.

Gee - if they had only taken some of their money and used it to maintain their infrastructure instead of blowing it on various alternative energy rat-holes, they would not have to do this.

Nuclear power is the way to go.

Seriously WTF - Nancy Pelosi

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The Democrats are revealing their inner tyrant. From Flag and Cross:

Pelosi’s Letter to Dems Makes Clear It Is ‘Dangerous’ to Let Election Decide Who Will Be POTUS
Even for Nancy Pelosi, this is pretty bad. How dare she say something like this? Where does she find the stones? Oh, that’s right. She can say whatever she wants because the mainstream media will spin in her favor. Got it.

All this does is reinforce the notion that President Trump never has, nor ever will, receive any semblance of credibility from the Democrat Party. These people are ruthless in their desire to destroy Trump’s life.

At the end of the day, Trump was the right man for the job. He has a big mouth and he likes to use it. He won’t apologize for being brash. He doesn’t care if liberals see things his way or not. He’s determined. He’s focused on making America a better place than she was under Barack Obama. And he’s winning.

Every day I wake up and thank God that Hillary did not steal the election. I can not imagine how bad our Nation would be if she won.

Veganism

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I have never met a vegan that seemed healthy. I was a vegetarian for about ten years and that is a sustainable diet but to eliminate all animal products from your diet is - to put it mildly - stupid. From Kim DuToit:

Quote Of The Day
From the normally mild-mannered Prof. Reynolds:

“Vegans should just be grateful for not being pantsed on sight.  Veganism is stupid and immoral, and mostly a marker for mental illness or deficiency.”

True dat.  He left out a lot of other endearing vegan traits, but the Treacher Man has his back:

“You just can’t please vegans, because if they were capable of happiness, they wouldn’t be vegans.  You can’t cater to them — in this case literally — because their entire philosophy is anti-human.  They’re ashamed of their own existence on this planet, and that shame has turned them into totalitarian wackjobs.”

Absolutely - Treacher nails it.

And I am out - long day

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Was up early, got another long day tomorrow and a meeting Thursday.

Found out this afternoon that a good buddy of mine whom I had been mentoring for Ham Radio passed his test and got his license the first time around. The more the merrier...

Youtube. Bed.

Keep your freezer full - a heads up

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Not hyperbole, just a confluence of unfortunate events. From Musings from the Chiefio:

Why You Need To Store Meat Now
The basic problems are:

1) More than 1/4 of all the swine on the planet have already died in the African swine fever outbreak. A haemorrhagic fever of hogs.
2) It has a lot further to go (Australia, Americas, Europe).
3) The virus can live for months in products like pigs ears for dogs.
4) It WILL get much worse.
5) Corn and soy will be in short supply for animal feed given present harvest.
6) China corn is in worse shape and they are buying a lot, so their shortage is coming here.
7) Remember that hay shortage? It isn’t any better.
8) Cattle herd culling is happening NOW holding beef prices down.
9) Beef prices will go up when the cull ends and herds are balanced to lower feed supply.

That pretty much says you have a few months to put away a freezer full, can some up, buy or make jerky, or buy some canned corned beef (or corn your own :-)

In 2020 meat prices will be higher, supply lower, and selection reduced.

More at the site. I have been tracking this and in the last four months, the price for Pork Butt (actually a shoulder cut) has gone from $1.89 to $2.79 at Costco (148% price jump since July). Very tough and cheap meat but it responds to smoking and slow braising gloriously. Makes amazing pulled pork. I buy a whole butt, portion it out into one pound chunks, smoke them and cryocvac them with seasonings (salt, pepper, garlic, rosemary).

When I need a pulled pork fix, I will thaw it out, sous-vide for eight or more hours and then finish with a sear and adjust the seasonings to suit. Amazing stuff. Now have about 40 pounds in the freezer and thinking of getting another two butts and processing them.

Yes, I have a backup generator.

Very cool technology - airplanes

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Cirrus makes some wonderful airplanes. Here is one example of their technology:

Developed in partnership with Garmin. Fun time to be alive - I can see all sorts of trickle-down with this.

The Jeffrey Epstein murder

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Starting to be investigated. The Deep State is not doing so well these days. From the New York Times:

Guards Accused of Napping and Shopping Online the Night Epstein Died
The night that Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself in a Manhattan jail, one of the guards on duty was catching up on sports news and looking at motorcycle sales on a government computer. The other spent time shopping online for furniture. For about two hours, they appeared to be asleep at a desk just 15 feet away from Mr. Epstein’s cell.

Those details were revealed in an indictment unsealed on Tuesday against the two jail employees. The indictment said neither guard made the required rounds every 30 minutes to check on inmates. Yet they filed paperwork claiming they had.

The entire night, from 10:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m., security cameras showed that nobody entered the wing where Mr. Epstein had been left alone in his cell, the indictment said. The guards, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, only discovered Mr. Epstein was dead when they went in to give him breakfast.

“I messed up,” Mr. Thomas reportedly told a supervisor just minutes later, according to the indictment.

Thomas and Noel are classical Fall Guys - it would be interesting to see what money is being transferred to any family members or what family members are being promoted to plumb positions in the New York State bureaucracy. Not gonna happen now but let's take a look in six months or so...

Arkancide anyone?

A touch-typer's nightmare

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No idea where this is from but it caught my eye:

20191119-keyboard.jpg

I would be lost...

From the New York Post:

Obama aides allegedly left Trump staffers ‘You will fail’ notes
President Obama’s aides taunted the incoming Trump administration in 2017 by leaving notes around the White House that said, “You will fail,” Trump’s press secretary said Tuesday.

“We came into the White House, I’ll tell you something. Every office was filled with Obama books, and we had notes left behind that said, ‘You will fail,’ ‘You aren’t going to make it,’” White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham told a Norfolk, Va., radio station during an interview.

Three former Trump aides confirmed Grisham’s claim to the Daily Mail, the Web site said.

She added that cabinets in the press office also were “filled” with books by Obama, who has written three tomes, and inside one of the drawers was another “You will fail” note.

And sadly, this is not without precident - Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2002

Clinton Transition Left $15,000 Damage, GAO Says
A yearlong investigation into whether Clinton administration aides left the White House in fraternity-party disarray as they vacated the presidential premises has turned up about $15,000 in damage, according to a government report released Tuesday.

Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) asked the General Accounting Office last June to look into allegations that Clinton staffers had ripped phone cords from walls, left obscene voicemail messages, defaced bathrooms and vandalized computer keyboards by removing the “W” keys when they left the White House. A number of items, including a 12-inch presidential seal and several antique doorknobs, were assumed stolen.

“The Clinton administration treated the White House worse than college freshmen checking out of their dorm rooms,” Barr said Tuesday. “They disgraced not just themselves but the institution and the office of the presidency as well.”

If the name is familiar, Mr. Barr is now our Attorney General and is cleaning up the deep state.

Interesting use of a radio band

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From Space News:

Satellite operators lose battle for private C-band auction worth billions
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai informed Congress Nov. 18 that the agency will run a public auction of C-band spectrum instead of allowing a consortium of satellite operators to sell it directly to 5G wireless operators.

Satellite operators Intelsat, SES and Telesat, acting as the C-Band Alliance, have been lobbying the Federal Communications Commission for more than a year to approve a private auction of C-band spectrum expected to fetch upwards of $60 billion in proceeds.

A good idea and it should be a public auction and not a private one. Too much insider dealing there. If the 5G people want the band, they can pay for it.

I do like the idea of 5G using these frequencies. They have languished for a long time. Remember all those old six-foot diameter television dishes? Those are C-band. 5G would be a perfect use. Just make it a public transaction please.

Film sound

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I have always been really interested in the music used for movie soundtracks. A friend said that this was "our generations'" classical music and I have to agree.

Was looking at something and ran into this website: Film Sound

It is focused on all aspects of movie soundtracks, not just music. Looks to be a really good resource.

Fun list here: Film Sound Clichés - so true...

Heh - stupidity at Whole Foods

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From the American Council on Science and Health:

Whole Foods Sells Both 'Nitrate-Free Meat' And Nitrate Supplements. Yup.
Whole Foods chemists, an incongruity if ever there were one, must have a helluva job. They somehow must explain to suckers customers how the same chemical can be both good and bad for you. And also how an inorganic salt can be "organic" depending on its source. This takes a degree of creativity, and Whole Foods is nothing if not creative, especially when it comes to science. 

More at the site - they go into quite a bit of detail. Vegetables are a very good (ie: high) source of nitrates.

Yesterday's rain

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Cliff Mass has some nice satellite photos of yesterday's storm:

Satellite Extravaganza
The MODIS weather satellite image around noon on Monday had something for everyone, including a major Pacific cyclone and attendant fronts approaching our region (see below).

20191119-satellite.jpg

Yup - that was what we were dealing with yesterday. Much more at the site.

Hoist by one's own petard

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Oopsie - from LEO Affairs:  (LEO - Law Enforcement Officer)

Seattle police captain arrested in his own department’s prostitution sting
A Seattle Police Department captain was arrested early Thursday morning on suspicion of sexual exploitation and has been placed on administrative leave, court records and the police department confirmed.

Randal Woolery was booked shortly after midnight and released less than 30 minutes later, according to King County Jail records.

“Seattle police arrested a 53-year-old SPD employee last night in an undercover Vice operation in North Seattle,” said a statement provided by department spokesman Sgt. Sean Whitcomb.

“The employee was booked into King County Jail with a request for misdemeanor charges, and the information was forwarded to the Office of Police Accountability,” the statement said. “The employee, a 31-year veteran assigned to the Professional Standards Bureau, has been placed on administrative leave.”

Bad cop - no donut.

156 years ago today - Gettysburg Address

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From the Infogalactic entry:

The Gettysburg Address is a speech by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, one of the best-known in American history. It was delivered by Lincoln during the American Civil War, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg.

Abraham Lincoln's carefully crafted address, secondary to other presentations that day, was one of the greatest and most influential statements of national purpose. In just over two minutes, Lincoln reiterated the principles of human equality espoused by the Declaration of Independence and proclaimed the Civil War as a struggle for the preservation of the Union sundered by the secession crisis, with "a new birth of freedom" that would bring true equality to all of its citizens. Lincoln also redefined the Civil War as a struggle not just for the Union, but also for the principle of human equality.

Pretty powerful stuff - full text:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here, have, thus far, so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that, government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

government of the people, by the people, for the people - we have lost our way and need to return to these basic precepts. Remember, they work for us. It is not the other way around.

Happy Blade Runner day

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Seminal movie Blade Runner was set between Nov 19 and Nov 22, 2019. A classic. Great soundtrack too.

Don Surber on the impeachment hearings

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The ratings suck. It is a boring show-trial. From Don's website:

Impeachment is must miss TV
Maybe today will be different. Maybe millions of Americans suddenly will see the light. Maybe they will abandon President Donald John Trump and tune in the Democrat Party's Taxpayer Funded Operation Research and Medicine Show on TV.

But we know better.

The impeachment inquisition is a slow, tedious show trial in which instead of confessing their sins against the state, the State Department experts who brought us Benghazi complain that President Trump ignored their advice and set foreign policy.

Nota Bene: It is the job of the President to set Foreign Policy. It is the job of the State Department to carry the policy out. To do different is to violate the Logan Act. Don then links to Rich Noyes' article at News Busters:

Yawn: 95% of U.S. Adults Skipped Friday’s Impeachment Hearings
Americans aren’t exactly obsessed with the Democrats’ impeachment hearings, it seems. Friday’s second day of live, wall-to-wall coverage drew an average of 12.7 million viewers on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC and the Fox News Channel combined.

That’s down from a relatively tepid 13.1 million for Day 1 of testimony on Wednesday.

In comparison, an actual news event that definitely captured Americans’ imagination — the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial — drew 150 million viewers (nearly twelve times as many) back in 1995.

That's got to hurt - 12 times more people watched the O.J. Trial. They have nothing. Time for Schiff to crawl back under his rock.

Good meeting this morning

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Working on a bunch of stuff down here. Busy.

Home today and then farm tomorrow - another meeting Thursday evening so just up for the day.

Fix lunch and surf for a while...

Good meeting - beers after

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A couple people from the meeting went out for drinks after and we chatted for another two hours. Great group of people and we covered a lot of stuff. This is the local arts association and we are looking at expanding our scope.

Got a 9:00AM meeting tomorrow so calling it quits for tonight. Couple of videos and a glass of wine and that will be it.

Is there anything it can not do? Fertilize the plants of the world, provide an excellent source of heat, make diamonds and that is just scratching the surface. From the AAAS Science:

The next graphene? Shiny and magnetic, a new form of pure carbon dazzles with potential
A “happy accident” has yielded a new, stable form of pure carbon made from cheap feedstocks, researchers say. Like diamond and graphene, two other guises of carbon, the material seems to have extraordinary physical properties. It is harder than stainless steel, about as conductive, and as reflective as a polished aluminum mirror. Perhaps most surprising, the substance appears to be ferromagnetic, behaving like a permanent magnet at temperatures up to 125°C. The discovery, announced by physicist Joel Therrien of the University of Massachusetts in Lowell on 4 November here at the International Symposium on Clusters and Nanomaterials, could lead to lightweight coatings, medical products, and novel electronic devices.

Therrien’s talk elicited both excitement and caution among the dozens of researchers attending the meeting. “Once it is published and the work has been replicated by others, it will generate a lot of interest for sure,” says Qian Wang, an applied physicist at Peking University in Beijing. She notes that carbon is much lighter than other ferromagnetic elements such as manganese, nickel, and iron. Moreover, carbon is nontoxic in the body, she says. “If it can be magnetic, it could be very useful for making biosensors or drug-delivery carriers” that could be magnetically interrogated or directed to diseased tissues.

This has not been reproduced by another labrotory so the jury is still out but wow - if this pans out, it could be interesting. New technologies. AAAS is the American Association for the Advancement of Science - good people.

Picking up a book at the library, getting a quick bite (burrito) and then Board meeting tonight.

Getting a beer or two later - back in a couple of hours.

Very interesting - Linux

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I love linux. Use Windows for office stuff but am running Linux on a couple of other systems. Very efficient for older systems and there is a lot of software out there - ham radio, photography, music, programming, etc...

An interesting metric at ZD Net:

The world's fastest supercomputers hit higher speeds than ever with Linux
Yes, there's a lot of talk now about how quantum computers can do jobs in 200 seconds that would take the world's fastest supercomputers 10,000 years. That's nice. But the simple truth is, for almost all jobs, supercomputers are faster than anything else on the planet. And, in the latest Top 500 supercomputer ratings, the average speed of these Linux-powered racers is now an astonishing 1.14 petaflops.

The fastest of the fast machines haven't changed since the June 2019 Top 500 supercomputer list. Leading the way is Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Summit system, which holds top honors with an HPL result of 148.6 petaflops. This is an IBM-built supercomputer using Power9 CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. 

In a rather distant second place is another IBM machine: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Sierra system. It uses the same chips, but it "only" hit a speed of 94.6 petaflops.

Close behind at No. 3 is the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, with an HPL mark of 93.0 petaflops. TaihuLight was developed by China's National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology (NRCPC) and is installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi. It is powered exclusively by Sunway's SW26010 processors.

That is fast...

That sums things up perfectly

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Excerpted from Ace of Spades:

Look, in every real sense, the Democrats have nothing, never had anything and will never get anything even remotely resembling a legitimate high crime of misdemeanor on this President that warrants impeachment. But, they will persist because a) they're completely out of their minds (with the possible exception of that Democrat Congressman Jeff Van Drew who sees this as a looming disaster) with hatred, b) their candidates and platform for 2020 is terrifying and repulsive even to those marginally interested in politics and c) the Deep State globalists in and outside government will not abide by having their grand strategy to control the destiny of this nation and its people taken from them.

Much much more at the site. This is a Monday morning link dump of stuff that they found interesting.

Interesting data point - mass shootings

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From Real Clear Politics:

Of 27 Deadliest Mass Shooters, 26 of Them Were Fatherless
After all, it is boys and men who are typically to blame for violent acts of aggression. Ergo, testosterone the defining hormone of masculinity must be to blame. But testosterone has been around forever. School shootings have not.

Makes a lot of sense - a stable family produces stable children.

Another Democrat gets busted

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From CNN:

Mayor of Muncie, Indiana arrested by the FBI amid corruption probe
Dennis Tyler, the Democratic mayor of Muncie, Indiana, was arrested at his home on Monday morning, according to the FBI.

An arrest warrant was executed at Tyler's home at 7:30 a.m., according to Chris Bavender, spokeswoman with the FBI in Indianapolis. Tyler is currently in FBI custody, Bavender said.

Bavender referred any additional questions to the US Attorney's Office, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Not just him:

Earlier this year, the city's former building commissioner was sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty to wire fraud and money laundering, WXIN reported.

Kudos to CNN for mentioning the Mayor's political affiliation in the first paragraph. Usually, the mainstream media either doesn't mention it if they are Democrat or the reveal is buried far down below the fold.

Utensil control

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We need more laws governing utensils. From America's newspaper of record: The Babylon Bee:

Supreme Court Allows Victims Of Heart Disease, Obesity To Sue Utensil Manufacturer
Acme Forks & Knives was trying to block a lawsuit brought against them by the obese community. The lawsuit suggested that the company's utensils were deadly tools that caused people to become overweight.

The Supreme Court has blocked the company's attempt to block the lawsuit, paving the way for victims of heart disease and other diet-related ailments to sue Acme.

"Finally---the big forks and knives lobby will be held accountable for contributing to heart disease and obesity, the leading causes of death among American adults," said a spokesperson for the oppressed obese community. "No human action leads to these deaths. It is entirely on the sentient utensils used to carry out the mass eating events."

"Blood is on their hands!" protesters cried. "Fight the corporate fork and knife lobby!"

Heh...

Mental health - not gender identity

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A lot of people who get sucked up into the gender reassignment bandwagon regret their decisions later. 19 years old is way too young to commit to something like this. From PJ Media:

'Frankenstein Hack Job': 19-Year-Old Regrets His Transgender Surgery
Transgender ideology is destroying lives, and victims are speaking out. In 2016, two women spoke about how they were permanently scarred by taking male hormones and having "top surgery" — the removal of their breasts. Last month, another woman who once identified as a man went public about setting up a support network for de-transitioners in Britain. This week, de-transitioner Walt Heyer shared the harrowing story of a 19-year-old man who thought he was a woman and described his new "female" anatomy in revealing terms.

Less than a year after receiving "bottom surgery" — removing his male genitals and replacing them with a simulated female version — 19-year-old Nathaniel deeply regrets his decision.

"Now that I’m all healed from the surgeries, I regret them," he wrote to Heyer. "The result of the bottom surgery looks like a Frankenstein hack job at best, and that got me thinking critically about myself. I had turned myself into a plastic-surgery facsimile of a woman, but I knew I still wasn’t one. I became (and to an extent, still feel) deeply depressed."

The first link points to an article calling it the Transgender 'Cult' Sounds about right...

When it is convenient for our narrative

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From OANN News Network:

Nancy Pelosi Has ‘No Idea’ When Impeachment Inquiry Will End
After several witnesses were called by the House to testify about President Trump’s relations with Ukraine, many are wondering just how many more will be brought in. Unfortunately, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can’t give an answer.

During an interview on Sunday, Pelosi stated she has “no idea” when the House’s impeachment inquiry will end and noted that the decision is up to the Intelligence Committee. She went on to say she is unsure the depositions would be wrapped up by the end of the year.

Like I said, they will end this farce when it is convenient for them. When it fits their narrative.

Now this will be interesting

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From Yahoo/Agence France-Presse:

Kanye West announces his first-ever opera, 'Nebuchadnezzar'
The announcement arrived a few hours after West paid a visit to renowned televangelist Joel Osteen at his Houston megachurch to discuss his recent commitment to Christianity.

"I know that God's been calling me for a long time and the devil's been distracting me for a long time. Jesus has won the victory. I told you about my arrogance and cockiness already. Now the greatest artist that God has ever created is now working for him," West declared.

Like much of his latest "Jesus is King" album, the rapper is drawing inspiration from the Bible for his first-ever opera, which will premiere on November 24 at Los Angeles's Hollywood Bowl.

The name "Nebuchadnezzar" refers to a king of Babylon who was famously driven insane for seven years in the book of Daniel, as he refused to acknowledge that his power, wealth and influence were from God and not of his own making.

Great story for the libretto. Should be really interesting. One of my favorite operas is Phillip Glass' Akhenaten. (more on Akhenaten here

Raining pretty hard

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That pineapple express is here - been raining pretty steady for the last couple of hours. We can see the effects of the last two fronts in the discharge of the Stillaguamish river - today's rainfall will show up in about 24 hours:

20191118-stilly.pngMaking some more nectar for the hummingbird feeders this afternoon and digging out the bird seed feeders. That time of year.

Got nothing this morning

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Heading out for coffee and some errands.

Meeting later today - need to take care of some paperwork and pay bills so doing that this afternoon. Also need to clean house and do some more sorting of crap.

Will be trying my new InstantPot rice cooker for dinner - last of the feijoada.

Punching back twice as hard - impeachment

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Starting to heat up a bit - from Breitbart:

White House Official Sues Politico: ‘Conspired with Schiff’ to Leak False Info to ‘Further Impeachment Inquisition’
House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) “acted in concert” with Politico to leak allegedly false information from the impeachment inquiry as part of a “scheme” to advance the “inquisition” against President Donald Trump, according to an explosive defamation lawsuit filed by a senior Trump White House official on Monday.

White House official Kash Patel, who is a senior counterterrorism official on the National Security Council (NSC), filed the lawsuit in Virginia court in which he says Schiff “weaponized the media” to advance his impeachment agenda.

Patel is a former staffer to the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), who later moved to the White House in the NSC to advise the president on national security and intelligence matters.

Patel on Monday filed the defamation suit in Virginia state court against Politico, Natasha Bertrand, a reporter for the establishment media outlet, and Robert Allbritton, the publisher and executive chairman of the media organization, all identified as defendants.

Patel accuses the defendants of defaming him by working with Schiff and members of his staff to disseminate false stories about him.

Great move - start hitting the complicit media. Break the law? Go to jail. Could not happen to a nicer bunch of idiots.

Some really good welding

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I love TIG - it is slow but you can do some amazingly precise welding. I am nowhere near this level :)
2:41 of some amazing technique. From 6061.com (YouTube channel here and their website here)

Some thoughts

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From Thomas Sowell:

Some really good ones - this one especially caught my eye:

Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.

True dat... This was published in 2004 but just as good today. Timeless.

Another passing - Werner Gustav Doehner

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Werner Gustav Doehner? From Time Magazine:

Last Survivor of 1937 Hindenburg Disaster Dies at Age 90
The last remaining survivor of the Hindenburg disaster, who suffered severe burns to his face, arms and legs before his mother managed to toss him and his brother from the burning airship, has died.

Werner Gustav Doehner, the last among 62 passengers and crew who escaped the May 6, 1937, fire, was 90. The fire killed his father, sister and 34 others. He was just 8 years old at the time.

“He did not talk about it,” his son Bernie Doehner said, adding that his father took him years later to visit the naval station where the disaster happened but not the Hindenburg memorial itself. “It was definitely a repressed memory. He lost his sister, he lost his dad.”

Quite the bit of history. Amazing what he had seen through his life.

From Canada's CBC:

Captain Dick Stevenson, inventor of Yukon's infamous 'Sourtoe Cocktail,' has died
Captain Dick Stevenson, a true Yukon original who "invented" one of the territory's oddest claims to fame — a drink with a severed human toe in it — has died.

According to his daughter, Dixie Stevenson, he died in Whitehorse early Thursday morning at age 89.

"I'm pretty sure I'm the only daughter in history that has to, following my dad's will, make sure that his toes are removed and dried and make it up to Dawson City," Dixie said on Thursday.

"As a matter of fact, I'm just on my way downtown. I have to buy containers and pickling salt."

Captain Dick's world-famous invention, the "Sourtoe Cocktail," is nearly 50 years old and continues to draw brave and thirsty crowds to Dawson City's Downtown Hotel.

Order one up and you'll get a shot of whiskey with a gnarled old human toe bobbing in the glass. Let the toe touch your lips and you're in the Sourtoe club — with a certificate to prove it.

"I thought maybe only 10 or 12 people would ever do it," Captain Dick Stevenson recalled in a CBC interview in 2017.

To date, more than 90,000 people have kissed the toe.

Quite the character... More of the story at the site.

Now this is cute

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Great human interest story from the San Antonio, TX FOX affiliate:

5-year-olds wear matching outfits for Twin Day after insisting they look exactly the same
FOLEY, Al. (WSET) -- Two boys dressed up as twins for Twin Day after one of the boys insisted they looked exactly the same.

Britney Tankersley's son, Myles, insisted that he and another boy in his class named Tanner were twins so they had to dress up for Twin Day during Red Ribbon Week at Magnolia School in Foley.

Myles insisted that he and Tanner were the exact same: same eyes and same hair.

Tankersley wasn't sure if Tanner wanted to participate in Twin Day with Myles but Myles kept insisting it had to be done.

After searching through Facebook and sending messages, Tankersley was able to get ahold of Tanner's mother and Tanner's mother gave Tankersley Tanner's clothing size.

Tankersley went to Walmart in Foley at 9:00 p.m. to buy the boys matching outfits for Twin Day.

I don't see a difference - do you?

20191117-brothers.jpg

A couple of brothers from different mothers.

Interactive dam map

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Tried the Interactive Dam Map again in Brave - still hangs indefinitely. For a lark, tried it in Internet Explorer and it pops right up. Ditto for Chrome. Something must be triggering in Brave but it does not alert me to a security issue, it just partly loads and then hangs. Will file a bug report.

No dangerous dams in my area - either the farm or the island. There are three just South of Everett - half-way between Everett and Redmond. Might be a fun road trip to take a look.

Our crumbling infrastructure - dams

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Associated Press has been covering this very well recently. First a highlight on California and now this on our dams:

AP: At least 1,680 dams across the US pose potential risk
On a cold morning last March, Kenny Angel got a frantic knock on his door. Two workers from a utility company in northern Nebraska had come with a stark warning: Get out of your house.

Just a little over a quarter-mile upstream, the 92-year-old Spencer Dam was straining to contain the swollen, ice-covered Niobrara River after an unusually intense snow and rainstorm. The workers had tried but failed to force open the dam’s frozen wooden spillway gates. So, fearing the worst, they fled in their truck, stopping to warn Angel before driving away without him.

Minutes later, the dam came crashing down, unleashing a wave of water carrying ice chunks the size of cars. Angel’s home was wiped away; his body was never found.

State inspectors had given the dam a “fair” rating less than a year earlier. Until it failed, it looked little different from thousands of others across the U.S. — and that could portend a problem.

A more than two-year investigation by The Associated Press has found scores of dams nationwide in even worse condition, and in equally dangerous locations. They loom over homes, businesses, highways or entire communities that could face life-threatening floods if the dams don’t hold.

A review of federal data and reports obtained under state open records laws identified 1,688 high-hazard dams rated in poor or unsatisfactory condition as of last year in 44 states and Puerto Rico. The actual number is almost certainly higher: Some states declined to provide condition ratings for their dams, claiming exemptions to public record requests. Others simply haven’t rated all their dams due to lack of funding, staffing or authority to do so.

Much much more at the site. Sobering. Associated Press also has an interactive tool here. but it is taking a long time to load. I will try again later this afternoon.

This is so true

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20191117-magic.jpg

Mayor Pete screws up

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From The Gateway Pundit:

WOW! Pete Buttigieg Puts Out List of 400 South Carolina Black Supporters: 42% Are White, Many Didn’t Endorse and Pete Used Generic Stock Photo FROM KENYA to Promote the List
South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg put out a list of 400 black supporters from South Carolina to boost his street cred with African Americans and liberal elites.

But it failed miserably:

Via Rachel Gonzalez:

    • 42% Are White
    • Many Didn’t endorse Buttigieg
    • Pete used a generic stock photo of black people FROM KENYA to promote his list

He’s lucky he’s a Democrat. If he was a Republican his campaign would be over.
And this clown wants to be president?

More at the site. Just not that bright.

Washington State Parks - a new website

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Looks wonderful - lots of photographs and a handy locator. Check out the Washington State Parks Foundation

This is rich - too left for Barack

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From the New York Times:

Obama Says Average American Doesn’t Want to ‘Tear Down System’
Former President Barack Obama offered an unusual warning to the Democratic primary field on Friday evening, cautioning the candidates not to move too far to the left in their policy proposals, even as he sought to reassure a party establishment worried about the electoral strength of their historically large primary field.

And a bit more:

While Mr. Obama did not single out any specific primary candidate or policy proposal, he cautioned that the universe of voters that could support a Democratic candidate — Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans — are not driven by the same views reflected on “certain left-leaning Twitter feeds” or “the activist wing of our party.”

“Even as we push the envelope and we are bold in our vision we also have to be rooted in reality,” Mr. Obama said. “The average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.”

This is rich coming from Barry. Didn't he campaign on fundamentally transforming America? (here, here, here, here and here) Thank God that President Trump is unwinding most if not all of President Obama's "legacy" and getting America and her people back onto a solid foundation.

An interesting number - 10.38%

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From the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services:

DACA Requestors with an IDENT Response
November 2019 Update

Introduction
The following tables provide information on DACA requestors from 2012 to October 2019 whoreceived an IDENT response. USCIS administrative data and IDENT data were analyzed to determine:

    • if a DACA requestor received an IDENT response;
    • when the IDENT response occurred in relation to an approval or denial of the DACA request;
    • the types of offenses associated with an arrest or apprehension of a DACA requestor;
    • the age group of a DACA requestor at the time of arrest;
    • the region and country of birth of arrested DACA requestors;
    • the last known state of residence of arrested DACA requestors; and
    • the state where the arrest of DACA requestors occurred.

An IDENT response indicates that an alien, in this case a DACA requestor, was arrested or apprehended for a criminal offense or an immigration-related civil offense. These tables only analyze arrests and apprehensions, as not all IDENT responses include disposition of the arrest or apprehension such as conviction, acquittal, dismissal or lessening of charges. These tables provide updates to the previous DACA Requestors with an IDENT Response report published on June 5, 2018. However, due to updates in reporting and extraction procedures, arrest information reflects a snapshot in time based on available data and is not part of a time series. New tables and maps are added to provide additional information where possible.

The table does not want to import well so here is a screenshot:

20191117-daca.JPG

So, over 10% of illegals approved to live in the USA under the DACA program have been arrested in the USA.
Looking at the population of DACA requestors who had their requests denied, 38.71% of these people were arrested in the USA.

They are sending their best and brightest. 

A transformation from reclaimed agricultural land back to salt marsh. From the Stanwood-Camano News:

Leque Island reopens to public
Leque Island has reopened to the public after a dramatic restoration project.

Eide Road is now open and leads to a new 17-car parking that features access a 0.75-mile new trail on the 15.5-foot high bern — about 5.5 feet higher than the previous dike. The berm is designed to survive a worst-case scenario event, such as a storm during a king tide. The trail features benches, interpretive signs and places to launch kayaks.

A new kayak boat launch was also added at the Davis Slough parking lot along Highway 532. Crews will next install interpretive and kiosk signs in the coming weeks.

It has been fascinating to watch the progress the last six months. Salt Marshes are an incredibly dense and active ecological niche - home to birds, insects, crustations and fish, algae and bacteria, Eukaryotes and Prokaryotes. A living soup and it is turtles all the way down. Very important to have and I am glad that we are restoring them. Do not look like much but when you take a closer look, they are teaming with life.

Crap. Hope not.

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No substantiation from other sources and do not know this person but this tweet really bothers me:

Dear God - not now. Please.

From the DC Clothesline:

Head of New York Medical Clinics Found Guilty in Nearly $100 Million Money Laundering and Health Care Kickback Scheme
The manager in control of multiple medical clinics in Brooklyn and Queens, New York, was found guilty today for his role in a nearly $100 million health care kickback and money laundering scheme.

After a two-week trial, Aleksandr Pikus, 44, of Brooklyn, was found guilty of one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, two counts of money laundering, one count of conspiracy to receive and pay health care kickbacks and one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States by obstructing the IRS. Sentencing has been set for April 8, 2020.

“Aleksandr Pikus was the architect of a massive healthcare kickback and money laundering scheme in which he and his co-conspirators stole tens of millions of dollars from the Medicare and Medicaid programs,” said Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “The jury’s verdict reflects the tireless work of our dedicated prosecutors and law enforcement partners to achieve justice and protect these essential healthcare programs on behalf of American taxpayers.”

I am not a betting man but;

#1) - this is just the tip of the iceberg and 
#2) -Obamacare greatly facilitated this sort of scam. That is why it was so loved by administrators and insurance companies. Lots of money to be made there.

The money is not made on the cure. The money is made on the process.

Birds of a feather

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Just wonderful. Get rid of them and salt the earth under their feet. From the United States Department of Justice:

Suburban Chicago Man Charged with Attempting to Provide Material Support to ISIS
The leader of a Chicago-area street gang has been arrested for allegedly attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).

Jason Brown, also known as “Abdul Ja’Me,” allegedly provided $500 in cash to an individual on three separate occasions this year, with the understanding that the money would be wired to an ISIS soldier engaged in active combat in Syria, according to a criminal complaint and affidavit filed in U.S. District Court in Chicago. Unbeknownst to Brown, the individual to whom he provided the money was confidentially working with law enforcement, and the purported ISIS fighter was actually an undercover law enforcement officer.

Brown, 37, of Lombard, Illinois, was arrested Thursday, Nov. 14, 2019. He is charged with attempting to provide material support and resources to a foreign terrorist organization. A detention hearing is set for Nov. 21, 2019, at 11:00 a.m., before U.S. Magistrate Judge Sunil R. Harjani in Chicago.

The complaint alleges that Brown is the leader of the AHK street gang, which is based in the Chicago suburb of Bellwood and comprised of former members of other gangs, including the Black P Stones, Gangster Disciples, and Four Corner Hustlers. AHK members trafficked various narcotics in the Chicago area, including a fentanyl analogue, heroin, and cocaine, and often boasted about the gang’s activities on social media, the charges allege.

Also Thursday, several AHK members or associates were arrested on federal drug charges. As part of the investigation, law enforcement shut down the gang’s operation of two illicit drug markets on the West Side of Chicago and executed search warrants at numerous locations.

Wonderful news - roll them up and get them off the streets. These are not teenage gang-bangers. Brown is almost 40. The press release lists the other people arrested. Some of them are 19-20 but many of them are in their late 30's - this is a career choice and not something that happened while playing outside in the neighborhood.

I am assuming that Brown is black - wonder if he knows who sold his ancestors into slavery in the first place.

Rain rain go away

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Getting some heavy rainfall off and on today - there is a pineapple express happening but the majority if it is centered on Vancouver Island and not here. Still, got a bit over a half inch from this morning. BC Hydro is showing about 2K customers without power.

Picked up a new rice cooker. My old one was sold in the big estate sale. Drove up to Walmart this afternoon and found that InstantPot makes a non-pressure cooker specifically for rice and grains. Will try it tomorrow for the feijoada. I love my InstantPot pressure cooker so it will be interesting to see how well their rice cooker does.

When driving through the Skagit farmlands up to Walmart (and Costco and Harbor Freight and...), saw a flock of about 80 Snow Geese - they are starting to migrate in. Also noticing an uptick of hummingbirds at my feeders - time to make another batch of nectar.

Dinner on the road and the two beers at my local were nice and cold. Surf for a bit...

Out for a few

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Coffee, etc... Working at home later.

Clueless - guns

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From Yahoo/Lifestyle:

How My Parenting Changed When I Moved My Family to a Place Where Most People Carry Guns
When I became a mom of two in Manhattan, I had already lived in New York City for ten years, in a city with notoriously strict gun laws. Residents with premise permits can only carry a gun outside of their home to a firing range and it must be unloaded and stored in a locked container during travel. Otherwise, guns can’t be taken anywhere, including outside city limits. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment only a few avenues away from Central Park and the only guns I ever saw were in the holsters of officers of the New York Police Department or members of the counterterrorism division who guard high-traffic areas of the busy city. My husband and I definitely did not keep a gun in our home and I never worried whether there were guns in the homes that my children, then ages 3 and 1, visited for playdates. Guns were just not a part of our community’s lifestyle. Even as a kid growing up in Syracuse, New York, my family did not own a gun. No one in my family hunted and I didn’t even own a toy pistol growing up. I never had a reason to learn how to properly hold or shoot a gun. But everything changed in 2016 when my family moved to Texas.

My husband, kids, and I moved into a home in the suburbs outside of Houston with plenty of open yard space, where the kids play with water balloons and make play forts out of our patio chairs. Our neighbors sit outside and chit-chat while kids scoot around or ride bikes together. Of course, I knew before we moved that Texas has very different views on guns than New York City, but I was still surprised to see the huge billboards on the highway for buying guns and ammo. I was shocked to realize you can buy a pair of soccer cleats and a gun in the same store.

Sheesh - she needs to learn about guns before she starts pontificating about them. Go to a gun range and take a class or two. They are a lot of fun. Guns shoot people just as frequently as forks make people fat. The problem is the mental health / criminality of the person holding the gun.

Our Media

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Not doing so well - from Rasmussen:

Most Say Media Working With Democrats to Impeach Trump
Most voters don’t expect fair play from the media when it comes to news coverage of the Democrats’ impeachment attempt.

Fifty-three percent (53%) of Likely U.S. Voters think most reporters are trying to help impeach President Trump when they write or talk about the impeachment effort. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that just 32% believe most reporters are simply interested in reporting the news in an unbiased manner. Eight percent (8%) say most are trying to block Trump’s impeachment. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Seventy-six percent (76%) of Republicans and a plurality (48%) of voters not affiliated with either major political party say most reporters are trying to help impeach Trump, a view shared by only 36% of Democrats.

Eighty-six percent (86%) of all voters say they have closely followed news reports about House Democrats’ efforts to impeach the president, with 54% who have been following Very Closely.

Among voters who have been following impeachment news Very Closely, 58% think most reporters are trying to help impeach Trump; 34% say they are simply interested in reporting the news in an unbiased manner.

People are tired of the lies. That simple. The democrats have no real clear policies or ideas to offer so they resort to lies and flinging poo. Pathetic.

An inside look at the Deep State

From the Deep State's house organ - the New York Times:

How the State Dept.’s Dissenters Incited a Revolt, Then a Rallying Cry
State Department Foreign Service officers usually express their views in formal diplomatic cables, but these days they are using closed Facebook groups and encrypted apps to convey their pride in Marie L. Yovanovitch, the ousted ambassador to Ukraine, whose House testimony opened the floodgates on the impeachment inquiry into President Trump.

In private conversations, they trade admiring notes about career State Department officials like William B. Taylor Jr. and George P. Kent, who delivered damning testimony about a shadow Ukraine policy infected by partisan politics and presidential conspiracy theories, and William V. Roebuck, a senior diplomat in Syria who wrote a searing memo on how Mr. Trump abandoned the Kurds and upended American influence.

And they are opening their wallets to help raise money — including nearly $10,000 last Monday alone — to offset the legal bills of department officials called to testify before Congress.

Rarely has the State Department, often seen as a staid pillar of the establishment, been the center of a revolt against a president and his top appointees. But as a parade of department officials has recounted to lawmakers how policy was hijacked by partisan politics, many career diplomats say they have been inspired by their colleagues’ willingness to stand up to far more powerful voices after nearly three years of being ignored or disparaged by Mr. Trump and those he has chosen to lead the department.

Earth to State. Like it or not, President Donald John Trump is your President and will most likely win the 2020 election as well. It is the job of the State Department to carry out the Foreign Policy decisions of the sitting president. Not the other way around. To act independently is to violate the Logan Act. We are talking a felony charge here.

Time for these people to get over their sense of self-importance and get back to doing their fscking jobs... Really...

Craigslist deal was awesome

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Someone north of here was selling the motor and fan from a smallish dust collection system for woodworking. Not this but very similar: 

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What I picked up today was just the fan and the motor. No mounting, no dust bags, nothing else. The full units sell for $250 at Grizzly and I got just the blower for $40. Sweet deal.

I will be using this for my new forges - both propane and coal. My original propane forge had three engineering "issues" that I am planning to correct with the next design. I have sold it and informed the buyer - it works great, just not optimal. I had built it with two Ron Reil naturally asperated burners but I made the working aperture a bit too small so as the gasses heated up and expanded, the resulting back pressure in the forge caused the burners to stall a little bit. Solution? Open the door a little bit.

The forge I am building now will use a ribbon burner which uses forced air and propane. (here, here, and here)

This blower will be perfect for running the ribbon burner as well as providing forced air for the coal forge. In my shop, I will be building a small mechanicals shed outside with the air compressor and hydraulic pump. I will mount this blower out there so it will be nice and quiet in the shop.

We were both happy with the deal.

Coffee time

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Heading up north for a Craigslist deal. Back home this afternoon - planning out a portable forge setup for live demonstrations and the farmer's market. Next spring is not that far away...

From Quanta Magazine:

Neutrinos Lead to Unexpected Discovery in Basic Math
After breakfast one morning in August, the mathematician Terence Tao opened an email from three physicists he didn’t know. The trio explained that they’d stumbled across a simple formula that, if true, established an unexpected relationship between some of the most basic and important objects in linear algebra.

The formula “looked too good to be true,” said Tao, who is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, a Fields medalist, and one of the world’s leading mathematicians. “Something this short and simple — it should have been in textbooks already,” he said. “So my first thought was, no, this can’t be true.”

Then he thought about it some more.

Well written and a really interesting problem. Fun time to be alive.

Hillary in 2020

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From America's newspaper of record - the Babylon Bee:

Hillary Clinton Says She Is Being Urged To Run By Many, Many, Many Voices In Her Head
In an interview with the BBC, Hillary Clinton said she is being urged to run for president in 2020 by "many, many, many" voices in her head.

"I'm under enormous pressure from many, many, many voices in my head to think about it," she said. She went on, elaborating on all the voices that echo inside her head all day long. "There's Bob---he's nice. And Carl, he's a swell guy, very supportive. Then there's this voice that sounds like Christopher Walken. He's kind of a jerk sometimes, but even he's on board with me running again."

Pressed for a solid figure, she said there's "at least a few thousand" of these voices that want her to run, and she promised to think about it in order to appease the voices. Clinton also said the voices have told her she's done a great job as president in her first term and they "can't wait" to see how much she can accomplish for the country should she be elected a second time.

She should run again. Give President Trump an even bigger win.

Cheap at $395K - from Zillow:

24665 S Highway 79, Catalina, AZ 85739
Bold opportunity to own a decommissioned underground Titan II missile complex. This property was once one of the most top secret of government assets and is now ready to fulfill a new mission. That mission is for you to define amongst the limitless scenarios. Secure storage facility? Underground bunker? Remarkable residence - literally living down under? The property is situated on a 12 + acre parcel with boundless views. Private yet not too remote. Quick easy access to Tucson and just 20 minutes for supplies. 

Some great photos of the site. Gorgeous property but needs a lot of work.

California - keeps getting better

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From Sacramento, CA station KCRA:

Some high hazard California dams are in poor condition
California is home to nearly 700 high hazard dams. A two-year investigation by the Associated Press found that 1,680 high hazard dams across the U.S. are in poor and unsatisfactory condition. Some are in California.

The article is published as a large infographic but basically, California had been spending very little on dam maintenance until Oroville. Now they are spending more money but no word as to whether this is going to have a positive outcome for dam safety.

From the Houston Chronicle:

State Rep. Poncho Nevárez faces drug charge after he lost cocaine at Austin airport
State Rep. Poncho Nevárez faces a drug charge after being caught on surveillance cameras at the Austin airport dropping a sealed envelope that contained four baggies of cocaine.

Nevárez, chairman of the House Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee, is charged with third-degree felony possession of a controlled substance, according to an arrest warrant filed Thursday by the Texas Department of Public Safety. The offense is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Bond was set at $10,000.

Those were the first two paragraphs of the story - the third will explain why Mr. Nevárez will walk away:

The Democrat from Eagle Pass, who announced last week he wouldn’t seek re-election, said Thursday “the news is true” and that he plans to seek treatment.

And the event happened two months ago and is only being reported now:

It is unclear why it took two months for authorities to charge Nevárez; the public safety department would not explain the timing on Thursday.

An affidavit related to the case was posted online late Wednesday night by the conservative activist group Direct Action Texas.

The revelation comes about a week after Nevárez announced he was deactivating his office’s Facebook page, followed by a retirement announcement two days later.

So you do not touch Democrats while they are in office. I thought that Texas was better run (except for Austin).

From Vice:

There’s Growing Evidence That the Universe Is Connected by Giant Structures
The Milky Way, the galaxy we live in, is one of hundreds of billions of galaxies strewn across the universe. Their variety is stunning: spirals, ring galaxies shaped like star-studded loops, and ancient galaxies that outshine virtually everything else in the universe.

But despite their differences, and the mind-boggling distances between them, scientists have noticed that some galaxies move together in odd and often unexplained patterns, as if they are connected by a vast unseen force.

Galaxies within a few million light years of each other can gravitationally affect each other in predictable ways, but scientists have observed mysterious patterns between distant galaxies that transcend those local interactions.

There is so much that we do not know. I love it! One example:

For instance, a study published in The Astrophysical Journal in October found that hundreds of galaxies were rotating in sync with the motions of galaxies that were tens of millions of light years away.

And where it gets strange:

The truth behind synchronized galaxies could change everything
The secret of these synchronized galaxies may pose a threat to the cosmological principle, one of the basic assumptions about the universe. This principle states that the universe is basically uniform and homogenous at extremely large scales. But the “existence of correlations in quasar axes over such extreme scales would constitute a serious anomaly for the cosmological principle,” as Hutsemékers and his colleagues note in their study.

However, Hutsemékers’ cautioned that more of these structures would need to be spotted and studied to prove that this is a serious wrinkle in the cosmological principle. “Other similar structures are needed to confirm a real anomaly,” he said.

One anomaly coming right up. Anything else?  This is a fun time to be alive.

California is getting so bad that even the major media are starting to report it. From Associated Press:

California faces fraught path out of wildfire, power crisis
The utility that serves more than 5 million electrical customers in one of the world’s most technologically advanced areas is now faced again and again with a no-win decision: risk starting catastrophic deadly wildfires, or turn off the lights and immiserate millions of paying customers.

Pacific Gas & Electric is in bankruptcy, facing $30 billion in liabilities, billions more in needed upgrades to its system and an uncertain path to safely providing reliable power to a vast portion of California.

How that came to be is a story not of a single villain but of systemic failure by the utility’s management, the regulators who oversee it and the politicians who let it all happen. It’s a story of climate change, a housing crisis and an aging power system that, like much of the infrastructure in the U.S., has fallen into disrepair.

Actually, it is a single villain - the unelected bureaucrats who are not held accountable for their poor decisions. They are blowing the available money on shiny "cool" projects and not spending it on maintaining the infrastructure. Alternative Energy or clearing the power lines? alt.energy gets the nod every single time.

This is what years of government by narrative will get you. Don't get me started on their cities.

I love pigs

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Friendly, intelligent and... BACON - from The Telegraph:

High on the hog - wild boar dig up and destroy £17,000 worth of cocaine stashed in forest in Tuscany
Wild boar in Italy have no shortage of enemies, from farmers and vineyard owners to motorists, but to that long list can now be added drug dealers.

A gang of dealers in Tuscany was left aghast after discovering that a stash of valuable cocaine they had carefully buried in the woods had been dug up by a herd of snuffling wild pigs.

With their powerful snouts, the boar managed to rip open the waterproof packages in which the cocaine was kept, scattering around €20,000 (£17,000) worth of the white powder across the forest floor.

The unusual drug “bust” came to light when police tapped the telephones of a suspected drug trafficking gang - an Italian and three Albanians.

One of the men was recorded furiously reporting the loss of the cocaine to a fellow gang member, telling him the drugs were ruined.

It is not known what became of the boars or what effect the cocaine had on them.

Pigs are routinely trained and used to sniff out truffles. Maybe they can be an alternative to drug-sniffing dogs.

Of course - Elizabeth Warren

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Fake fake fake. A liar too. From Daily Caller:

Warren’s ‘Billionaire Tears’ Mug Is Sold Through A Billionaire-Run Company
A billionaire stands to benefit financially from the sales of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s new “Billionaire Tears” mug.

The $25 mug, which Warren’s presidential campaign introduced Wednesday, is sold through Shopify, a Canadian e-commerce company whose founder and CEO, Tobias Lütke, is worth an estimated $2.8 billion.

“Savor a warm, slightly salty beverage of your choice in this union-made mug as you contemplate all the good a wealth tax could do: universal healthcare, student debt cancellation, universal free college, and more,” the mug’s product page states.

If I was going to spend money for a new coffee mug, I would save myself ten dollars and get this one from Amazon

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It is neither Best nor Buy. Seems that their CEO has gotten hisself WOKE so there goes the company. From Vox Day:

The new climate for business
Is one where business is rapidly shrinking. Best Buy's CEO takes a very converged position on corporate profits:

"The purpose of a company is not to make money," says Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly, discussing the need for a re-foundation of capitalism. Purposeful leadership is being clear about your purpose as an individual and how it connects to the purpose of the company where you work.

If you can't see the danger in where this is headed, then you really aren't paying attention. What is the purpose of the company where you work if it isn't to make money?  How long do you anticipate working there without making money yourself? And if the purpose isn't to make money, then why do so many companies nevertheless insist on charging money for their goods and services?

Capitalism doesn't need to be refounded, it is something to which we should return. The modern day financialized corpocracy which funnels most profits to the financial institutions, the government, and the pirate class is simply not capitalism by any measure.

By the way, there is a whole conference devoted to business convergence. Look at the pictures on the linked Twitter account. There is literally zero productive business being discussed there.

Speaking truth to power. 130+ interesting comments - a lot along the line where we should just walk into the local BestBuy and ask for free stuff. To charge money for it would not be purposeful.

The last three years of BBY stock prices are actually pretty decent. We will see what happens:

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In the fall and winter, winds in the eastern Mediterranean come out of the South. Some Church of Global Warming idiots are capitalizing on this to promote their narrative to the fellow travellers who do not bother to learn any history.
From BoingBoing:

Italy: Venice council flooded after 'NO' vote on climate change measures
Oops. Awkward.

An Italian council was flooded immediately after rejecting new measures to address the climate crisis that threatens to sink the city, and wreak havoc throughout the world.

The regional council of Veneto is situated on Venice's Grand Canal. On Tuesday night, the office flooded for the first time in its history, right after rejecting measures to fight climate change.

Actually very very awkward but not in the manner that they were hoping for. Acqua Alta (High Water) is a annual seasonal event that causes flooding in Venice and the surrounding areas. Been doing this forever. Will continue to keep doing this forever.

Also, even if this did not happen every fall/winter (to varying degrees), the waters of the Mediterranean are not rising. Venice is sinking. Some clickable headlines:

You get the idea - always been sinking. Always will.

Do the global warmists think that we are really that stupid or are they so completely out of talking points that they have to fabricate shit like this to try to win us over. Either way, speaks badly for them.

Good dinner, meeting, beers

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Back home for the night. Surf for a bit and then YouTube

Well... I gave it 40 minutes

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And that car is not unpacking itself. Heading downstairs to unpack, feed the pups and get ready to head out for dinner and the meeting - back in a few hours...

The Numbers

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Most of the current Democrat politicians are horribly innumerate. They promise free shit to keep the votes rolling in but they have zero clue how to pay for all of it. From the Foundation for Economic Education:

Entitlement Liabilities Are a Graver Threat to the Next Generation of Americans Than Climate Change
On January 31, 1940, Miss Ida Fuller received a check for $22.54. She was the first person to retire under the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) scheme, better known as Social Security. At the time of her retirement in 1939, she had paid just $22 in Social Security taxes. Ms. Fuller lived to be 100, cashing over $20,000 worth of Social Security checks.

How Social Security Is Funded
If she had only paid $22.54 in contributions, where did the $20,000 Ms. Fuller received in Social Security payouts come from? It came, as it does now, from the taxpayers of the day. As of 2019, your employer deducts 6.2 percent of your wages up to $132,900 a year, matches this amount, and sends it to the Social Security Administration (SSA). The SSA deposits this with the Treasury, which spends it and receives Treasury bonds in return. This is the fabled trust fund that guarantees Social Security.

The growing problem:

This is only going to get worse. According to Census Bureau projections, by 2030 each 100 working-age Americans will be supporting 35 retirees, and this could rise to 42 by 2060. Another way to think of this is to calculate the number of retirees each worker must support. In 1946, the burden of one retiree was shared between 42 workers. Today, according to the SSA, roughly three workers cover each retiree’s Social Security and Medicare benefits. By 2030, however, there will be only two workers supporting each retiree.

More at the site. This article doesn't even get into Union Pensions and other entitlements.

Want more free stuff? Better be ready to pay the bill.

Tick Tock Tick Tock

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Looks like things might get real interesting real soon - from The Gateway Pundit:

IT’S HAPPENING… BREAKING: President Trump Meets with AG Bill Barr in Oval Office – Then Delays Departure and Calls in Top Aides and Communication Team
President Donald Trump met with Attorney General William Barr today in the Oval Office.

Earlier this week their were rumblings that the Inspector General’s report was going through the final stages before it is released.

Inspector General Horowitz has been working on the report for over a year.

Planning a trip to Costco tomorrow - maybe pick up some more popcorn.

A paper trail - Ukraine

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Looks like some Ukranians are doing some leaking of their own - from The Federalist Papers:

BREAKING, Leaked Documents Show Tens Of Millions From Ukraine Paid To Kerry, Biden Jr Fund, Report
Documents have been discovered that show cash transfers from a Ukrainian gas company to a slush fund operated by several major Democrats.

The slush fund is reportedly run by former Secretary of State John Kerry, John Kerry Jr., another Kerry family member and Hunter Biden, Michael Coudrey reported.

“Leaked documents from the Ukrainian General Prosecutor’s office indicate complex money transfers from foreign sources into the control of a ‘slush fund’ owned and operated by Devon Archer, John Kerry Senior, John Kerry Junior, Heinz Jr, and Hunter Biden,” he said.

Screen caps and links at the site. Fun watching this all unravel. Could not be happening to a nicer group of people.

Joe Biden - clueless

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From Marc Thiessen writing at the New York Post:

Sorry, Joe: Team Obama refused to arm Ukraine at all
Joe Biden has said that by holding up vital military aid to Ukraine, President Trump “used the power and resources of the United States to pressure a sovereign nation, a partner that is still under direct assault from Russia … to subvert the rule of law.”

That’s rich. The aid in question is lethal military assistance that the Obama-Biden administration refused to give Ukraine.

In 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea and began arming separatists in eastern Ukraine with tanks, armored vehicles and rocket launchers, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko came to Washington to plead for weapons to defend his country. In an impassioned address to a joint session of Congress — with Biden sitting directly behind him — Poroshenko said his country appreciated the nonlethal assistance he was getting, but declared “one cannot win a war with blankets.”

The Obama-Biden administration was unmoved. The Wall Street Journal reported at the time that “President Barack Obama stuck to his refusal to provide weapons or other lethal military gear to Ukraine.” Why?

Team Obama feared that lethal aid would provoke Moscow.

More at the site - if these actions were public knowledge during the Obama administration, he would have been impeached in 2014. The current impeachment hearings are just a distraction to cover up the Obama / Biden / Kerry corruption.

Sweetening the pot - auction

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Drove down to pick up the printers - with tax and buyer's premium, the two were $41 each. Compare to their current list price of $305. Factor in two trips of just under 100 miles each and I still made out like a bandit. I use the one I have a lot and already have several thousand blank labels of various sizes from when I had my office services business in Maple Falls so I am all set there.

What really sweetened the pot was that they were tossing a bunch of stuff into some dumpsters. Picked up some nice electronics, about 20 "brick style" power supplies (use them a lot) as well as some other fun geek doo-dads.

Mitigated the driving by stopping at WinCo on my way back. Picked up some poke, some dried beans and some Portuguese Linguiça Sausage. I am going to cut it up, saute it with some more garlic as well as some tomato paste and add it to the feijoada. Just have ham and bacon in there now - this will add a nice dimension. Also picked up some par-boiled (Minute) rice so serve it with. Have that for dinner tomorrow. Meeting later so going out for a bowl of pasta tonight.

It's time for coffee

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Out for a bit. Heading down to pick up my printers from the auction. Meeting later this evening.

Great quote - Helen Mirren

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Just wonderful - Seattle opioid epidemic

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From Seattle station KOMO:

An opioid more deadly than fentanyl found on Seattle streets
Right in the midst of the opioid crisis, another illicit drug has hit the streets of Seattle. Experts say it's more potent and deadly than other opiods.

The DEA says carfentanil is 10,000 times more potent than morphine and 100 times stronger than fentanyl. It was first detected in Seattle in March. Experts insists its usage is "very rare" in the area, but nonetheless, it's surfaced in the city.

The timing couldn't be worse. Two people in Washington state overdose on opioids each day. In King County, at least three teenagers have died from fentanyl overdoses recently.

"I was like, 'Oh crap!' " said Dr. Caleb Banta-Green when he heard that carfentanil was detected in Seattle.

These opioids - fentanyl and carfentynil are not being prescribed by Doctors - that is not the opioid crisis that we have. These are cheap to make and are coming in from overseas - China and North Korea. It is coming in through our port cities as well as through the borders.

I am ambivalent - there are some real personal tragedies but also, many of the fatalities are people who would find some other way to shuffle off this mortal coil if they didn't have these drugs. At least, this will be a painless way to go.

Now this has to grind their gears a bit

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From the New York Times Best Sellers list - nonfiction:

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Only in California

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From ArtNet:

California Is Spending $2.4 Million to Build the World’s Largest Permanent Installation of Climate Change-Themed Art
California’s clean-air agency has commissioned the world’s largest permanent public installation of climate changed-themed art. Large-scale works by Allora & CalzadillaRefik AnadolKameelah Janan RasheedNoé MontesAndrea Polli, and Tomás Saraceno will appear in the common areas of the California Air Resources Board’s new headquarters in Riverside, California, opening in late 2021.

The agency went through 600 applications before it made its selection of “world-class art by artists whose work embraces environmental and equity themes,” said board chair Mary Nichol in a statement. The works themselves will be announced in 2020.

“The conversation about climate change should always include the subject of climate justice,” artist Noe Montes said in an email. The photographer was inspired to apply for the project after witnessing the health problems experienced by residents in the Jordan Downs housing project in South Los Angeles due to air pollution from the logistics industry.

Must be nice to have that kind of dispoasble income. Oh. Wait. The State of California is broke. They can't afford this.

Just for the hell of it I DuckDuckGo'd (much better than that other search engine) this new building and found the press release for their new temple:

CARB unveils design for its new Southern California Headquarters
The California Air Resources Board (CARB) announced today that it has selected the design of its new Southern California headquarters. Located on a 19-acre site near the campus of UC Riverside, the approximately 380,000-square-foot facility will be one of the largest and most advanced vehicle emissions testing and research facilities in the world. It will also be the largest ‘net-zero energy’ structure (producing as much energy as it uses) of its type in the nation.

“This striking design will make CARB’s new Southern California headquarters an immediately recognizable landmark,” said CARB Chair Mary D. Nichols. “It incorporates the highest standards of sustainability in the office and public spaces, and meets the exacting laboratory specifications we need to keep California at the forefront of our world-leading efforts to clean up our air and fight climate change.”

Have you tried driving down there?  I-5 is full of potholes and the large cities are literally shitholes. How about spending the money where it is actually needed (infrastructure) instead of on shiny new toys. Building cost is estimated at $368 Million and these projects always overrun.

Heh - waking up in hell

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From Woodsterman:

20191114-abu-bakr.jpg

So... Stressed... Out...

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Interesting story at The Hill:

Therapy dogs slated to visit Capitol Hill today
Some cuddly canines are coming to the rescue of stressed-out Capitol Hill staffers.

Pet Partners, a therapy animal organization, and the Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council are bringing a batch of furry friends to the halls of Congress.

Therapy dogs will be ruff-ing it on Wednesday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. in Room 902 of the Hart Senate Office Building and rooms 2043 and 2044 of the Rayburn House Office Building.

“Who better to bring comfort and relief to the hardworking folks on Capitol Hill than a furry group of loving, intuitive, and bipartisan Pet Partners therapy animals?” the groups asked in a news release touting the event.

Well... I guess that when you put all of your hopes for the 2020 election into one basket labeled "impeachment", things are going to get a bit stressed out. Good luck on that.

The impeachment is about covering up the massive corruption in the Obama presidency. From Twitchy:

Twitchy is a Twitter aggregator and Glen Beck went on a massive 40+ tweet outline of what happened over there in 2014 and it is damning for Obama:

Glen Beck:
There are two terms that kept popping up in our research of what was happening between the Left and Ukraine, and they’re used interchangeably. You see them in government documents, aid packages and even by activists rioting in the streets. They are: “Civil Society” and “Open Society”.  These two phrases are used by a global Shadow Government to mold the rest of the world into a Socialist theme park. And it’s all being done in YOUR NAME, but... WITHOUT your consent or vote.

Now, when we were first looking into Ukraine, we were primarily focusing on the timeline AFTER February 2014. We knew the coup had brought forward some new possibilities for the Obama Administration, and that was what we were primarily focused on.  So, how do they do it? By using "Civil & Open Society" groups to instigate violent regime change… oh I’m sorry. They don’t use the term regime change. Sounds too scary! They call it quote: “spontaneous, indigenous popular uprisings."  But still… something seemed incomplete. Why was George Soros funding an NGO in Ukraine ALONGSIDE the Obama Administration. According to TWO former Prosecutor General’s in Ukraine, that NGO - the Anti-Corruption Action Center - was being shielded by the U.S. Government.

I recently did an interview with a former Ukrainian official who was working inside the Prosecutor General’s office. He was actually there when this NGO was organizing street protests to get his boss fired. Watch:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R86awAp4uIw

It is worth remembering that the Ukraine also had a very deep state. The new administration was voted in to get rid of this corruption.

What I have quoted so far represents less than one quarter of what is at Twitchy - a long read but really exposes the corruption present in both countries and how both countries are now rooting it out - much to the dismay of the deep staters. President Obama and George Soros at the heart of it all.

Off to YouTube

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See what the internet faeries have brought for my enjoyment this evening.

Meeting tomorrow.

Victor Davis Hanson on impeachment

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One of America's greatest thinkers. Seriously. From the New York Post:

10 reasons why this impeachment ‘inquiry’ is really a coup
There are at least 10 reasons why the Dem impeachment “inquiry” is really a coup.

1) Impeachment 24/7: The “inquiry,” supposedly prompted by President Trump’s Ukrainian call, is only the most recent coup seeking to overturn the 2016 election.

Usually, the serial futile attempts — with the exception of the Mueller debacle — were characterized by about a month of media hysteria. We remember the voting-machines-fraud hoax, the Logan Act, the Emoluments Clause, the 25th Amendment, the McCabe-Rosenstein faux coup and various Michael Avenatti-Stormy Daniels-Michael Cohen psychodramas. Ukraine, then, isn’t unique, but simply another mini-coup.

2) False whistleblowers: The “whistleblower” is no whistleblower by any common definition of the noun. He has no incriminating documents, no information at all. He doesn’t even have firsthand evidence of wrongdoing.

Instead, the whistleblower relied on secondhand water-cooler gossip about a leaked presidential call. Even his mangled version of the call didn’t match that of official transcribers.

He wasn’t disinterested but had a long history of partisanship. He was a protégé of many of Trump’s most adamant opponents, including Susan Rice, John Brennan and Joe Biden. He did not follow protocol by going first to the inspector general but instead caucused with the staff of Rep. Adam Schiff’s impeachment inquiry. Neither the whistleblower nor his doppelganger, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, was bothered by the activities of the Bidens or by the Obama decision not to arm Ukraine. Their outrage, in other words, was not about Ukraine but over Trump.

3) First-term impeachment: The Clinton and Nixon inquiries were directed at second-term presidencies, when there were no more electoral remedies for alleged wrongdoing. By contrast, Trump is up for election in less than a year. Impeachment, then, seems a partisan exercise in either circumventing a referendum election or in damaging a president seeking re-election.

Seven more - compelling. This is a coup and not any real law enforcement action.

Of course it is UC Berkeley

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From Campus Reform:

Berkeley ‘instructor’: ‘Rural Americans’ are ‘bad people’

    • A graduate student at the University of California-Berkeley took to twitter on Wednesday to express his disdain for rural Americans and those who aren’t “pro-city.”
    • According to his resume, he has taught ten courses at the university over the past several years

A man who identifies himself as an instructor at the University of California-Berkeley publicly proclaimed Wednesday that Americans who live in rural areas are “bad people” who deserve “uncomfortable” lives. 

Jackson Kernion, who describes himself as a Graduate Student Instructor at Berkeley, having taught at least 11 philosophy courses at the university since 2013, took to Twitter Wednesday to explain the academic reasoning behind his distaste for people from rural America, calling those who live in rural areas “bad people who have made bad life decisions.”

Clueless wanker. Of course he teaches there, no legitimate University would have him. Before he hectors us about "bad life decisions", maybe he could tell us how well he is servicing his student debt obligations... Learn to code a**hole.

Today's public impeachment hearing

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The New York Post did it perfectly with their cover:

20191113-nypost.jpg

Another nothingburger owned by the Democrats. They brought this on themselves.

Can't get a break - Errol Morris

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An amazing film maker runs into the WOKE crowd - from Reason:

Oscar-Winner Errol Morris on American Dharma, Steve Bannon, and Cancel Culture
When Errol Morris debuted American Dharma, his documentary about Stephen Bannon, last year at the Venice Film Festival, he received an ovation. But after early reviewers accused the Oscar-winning director of letting the former Breitbart.com head and adviser to President Trump "off the hook," Morris found it impossible to get a distribution deal in the United States.

It was the first time in decades that the acclaimed director of The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War couldn't get a movie into theaters. "The experience was so damn weird," Morris tells Reason. "People became so angry with me and with the movie, they certainly wanted to deplatform not just Bannon, but they wanted to deplatform me."

But now his film, American Dharma, is finally in theaters.

Nick Gillespie sat down with the 71-year-old Morris, whom Roger Ebert called "as great a filmmaker as Hitchcock or Fellini," for a wide-ranging conversation about the censorious first reactions to his new film, his history with Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, and what he learned—and didn't learn—about Steve Bannon's philosophy. He also talks about why he thinks we're in a golden age of documentary filmmaking, his heated grad-school confrontations with philosopher Thomas Kuhn (detailed in his recent book The Ashtray: Or the Man Who Denied Reality), and Wormwoodhis 2017 Netflix docudrama series about the CIA's notorious MKUltra mind-control program.

Looks like an interesting podcast - Errol Morris is one of my favorite documentarists.

And back home again

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Quiet day. Got a lot accomplished for a day spent idle.

Saw the first Snow Goose of the season - they migrate from Alaska and Russia and spend the winters down in the Puget Sound area. Very photogenic so time for some more wild goose chases.

The auction closed and the only thing I won was the label printers. Was hoping to get the power supply but was outbid by someone who paid more than what it was worth - much older unit and one of the terminals was loose and rattling - not able to test it so pig in a poke.

I was hoping to get the two office printers but someone sniped me on it. The label printers will be great as I am starting to sell stuff on eBay. I already have a shipping label printer but they are expensive ($370 each) and do wear out and break. Good to have a backup unit especially since I am only paying $40 for it. Also great for labelling bulk food containers, storage boxes, etc... at home. Be picking them up tomorrow.

Not just the midwest

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Record cold all over:

7 killed in heavy snowfall in Kashmir valley

Parts of South Island 'snapping back to winter' with 0C morning (New Zealand)
Summer might be 18 days away, but it is feeling like winter never left in some parts of the country.

Road to the Lesachtal free again (Google translate - Austrian)
Because the precipitation has decreased significantly, the road from Kötschach Mauthen to St. Lorenzen in Lesachtal on Wednesday afternoon could be released again. In the Lesachtal there are so far about 70 centimeters of fresh snow, the schools are open again on Thursday.

Snowfall: Several blocked roads (Google translate - Algeria)

Winter heavily attacked in Scandinavia. He sleeps in Norway and Sweden (Google translate - Norwegian)
Winter is waging over Europe over Europe, resulting in heavy snowfall in some countries. In both Eastern Norway and central Sweden, it was snowing heavily on Monday, resulting in numerous collisions on the roads as well as disruption to airport operations.

I wonder where Al Gore is these days...

It's heeeere...

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Arctic cold blast - from Watts Up With That:

Arctic blast has arrived in the eastern US…numerous record low temperatures by early Wednesday

20191113-low-temp.jpg

Numerous record low temperatures were set this morning for the day and, in some cases,
the all-time low temperature for November was recorded; map courtesy coolwx.com, NOAA

Overview
The strong cold front representing the leading edge of a widespread Arctic air mass passed through the DC-to-Philly-to-NYC corridor early this morning and temperatures have fallen into the 30’s from early day highs. Precipitation is being enhanced in the cold air behind the front as a strong jet streak aloft generates upward motion in the I-95 corridor. As a result, a changeover to snow is likely during the mid-day and early afternoon hours in the immediate DC-to-Philly-to-NYC corridor and this changeover to snow is likely all the way to coastal New Jersey and Delmarva. Some spots could receive small snow accumulations and as temperatures drop to near freezing later in the day, watch for the possibility of “black ice” on some roadways. Precipitation winds down later today and the cold will become the main story with record low temperatures in numerous Mid-Atlantic/NE US locations by early tomorrow. Widespread records were set earlier today from Texas to the Great Lakes with some stations recording their lowest temperature ever for the month of November and we are not even at the halfway point.

I hope the power grid is able to keep up with the demands. More people die from cold than from heat.

More at the site.

Great essay - rage

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From the Z Man - a long read but very thoughtful:

It’s Personal
Something that has been noticeable for a long time now is that the Left is in a perpetual state of rage. The smallest things send them into spasms of anger. They hate Trump and they really hate his voters. They will go rummaging around in the social media history of people, looking for reasons to hate them. It’s not a general all-encompassing hate, like hating the fans of a rival sports team, but a very personal and cruel hate. They want the victim to suffer and they want to enjoy his suffering.

One reason for this, obviously, is that many people attracted to the Left are mentally unstable, so their politics are just a vehicle for their pathology. Many of the Antifa people, for example, have no coherent political thoughts. They just like being crazy on the streets and causing mayhem. This is the type of person who was attracted to the riots that used to follow the big economic summits. There was never any purpose to their rampages, other than the thrill of smashing things and causing mayhem.

Another more important reason for the rage is the nature of leftist politics in our post-national age. Being on the Left no longer means joining a group that has a tangible enemy, against whom the group throws themselves. The days of unionist, socialists and communists operating as collectives are gone. Even the post-modern movements like climate change and sexual politics is atomized. Much of it is backed by the sorts of people the Left used to oppose like rich people and business.

Climate activism:

This is not something anyone is trying to hide. This essay by one of the organizers of the climate activist group Extinction Rebellion explicitly makes this point. He’s not really concerned about the climate. He concedes that there is nothing to be done that is going to change what’s coming. The purpose of his activism is to normalize himself and his sense of self. It’s all about him forcing you to listen to his story and then accepting it and him as something other than strange.

Read the whole thing - explains a lot. Tip of the hat to Peter at Bayou Renaissance Man for the link.

Potential for change

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Wonder how long she will hang on - from St. Louis, MO station KMOV:

Ruth Bader Ginsburg misses court due to illness
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was not on the bench for oral arguments Wednesday due to illness, according to Chief Justice John Roberts.

Roberts announced she was "indisposed due to illness."

A court spokesperson said that Ginsburg was home with a stomach virus and that she is expected to participate in the cases by reading the briefs.

As poor as her health has been in the last ten years, she really blew it by not retiring during Obama's administration. The Dems could have seated a liberal justice then. Now, we run things and the court will be conservative for a long long time.

Not wishing anyone any harm but feeling very happy at this development.

Unusually quiet out there

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Nothing on the internet catches my eye.

Very odd for the middle of the week - usually, there are people running around with their hair on fire for some cause or another... I understand a quiet weekend - slow news cycle. Middle of the week?

Welcome to 1.0 - Brave Browser

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Been using the Brave Browser for the last six months or so and really really like it. A spin-off from Chrome but with a lot of privacy enhancements. It has been fast and very secure.

They just announced Version 1.0 today - they are officially out of Beta test.

Give it a try - I certainly like it.

Yawn - impeachment

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So the House is holding a public impeachment hearing today.

They got nothing - wake me up when it is over. What is next? The Meuller Report was nothing. Now this. What's next?

Bright and early

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Whatever was affecting my sleep seems to have passed. Woke up at my usual time this morning feeling refreshed.

Checked the auction - outbid on a few items but still winning the label printers and the power supply. Four more hours.

Nuke some oatmeal and frozen bluueberries for breakfast, finish the laundry and then out for coffee and the day.

And that is it for tonight - video time

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Nothing much happening out there to catch my eye.

Couple of videos and bed. Doing nothing tomorrow - meeting Thursday.

I think about this all the time too...

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...And I am so glad that it is President Trump. From PJ Media:

Hillary on BBC Radio: 'I Think About What Kind of President I Would Have Been All the Time'

The deep state would have won. President Trump came not a second too late.

As shit keeps getting stranger

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A new state of matter - from Phys Org:

Physics experiment with ultrafast laser pulses produces a previously unseen phase of matter
Adding energy to any material, such as by heating it, almost always makes its structure less orderly. Ice, for example, with its crystalline structure, melts to become liquid water, with no order at all.

But in new experiments by physicists at MIT and elsewhere, the opposite happens: When a pattern called a charge density wave in a certain material is hit with a fast laser pulse, a whole new charge density wave is created—a highly ordered state, instead of the expected disorder. The surprising finding could help to reveal unseen properties in materials of all kinds.

This will open up some areas for exploration. A fun time to be alive.

Interesting meeting

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Can't say very much about it now - early tentative stages. Interesting ideas - long-term planning for the future.

Two beers at my local.

Back home and surf for a bit. Finish the laundry.

Life in the United States

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Pretty good actually - two headlines:

You do not get hired as CEO at Chase if you are stupid and innumerate. Bernie would never make the grade.
Moore is no slouch either:

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, an economic consultant with FreedomWorks and a Foxnews.com contributor.

Laissez les bon temps roulez

And I am outbid again

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The laser printers and some packaging materials are now listed for almost what they cost new. Bunch of amateurs out there. Still have the winning bid on the two label printers. Also bidding on a power supply for my ham radio equipment.

Running a couple loads of laundry. Meeting in 90 minutes.

Heh - some one-liners

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From Grouchy Old Cripple:

~ Interviewer: “So, tell me about yourself.” Me: “I’d rather not. I kinda want this job.”

~ I had my patience tested. I’m negative.

~ Age 60 might be the new 40, but 9:00 is new midnight.

A lot more at the site. So true...

Yesterday's transit of Mercury

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Great video from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) (22,000 miles up):

The Transit of Mercury seen from Space from Earth to Sky Calculus on Vimeo.

Cody's Lab shows what really happened:

Life in Los Angeles

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Talk about a shit-show - from The New York Post:

Homeless man hurls bucket of diarrhea at woman near Hollywood Walk of Fame
A homeless man dumped a bucket of “hot” diarrhea on a Los Angeles woman near the Hollywood Walk of Fame — an unprovoked attack that’s left her with PTSD,  she said this week.

Heidi Van Tassel said she was about to drive home from a Thai restaurant near the famed tourist area in April when the alleged assailant, Jere Blessings, dragged her out of her vehicle, news station NBC4 reported.

He pulled her into the middle of the street, where he dumped a bucket of feces over her head, she said.

“It was diarrhea. Hot liquid,” Van Tassel told NBC4. “I was soaked, and it was coming off my eyelashes and into my eyes.”

The Democrats own this problem. They created it, they need to assume the responsibility for their policy failures.

Well crap

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I was outbid on everything. No tears though as my top limit was what I felt these items were worth. They are someone else's cost overrun now.

Uneventful drive back - fixing the last of the minestrone soup and half of a Walmart par-baked baguette - they are really good - cheap too.

Today's preview was "interesting" to say the least. The place was pretty well stripped out and nothing but junk left behind. There were a couple of printers that I am putting bids on as well as some office stuff and a nice small five-drawer rolling tool chest.

The site looked like the warehouse in the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark except filled with a crap-ton of junk and not Ark of the Covenant.

20191112-auction.jpg

This went on for two more rooms.

And back to what passes for normal

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Got a good night's sleep finally.

So far, I have been outbid on three lots (out of seven). Going to let these go as my maximum bid was what I feel these were worth. Not going to get sucked up in the hype. See what happens with the other four.

Out for coffee and then to the second auction preview. Meeting tonight at 6:00PM so get a bite to eat on the road.

And that is it for me

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Quick trot around the web and nothing. Quiet news day.

Surf some videos for a bit and then an early bedtime - today was busy. Tomorrow is even busier.

A fun day - but I hate cities

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Drove down to see the auction preview in Kenmore on the north end of Lake Washington. That area has grown up a lot - tons of housing developments. Remember when it was all farmland. Reminds me of why I do not like big cities.

Some good stuff - a really wonderful Starrett machinist's level. I have a Taiwanese one from Grizzly that is OK but not perfect. The Starrett is perfect. Unfortunately, there is already a bid of $70 for it. These sell on eBay for about $100 so I will be letting this one pass. For the work I do, the Grizzly is fine - the Starrett would have been wonderful to own but not in my budget.

I am bidding $30-$50 for some assortments of machine tools - reamers. Very handy to have. There is a Harig Surface Grinder in immaculate shape - perfect for knife making so I am bidding some money on that.

There were also two CNC machines. Anything CNC is at the apex of my lust-list. Alas, these had been rode hard and put away wet. Missing pieces, no software, no manuals or schematics, no computers. The online bidding is in the $500+ range for these - worth much less as scrap. Some poor fool is going to get an expensive lesson.

Had my first experience with Chick-fil-a - really delicious. Wish they had a branch closer to the island.

Got another preview tomorrow and then a meeting at 6PM in Stanwood.

Out for the day - auction preview

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Slept in a bit today too but not as bad as before.

Getting a quick coffee and heading down to beautiful Kenmore, WA for an auction preview. Back in a couple of hours.

And I am back

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Cute new waitress - her day job is doing electronic assembly for a local company so we chatted about various geekery and making stuff. She does books on tape while she is working so we talked about things to read. A fun evening and glad I went out. The beers were cold and wet too.

Quick surf around the net shows that nothing has happened so off to YouTube-land for a bit. Early bedtime. No red wine for me tonight - want to get up at a reasonable time tomorrow morning.

And those beers are just calling my name

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Screw it - back in two hours.

Two auction previews

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Tomorrow here: JAY KASIN CUSTOM GUNMAKER, CITY OF TACOMA & OTHERS

Lots of machinists tools - Starrett, Brown and Sharpe, Lufkin, etc... Top end manufacturers and the prices seem reasonable so far.

and Tuesday: BRANCH SOLUTIONS

They made Point of Sale hardware - scanners, etc... I will be looking for test equipment. I especially like these auctions as 90% of the people are coming to get the business' main hardware - the scanners and POS systems in this case. The engineers that keep these places running will invariably have small "stashes" of goodies and these go for pennies on the dollar.

From The Seattle Times:

Amazon lost the Seattle City Council elections after a $1 million power play. Will it see a new head tax?
More than a year ago, Seattle City Councilmember Lisa Herbold teared up as she voted to repeal a per-employee tax on high-grossing businesses that would have raised money for homeless housing and services.

“This is not a winnable battle at this time,” Herbold said, referring to a referendum on the so-called head tax bankrolled by Amazon and other large companies. “The opposition has unlimited resources” to spend on turning voters against the tax.

Fast forward to this year’s council elections, and that picture may have changed. An attempt by the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce to remake the council and ensure policies like the head tax would never return has been soundly rejected by a progressive-minded electorate, despite Amazon pouring nearly $1.5 million into seven district races through the chamber’s no-limit political-action committee (PAC).

Heh - the progressives want to soak the rich and use the money to fund stuff that sounds good and will buy them votes from the low-information voters. Little do they know that elections have consequences and their pet projects may run out of money in a few years. 30 years ago, Boeing was fed up with Seattle's perennial tax-the-rich policies and moved their head office to Chicago. I bet Amazon will have zero problem doing the same thing. Seattle is not holding up its end of the bargain when trying to keep large businesses in the area. Goose that lays Golden Egg sort of thing...

Amazon has already put their toes in the water with New York City but discovered that AOC was just as entitled as Seattle is - they decided against a move and NYC lost a whole bunch of nice jobs.

A bit more about Muslim incest...

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...and it's effect on society. Nobel Laureates by religion. The only concrete lists I could find were for Christians of various Denominations, Jews of various, and Muslims. From Infogalactic:

Christian Nobel laureates by denomination (1901 - 2000) - total of 425 (65.4% of the Laureates)

List of Jewish Nobel laureates (no years cited): Nobel Prizes have been awarded to over 850 individuals, of whom at least 20% were Jews, although Jews comprise less than 0.2% of the world's population (or 1 in every 500 people).

List of Muslim Nobel laureates (cuts off at 2015): Muslims make up over 23% of the world's population. And as of 2015, twelve Nobel Prize winners have been Muslims. More than half of the twelve Muslim Nobel laureates were awarded the prize in the 21st century. Seven of the twelve winners have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, including a controversial award to Yasser Arafat. The recipient of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics, Abdus Salam, was a member of the Ahmadiyya community of Pakistan. Aziz Sancar is the second Turkish Nobel laureate and the first Muslim to be awarded Nobel prize in the field of molecular biology in 2015.

Some of the numbers are a bit wonky (drawn from different sources and different ranges of years) but the overall trend is very prominent. Data don't lie.

Good lord - California

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Say goodbye to any semblance of democracy. From Legal Insurrection:

San Francisco: Socialist Son of Imprisoned Weather Underground Terrorists Who Was Raised By Bill Ayers and Worked for Hugo Chavez Elected D.A.
As we noted in 2018, leftist billionaire George Soros has been focusing his intricate web of foundations, super PACs, and assorted organizations on the nation’s District Attorney offices.

Across the country, Soros-affiliated groups have backed far-left radicals for the office and have seen some success.  One example is Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, and another, as of yesterday, is self-proclaimed socialist Chesa Boudin in San Francisco.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Chesa Boudin won the race to become the city’s next district attorney Saturday on a campaign promising to confront mass incarceration and racial disparities in the criminal justice system, while vowing to hold police more accountable in cases of brutality.

A former deputy public defender, Boudin will now helm the office he previously went up against after winning by a razor-thin margin against Suzy Loftus, who had been appointed as interim district attorney by the mayor weeks before the election.

Boudin wound up with 85,950 votes and Loftus with 83,511 votes on Saturday afternoon, with only about 1,200 votes left to count.

Boudin ran on a platform of “decarceration” . . . except for ICE and police officers who are doing their jobs. Those he wants to pursue, prosecute, and imprison.

Boudin’s background is alarming. His parents are violent radicals who were still acting as if the sixties never ended when they were involved in the robbery of a Brinks armored car robbery in 1981. The crime included the murder of two police officers and a security guard, and Boudin’s father is still in prison for his horrific crimes.

Michelle Malkin reports:

The cornerstone of Boudin’s campaign is sabotaging immigration enforcement. He has called for prosecution and imprisonment of ICE and police officers for doing their jobs and vowed to create an “immigrant defense unit” within the DA’s office to “stand up to Trump on immigration.”

. . . . Boudin is the militant offspring of spoiled-rich radicals Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, members of the violent Weather Underground terrorist group, which bombed government buildings and corporate headquarters, aided convicted felons in jailbreaks and participated in a 1981 Brink’s armored car holdup in Nyack, New York, with the Black Liberation Army. That crime took the lives of three innocent Americans — police officers Edward O’Grady and Waverly Brown and private security guard Peter Paige.

Kathy Boudin was an 11-year fugitive from justice after an accidental homemade bomb explosion at her New York City townhouse resulted in three other deaths. At the time of her arrest in Nyack, Boudin gave police one of many false identities she had used to evade the law. She was paroled in 2003 after convincing parole board members that she acted nobly out of “white guilt” to protest racism against blacks. (Reality check: Officer Waverly Brown was a black, working-class military veteran.) Gilbert remains in prison. Their story was glorified and romanticized by Robert Redford in the 2013 movie, “The Company You Keep.”

Following his parents’ incarceration, Boudin was raised by Weather Underground radicals Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

Ayers and Dohrn were the people who found, groomed and launched Barack Obama's career. He decided to run for President while sitting in their living room.

Much more at the site.

It is served over rice. Rice cooker is still at the farm as well as my five gallon bucket of white rice.

Serving it over pasta instead.

Once again, there is something magic about onions and garlic when cooked - makes the whole house smell fantastic. Another five minutes or so for the pressure to release and then dinner is served. 

Cold and rainy night - staying home and having a beer or three here. I like the socialization and getting to know some really great people but feeling tired again. If I am coming down with something, do not want to spread it around. Feeling good, just tired. Odd dreams too.

From all fin next level:

1500 Year Experiment on Effects of Inbreeding

Healthy unrelated parents have an estimated chance of two to four per cent of having a child with a genetic disease, developmental problem or congenital defect. In contrast, in consanguineous marriages the risk is five to seven per cent, depending on the degree of the relationship between the parents and their ethnicity. __ Source

For almost 1500 years, Islam has allowed first cousin marriages. The result of this policy is clear across the middle east, North Africa, and in other parts of the world where Muslims practice inbred marriages.

A Danish news outlet titled Jyllands-Posten released information in 2009 concerning the astonishing rate of stillbirths, physical deformities, and various mental diseases caused by the ever-imminent incest-filled landscape in the Muslim world, concluding that Pakistani, Turkish and Somali women are twice as likely to experience complications during childbirth. Nearly 70% of Pakistanis are the product of inbreeding in Islam, mostly due to the Muslim tradition of marrying cousins via choice or arrangement. BBC also released a study, revealing that approximately 55% of Pakistani immigrants in Britain were married to a first cousin and that Pakistani-British were “at least 13 times likely to than the general population to have children with recessive genetic disorders.” __ https://steemit.com/politics/@squawker.org/inbreeding-in-islam-over-70-of-muslims-are-the-product-of-incest

Much more at the site and a lot of hard data to back up the cultural acceptance of incest and birth defects. What this has caused is an overall "dumbing down" of islamic culture and a "smartening up" of european culture due to the Church prohibiting consanguineous marriage.

The islamists are showing no sign of changing this policy so we get to watch them slowly fade away. Sad really as they once had a very strong and vibrant culture. Much much more at the site - very thought provoking and explains a lot.

Fixing dinner - feijoada

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Got a hankering for some feijoada for dinner tonight. Was up at the food co-op so picked up two bundles of chard and a small ham steak. Thawing out some bacon too. Delicious stuff and cheap and easy to make. Brazilian slave food.

Slavery? For all the horrors in the United States, it was the Caribbean and South America that was importing slaves like crazy - 70% to our 30%. Treated them worse too. It is also good to remember that Muslims continue to practice slavery to this day and they were the people who rounded up the slaves and sold them back then. Old family business. Many of them were from the Barbary Coast from which we get our word Barbarian.

Three news items all related. From San Francisco station KRON:

Medical tech company claims to have cure for HIV
American Gene Technologies believes it may have a potential cure for HIV-AIDS.

The Rockville, Maryland pharmaceutical company filed a 1,000-page application to the FDA on Wednesday.

Next, the website from the company in question: American Gene Technologies

Redesigning Medicine
AGT uses a proprietary gene delivery platform to rapidly develop patented gene and cell therapies that cure infectious disease, monogenic disorders, and cancers by targeting their genetic root causes.

A bit more:

Gene Therapies
AGT’s platform allows it to pursue exciting clinical “cures” in large and orphan indications and complex diseases. The company has developed individual, intellectual property protected gene therapeutics that are breakthroughs in medicine.

They are not saying very much on their website but in addition to HIV, they are working on a Liver Cancer cure as well as a cure for Phenylketonuria

FInally, this from the Baltimore, Md. CBS affilliate:

Maryland Medical Company Claims To Have Cure For HIV, AIDS
A Maryland medical company has submitted an application to the U.S Food and Drug Administration for a gene therapy it says will eliminate HIV.

American Gene Technologies in Rockville said based on lab tests, the single-dose gene therapy has a “high potential” to be effective.

The company said the therapy, AGT103-T, is a genetically-modified product made from a person’s own cells that focuses on repairing damage to the immune system caused by HIV.

“Our aim is to treat HIV disease with an innovative cell and gene therapy that reconstitutes immunity to HIV and will control virus growth in the absence of antiretroviral drugs,” the company’s chief science officer C. David Pauza said.

A shoe-in for a Nobel if it turns out to work. I wish them luck!

From Nikki Haley - former Ambassador to the United Nations. From The Washington Post:

Nikki Haley claims top aides tried to recruit her to ‘save the country’ by undermining Trump
Two of President Trump’s senior advisers undermined and ignored him in what they claimed was an effort to “save the country,” former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley claims in a new memoir.

Former secretary of state Rex Tillerson and former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly sought to recruit her to work around and subvert Trump, but she refused, Haley writes in a new book, “With All Due Respect,” which also describes Tillerson as “exhausting” and imperious and Kelly as suspicious of her access to Trump.

“Kelly and Tillerson confided in me that when they resisted the president, they weren’t being insubordinate, they were trying to save the country,” Haley wrote.

“It was their decisions, not the president’s, that were in the best interests of America, they said. The president didn’t know what he was doing,” Haley wrote of the views the two men held.

Haley is also the former South Carolina governor. She is widely viewed by Republicans as a top potential presidential candidate in 2024. I like her - she does not back down from anyone. A solid American.

Very interesting too - always thought that T. Rex's and Kelly's resignations were done under a cloud of sorts.
Now we know...

Got her book in the queue at the library - 14 requests ahead of me.

Worst racist ever - President Trump

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From the San Diego, CA FOX News affiliate:

NASA’s ‘Hidden Figures’ to receive highest civilian award
Four African American women known as the “Hidden Figures” who worked at NASA during the Space Race are being awarded Congressional Gold Medals, the highest civilian award in the U.S.

President Donald Trump signed into law the Hidden Figures Congressional Gold Medal Act on Friday.

Engineers Christine Darden and Mary Jackson, as well as mathematician Katherine Johnson and computer programmer Dorothy Vaughan, were awarded Congressional Gold Medals.

Vaughan and Jackson, who passed away, were both awarded posthumously.

A fifth gold medal was granted in honor of all women who contributed to NASA during the Space Race.

A bit about their stories in the article - an amazing history. One which President Obama had eight years to award but no. He was more interested in being divisive than to unify us.

Here is a ten minute documentary parody:

Hits bottom - keeps digging. California

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UPDATE BELOW

No common sense at all. From Zero Hedge:

California Approves $3.2 Billion Bond For High Speed Train To Nowhere
The high speed train is dead, long live the high speed train.

Less than a year after California Gov. Gavin Newsom brought California's dreams for a LA to San Fran bullet train crashing down, when he said in February that he is ending the state’s hugely expensive and hopelessly quixotic high-speed rail line fiasco (which would have been completed in 2033 at a staggering cost of $77 billion), California is about to unleash another high speed train project, and this one is even more idiotic.

The California Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank (IBank) has authorized a $3.2 billion tax-exempt, fixed-rate revenue bond issuance to help DesertXpress Enterprises, an affiliate of Virgin Trains USA, build a high-speed train from Victorville, California, to Las Vegas. The new XpressWest service, at speeds of up to 180 miles per hour, will take about 90 minutes one way. 

There is just one problem: Victorville, located in SoCal's high desert, is quite literally in the middle of nowhere.

I get that this is the first leg of the proposed Las Vegas - Los Angeles service but the two cities are only 270 miles apart - about a four hour drive. So you will park your car, get on the train, arrive at your destination (saving two hours) and then pay for Uber to get to where you want.

If it was me, I would choose to not have the baggage restriction, not have to pay to park my car, not have to pay for a taxi and have my own personal vehicle with me at all times - saving two hours in transit time does not provide enough benefit for me to forgo these perks.

Stupid idea at a time when the state is facing some profound financial problems.

UPDATE: Just for the hell of it, I looked up the California State Debt. It currently stands at $453 Billion dollars. This rail project represents 0.7% of the total California debt. This is not an insignifcant chunk of change for one project (and the cost overruns of course). They need to be reducing their debt, not switching to turbo mode.

Slept in again today

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Only ten hours instead of yesterday's twelve. Been feeling something kicking around my immune system so probably fighting off a cold or something. Take it easy and rest next couple of days.

President Trump attends a football game

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Fun to see the numbers - from ESPN:

President Trump soaks in Deep South cheers at LSU-Alabama game
President Donald Trump knew where to go Saturday for home-field advantage, finding comfort in the Deep South with college football fans cheering two of the nation's top teams -- and him.

A bit more:

Trump, sitting one tier above the field, waved as fans turned around to look up at the president. He smiled, gave a thumbs-up a few times and threw a couple of fist bumps into the air as the Alabama fans waved red and white pompoms in response. First lady Melania Trump got an equally enthusiastic welcome.

But of course, there were some protestors outside the stadium - from Alabama.com:

‘I hate Trump more than Auburn’; UA students stage protest on campus ahead of president’s visit
University of Alabama students and members of the Student Civil Justice Coalition staged a sit-in on the steps of Gorgas Library Friday to protest the impending visit of President Donald Trump during Saturday’s football game between the Crimson Tide and LSU.

And they had a photo montage - here is a screen cap - all nine photos at the site:

20191109-protest.JPG

I am counting all of about ten people. The hatred for the Orange Man is strong down there. Finally, the cute baby trump baloon got knifed and is unreparable - from Breitbart:

‘Baby Trump’ Balloon Slashed at Alabama Appearance
A towering Baby Trump protest balloon was knifed and deflated by someone unhappy with its appearance during President Donald Trump’s Saturday trip to Alabama, organizers said.

The incident occurred during Trump’s visit to watch the University of Alabama football game. The balloon, which is over 20 feet (6.1 meters) tall, was set up in a nearby park.

Jim Girvan, the organizer of a group that “adopts” out Baby Trump balloons for protests, said a man charged the balloon with a knife and cut an 8-foot-long (2.4-meter-long) gash in the back. Girvan said the unidentified man was arrested. Tuscaloosa police did not immediately respond to a request for more details.

Of course, there is a Go-Fund-Me fund for Hoyt's defense - their target was $6,000 and they have already raised $11,230. Go here: Restitutions for Baby Trump Stabber

A curious development

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Dan Scavino is President Trump's online communications director and yesterday, he posted this:

Curious...

Late start to the day

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Cripes! Slept in a lot more than I was planning - 12 hours.

Stuff to do today - out the door in a few minutes.

The economy of Germany is one of the primary drivers for the whole EU economy. Germany's largest bank is experiencing some serious problems.

Started earlier this year - from February 25th, 2019 - CCN News:

Failing Deutsche Bank Lost $1.6 Billion, Conspired to Hide Bond Bet Gone Wrong
Germany’s largest lender Deutsche Bank is in the news again for the wrong reasons. According to the Wall Street Journal, Deutsche Bank lost approximately $1.6 billion over a decade in a bond bet gone awry.

Interestingly, Deutsche Bank has never publicly revealed the loss. This is likely to generate controversy over the bank’s corporate governance structures. As recently as last year the possibility of restating past financial results to reflect the loss was discussed. However, this proposal was shot down.

Fast forward to June 17th, 2019 - Forbes:

Deutsche Bank's Latest Restructuring Plan Fails To Impress
Since the failure of merger talks with Commerzbank, there has been speculation that Deutsche Bank would embark on a major restructuring in the hopes of restoring its fortunes. Now, details are beginning to emerge. According to the Financial Times, the bank’s chief executive, Christian Sewing, plans to create a “bad bank” into which will be placed up to €50bn ($56.18bn) of poorly performing assets, mostly from the troubled U.S. investment bank. The bank also intends to make further deep cuts to its investment bank, and pivot to a new focus on transaction banking and wealth management.

And then there is this - from July 17th - Zero Hedge:

Bank Run: Deutsche Bank Clients Are Pulling $1 Billion A Day
There is a reason James Simons' RenTec is the world's best performing hedge fund - it spots trends (even if they are glaringly obvious) well ahead of almost everyone else, and certainly long before the consensus.

That's what happened with Deutsche Bank, when as we reported two weeks ago, the quant fund pulled its cash from Deutsche Bank as a result of soaring counterparty risk, just days before the full - and to many, devastating - extent of the German lender's historic restructuring was disclosed, and would result in a bank that is radically different from what Deutsche Bank was previously (see "The Deutsche Bank As You Know It Is No More").

In any case, now that RenTec is long gone, and questions about the viability of Deutsche Bank are swirling - yes, it won't be insolvent overnight, but like the world's biggest melting ice cube, there is simply no equity value there any more - everyone else has decided to cut their counterparty risk with the bank with the €45 trillion in derivatives, and according to Bloomberg Deutsche Bank clients, mostly hedge funds, have started a "bank run" which has culminated with about $1 billion per day being pulled from the bank.

As a result of the modern version of this "bank run", where it's not depositors but counterparties that are pulling their liquid exposure from DB on fears another Lehman-style lock up could freeze their funds indefinitely, Deutsche Bank is considering how to transfer some €150 billion ($168 billion) of balances held in it prime-brokerage unit - along with technology and potentially hundreds of staff - to French banking giant BNP Paribas.

And now this from last Tuesday, November 5th, 2019 - Zero Hedge again:

The Deutsche Bank Death Watch Has Taken A Very Interesting Turn
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
The biggest bank in Europe is in the process of imploding, and there are persistent rumors that the final collapse could happen sooner rather than later.  Those that follow my work on a regular basis already know that this is a story that I have been following for years.  Deutsche Bank is rapidly bleeding cash, they have been laying off thousands of workers, and the vultures have been circling as company executives desperately try to implement a turnaround plan.  Unfortunately for Deutsche Bank, it may already be too late.  And if Deutsche Bank goes down, it will be even more catastrophic for the global financial system than the collapse of Lehman Brothers was in 2008.  Germany is the glue that is holding the EU together, and so if the bank that is right at the heart of Germany’s financial system collapses, the dominoes will likely start falling very rapidly.

Much more at the site - things are so bad that they cancelled the Christmas party for their retired executives

This bodes poorly for Europe - I hope that England can Brexit before it all comes crashing down around their ears.

That make the whole house smell so wonderful. Sitting down to a big bowl of delicious stuff...

Time for dinner

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Out for two beers at my local after. Got a couple things to take care of down here tomorrow so probably an early bedtime.

Global warming?

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Europe is feeling some pain

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Lots of reasons - alt.energy being a big one. From Musings from the Chiefio:

Europe’s Green Fall
Looks like after the hallucinogenic green fantasy the morning after hangover has begun in Europe.

With incredibly high electricity prices, folks freezing in winter is spiking (up to about 1/3 without adequate heat in Greece at the peak of their troubles). Highest electrons price around driving industry out.

It’s an interesting POV being presented, including from the prior Environment Minister of Hamburg…

None of this news, really, to our sort. We saw it coming and said so, decades ago. Oh Well… I do find it interesting that they say 6 Euro-cents / kW-hr is subsidy to the wind and solar subsidy farmers and that’s about 1/3 the power bill. The folks who pushed this scam are clearly not dumb, they are creaming off a HUGE vigorish

More at the site - mistake after mistake after mistake and zero accountability. Here, this sounds good - let's push it on everybody. Make it mandatory.

Comfort food for dinner tonight

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Making some American Goulash for dinner tonight - it was good last time and feels like a good night for some stick-to-your-ribs comfort food. Making a double-size batch so will have lots of leftovers.

Latest forecast calls for rain tonight and tomorrow.

The Deep State - not just Democrats

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The Deep State is non-partisan - from The Hill:

Trump encounters GOP resistance to investigating Hunter Biden
A push by President Trump and conservatives to dig into Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine is running into stumbling blocks from an unusual corner: congressional Republicans.

Some Republicans believe Trump’s impeachment trial or a separate Senate committee inquiry could lay the groundwork for investigating former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, who have both emerged as a fixation for Trump and his top allies as they look for a foothold in the impeachment battle.

Trump escalated the effort on Thursday when he tweeted that the Bidens “must testify” — raising the specter that the president’s lawyers or GOP senators could try to drag them into the public impeachment trial.

The Deep State has grown too large (anything is too large). Time to dismantle it and salt the ground it was built on.
Deep State Delenda Est

As the facts come out - Biden and Obama

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From John Solomon:

Testimony bombshell: Obama administration tried to partner with Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian gas firm but was blocked over corruption concerns
A State Department official who served in the U.S. embassy in Kiev told Congress that the Obama administration tried in 2016 to partner with the Ukrainian gas firm that employed Hunter Biden but the project was blocked over corruption concerns.

George Kent, the former charge d’affair at the Kiev embassy, said in testimony released Thursday that the State Department’s main foreign aid agency, known as USAID, planned to co-sponsor a clean energy project with Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas firm that employed Hunter Biden as a board member.

At the time of the proposed project, Burisma was under investigation in Ukraine for alleged corruption. Those cases were settled in late 2016 and early 2017. Burisma contested allegations of corruption but paid a penalty for tax issues.

Kent testified he personally intervened in mid-2016 to stop USAID’s joint project with Burisma because American officials believed the corruption allegations against the gas firm raised concern.

“There apparently was an effort for Burisma to help cosponsor, I guess, a contest that USAID was sponsoring related to clean energy. And when I heard about it I asked USAID to stop that sponsorship,” Kent told lawmakers.

It is all unraveling before their eyes. Time to get more popcorn...

As ISIS continues to get deleted

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The information is a little old but I understand the security concerns - from CBS News:

Captured al-Baghdadi wife revealed plenty about ISIS, source says
One of slain Islamic State of Iraq and Iran (ISIS) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's wives revealed "a lot of information" about the jihadist group's "inner workings" after she was captured last year, a Turkish official told Agence France-Presse.

The official said Baghdadi's spouse identified herself as Rania Mahmoud but was in fact Asma Fawzi Muhammad Al-Qubaysi.

She was said to be the "first wife" of the ISIS leader, who was killed in a U.S. special forces raid in Syria last month. Al-Bagdadi was known to have four wives, according to The Associated Press.

AFP said the woman was arrested on June 2, 2018 in the Turkish province of Hatay, near the Syrian border, along with 10 others, including Baghdadi's daughter, who identified herself as Leila Jabeer.

Good - decapitate their leadership and the body will die. These are evil people.

Out for a couple of hours

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Coffee, post office, library (the new Ronan Farrow book is in) and then working at home today. Been making sauerkraut - since we have had a couple of hard frosts the cabbage is nice and sweet. Bought a large cabbage slicer at Amazon and will be inaugurating that this afternoon. Also picked up some lactobacillus culture - had two batches turn moldy so this way, I will jump-start the fermentation process.

From The Federalist:

Mississippi Food Stamp Work Requirements Save State Taxpayers $93 Million Every Year
Reinstating work requirements for food stamp recipients in Mississippi reduced enrollment and led to higher wages among those weaned off government dependency, finds a new study released on Friday from the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA).

The study from the Florida-based think tank found that after Mississippi reinstated work requirements for food stamps for able-bodied, childless adult recipients, the program saw a 72 percent decline in recipients among this group, saving Mississippi taxpayers almost $93 million each year after the measures were put in place in 2016.

The authors also found that those who benefited from the dignity of working instead of taking welfare flourished across 716 different industries and saw wages double in just one year off of government assistance.

Nothing wrong with a social safety net - shit happens out there. It needs to be temporary though - not a lifestyle.

Does not fit the narrative

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From Town Hall:

Two Illegal Aliens Charged in Killing of California Sheriff Deputy, Gov. Newsom Skips Memorial
On Thursday, the Department of Justice announced federal indictments against four individuals arrested in connection with the killing of El Dorado County Sheriff Deputy Brian Ishmael. The charges handed down today relate to the illegal cultivation of marijuana and illegal discharge of a firearm, but the new indictments confirm the two suspects previously arrested for the killing of Deputy Ishmael were in the country illegally.

Vicki Gonzalez - a reporter for the Sacramento, CA NBC affiliate tweeted:

How difficult would it have been so show some respect for a fallen officer. This is part of your job.

Heh:

20191108-vet.jpg

Life in Sweden

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Would never want to live there. From Breitbart:

Swedish State Agency Uses Money of Dead Citizens to Fund Drag Shows
The Swedish Inheritance Fund, which manages the wealth of deceased Swedes with no heirs, will be using the money of dead Swedes to fund drag queen shows.

The state agency announced it would be giving 1,710,500 Swedish Krona (£138,656/$177,774) to the MUMS Cultural Association in Stockholm to “develop available normative creative fairy tales in the form of feature shows”, according to their website.

The shows in question will involve the group Among Dragons and Drag Queens, which will create “new fairy tales” to whichever group is being targetted at the time. The project will also involve “drag show workshops” in which participants will be able to perform their own drag shows with the project to be presented at local libraries.

And their target?

At the end of October, Among Dragons and Drag Queens even did a library drag storytime event for newly arrived migrant children. They said in a press release: “It was a little extra magical since most of the children could not speak Swedish. With the help of colours, glitter, costume transformations, and repetition of the words, all the children could follow the stories.”

Why do they always target little children - especially children from immigrants who do not understand the Swedish culture and who are trying to conform and fit in. Great way to get them indoctrinated. This is a moral sickness.

From Associated Press:

Ivanka Trump meets with female landowners on Morocco trip
Visiting Morocco for the first time, Ivanka Trump received a warm welcome Thursday from housewives, widows and other women who are benefiting from new laws that allow them to own land.

One woman expressed her gratitude by embracing President Donald Trump’s daughter and kissing her hands.

Ivanka Trump is a senior White House adviser who works on women’s issues and has sought through an initiative to encourage developing countries to help women build wealth and financial independence by owning land or other property.

Morocco is one such nation. Working in partnership with the Millennium Challenge Corp., a U.S. aid agency, Morocco has updated its land titling laws and earned the three-day visit from the U.S. president’s daughter.

And what has Chelsea Clinton done recently? I get it - Ivanka was born with a silver spoon in her mouth but she has worked hard and made something of herself. The idea that a muslim majority nation is allowing women to own land is amazing and yet, from the mainstream media?

.

.

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- - - crickets - - -

Must be nice - California pensions

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From The Washington Free Beacon:

Calif. Taxpayers on Hook for Six-Figure Government Pensions
Nearly 80,000 Californians collected six-figure taxpayer-funded pensions in 2018, as retirement costs leave half the state's cities at "high risk" of serious financial distress, according to an analysis.

Transparent California, a free-market think tank, found that 6 percent of retired government workers collected more than $100,000 in 2018, an 85 percent jump since 2013. Those payouts represented 20 percent of the $51.7 billion in total pension payments. Taxpayers spent a record-high $40 billion to cover the costs of public sector retirees in 2018, the report also found.

The median household income in California is $75,277. The six-figure payouts propel thousands of retirees into the top 38 percent of all earners in the state, according to census data. About 1.2 million people received pension checks in 2018, including a retired deputy police chief who collected nearly $1.5 million in 2018.

The California state government promissed these pensions so they are obligated to pay them. The problem is that they kicked the can down the road - they promissed this money without having the means to pay for it. They are unable to maintain their infrastructure and now they come crying to the rest of us American's hoping that we will bail them out.

I say no - let them learn from their mistakes.

Interesting - Vitamin D

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I take D3 supplements - a small amount in summer and a larger amount in winter. From United Press International:

Vitamin D deficiency linked to muscle weakness in older adults
Vitamin D deficiency is linked with poor muscle health in older adults, a new study finds.

Maintaining muscle health helps seniors maintain their independence, mobility and quality of life. It also lowers their risk of falls and frailty.

Researchers looked at more than 4,100 people, aged 60 and older, in England. About 4 in 10 with vitamin D deficiency had muscle weakness -- twice the level found among those who had adequate vitamin D levels.

Impaired muscle performance was three times more common among those with vitamin D deficiency (25.2 percent) than those with adequate vitamin D (7.9 percent).

Interesting - one of those chemicals that is used (for good) in several places in our body.

Alexandria Occasional-Cortex

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MABA - Make Alexandria Bartend Again - she is the gift that keeps on giving:

20191107-stupid.jpg

Great essay - Climate

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From Joel Kotkin writing at City Journal - really like his writing and really like City Journal overall.

Climate Stalinism
The Left’s fixation on climate change is cloaked in scientism, deploying computer models to create the illusion of certainty. Ever more convinced of their role as planetary saviors, radical greens are increasingly intolerant of dissent or any questioning of their policy agenda. They embrace a sort of “soft Stalinism,” driven by a determination to remake society, whether people want it or not—and their draconian views are penetrating the mainstream. “Democracy,” a writer for Foreign Policy suggests, constitutes “the planet’s biggest enemy.”

Today’s working and middle classes are skeptical about policies that undermine their livelihoods in the promise of distant policy goals. Even now, after a decade-long barrage of fear-mongering, a majority of Americans, Australians, and even Europeans doubt that climate change will affect their lives substantially. A recent UN survey of 10 million people found that climate change ranked 16th in concerns; most people in the developing world, notes environmental economist Bjorn Lomborg, “care about their kids not dying from easily curable diseases, getting a decent education, not starving to death.”

Much more at the site - calling it Climate Stalinism really defines the problem. This is science forced to fit the narrative and not the pure gathering of data and extrapolating trends. Reminds me of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko and his failed agronomy research. He was wrong wrong wrong but he was also politically connected so they accepted his narrative as fact and 100 million people starved to death.

Tip of the Stetson to Kim DuToit for the link. A daily read for me.

Great history lesson from Chris Lynch at Large Regular:

Trump, the Democrats, Syria and Iran
Interesting article that claims that President Trump may have prevented a war with Iran by withdrawing our troops from Syria. This paragraph really got my attention (and my blood pressure up):

"People should remember that in the height of the Nixon Watergate Impeachment tumult during late 1973/early 1974 culminating in Nixon's resignation in August 1974, the North Vietnamese reneged on the Nixon Paris Peace Accords, and Saigon fell soon thereafter, in April 1975. G-d only knows what will happen because of Democrats' paralyzing of an American President while the world is in flames."

Now I hesitate to draw any comparisons between Trump and Nixon and I would also hesitate to use the description that "the world is in flames" but there's a special place in hell for those of either political party who claim to be acting on behalf of world peace or downtrodden folks in foreign lands when they are only acting in the interests of their own domestic political agenda. A special place in hell!

Do you remember the plight of the "boat people"?

Remember how eager the press was to hear from General Mattis prior to his recent book tour when they thought he was going to speak badly about President Trump? Remember how quickly they dropped any interest in him when they learned it was President Obama who was slammed in the new book?

Remember the 24/7 news cycle about how "Trump was abandoning the Kurds" and the predicted horrors that awaited those poor people? Can you remember any of those horrors coming to pass? And you know if they did come to pass it would have been an orgy of coverage. Instead we got fake news footage from a  Kentucky shooting range.

Remember how Libya is now a failed nation-state because of the actions of President Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton? Slavery is now an accepted practice in what used to be Libya! Talk about horrors (horrors you won't learn about on the MSM).

I remember! And I hope you do too! A SPECIAL PLACE IN HELL!

The Democrats are attempting to manipulate history to fit their narrative. Not a good way to go through life.
History always has the last laugh - if it does not outright repeat, it rhymes.

A big yawn - anti-Trump book

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Some schmo wrote a book and it is not selling well - from The Washington Free Beacon:

Mark Halperin’s New Anti-Trump Book Barely Sells 500 Copies
Disgraced former MSNBC analyst Mark Halperin’s book How to Beat Trump: America's Top Political Strategists On What It Will Take sold 502 copies during its first week, according to NPD BookScan's Wednesday report.

Not many Americans purchased Halperin's book this week despite the description on Amazon that claims, "more than 100 million anxious Americans want to know: how can Donald Trump be beaten in 2020 and evicted from the White House?"

Just six reviews of the book have been posted to Amazon, one of which is titled "Write what you know, Mark." In it, user Ball Student wrote, "He'd be better off avoiding speculation and sticking to areas he has extensive experience in: groping female employees."

ZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzz... Mark Halperin? Didn't he used to be famous or something?

Heh - from FOX News:

'Putting ego and politics’ before ‘black bodies’: Chicago native blasts city leaders who snubbed Trump
Fox News political analyst Gianno Caldwell blasted the Democratic leadership of his native Chicago amid new reports that the city's' police superintendent is set to announce his retirement.

Last month, Chicago’s top cop, Eddie Johnson got into a highly publicized spat with President Trump after he refused to attend the president's speech at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference hosted by the Windy City. On Wednesday, reports emerged that Johnson may step down amid an investigation into an incident in which officers found him allegedly asleep in his car at a stop sign.

And of course, the usual suspects rallied to Johnson's defense:

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot came to Johnson's defense and dinged the president by tweeting, "It’s no surprise that @realDonaldTrump brought his insulting, ignorant buffoonery to Chicago. Luckily, in this city, we know the truth and we will not let anyone — no matter how high the office — denigrate who we are as a people or our status as a welcoming city."

The black Democrats refuse to work with the man who is trying his best to help them. Obama didn't help them, President Obama created the racial divides so he could Balkanize the population. President Trump is really trying to elevate the black population out of poverty but some of them - the ones suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and who are living on the Democrat Plantation are in serious denial.

Whistleblower - pedophile?

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What is it with prominent Democrats and sexual abuse - from NOQ Report:

Whistleblower’s lawyer Mark Zaid’s YouTube channel liked young Disney girl videos
The Internet has a long memory. In fact, it’s eight years too long for the Ukraine whistleblower’s lawyer Mark Zaid. That was the last time he had activity on his YouTube page, and the three videos he liked at the time are pretty creepy. It seems the lawyer really enjoyed watching videos about the “prettiest” Disney Channel stars, including a video that tracks Selena Gomez from childhood.

Long memory? Hell - the Internet is forever. Do not ever forget that.

His channel, called MarkSZaidEsq (archive link in case he deletes it or unlikes the perverted young girl videos) was linked to (archive link) from his primary website and as of the writing of this article, is still linked to from his other website (archive link).  The link from the primary website was scrubbed after Washington Times journalist Douglas Ernst asked him about it earlier today. Ernst originally asked Zaid in April about the channel but his question was ignored. Between his primary website getting scrubbed and the link to the YouTube channel still being live from his profile page on a different website, it seems to clearly indicate the channel is, indeed, his.

Much more at the site - maybe not out-and-out sexual abuse but still, an unhealthy interest. The website has screen captures and copies of the posts - pretty graphic.

Again, can anyone point me to a prominent Republican with kid-pro-quo deviancy issues? Did not think so.

And that is it - tired

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Full day. Photos were very well received. Meeting went well.

Time for some videos and a glass or two of red wine.

Every meeting, there is a public presentation by an artist or someone involved in arts or technology. Tonight's presentation was very interesting as they talked a bit about PechaKucha - Japanese for "chit chat". It was devised by some architects in Japan who use the format to distill their presentations to the bare essence.

You present 20 images and talk about each image for 20 seconds. That is it. 400 seconds for your entire presentation. A little bit over six minutes max. Sort of like the classic business Elevator pitch.

Meet Candle

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A Smart Home system that doesn't snoop on you. What a concept. From Candle Smart Home:

Do we have to choose between privacy and convenience?
Candle is a privacy focused smart home demonstrator. Our prototypes prove it's technically possible to build a privacy respecting smart home while maintaining convenience.

Candle is being developed by a collective of designers, artists and privacy experts from Amsterdam. While the main goal is raising awareness, we're also interested in working with partners to bring these innovations to market.

The Central Controller runs a Raspberry Pi and the various remotes use Arduino. Operating system is based on the Mozilla WebThings. Devices include door locks, light switches, plant sensors, electricity use, weather, alarm clock, thermostat. All open source so developing your own sensors is a piece of Pi.

Been thinking about a system like this for the island house - this is drop-dead perfect. Already been familiarizing myself with the Pi and the 'duino.

The silent coup

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Looks like someone should have been a bit more circumspect on their twitter account. From The Daily Wire:

Whistleblower Lawyer In January 2017: ‘Coup Has Started,’ ‘Impeachment Will Follow’
Mark Zaid, the attorney for the Ukrainian whistleblower, stated just days after President Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2017 that the “coup has started” and that “impeachment will follow.”

“The posts, which came shortly after President Trump fired then-acting Attorney General Sally Yates for failing to defend federal laws in court, are likely to fuel Republican concerns that the whistleblower’s complaint is tainted with partisanship,” Fox News’ Gregg Re reported. “Trump has repeatedly accused Democrats and partisans in the intelligence community of effectively plotting a coup against him, through selective leaks and lengthy investigations.”

Screen caps of the tweets at the site.

Saving the Parade

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Great post from Don Surber:

Trump will lead the NYC parade he saved
In August 1995, organizers for the annual Veterans Day Parade in New York City looked at how much money they had three months before the big day.

$1.21.

The New York Times reported, "A request to airlines to donate blankets for aging veterans was turned down because logos might not be visible on television."

Wow.

The Times reported, "Then Donald Trump, a non-veteran, agreed to throw in $200,000 as well as raise money from his friends, in exchange for being named grand marshal."

In short order, they had $2.4 million, saving the parade and the city's honor.

On Veterans Day 1995, United Press International reported, "More than 500,000 people jammed the sidewalks of Manhattan's Fifth Avenue Saturday to watch three generations of veterans march in the Nation's Parade. The crowd cheered as 25,000 veterans marched in one of the last national events marking the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. The mood of the parade was festive despite the blustery weather, with marching veterans smiling and onlookers shouting 'Thank you.'"

Segue to today:

24 years later, hounded by politicians and high taxes, President Trump has moved to Mar-a-Lago.

But he'll be back on Monday in the city he saved to lead the parade he saved.

The Military Times reported, "President Donald Trump will mark Veterans Day this year with a speech at the start of the New York City Veterans Day Parade, which would be the first time a sitting president has attended the event.

The words: "Thank You" come to mind. Never uttered by anyone from New York City for the last couple of years...

Heading out soon - meeting

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Had some more minestrone soup and some par-baked bread which I finished in the oven. Great stuff.

Back in a couple of hours - working down here tomorrow and then to the farm Thursday for a few days.

Quote of the week

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So true:

"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it."
--H.L. Mencken

Heh - Epstein

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Seriously WTF Austin, TX

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Austin Texas is a liberal holdout in a deep red Texas. Here is one example. From Texas station KXAN

Austin ISD approves new sex ed curriculum
Early Tuesday morning, Austin Independent School District’s board unanimously approved a controversial new sex-education curriculum.

The curriculum spans grades three through eight. Under the new curriculum, for the first time, the district will teach students about gender identity and sexual orientation. The lessons will also help kids identify an adult they can trust; plus talk to them about options if they get pregnant, and seventh graders would learn how to use a condom.

Needless to say, the usual suspects are deeply embedded:

Those supporters include Informed Parents of Austin, a group of AISD parents advocating for “policies in the Austin Independent School District that pertain to the LGBTQ community.” The group’s mission also includes working to “counter the efforts of any group which has a mission of removing anti-bullying and equality policies from AISD.”

So that group is just a front for gay activists - that vanishingly small percentage of people who insist that we change our society to accommodate their fetishes. No thought given to the lives of the poor children exposed to this crap.

Fun video - BadFellas

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Quite obvious really

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I hate to see parents using a screen as an artificial babysitter. Yes, it keeps the kiddos quiet but it is causing some significant damage to their developing brains. From the MIT Technology Review:

Screen time might be physically changing kids’ brains
study published today in JAMA Pediatrics warns that kids’ literacy and language skills suffer with screen use, and MRI scans of their brains appear to back up the findings.

The study: Forty-seven 3- to 5-year-olds took a test to measure their cognitive abilities, and their parents were asked to answer a detailed survey about screen time habits. Questions included: How frequently do they use that screen? What type of content are they viewing? And is there an adult sitting with the child talking about what they’re watching? The answers were scored against a set of screen time guidelines put out by the American Academy of Pediatrics. The kids also had their brains scanned in an MRI machine.

Brain changes: The scans revealed that kids who spent more time in front of screens had what the authors call lower “white matter integrity.” White matter can be roughly thought of as the brain’s internal communications network—its long nerve fibers are sheathed in fatty insulation that allows electrical signals to move from one area of the brain to another without interruption. The integrity of that structure—how well organized the nerve fibers are, and how well developed the myelin sheath is—is associated with cognitive function, and it develops as kids learn language. 

Lead author John Hutton of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital told MIT Technology Review there’s a clear link between higher screen use and lower white matter integrity in the children his team studied. That structural change appears to be reflected in the results of the cognitive test the kids took as well, which showed high screen time associated with lower levels of language and literacy skills. “The effect size is substantial, as these findings also rigorously controlled for multiple comparisons across the brain,” Hutton says.

Sample size was pretty small (less than 70) but the evidence is pretty overwhelming.

Rethinking sanctuary counties

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Good to see reality trump narrative - from Daily Caller:

Sanctuary County Rolls Back Its Anti-ICE Policy Following String Of Illegal Aliens Charged With Rape
Following months of national media coverage over the handling of illegal aliens in his custody, Montgomery County, Maryland, Executive Marc Elrich has somewhat reversed a sanctuary policy he signed into law.

Elrich will allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents the ability to access certain areas of the Montgomery County jail in order to apprehend illegal aliens, according to ABC7 News. A county spokesman confirmed to the local news outlet on Nov. 1 that correctional officers have been ordered to give ICE agents clearance to “identified areas” of the jail to “ensure that transfers are conducted in a safe environment.”

A bit more:

Elrich signed the “The Promoting Community Trust Executive Order” in July, which barred county police from asking an individual about their immigration status and largely prohibited them from cooperating with ICE agents. Montgomery County had already refused to honor ICE detainer requests, and the new order was the latest sanctuary measure enacted by a deep-blue locality revolting against the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

The 'ole double whammy - Orange Man Bad and preserving the progressive narrative. Of course:

However, Elrich’s order soon proved controversial. Authorities arrested numerous illegal aliens in Montgomery County — all of the arrests taking place just weeks after the order was signed — and charged them with rape or other sexual abuse crimes. The string of rape charges shined a national spotlight on the county’s policy toward criminal illegal aliens and its fraught relationship with the agency tasked with removing them.

Wake up and smell the cappuccino. The people coming across the border are not the best and brightest. DUH! Glad that they woke up before someone was murdered. The county council still needs to get their collective heads screwed on straight:

In a scathing response to national criticism, the Montgomery County Council in early September accused the Trump administration, conservative media, “Neo-Nazi sympathizers” and others of spreading “a lot of inaccurate information” about the county’s criminal justice process.

Bunch of self-centered morons. Elections have consequences.

Not the way to handle it - Mexico

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How deep in bed is he with the cartels? From FOX News:

Mexico's Lopez Obrador doubles down on ‘hugs, not bullets’ policy amid mounting criticism
Mexico’s president stood defiant Wednesday amid mounting criticism of his government’s policy of using "hugs, not bullets" when fighting drug cartels after nine Americans – including six children – were gunned down by sicarios on Monday.

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador brushed off criticisms against his government’s position and reiterated Wednesday during his daily media briefing that violence was not the answer or appropriate response to the growing deaths at the hands of cartels.

“It was lamentable, painful because children died, but do we want to resolve the problem the same way (as previous administrations)? By declaring war?” he asked. “That, in the case of our country, showed that it does not work. That was a failure. It caused more violence.”

Hey AMLO - you campaigned on getting rid of the cartels and cutting crime. Now it is time for you do actually fulfill your campaign promises. You have all sorts of support from President Trump if you need it. Time for you to act.

Picking the wrong side - New York Times

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Third time's the charm - from Elizabeth Harrington:

Heh - so true. The creepy porn lawyer was going to get the Bad Orange Man. Then it was Robert Meuller after spending $20+ million and two+ years. Then it was Leaky Adam Shiff-4-brains. They have nothing. We have President Trump.

Brad Upton - comedy

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Fun stuff - tip of the hat to Eaton Rapids Joe:

Brad's website: Brad Upton

Socialized medicine - England

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They just got woke big-time - from the National Health Service:

North Bristol hands red card to racism
North Bristol NHS Trust has today launched a “Red Card to Racism” campaign to protect all staff from any discrimination.

Following a national trend, staff have reported that incidents of racism on wards have increased over the past year so the hospital will be enforcing its zero tolerance policy against abusive behaviour.

This means that any patient abusing staff will be challenged and warned, leading to a sports-style disciplinary yellow card and then final red card in which treatment would be withdrawn as soon as is safe.

Any visitors causing disturbance or behaving in an unacceptable manner will get one verbal warning before being removed.

Talk about the Camel's Nose - you get a yellow card and then a red card and then the Doctors withdraw treatment? Stopping the medical care for which this person was admitted to the hospital. What is next? Checking their social media before you attempt resuscitation?

Here is what gets you a red card:

  • Racist or sexist language, gestures or behaviour.
  • Excessive noise.
  • Abuse of alcohol or drugs.
  • Threatening and offensive language.
  • Malicious allegations.
  • Intentional damage to trust property.

So you are injured or in pain or confused and you blurt out something not in keeping with the protected narrative (all hail the narrative) - they withhold your treatment?

This is socalized medicine and this is why it needs to be killed with fire. We do not want to implement it here.

Done for the day

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Got the photos color balanced* and selected. Some great faces.

Sitting down to a big bowl of minestrone soup - big flavor and mouthfeel difference making it with dried Cannelloni beans instead of some generic canned white beans. Out for a couple pints later.

* Color Balancing - Friday's Patron party was held in the evening and the Color Rendering Index of the fluorescent lighting in the Center is horrible (50-60 at best where 100 is perfect). Needed to correct to get the white shirts looking white instead of as though they had been soaked in weak tea. Fortunatly, once I get the correct values, I can sit back and do the rest of them as a batch process.

Do not pick up any hitchhikers - from Raleigh, NC station WRAL:

13-year-old charged with murder escaped from Robeson courthouse wearing leg restraints, no shoes
Officials are searching for a boy who escaped from Robeson County Juvenile Court on Tuesday afternoon.

The 13-year-old, who was appearing in court for two counts of first-degree murder and robbery with a dangerous weapon charges, escaped around noon, according to the Robeson County Sheriff’s Office.

He was last seen in the intersection of North Carolina Highway 72 and Country Club Road in Lumberton wearing a white T-shirt, beige pants and leg restraints without any shoes.

Some forms of birth control need to be retroactive.

Winning the tri-fecta

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  • Democrat
  • Sexual Predation on a minor
  • Portland, OR

Sounds like it was a great party - NOT. From Portland station KOIN:

Sodomy, bribery: The case against Terry Bean
Terry Bean, the high-profile Democratic donor and activist, bailed out of jail the same day he was arrested Wednesday afternoon by Portland police. His lawyer, Derek Ashton – who was arrested hours earlier – also posted bail and was released from jail.​

Court documents say the men arranged a $200,000 payment to a 15-year-old boy to make sex abuse charges against Bean go away. ​

Bean was arrested on a warrant accusing him of 2 counts of 3rd-degree sodomy — both felonies — and a misdemeanor sexual abuse charge on a case that was first filed in 2015.

And of course, the major charges are quietly going away. Douchebaggery like this makes me sick. Could someone please point me to a Conservative American with similar charges? Anyone?

From The Hill:

Hillary Clinton urges Democrats to pick a candidate who can win the Electoral College
Hillary Clinton on Monday urged Democrats to choose a nominee who can win the Electoral College in 2020.

"We have to hope that whoever ends up nominated can win the Electoral College," she said at a discussion of her book, "The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience," in Denver.

"I think several of our candidates could win the popular vote but as I know ... that's not enough," added the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee.

"I don't think we have a choice; we have to win" in 2020, she said, speaking alongside her daughter and co-author Chelsea Clinton at a sold-out event.

She urged a supportive crowd of almost 2,000 people to "work hard for your preference in the primary" but "close ranks behind whoever is nominated."

And of course, that winner would be none other than Hillary herself. It is her turn. She deserves the title.

Heh - not just the White House - UPDATE

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UPDATE - a reader commented with what actually happened. More complex than the Reuters report.

Two weeks ago, President Trump asked Federal Agencies to drop their New York Times subscriptions (and The Washington Post). Now a library in Florida is doing the same - from Reuters:

Florida county to revisit rejection of digital New York Times for libraries
Responding to a public furor, a Florida county board on Tuesday said it would revisit its decision to reject its library system’s request for a digital subscription to the New York Times, whose reporting one member had called “fake news.”

The Oct. 24 decision by the Citrus County commissioners drew sharp opposition as well as national attention when it came to light in a local report late last week.

“One of the most, if not the most, disappointing aspects of all of this has been the vitriol that has come about so quickly,” said Jeff Kinnar, chairman of the Board of County Commissioners. “I have gotten more foul language in my emails in the last 48 hours than I have gotten in the past three years.”

Of course the deep state apparatchiks respond with venom when the sacred narrative is being questioned.

Some fun stuff to play with - Spleeter

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From Waxy:

Fast and Free Music Separation with Deezer’s Machine Learning Library
Cleanly isolating vocals from drums, bass, piano, and other musical accompaniment is the dream of every mashup artist, karaoke fan, and producer. Commercial solutions exist, but can be expensive and unreliable. Techniques like phase cancellation have very mixed results.

The engineering team behind streaming music service Deezer just open-sourced Spleeter, their audio separation library built on Python and TensorFlow that uses machine learning to quickly and freely separate music into stems. (Read more in today’s announcement.)

You can train it yourself if you have the resources, but the three models they released already far surpass any available free tool that I know of, and rival commercial plugins and services. The library ships with three pre-trained models:

    • Two stems – Vocals and Other Accompaniment
    • Four stems – Vocals, Drums, Bass, Other
    • Five stems – Vocals, Drums, Bass, Piano, Other

It took a couple minutes to install the library, which includes installing Conda, and processing audio was much faster than expected.

On my five-year-old MacBook Pro using the CPU only, Spleeter processed audio at a rate of about 5.5x faster than real-time for the simplest two-stem separation, or about one minute of processing time for every 5.5 minutes of audio. Five-stem separation took around three minutes for 5.5 minutes of audio.

When running on a GPU, the Deezer team report speeds 100x faster than real-time for four stems, converting 3.5 hours of music in less than 90 seconds on a single GeForce GTX 1080.

They have some samples and the effect is really good - something to play with this winter.

Looks like rain

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Forecast doesn't show rainfall until Saturday.

Tell that to the real world. No rain now but it is warm, humid - positively gravid.

The New York Times

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It used to be America's Newspaper of Record until their liberal bias became a major problem.
From The Washington Free Beacon:

Republicans Lie, Democrats Misstate: A New York Times Style Guide
Politicians tend to make stuff up. When that happens, the media coverage tends to differ depending on the letter next to the offending politician's name.

The New York Times, for example, took a markedly different tone in covering Hillary Clinton's bogus 2008 claim about landing under sniper fire in Bosnia than it did with President Donald Trump's dubious statement that the late ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi went down "whimpering" during a U.S. raid last month.

In 2008, after the Washington Post published a Four-Pinocchio "fact check" of Clinton's oft-told Bosnia story from 1996, the Times reported Clinton's "admission that she had misspoken." A story the following day discussed her attempts to put "a softening spin on her misstatement."

By contrast, the Times has devoted three news reports to fact-checking Trump's statement that al-Baghdadi died "crying and whimpering and screaming," including a front-page story on Saturday headlined, "The ‘Whimpering’ Terrorist Only Trump Seems to Have Heard." Multiple defense officials said Trump's story was likely a fabrication, and no evidence has emerged to confirm his account describing a humiliating end for the world's most-wanted terrorist.

This bias is so pervasive that we have become inured to it. They are Gaslighting us and most people do not recognize it for what it is.

Learning their history - socialism

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From America's Newspaper of Record - the Babylon Bee:

Millennial Wishes There Were Some Historical Examples Of Socialism We Could Study To Have Some Idea How It Might Turn Out
Local socialist millennial man Matthew Hatter lamented Monday that there are no concrete examples of socialism he can point to in order to have some kind of idea how it would turn out.

"If only there were other countries that have tried socialism before," Hatter said to a friend at an ethical coffee shop, Commiebrews, Monday afternoon, after he finished his paper route. "Then, we could see if there are any pitfalls."

Hatter said it'd be nice if there were books that covered things like world history and economics that we could read. If that were the case, Hatter said, we could abandon socialism if it looked dangerous or proceed with socialism if every country that implemented it were incredibly successful.

"Like, say some countries in South America tried socialism before and everybody starved to death," he said. "Or if there were major superpowers who implemented socialism and then, like, 100 million people died---that would be really bad. We could look to these 'books of history' and decide that wouldn't be the route for us."

"Alas, sadly, this isn't the case, so the country will just have to be pioneers and try socialism to see what it's like."

I rest my case...

A great observation from Freedom Works:

The Framers of the Constitution Warned Against a Partisan Impeachment Process
Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School, writes in The Hill, “A partisan impeachment vote is exactly what the Framers feared.” Dershowitz emphasizes the exceptional and unique power of impeachment. “Impeachment is an extraordinary tool to be used only when the constitutional criteria are met. These criteria are limited and include only ‘treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.’”

Knowing the intent of the Framers of the Constitution, Dershowitz paraphrases a major concern of Alexander Hamilton that partisan politics will be used to remove an elected president. “Hamilton warned of the ‘greatest danger’ that the decision to move forward with impeachment will ‘be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties than the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.’ He worried that the tools of impeachment would be wielded by the ‘most cunning or most numerous factions’ and lack the ‘requisite neutrality toward those whose conduct would be the subject of scrutiny.’”

“[M]ost cunning” has been House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who has conducted a secret investigation and appears to have selectively leaked damaging reports of allegations of misconduct by President Trump. For sure, the most numerous factions are the House Democrats that have finally voted for the ground rules on an impeachment inquiry – with every Democrat but two voting to continue. Dangerously, Schiff, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and the Democrats have and are intentionally creating a constitutional crisis, foreseen by the brilliant Alexander Hamilton.

Much more at the site - an excellent analysis. This impeachment needs to be put down now before they get any other ideas. President Trump won the election fair and square - the Democrats should be doing their jobs and representing their constituents instead of wasting millions of taxpayer dollars on this soft coup.

I really wish that we had this chain up here - great food plus super secret hidden messages:

20191105-epstein.jpg

Late lunch

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Dump and recycling run completed - got a couple hundred more pounds of crap gotten rid of. Old papers, etc...

Started the minestrone soup for dinner tonight and having a quick sandwich for lunch - spending the next two hours sorting through images and building the slide show for the Patron's party - it was a lot of fun and some really good people. The CAA more than broke even so the event was a success.

Out for a bit

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Coffee, post office, drop my ballot at the county drop-box, dump and recycling run and then back home to sort through photos and assemble them into a video for tomorrow's meeting.

From The Hollywood Reporter:

Nigeria's Oscar Entry 'Lionheart' Disqualified for Predominantly English Dialogue
Nigeria's entry for the international feature film Oscar category was disqualified on Monday because it contained too much English dialogue, leading to backlash from its filmmaker, Nigerian actor-director Genevieve Nnaji, as well as from fellow helmer Ava DuVernay.

Lionheart is Nigeria's first-ever submission to the Academy Awards. Nnaji stars alongside Peter Edochie and Nkem Owoh in the film, which she also co-wrote with her producing partner Chinny Onwugbenu. Lionheart premiered at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival and was acquired by Netflix for worldwide distribution.

According to the Academy's rules for the international feature film category, "an international film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (defined as over 40 minutes) produced outside the United States of America with a predominantly non-English dialogue track." Lionheart has just under 12 minutes of dialogue that is in the Igbo language native to Southeastern Nigeria, while the rest of the 94-minute pic is in English. The film is not excluded from entering other Oscar categories, including consideration for best picture. 

From the CIA World Factbook for Nigeria (excellent resource for any nation by the way):

20191105-nigeria.JPG

So with over 500 indigenous languages, they standardized on English as their official language.
Smart move Academy. Fact checking anyone?

Epstein. From their website: Project Veritas:

[VIDEO] Leaked Insider Recording From ABC News Reveals Network Executives Killed Bombshell Story Implicating Jeffrey Epstein

    • “I’ve Had This Story for Three Years… (ABC) Would Not Put It on The Air” says Good Morning America Breaking News Anchor, and 20/20 Co-Anchor Amy Robach. “It Was Unbelievable… We Had – Clinton, We Had Everything…”
    • Robach: “We Had Her Whole Allegations About Prince Andrew…I Got a Little Concerned About Why I Couldn’t Get On.”
    • Amy Robach Describes How She Interviewed a Woman Who Had the Courage to Come Forward “Years” Ago About Epstein: “She Had Pictures, She Had Everything. She Was in Hiding for Twelve Years. We Convinced Her to Come Out. We Convinced Her to Talk to Us.”
    • Robach Details ABC’s Initial Response to Her: “Who’s Jeffrey Epstein? No One Knows Who That is. This is a Stupid Story”
    • Robach: “Now it’s All Coming Out … I Freaking Had All Of It…”

Newly revealed footage leaked by an ABC insider has exposed how network executives rejected allegations against Jeffrey Epstein years ago, even though there was content regarding the merit of those claims in-hand.

Amy Robach, ‘Good Morning America’ Co-Host and Breaking News Anchor at ABC, explains how a witness came forward years ago with information pertaining to Epstein, but Disney-owned ABC News refused to air the material for years. Robach vents her anger in a “hot mic” moment with an off-camera producer, explaining that ABC quashed the story in it’s early stages. “I’ve had this interview with Virginia Roberts (Now Virginia Guiffre) [alleged Epstein victim]. We would not put it on the air. Um, first of all, I was told “Who’s Jeffrey Epstein. No one knows who that is. This is a stupid story.”

She continues, “The Palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways.”

Robach goes on to express she believes that Epstein was killed in prison saying, “So do I think he was killed? 100% Yes, I do…He made his whole living blackmailing people… Yup, there were a lot of men in those planes. A lot of men who visited that Island, a lot of powerful men who came into that apartment.”

Robach repeats a prophetic statement purportedly made by Attorney Brad Edwards “…[T]here will come a day when we will realize Jeffrey Epstein was the most prolific pedophile this country has ever known,” and Disgustedly Robach states “I had it all three years ago.”

The Epstein files are out there somewhere. Things are getting interesting. This time of American history will be studied by future generations. How we almost lost our Republic.

Nice chunk of change - Volkswagon

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Nope - no corruption here. From Deutsche Welle (German World):

German government expands subsidies for electric cars
The German government and car industry have agreed to increase joint subsidies for the purchase of electric cars on the same day automobile giant Volkswagen began production of a new all-electric vehicle.

The agreement between the government and the automobile industry was reached following a Monday evening "car summit" aimed at fostering the mass production of cleaner transportation. 

And how much?

Under the agreement, consumer subsidies for electric cars costing less than €40,000 ($44,500) will increase to €6,000 (about $6,700) from €4,000. Purchasers of plug-in hybrids in this price range would be given a subsidy of €4,500, up from €3,000.

This money is coming out of German taxpayer's wallets and is being used to subsidize coal-burning cars. Electricity is not a fuel, it is an energy transport medium and these cars are burning coal and natural gas.

I wonder who Volkswagon had to bribe to get this free lunch.

Very bad court decision

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They should have just let this guy die on the streets. I can not think of a better definition of "a worthless life".
From the New York Post:

Heroin addict allegedly drags NYPD cop with his car — and wins $11 million in court
A heroin addict with nearly 20 arrests to his name allegedly dragged a cop along a busy Bronx street while fleeing a traffic stop, forcing another lawman to shoot him — and a jury just handed him an $11 million payday, The Post has learned.

The incident:

Lopez, 27 when the encounter happened, was in the midst of “a two-week-long bender” and had just scored his latest fix on Feb. 1, 2006, when he rolled through a stop sign at East 169th Street and Grand Concourse, a city lawyer wrote in papers filed in the Bronx Supreme Court case.

Sgt. Philippe Blanchard and Officer Zinos Konstantinides pulled Lopez’s Honda to a stop shortly before noon and ordered him to kill the engine, but he refused to comply, according to the filings.

Instead, when Konstantinides reached inside the car to make a grab at the keys, Lopez hit the gas, dragging the cop into traffic along bustling Grand Concourse, the documents said.

Fearing “that his partner would be maimed or killed if he did not take immediate, forceful action,” Blanchard fired a single shot, striking Lopez in the neck, the city wrote in the papers.

I have to say that his attorney has chutzpah:

Lopez, according to police sources, has 19 lifetime arrests and, by his own admission in court, “about 13” convictions.

His attorney, Brett Klein, even requested of the jury $6 million to $9 million for lost earnings — despite Lopez not being employed at the time of the incident, according to the documents.

Fortunately, clearer heads are running things:

The NYPD deferred comment to the city Law Department, which said the case may not be over just yet.

“The split-second response by an officer likely stopped this driver from dragging an officer to his death, a response we believe was justified under the circumstances,” said spokesman Nicholas Paolucci in a statement. “We strongly disagree with this verdict and are reviewing the city’s legal options.”

Worst case scenario, Mr. Lopez gets some money and ODs. Win/win.

Water in Canada

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Just the tip of a public-health iceberg - this could be major. From The Beeb:

Lead levels in Canadian water 'exceed safe limit' in a third of cases
The amount of lead in the water supply of major Canadian cities exceeded safe levels in hundreds of thousands of homes, a major investigation has found.

Some areas showed lead levels "similar" to those in the US city of Flint, Michigan, during its 2015 water crisis.

Out of 12,000 samples taken from 2014 to 2018, one third exceeded the national safety guideline of 5 parts per billion (ppb).

The US limit is 15 ppb so 5 ppb is not earth shattering - BUT - 

While a third exceeded the safe limit of 5ppb, 18% were over the US limit of 15ppb.

Now this is bad. The cities in question?

Among the areas studied were Montreal, the second-largest city in Canada (population 1.75m), and Oakville, an affluent part of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Regina, the capital of the prairie province of Saskatchewan, and the city of Prince Rupert, in northern British Columbia, were also included.

A bit more:

The biggest source of lead in Canada's drinking water is antiquated pipes and public service lines that connect people's homes to the main water supply. A government report from 2017 estimated that about 500,000 homes across the country were affected.

Tests are done differently across the country, and sometimes are not done at all, the journalistic investigation revealed.

And it is not just large urban areas:

The exception would be on indigenous reserves under the control of the federal government. There are currently 57 long-term drinking water advisories affecting indigenous communities across the country, according to Indigenous Services Canada.

Screw over the Indians - both Canada and the USA have a long history of that. This is also a perfect example of not maintaining the infrastructure. It is so easy to budget money for shiny new things - universal health care for example,  alternative energy for another, then to use it to dig up and replace old pipes. That is just a boring hole in the ground.

Ho. Li. Crap - normally, I will use a 1/8" or 3/32" rod (7018) at 30-45 amps.

Red Beard from weld.com teams up with the WeldTube Squad welding with some 3/4" Cor-Met F25 stick electrode. The rod is 4 feet long and weighs approximately 20 pounds. Extreme to the max.

Feeling a lot better tonight

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Spent some time on a weight machine as well as rowing. Feel a lot less cramped - got everything nice and stretched out again. The same farm that does the dinners I like also has a Wednesday Yoga class - thinking of attending. I am OK on strength and stamina, being a bit more limber would be a good thing.

Tired with the time change so early bedtime - a few videos and then to sleep.

President Trump is withdrawing the US from the Paris Climate Accord. Oh Nooooesssss!!!
But, let us look at some things he has done - from The Daily Wire:

BREAKING: Trump Admin Begins Withdrawal From Paris Climate Accord
The Trump administration announced on Monday that it was officially withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, with the withdrawal officially set to be completed one year from now.

“President Trump made the decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement because of the unfair economic burden imposed on American workers, businesses, and taxpayers by U.S. pledges made under the Agreement,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wrote in a statement. “The United States has reduced all types of emissions, even as we grow our economy and ensure our citizens’ access to affordable energy.”

“Our results speak for themselves: U.S. emissions of criteria air pollutants that impact human health and the environment declined by 74% between 1970 and 2018,” Pompeo added. “U.S. net greenhouse gas emissions dropped 13% from 2005-2017, even as our economy grew over 19 percent.”

Several months after the Trump administration took power in Washington, D.C., the United States was rated as the top nation in the world for reducing CO2 emissions. Forbes reports:

According to the 2017 BP Statistical Review of World Energy, since 2005 annual U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have declined by 758 million metric tons. That is by far the largest decline of any country in the world over that timespan and is nearly as large as the 770 million metric ton decline for the entire European Union.

By comparison, the second largest decline during that period was registered by the United Kingdom, which reported a 170 million metric ton decline. At the same time, China’s carbon dioxide emissions grew by 3 billion metric tons, and India’s grew by 1 billion metric tons.

Carbon Dioxide is plant food so I for one thank our Chinese and Indian friends for their help increasing global crop yields. That being said, the Paris Accords are just a globalist shake-down of first world nations to deliver money to the third-world kleptocrats and their cronies. Any civilized nation should walk away from this deal - it has zero basis in science.
As President Trump tweeted two months ago:

Those are the facts and they are kind of hard to dispute. Cheap and abundent energy lifts people out of poverty and makes their environment cleaner. Proven true time and time again. Has never been proven wrong.

From World Net Daily:

Gag order in case of 7-year-old 'transgender' triggers alarm
A family advocate is protesting gag orders by judges in family disputes, citing the Texas case in which a father challenged his ex-wife's forced gender "transition" of their 7-year-old boy.

Judge Kim Cooks imposed a gag order on Jeffrey Younger and Anne Georgulas after ruling "joint conservatorship" of their son, James.

The Mom:

James Younger's mother had been making him wear dresses, paint his nails and telling him he's a girl since he was 3 years old.

She's also been taking him to a "gender clinic."

Her plans for the boy, whom she calls Luna, include drugs and even surgery.

I have not seen it mentioned  but this sounds like a classic case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy

Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSbP or MbP) is a behaviour pattern in which a caregiver fabricates, exaggerates, or induces mental or physical health problems in those who are in their care, usually to gain attention or sympathy from others. With deception at its core, this behaviour is an elusive, potentially lethal, and frequently misunderstood form of child abuse or medical neglect that has been difficult to define, detect, and confirm.

Signs and symptoms
In Munchausen syndrome by proxy, an adult caregiver makes a child appear mentally or physically ill or impaired by either fabricating symptoms or actually causing harm to the child, in order to gain the attention of medical providers and others. In order to perpetuate the medical relationship, the caregiver systematically misrepresents symptoms, fabricates signs, manipulates laboratory tests, or even purposely harms the child (e.g. by poisoning, suffocation, infection, physical injury). Studies have shown a mortality rate of between 6% and 10% of MSbP victims, making it perhaps the most lethal form of abuse.

A review found the average age of the person affected at diagnosis was 4 years; slightly over half of were aged 24 months or younger, and 75% were under six years old. The average duration from onset of symptoms to diagnosis was 22 months.

That sure seems to fit the story. The problem is not the child or father, it is the mentally ill mother.

Good guns

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Several people are alive and one goblin is dead because of an "assault rifle". From the New York Post:

Pregnant Florida mom uses AR-15 to kill home intruder
A pregnant woman is credited with saving the lives of her husband and daughter after she used an AR-15 to fatally gun down a home intruder, a report said.

The hero mom sprung into action when two intruders entered the family’s Lithia, Fla. home last week and pistol whipped her husband while violently grabbing their daughter, according to the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office.

The numbers simply do not  lie - more guns = less crime.

Heading out soon

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Was doing some filing and paperwork this morning. Heading out for coffee &c. in a bit.

$2.5 billion?

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That's enough for two or three houses in California - from the Los Angeles Times:

Apple pledges $2.5 billion to address California’s affordable housing problem
Apple said it will direct $2.5 billion toward affordable housing in California, the latest tech giant to pledge money to one of the state’s most pressing problems.

The announcement, made Monday, follows similar big pledges this year from Facebook, Google and Microsoft, which put money toward housing in its home base of Seattle. And it comes amid criticism that tech firms had done too little to ease an affordability crunch that their rapid expansion helped worsen.

Yeah - virtue signalling writ large. Making a grand statement - a promise to DO SOMETHING instead of actually, you know, doing something about the problem.

Apple could move to Detroit - lots of cheap housing there.

So true - socialists and food production

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Yes, they are just that unaware:

20191104-socialist.jpg

Doing your job

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And getting fired as a result. Bet there is a nice lawsuit here - from Nashville, TN station WSMV:

Nashville probation director terminated
News4 Investigates has confirmed Bob Green, the former director of the Nashville Probation department, has been terminated.

The action comes after News4 Investigates first uncovered emails showing collaboration between the department and the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement in which probation officers were providing information to help track down undocumented immigrants.

Getting fired for sollowing the published law of the land? And this:

Hollin said Green intends to fight for his job and has already filed a litigation hold that would require the courts to preserve all emails and texts in storage in anticipation of a lawsuit.

“No one is above the law. It is abundantly clear that Mr. Green followed the law, and what he did was approved by the Metro Department of Law. Any suggestion that he’s been insubordinate is false,” Hollin said.

Good that he saved all his emails. The discovery process can be a bitch - hope he gets a nice settlement for his efforts.

Feeling stiff today

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Moving all that furniture Sunday - was a bit stiff yesterday but really feeling it this morning. Head to the gym later this afternoon and loosen up a bit.

Coffee first...

Some common sense in Austin Texas

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Great news - cleaning up the homeless population. From FOX News:

As homeless camps continue to spring up in Austin, Gov. Abbott orders cleanup effort
State agencies are moving in to clean up Austin, Texas after the capital city became a magnet for homeless vagrants, due to laws allowing people to camp out on the streets.

The project started on Monday morning as cleaning crews used leaf blowers and street sweepers to clear debris while they were guarded by state police.

Fox News sent a camera crew and reporter Aishah Hasine into Austin to investigate and ask questions to people on the ground.

"We saw... crews out and about escorted by state police cleaning up the trash out here, using leaf blowers and a street sweeper," Hasine told the hosts of "Fox & Friends." "The second part we believe will be to pack up the folks living here as the state steps in and frustration mounts, over how the city is handling this crisis."

It's a classical Pidgeon Problem - these people may be homeless but they are well connected and if some city is willing to give them free shit and a place to camp, they will flock. Kudo's to Governor Abbott for recognising this and starting the cleaning process before the population is entrenched. This could have been done in Seattle and now Seattle is a big mess. I hate to think of what Portland is like - have not been there for several years and not planning to depsite Powell's Books and the Tektronics surplus store.

Best and brightest - Hillary staffer

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From The Washington Standard:

Muslim Hillary Clinton Staffer Arrested For Sexual Assault Of Mentally Retarded Child
A Michigan high school employee is in the news.

It seems that Ibrahim Aljahim put a special needs student into a sexual situation and stands accused of sexual assault.

Details can be found in a full write up below.

Aljahim also happened to be a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton and her fellow Democrats.

Here is the video, which will be followed by the “not suitable for everyone” details we have at this time.

If you don’t want those gross details, you might want to leave now.

Nothing says equality and diversity like sexual predation of an invalid. Someone needs to get their pee-pee whacked off preferably without the benefit of anesthesia. If he committed this heinous act in a nation with Sharia Law, he would be looking at the death penalty.

Very clever idea

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Harbor Freight makes some very cheap clamps like this if you do not have an old one to repurpose.

Running an old version of Windows?

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Get it offline NOW unless you want to get malware. From Slashdot:

A Widespread BlueKeep 'Exploit' Is Targetting Unpatched Windows 7/XP Computers
When Microsoft issued the first patch in years for Windows XP in May 2019, you knew that something big was brewing. That something was a wormable Windows vulnerability that security experts warned could have a similar impact as the WannaCry worm from 2017. The BlueKeep vulnerability exists in unpatched versions of Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2: and it's now been confirmed that a BlueKeep exploit attack is currently ongoing...

Security researchers, including Kevin Beaumont who originally named the vulnerability and Marcus Hutchins (also known as MalwareTech) who was responsible for hitting the kill switch that stopped the WannaCry, have confirmed that a widespread BlueKeep exploit attack is now currently underway. Hutchins told Wired that "BlueKeep has been out there for a while now. But this is the first instance where I've seen it being used on a mass scale." It would appear that rather than a wormable threat, where the BlueKeep exploit could spread itself from one machine to another, the attackers are searching for vulnerable unpatched Windows systems that have Remote Desktop Services (RDP) 3389 ports exposed to the internet. This dampens the panic that there could be another WannaCry about to happen, although the potential for such a scenario, albeit on a much smaller scale, certainly remains. For now though, this looks like being an attack campaign with a cryptocurrency miner payload.

These systems are all about 15-20 years old and are well past their service life. If you do not want to upgrade, get them off the internet or else your system will get infected with malware.

An interesting bit of history

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British legal wigs:

No mention of cost but if they take several weeks to manufacture, I would suspect more than a few thousand bucks.

I used to be bad at it. Microsoft had a branch of Toastmasters that I joined and it helped a lot.

This book looks really good: TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

My local library has a copy so it is being sent to my branch... Cool!

With my involvement in the local arts group, I am going to be having to do a lot more public speaking so this will be a great refresher...

Our dry spell is over

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We had the cyclones but now it is time for some good old-fashioned winter rain.

From Cliff Mass:

Rain Returns to the Northwest
It has been extremely dry during the past week over the Pacific Northwest, and dry conditions will continue into Thursday.

But by the weekend, the rain will return.

Dry periods extended into the first week of November is not that unusual in western Washington and Oregon, but for it to continue into the second and third week would be extraordinarily unusual. And this won't happen this year.

Let's forecast the right way, looking at ensembles of many forecasts. Below are the 21 members of the U.S. GEFS ensemble. The accumulated precipitation of each member at Sea Tac is shown. Precipitation is flatlined for all members until November 7th, after which there is a steady rise. This is called a plume diagram by the way, with each line being one member.

Ahhh yes - life in the Pacific Northwet. Sort of a double whammy - rain and very short days. Time to focus my thoughts inward - building and outfitting the shop. I have a bunch of projects I want to get done this winter:  amateur radio, CNC machining, blacksmithing, welding, electronics, programming and get a bunch of stuff listed on eBay. The months are going to fly past...

A wonderful lazy day

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Celebrated my 69th birthday by doing absolutely nothing. Went out for coffee, went to a bakery near the library, sat and read for an hour and then headed to Mt. Vernon to do some shopping at Costco and the food co-op (making another batch of Minestrone soup Tuesday - stuff is good!) Had some Chinese food in Mt. Vernon and two pints at my local.

I know that Daylight Savings is over but it is still a surprise to have full twilight at a bit after 5:00 PM. Gorgeous colors in the sky so planning to do some photography tomorrow if the light is favorable. Got a meeting here Wednesday so spending the rest of the week at the farm. Need to get the water running again and get the house buttoned up for the winter.

Working on the Crow Island Forge website tomorrow and Tuesday - get that up and running. Still a bit sad that the US Website tools were too large for me to use but it was fun trying.

Tired so surf for a bit, some video and then to bed. No wine tonight - been making too much of a habit of that. Time for a vacation.

Talk about stupid - Joy Behar

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Really? I mean really? If the call went out to hire 10,000 people, it would be all over all media. From Newsbusters:

Joy Behar: Trump Thinks His Voters Are Stupid; Rallies Are Fake, Full of Paid Actors
Just when you think things can’t get any more ridiculous on The View, the hosts spend time whining the President’s son’s Halloween costume is insensitive to animals. On Friday’s show, they also complained about a 2020 Trump campaign ad, which Joy Behar declared was full of paid actors “just like the ones who go to his rallies.”

She is not an American. She is just a stupid big-city elite whiner who does not see the beauty in this world. I pity her.

From Yahoo/Bloomberg:

Nancy Pelosi Is Worried 2020 Candidates Are on Wrong Track
Speaker Nancy Pelosi is issuing a pointed message to Democrats running for president in 2020: Those liberal ideas that fire up the party’s base are a big loser when it comes to beating President Donald Trump.

Proposals pushed by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders like Medicare for All and a wealth tax play well in liberal enclaves like her own district in San Francisco but won’t sell in the Midwestern states that sent Trump to the White House in 2016, she said.

“What works in San Francisco does not necessarily work in Michigan,” Pelosi said at a roundtable of Bloomberg News reporters and editors on Friday. “What works in Michigan works in San Francisco — talking about workers’ rights and sharing prosperity.”

“Remember November,” she said. “You must win the Electoral College.”

Actually folks - you candidates out there? Ignore her. She does not know what she is talking about. We Americans want much higher, crippling taxes. We want bloated state-controlled health care complete with death panels. We want an unimpeded torrent of illegal criminals coming across our borders, using our welfare programs (at our expense) and not assimilating into the American culture. We want it all.

Run on this platform and your sweet sweet victory will be guaranteed.

Or not... Shhhhhhh.

Slept for another two hours

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And feeling fantastic - needed the sleep after the last two days.

Birthday plans? NADA. Just Another Day

The time change

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Maggie's Farm is there:

Busy, cold night
Busy, cold night at Stonehenge as they move the rocks back an hour

20191103-stonehenge.jpg

Maggie's is a daily read for me.

The crazy is strong in England

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From the London Daily Mail:

Birth coach is 'hounded out' of industry charity Doula UK after transgender activists branded her Facebook message claiming only women can have babies 'offensive'
A birth coach has been ‘ostracised’ by her professional organisation after transgender activists branded as offensive a Facebook post in which she said that only women can have babies.

Lynsey McCarthy-Calvert, 45, was forced to stand down as spokesperson for Doula UK and has since resigned altogether from the national organisation for birth coaches. Her exit comes after transgender rights activists triggered an investigation in which Doula UK concluded her message breached its equality and diversity guidelines.

They did not expel the mother- of-four, who has been a doula – who provide continuous support during pregnancy – for six years, but threatened to suspend her unless she deleted the post.

Let us look at some numbers.

The 2010 census puts the population of homosexuals at around 3.8% of the general population. Since homosexuality is at heart a biological issue, I am assuming that this number is pretty consistent through the world's population.

Figure the percentage of extreme activists to be maybe one tenth of this number or 0.38% or so. Four people in a population of one thousand. And I am being generous. The gay people I know are quiet and just want to be left alone with their sweeties so let's bump that down one more order of magnitude - make it 0.038% of the US population.

In a population of ten thousand people, there will be 3.8 extreme activists. Why do these people get all the attention? How do they get away with imposing their ideas on innocent people. How do they get away with imposing their "culture" on the other 9,996.2 of us?

Screw them - this is a big planet and they need to adapt to us, not the other way around. Don't like it? S.T.F.U.

So true - screen time

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From Randall:

20191103-screen.png

In the majority

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WA State passed some foolish law that keeps us permanently on Spring Forward time. So did Oregon and California.

Sometimes I hate that I live on the left coast... Buncha loonies. It is not the states that determine time-keeping. This is part of the interstate commerce laws and it needs an act of Congress to make it so.

Looks like the majority of Americans like the original standard time - from CBS News:

Dislike twice-a-year time changes? You're part of large majority of Americans, poll shows
Most people across the country will see their clocks roll back an hour this weekend as nearly eight months of daylight saving time come to an end. It is part of a twice-a-year ritual that most want to stop.

Seven in 10 Americans prefer not to switch back and forth to mark daylight saving time, a new poll shows. But there's no agreement on which time clocks ought to follow.

According to the new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 4 in 10 Americans would like to see their clocks stay on standard time year-round, while about 3 in 10 prefer to stay on daylight saving time. About another 3 in 10 prefer what is the status quo in most of the United States, switching back and forth between daylight saving time in the summer and standard time in the winter.

Makes no sense. If you want the extra daylight? Wake up an hour (or more - no one is stopping you) earlier.

Back to sleep in a few minutes

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Still sleepy but wide awake for some strange reason.

Celebrating two things today:

#1) - the return to a normal time keeping and
#2) - 69 orbits around our Sun.

No plans for any b-day celebration - doing the usual coffee, post office, etc... Maybe a dump run if I feel adventurous. Probably start to sort through the 300+ photos of the artists' event. We have a general meeting next Wednesday and want to do a five minute slide show.

Aging is a funny thing - I feel like I am in my 40's. My Dad passed at 94 and I am in better health and physical condition than he ever was. My Mom? 87 but she had a pathological hatred of Doctors and what killed her could have been fixed with a simple surgical procedure and better nutrition.

Good - these people are stupid scum. They are not on the right side of history and their legacy will be the same as Hitler's brownshirts and Lenin's Useful Idiots. Reviled.

One of them was sentenced the other day. Now another one gets to spend some quality time behind bars. Maybe he will do something useful with his life like learning auto mechanics or HVAC or Welding. From The Oregonian:

Baton attack during June protests in downtown Portland lands man in prison for nearly 6 years
A 24-year-old man who hit another man over the head with a baton in June during dueling downtown Portland demonstrations was sentenced Friday to nearly six years in prison.

Gage Halupowski pleaded guilty to second-degree assault in connection with the June 29 attack on Adam Kelly outside The Nines Hotel along Southwest Morrison Street. Halupowski was identified as one of several masked, black-clothed demonstrators seen on video hitting and pepper-spraying Kelly after he appeared to come to the aid of another man who’d been attacked during the protests, authorities said.

Some photos of Kelly's wounds at the website - this is not just a bruise, this is intent to cause physical incapacity and the fact that he was not just getting in Kelly's face, he was attacking Kelly because Kelly was coming to the aid of someone else makes this especially heinous.

These people have no wisdom or intelligence. They are puppets. Tools of their masters. They are the modern slaves living on the Democrat plantation. Throw off your chains and become Americans.

The Democrat party was always the party of slavery. Of the KKK. They own a different breed of slave these days. The new ones do not even realize that they are working on their Master's plantation.

Just one image and the whole impeachement thing shows itself for the Democrat fever-dream that it is:

20191102-whistleblower.jpgCiaramella (CHAR-a-mella) is a partisan hack. There is nothing of substance here.
Adam Schiff's impeachment proceedings are a Granfalloon. A nothingburger.

Rode hard and put away wet...

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Long day. Since I was not showing any of my blacksmithing at the show this weekend, I took photos and helped set up and tear down. The venue is the Island's community center so we had to reset the main room with x tables and x*8 chairs. Since most of the 42 artists were busy packing their own stuff up, me and two other people were slinging tables and chairs around for 45 minutes. I have been pretty constant with going to the gym 3-4 times/week and it is showing - a nice change. Stamina is improved.

I packed a lunch so was not that hungry so a quick burrito and one nice cold beer at my local and I am done for the day.

Surf for a little bit, maybe a video or three and that is it - no wine for me tonight, too tired.

Coffee and community center

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Oops - slept in a bit. Running late.

The public art show is today (started six minutes ago) Out the door for a few hours - runs until 3:00PM

Sour grapes - New York

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Trump picks up his baseball and goes home. Governor gripes:

Gov. Cuomo: Trump Not a Real New Yorker — He Is ‘Repugnant to New Yorkers’

And how many millions of dollars of his tax monies were you planning on spending in 2020?

New York State just lost a huge chunk of revenue and you are blaming Trump for this?

Don't forget to thank Alexandria Occasional-Cortex for the Amazon loss - that is another chunk of $$$ that NY lost.

Just the headline:

Pete Buttigieg: ‘We Will Not Recognize’ America if Donald Trump Is Re-Elected in 2020

Probably the best endorsement we can get. Needs a bit of editing: Liberal Progressives will not recognize America.

The We in question is the loony left that has tried to hijack our culture and values for the last 50 years.

You lost. So sad. Too bad. Failed in Russia. Failed in China. Failed in Cuba. Failed in Venezuela. Failed in Zimbabwe.
Failed in...

The stupid - it burns!!!

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New York State Governor doesn't know shit about climate. From the Daily Caller:

Andrew Cuomo: ‘We Didn’t Have Hurricanes’ Before Climate Change
Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo blamed climate change for damaging floods in upstate New York, and claimed that natural disasters didn’t happen before climate change.

“Ali, anyone who questions extreme weather and climate change is just delusional at this point,” Cuomo told MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi. ” We have seen in the State of New York and we have seen — it is something we never had before.”

“We didn’t have hurricanes or super storms or tornadoes,” Cuomo added.

Well gee - lookie here: List of New York hurricanes

List of New York hurricanes encompasses 84 tropical or subtropical cyclones that have affected the state of New York since the 17th century. The state of New York is located along the East coast of the United States, in the Northeastern portion of the country. The strongest of these storms was the 1938 New England Hurricane, which struck Long Island as a Category 3 storm on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. Killing more than 600 people, it was also the deadliest. Tropical cyclones have affected the state primarily in September but have also hit during every month of the hurricane season, June through November. Tropical cyclones rarely make landfall on the state, although it is common for remnants of tropical cyclones to produce heavy rainfall and flooding.

People still take this clown seriously on ANYTHING?

Sobering news from USA Today:

Quarter of all pigs worldwide could die from swine fever, animal health organization says
At least a quarter of the world's pig population could die as a mass outbreak of African swine fever spreads, a global animal health organization says.

The die-off would spark global pig shortages, spiking prices of pork and products that rely on the animals to be produced, said Mark Schipp, president of the World Organization for Animal Health.

"I don’t think the species will be lost, but it's the biggest threat to the commercial raising of pigs we've ever seen," Schipp told reporters Thursday in Sydney. "And it's the biggest threat to any commercial livestock of our generation."

I have about 20 pounds of each in my freezer and thinking of doubling this. Prices are going to spike.

A wonderful event tonight

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Turnout was about 30% better than expected. Broke even and raised a good chunk for next year's operations (studio tour, general publicity and scholorship fund). The food was really yummy and the bar offered a wide selection so people were able to get the libation of their choice.

The show is open to the general public tomorrow starting at 10:00AM so up early. Glass or two of red wine and then to bed. Took over 300 photos tonight - 90% of them will be destined for ye old bit bucket but got some good ones too. It was like shooting fish in a barrel there were so many interesting looking people. Some great faces. I'll post a few in a couple of days. Got to sort through them first...

I am an American

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Gerard Van der Leun has sounded the clarion call and we must answer. From American Digest:

The AMERICAN Party: I Am Not “Republican.” I Am Not “Conservative.” I Am Not “Alt Right.” None of These. “I am an AMERICAN.”

An American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,… No sentimentalist …. no stander above men and women or apart from them…
— Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)

“I am not an American, I am THE American.”
-– Mark Twain

A string of fearless hearts, on an endless ball of twine
It’s the same old train, it’s just a different time
— Same Old Train

Remember when Hillary Clinton, during her 2007 attempt to rule the world, stopped calling herself a “liberal” and rebranded herself as a “progressive?”

I do.

This relabeling from “Liberal” to “Progressive” was Clinton’s desperate attempt to crawl out from under the vast heap of crap she and all the other “liberals” had piled on themselves -– notably during her own husband’s administration. And who, when trying to run, wanted to have that old “liberal” ball and chain around her thick ankles? Not Hillary.

By 2007 “Liberal” had become so drenched in sewage liberals could only clean it through “rebranding.”

The new/old brand name chosen was ‘progressive.’

Some very clear writing there - this needs to be spread around widely as Van der Leun is the first person to articulate what I and many other people have been feeling the last few years. A bit more:

After all, who can be against “progress?” Who is not pro “pro?”

Who, that is, except the vast majority of older Americans who had seen the wreckage that the progressives’ “progress” had wrought wherever it touched down on the American landscape.

Still, the recloaking of ye olde “liberal” wolves inside of the “Progressive Sheeps’ Clothing” worked well enough with the young and stupid as well as the old and malicious.

“Progressive” caught on because it junked “liberal” but didn’t say “socialist.” At least not in so many syllables, until the Democrat candidate Clownworld of 2019.

Much more at the site - a very powerful idea whose time has come.

I am an American.

Taking back the power - PG&E

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Great news - from Nevada County, Calif. station KCRA:

Nevada County water agency considers PG&E power takeback
About 200 people piled into the Nevada Irrigation District headquarters in Grass Valley on Tuesday night to discuss the possibility of the water agency taking control over the local electric grid amid growing frustration with PG&E power shutoffs.

“It’s about local control,” said general manager Remleh Scherzinger. “It’s about taking back the opportunity to decide how we, as a community, want to run our power system.”

Nevada Irrigation District is an independent agency that supplies water to about 85,000 customers in Nevada and Placer counties. Scherzinger said the district is looking into acquiring local PG&E assets after the community called for action.

“We would purchase their assets and their property as necessary to begin the service here in our community,” he said.

Makes perfect sense. PG&E has already amply demonstrated that they are incapable of managing their system efficiently. Time to deregulate.

And he is gone - Beto

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Another clown drops out of the race - from FOX News:

Former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke drops out of 2020 presidential race
Former Texas Democrat congressman Beto O'Rourke announced Friday he is withdrawing from the 2020 presidential race, telling supporters “it is clear to me now that this campaign does not have the means to move forward successfully.”

That he and his supporters even thought that he had a chance shows how clueless the lot of them are. Bunch of morons.

Quick break

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Got everything set up and running - some gorgeous work there.

Chef Mike is heating up a bowl of the American Goulash for dinner - that and  Diet Coke and I am outta here. We let the unwashed masses our beloved patrons in starting at 6:00PM - doing a very nice spread of food and booze so it will be a party to remember.

Great quote

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"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."
--Dwight D. Eisenhower

I start at 2:00PM so right on time. Back later tonight. The same event is running tomorrow but then, it is informal and for the general public.

Cracks in the foundation

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From Zero Hedge:

Trump-Ukraine Whistleblower Suddenly Won't Testify; Lawyers Break Off Negotiations Amid New Revelations
A CIA officer who filed a second-hand whistleblower complaint against President Trump has gotten cold feet about testifying after revelations emerged that he worked with Joe Biden, former CIA Director John Brennan, and a DNC operative who sought dirt on President Trump from officials in Ukraine's former government.

According to the Washington Examiner, discussions with the whistleblower - revealed by RealClearInvestigations as 33-year-old Eric Ciaramella have been halted, "and there is no discussion of testimony from a second whistleblower, who supported the first's claims."

Ciaramella complained that President Trump abused his office when he asked Ukraine to investigate corruption allegations against Joe Biden and his son Hunter, as well as claims related to pro-Clinton election interference and DNC hacking in 2016.

On Thursday, a top National Security Council official who was present on a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky testified that he saw nothing illegal about the conversation.

"I want to be clear, I was not concerned that anything illegal was discussed," said Tim Morrison, former NSC Senior Director for European Affairs who was on the July 25 call between the two leaders.

First movement of the whole thing crashing down around their ears. They own this and it is going to really hurt them in 2020. They thought they had a sure thing with the Meuller report. They thought they had a sure thing with this. Oops...

Will it earn him a court martial? From Military Times:

How the Army officer who testified against Trump could end up in a court-martial
When Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman appeared before members of Congress on Tuesday to discuss what he knew about President Trump’s conversations with Ukraine’s president, he was violating an order from his commander in chief not to cooperate with the House’s impeachment inquiry.

He is likely protected from legal ramifications from showing up to testify, a former Army judge advocate told Military Times on Thursday. But it remains to be seen whether what he told legislators could get him charged with a crime ― and, of course, how his choice to rebel against his White House chain-of-command will affect his career.

“It’s not far-fetched,” Sean Timmons, a managing partner at Tully Rinckey, said. “It’s a murky issue.”

It comes down to whether Trump’s order was lawful, he said. If Trump was trying to prevent Vindman from sharing sensitive information, it could be. If he was trying to prevent testimony, period, it’s not.

Link is from Don Surber who also quotes a very long twitter thread - I have edited this into one block of text.

A retired LTC speaks out that Vindman mocked Americans during multinational exercises
I know LTC Alex Vindman from a Combined US-Russian exercise called Atlas Vision 12 in Grafenwoher, GE. He worked w/the Russian Embassy & I was assigned to the JMTC (Joint... ...Multinational Training Command), w/in USAREUR (US Army Europe). He worked coordination w/the Russian 15th Peacekeeping Brigade, & I was in charge of all Simulations planning, as well as assisting the USAREUR Lead Planner as the Senior Military Planner. The following... ...account of LTC Vindman's words & actions are completely accurate to the best of my recollection & have been corroborated by others. We interacted on several different occasions throughout the planning cycle, but it was during the actual execution of the exercise, that we... ...had an issue relevant to his recent testimony.

As stated earlier, Atlas Vision 12 was conducted at JMTC in the VBS2 (Virtual Battle Simulations 2) Classrooms for Simulation. Vindman, who was a Major at the time, was sitting in one of the classrooms talking to the US &... ...Russian Soldiers, as well as the young Officers & GS Employees about America, Russia, & Obama. He was apologetic of American culture, laughed about Americans not being educated or worldly, & really talked up Obama & globalism to the point of uncomfortable. He would speak... ...w/the Russian Soldiers & laugh as if at the expense of the US personnel. It was so uncomfortable & unprofessional, one of the GS employees came & told me everything above. I walked over & sat w/in earshot of Vindman, & sure enough, all was confirmed.

One comment truly.. ...struck me as odd, & it was w/respect to American's falsely thinking they're exceptional, when he said, "He [Obama] is working on that now." And he said it w/a snide 'I know a secret' look on his face. I honestly don't know what it meant, it just sounded like an odd thing to... ...say.

Regardless, after hearing him bash America a few times in front of subordinates, Russians, & GS Employees, as well as, hearing an earful about globalization, Obama's plan, etc...I'd had enough. I tapped him on the shoulder & asked him to step outside. At that point I... ...verbally reprimanded him for his actions, & I'll leave it at that, so as not to be unprofessional myself. The bottom-line is LTC Vindman was a partisan Democrat at least as far back as 2012. So much so, junior officers & soldiers felt uncomfortable around him. This is.. ...not your professional, field-grade officer, who has the character & integrity to do the right thing. Do not let the uniform fool you...he is a political activist in uniform. I pray our nation will drop this hate, vitriol & division, & unite as our founding fathers intended

I need to make a slight correction on my statement, it was actually Atlas Vision 13 when the incident occurred. I was thrown off, as the next year Russia invaded Crimea. Also, I was promoted to Chief, Regional, Joint & Combined Exercises Branch, USAREUR, over many exercises.

And this is the Democrat's star witness?

I will take a raincheck on my jetpack but I would love a flying car. From the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

Blade Runner was set in November, 2019. Here's what it and other movies got right and wrong about the 'future'
Look at the person sitting to the left of you. Now look at the person sitting to the right of you. Is either of them wearing a high-collared full-length trench coat or a wide-shouldered black boxy blazer?

If the answer is "no," you've just discovered one of the things 1982 sci-fi classic Blade Runner got wrong about the "future".

Because that future is right now — today, in fact. The Harrison Ford film, based on the Philip K Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, is set in November, 2019.

The Ridley Scott classic tells the story of Rick Deckard (Ford), a world-weary cop whose job it is to hunt down and "retire" replicants — robots that are so human-like they've started believing they should be left alone to live their lives like everyone else.

We can now officially say the fashion of Blade Runner, inspired by 1980s punkish elements and the noir films of the '40s and '50s, is not what people are wearing in 2019.

More at the site. Great movie. Great soundtrack too.

And label them for what they are. From The Post-millennial:

Antifa activist charged with felony hate crime for anti-Semitic attacks
An antifa activist with a history of violence and threatening behaviour across the Pacific Northwest has been arrested on a felony hate crime charge in Seattle for alleged anti-Semitic attacks.

Jamal Oscar Williams, 44, is accused by state prosecutors in Washington state of hate crimes and criminal harassment against Schmuel Levitin, a rabbi, and Ephriam Block. According to court documents, Williams “maliciously and intentionally” followed, threatened to kill and assaulted the men in multiple attacks in October because of their perceived religion.

Levitin and Block were operating a permitted religious booth for the Sukkot Jewish holiday in downtown Seattle on October 11 when Williams allegedly approached them and shouted: “Jews, Jews, Jews … give me your money!” He then said he had a gun and was going to kill them. Both Levitin and Block have beards and payots, or sideburns, and were wearing yarmulkes. Levitin is a rabbi at the Chabad of Downtown Seattle.

A bit more on the sterling character of this turd in a punch bowl:

Jamal Williams is known in the Pacific Northwest for his involvement in various antifa protests and his outspoken views on black nationalism. In August 2018, he was arrested in Seattle during a counter-protest against right-wing group Patriot Prayer. Last November, he threatened this journalist with death outside Seattle City Hall at a counter-demonstration against a conservative group. 

More recently, Williams was in Portland, Oregon on August 17 where he was recorded accosting people aggressively during an antifa protest-turned-riot against the Proud Boys. He was also part of a group of people who surrounded and threatened to hurt a reporter with the Washington Examiner

Antifa. Their public relations people spin them as some people who are fed up with right-wing politics. They in fact are an outgrowth of Germany's National Socalist's . Sturmabteilung - the brownshirts. They are common street thugs and need to be treated as such. Punch back twice as hard. More here, here, and here. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, walks like a duck...

Great observation by Tyler O'Neil at PJ Media:

Polls Suggest Impeachment Will Help Trump Reelection in Swing States
Democrats took a tremendous gamble by formally voting for an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump on Thursday. While polls suggest Americans support the inquiry, the general public is divided on whether or not Trump should be impeached and removed from office. Those in key swing states are more likely to oppose impeachment and removal, suggesting that the impeachment battle may help Trump's reelection in 2020.

Heh - Shiff et. al. think they are so very smart. They are not. Quite the opposite. I almost ALMOST feel sorry for Nancy Pelosi - she lost her mojo and is being dragged behind the progressive clown car.

Looking forward to the landslide in 2020.

Quick lunch and a change of clothes

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Coffee was good. The event is formal so home to get a quick bite (tuna sandwich) and change into Island Formal. Black Pendleton shirt, black leather vest and Jerry Garcia tie (yes, that Jerry Garcia and this is the tie in question - love it).

Out the door

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Coffee and then to the Camano Center to help set up for today's Patron's party.

More spew much later this evening. Busy day today and tomorrow.

Glad I shoot Nikon

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Been a Nikon shooter for the last 40+ years. Got a nice collection of lenses and currently using a D810 full-frame and a D7100 FX Bodies. Love them both. Canon also makes good stuff. They are very generous with loaning camera equipment to established sports photographers so you see a lot of Canon gear there but overall? Not so much.

From DIY Photography:

CANON IMAGING PROFITS DROP BY NEARLY 60% IN Q3/2019
Canon recently released its Q3/2019 financial report and the results are once again pretty bad in the imaging division. The trend of declining sales and profits continues, with a 13.9% decrease in sales and a 56.8% decrease in profits compared to the Q3/2018.

At the beginning of this year, Canon predicted a grim future for the camera business. Canon’s president Fujio Mitarai said back then that the digital cameras market could shrink by 50% within the next two years. And it seems that this is happening.

According to the latest financial report, the overall camera sales have declined in the Canon Imaging System. The company notes that this is due to the impact of global market contraction, but they have still seen a growth in the unit sales of mirrorless cameras. However, the overall drop in net sales is decreased by 13.9% compared to the same period last year, while operating profit has declined by 56.8%.

Ouch! Markets change but it is the job of the CEO to see these changes happening and to compensate for them. They make good stuff but for a major manufacturer to take such a misstep hurts the entire market.

From Breitbart:

Michelle Obama: ‘Afraid’ White Folks Were Running from Us — ‘And You’re Still Running’
On Tuesday at the Obama Foundation Summit in Chicago, former first lady Michelle Obama accused “white folks” of running from “us,” while recounting her childhood on the South Side of Chicago.

Discussing “white flight” in Chicago neighborhoods, Obama said, “As families like ours — upstanding families like ours who were doing everything we were supposed to do and better. As we moved in, white folks moved out because they were afraid of what our family represented.”

She continued, “I want to remind white folks that y’all were running from us. This family, with all the values that you read about, you were running from us. And you’re still running because we’re no different than the immigrant families that are moving in, the families in Pilsen. The families that are coming from other places to try and do better. But because we can so easily wash over who we really were — because of the color of our skin, because of the texture of our hair — that’s what divides countries, the artificial things.”

Two words come to mind. Bull and Shit. M is only seeing the narrative. Cultural diversity is good.

She is not seeing the increase in crime - much of it violent. She is not seeing the increase of drug use. She is not seeing the gangs. She is not seeing the run-down properties. I could go on but you get my drift.

An interesting link - guns and lead

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Not the link you are thinking of. From Science Direct:

Association of childhood blood lead levels with firearm violence perpetration and victimization in Milwaukee

Highlights

    • Blood lead linked to subsequent firearm violence perpetration and victimization.
    • Increasing risks for firearm violence found in each higher category of blood lead.
    • 56% of perpetration (51% victimization) may be attributable to blood lead ≥ 5 μg/dL.

Abstract
Childhood lead exposure impairs future decision-making and may influence criminal behavior, but its role in future firearm violence is unclear. Using public health, education, and criminal justice datasets linked at the individual level, we studied a population-based cohort of all persons born between June 1, 1986 and December 31, 2003 with a valid blood lead test before age 6 years and stable Milwaukee residency (n = 89,129). We estimated associations with firearm violence perpetration (n = 553) and victimization (n = 983) using logistic regression, adjusting for temporal trends, child sex, race, and neighborhood socioeconomic status. Increasing risks for firearm violence perpetration and victimization were found in each higher category of blood lead compared to the lowest, after adjusting for confounding...

...In Milwaukee, during a period of high lead exposures, childhood levels may have substantially contributed to adult firearm violence. While we cannot definitively conclude causality, the possibility that over half of firearm violence among this sample might be due to lead exposure suggests the potential importance of lead exposure reduction in firearm violence prevention efforts.

Very interesting and very plausible. Tip of the hat to Peter Grant at Bayou Renaissance Man for the link.

President Trump leaves New York City

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And he tells us why - from the New York Post:

This is President Trump’s ‘Why I’m leaving New York’ essay
Donald Trump is leaving New York.

President Trump on Thursday night explained his decision to ditch the glitzy world of Midtown skyscrapers and — eventually — flee to his Mar-a-Lago resort at the conclusion of his White House tenure.

The Queens native penned a series of tweets about his departure from Trump Tower after reports said he filed documents to change his primary residence to Palm Beach, Florida.

“I cherish New York, and the people of New York, and always will,” Trump wrote.

“But unfortunately, despite the fact that I pay millions of dollars in city, state and local taxes each year, I have been treated very badly by the political leaders of both the city and state.”

This from New York's Governor:

“Good riddance,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said after news broke of Trump’s impending exit. “He’s all yours, Florida.”

New York does not realize what a benefit Trump is - he turned the city around in the 1970's. It will be interesting to see the downward slide when he leaves. Nothing sudden but still, inexorable. Those Amazon jobs would have been nice - decent tax base too. Thanks AOC.

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