Intro
This is another of the W.O.O.D. series of semi-regular
Weekly Occasional Open Discussions.
(i.e. if I forget and skip one, no big)
Immediate prior one here:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2019/01/12/w-o-o-d-12-january-2019/
and remains open for threads running there (at least until the ‘several month’ auto-close of comments on stale threads).
Canonical list of old ones here:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/category/w-o-o-d/
So use “Tips” for “Oooh, look at the interesting ponder thing!”
and “W.O.O.D” for “Did you see what just happened?! What did you think about it?”
What’s Going On?
Is it just me wondering this, or does it seem like the entire world is going Bat Shit Crazy?
I find myself wondering how the world ended up run by such a collection of despicable SOBs who I’d not trust alone with my children or with the key to the house. I’ve been wondering if there is something inherent in the “Drive To Power” that of necessity selects for folks who don’t care about others, have no moral compass, and have a nihilistic destructive streak in them.
For anyone wondering what “nihilism” is, the wiki gives a sense of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism
Nihilism (/ˈnaɪ(h)ɪlɪzəm, ˈniː-/; from Latin nihil, meaning ‘nothing’) is the philosophical viewpoint that suggests the denial or lack of belief towards the reputedly meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism, which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. Moral nihilists assert that there is no inherent morality, and that accepted moral values are abstractly contrived. Nihilism may also take epistemological, ontological, or metaphysical forms, meaning respectively that, in some aspect, knowledge is not possible, or reality does not actually exist.
The term is sometimes used in association with anomie to explain the general mood of despair at a perceived pointlessness of existence that one may develop upon realising there are no necessary norms, rules, or laws.
Nihilism has also been described as conspicuous in or constitutive of certain historical periods. For example, Jean Baudrillard and others have called postmodernity a nihilistic epoch and some religious theologians and figures of religious authority have asserted that postmodernity and many aspects of modernity represent a rejection of theism, and that such rejection of theistic doctrine entails nihilism.
It does seem to describe most of the folks “On the Left”… Perhaps they spent too much time navel gazing in college philosophy classes… There’s the UK Royal who wanted to become a virus and destroy most of the people on the planet. Now New York City has passed a law that it’s just fine to have an abortion as long as you have not actually finished labor yet… What kind of mind doesn’t even care that in the last few months of pregnancy there is clearly a fully formed baby human being present, and thinks nothing of their death?
In Venezuela, they have Two Presidents. So far, the Military is sticking with Maduro (likely the bucket of money Puten will be supplying to his buddy to keep them paid off…) Will anyone care what the PEOPLE of Venezuela want for their government? It would seem not. A bunch of the rest of The Americas’ States have said they are supporting the new guy. So far no major military activity, nor really even visible preparations. But “Watch This Space”!
Trump & Pelosie agreed to bring the Federal Workers back from their extra long paid Christmas Holiday long enough to collect their (retro) paychecks and prep for the next extended Vacation for Valentines Parties in February. Oh, thous poor poor traumatized Federal Employees; needing to take all that time off with full retro pay… Suffering that they actually had to go a full two weeks without a paycheck in hand. (Some of us who ran our own businesses sometimes when months without a paycheck, and when working for various companies I was paid once per month…)
So, OK, they pick up their checks, pretend to catch up what passes for work for most of them, and then we do this all over again: HEY TRUMP! Just have the military build the wall and be done with it. Thanks.
Ought we start a Betting Pool on when Pelosie files articles of Impeachment? I was sure they were going for it when they started 4-walling the story of “Trump TOLD Cohen to LIE to Congress!”, but then Mueller quashed that by pointing out it was a flat out lie. So, ok, they need to cook up a new “Story”, one that takes longer than 1 day to be discovered as a blatant lie for effect. Since they can’t do an impeachment with the government shut down (you would not expect any of the Congress Critters to know how to type up the docs, now would you?) I’m betting on just prior to the next shutdown date. Call it February 7th. That way they can hit the mid-week news cycle but still blow town for the weekend…
Meanwhile back in Europe, the UK is into No-Deal Brexit FUD Project Fear (Fear Uncertainty & Doubt). I suppose we ought to have another betting pool on how close to the wire before the UK Government cancels Brexit… I think they will wait until about March a week before the wall, sometime around the 15th to 22nd or so. I can’t see May’s Mess being suddenly accepted, nor the EU deciding not to extract every pound (or two!) of flesh possible. That only leaves No-Deal WMO Rules BREXIT (that’s looking better ever day to me) or “Never Mind…” (which is what I think the spineless jellyfish will vote for). Maybe we could put up a Go Fund Me! page to buy them a backbone to share… Just one question: IF the WMO rules are Oh So Horrible, End Of LIFE!!! HORRIBLE!!!: How come so much of the world lives under them just fine, eh?
Then there’s the simmering “whatever” between Russia and Ukraine. It had looked like Russia was getting ready to grab the rest of Ukraine, what with the Shutdown here and BREXIT there and the EU a bit of a basket case with Italy leading the “Up Yours!” movement on budgets and the Visgrade area telling them to stuff it on open borders… while France was practicing their polite brand of riots… Then Macron & Merkle had a get together to announce agreement on (something the news never made clear…) while the USA got back to opening the government and Puten discovered he had some work to do with Maduro… So maybe not this month…
Sigh. So much of the world in such a mess…
Then on one of the news shows, France24? Sky?, they were interviewing some Talking Head woman at Davos. Clearly someone of some importance (or so they seemed to think… but not enough for me to notice her name or title…) who said, no less than 2 and perhaps 3 times, that the IMF and UN were cranky about the Trump / China thing and we needed to get together and fix it ’cause they didn’t want to risk losing a single $$$$ of the money we were expected to ship to the rest of the world. No, that’s not quite how she said it, but it was clear that Fleecing The USA Business As Usual being shut down had caused them heartburn. Well guess what: IF stopping China from practicing exploitative Mercantilist Policies causes the Ultra Wealthy & Powerful of Davos “World Economic Forum” to lose sleep and feel cranky, then I’m 100% for it. Go Trump! Just the folks I want to see worried… The Exploitative Globalist Greedy Evil Bastards. EGGEBs. (The female contingent gets a different “B word” but the acronym still works). The USA is for the CITIZENS of the USA, not them.
I took a day off from playing with MySQL as something in the air was making me have a sneeze fit most of last night, so not a lot of sleeping or productivity today. Whatever it was seems to have drifted off on the same wind that brought it (or my air filter just worked really well 8*) So I hope to get back into it tomorrow afternoon. I think I’ve learned enough of what MySQL can do, and how it does it, and figured out some things I want to do with it; such that I can now know what ought to be in round 2 of the design process. Basically I’m ready to nock together some reports / extracts and then iterate the design until they are doing what was expected. Overall my impression of MySQL is that it is a “good enough” set of features to do what I want, and is a fairly professional product. Not as feature rich as some other DBA products I used in the past, but competent enough (and not costing huge thousands of $$$ either…) The language is fairly easy to learn, especially for database layout and data loading / updating. For reporting it has a couple of more complicated features (nested SELECT statements for example) but sill not that hard.
Oh, and heard on another news program that Israel & Syria were basically at war with each other. Who knows how that will turn out. Not a lot about it on other news shows, but that whole Syria / Israel / Lebanon / Iran area is ripe for a big Aw Shit. Of course the ongoing “whatever it is” in Yemen with Saudi Arabia is also a horrible situation that could spread. Pretty much the entire area is a mess and not stabilizing.
One parting mention that Rhodesia / Zimbabwe is having some trouble feeding itself, has rampant inflation, and the expected political violence:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-46986151 so that whole “What Man Bad” and kicking them out seems to have mostly resulting in discovering that Black Man Bad is about equally true. The southern part of Africa looks to be in just as bad a shape as the Middle East or the area of North Africa with various religious and tribal violence. We just don’t normally talk about it, or even notice it for that matter, due to it being “old news”.
What saddens me is that all of those areas could be rich, prosperous, and with well fed happy people; but for their governments being run by GEBs (perhaps with the manipulation of EGGEBs). There is NOTHING at all technologically nor economically limiting the ability of a Free People to prosper, other then their lack of willingness to work for their own gain, and their tendency to introduce corrupt and envy driven governments with redistributionist policies. Nothing so kills Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” as telling it you will take what it produces. We live in a world of abundant natural resources, with unlimited human resources, with more technological skill than ever before: all that is required is for Government to get out of the way and “leave the people alone” in liberty. I used to say “Oh Well, they can see what to do by looking at the USA” (and Canada, and Australia, and the UK, and…) but now we’re getting to be as bad as they are; just taking us longer to destroy what we inherited…
Perhaps we need a pool on “Last Industrial Paradise Left Standing” to figure out where the last refuge of prosperity for a regular Middle Class person will be… At this point I’m not sure where, if anywhere, will survive the Soros / Globalist / UN “Agenda”… I also wonder why they want to be owner-King of a pile of crap instead of a richer Prince Of Prosperity in a Libertarian Market, but hey, I’m not a sociopath so don’t “get it” how they think…
Finally, the SPY chart has prices pausing after a run back up to the top of the SMA (Simple Moving Average) 3 line stack. Now we wait for Mr. Market to make a decision. We had way over sold (price well below the SMA stack) and now have rebounded to it. At this point it can resume the downward trend, or attempt to run up, fail back to the lines but also fail to drop through them and then start climbing. We’ll know in about a week. I take trades off at this point (bank the money from the rebound to the mean move) and plan for another trade once you have a “setup”, which means a clear trend indication OR prices well away from the SMA stack so you can trade the “return to the mean” process.
Musings from the Chiefio 
As you say it is a bit odd that the globalist would prefer a world of poor surfs to a world of well off surfs.
Maybe they think if the people are so busy just staying alive they won’t think about rebellion and taking from the rich what they have stolen from the people.
I saw a program a couple of years ago about how the old idea of “trickle down” economics has stopped working and the rich are just getting richer and instead of being philanthropists they just either bank the money or buy ever more exepensive “toys”. Well one of those very rich guys was quite worried, he had to hire body gaurds because he is expecting the poor to try and take what he has.
And that is what we see with the very famous who flaunt their wealth, their properties get broken into, whether they are in them or not, thir kids have to be guarded from kidnappers etc.
But there is not about it until Pres Trump came along the Globalists have been winning hands down, but at least we are seeing some fight back in France, but you won’t see any action like that here in the UK, we have forgotten how to protest over righteousness.
The impeachment papers, wouldn’t Nancy have a lawyer holding that file on a USB drive, with the charges listed, only the date needed? That someone can have the actual paper printed anywhere.
Those papers have to be filed with the right authority, of course. I am sure some President Trump hating public servant will come to the office to accept them, paycheck or no.
9th Circuit will probably be their choice.
E.M.: “The Exploitative Globalist Greedy Evil Bastards. EGGEBs”
Like!
I’ve been using ‘GEBs in conversation and I think that it will become a commonly understood acronym soon. Three letter acronyms also roll easily off the tongue.
When I saw EGGEBs, I was thinking how you would say that and ‘Egg Beaters came to mind. EGGEB as written is fine, but how does one say it? I hear Egg Beaters.
I’ve been pooh-poohing the idea that America could go hot in my time, but given the recent actions of our government to rule against the will of the people, I’m concerned that America just may wind up going hot sooner than I thought. I consider myself fortunate that I now own mobile accommodations and have some means of defending myself from the Egg Beaters.
I do consider the US to be fortunate in that, by what I have gathered in news video clips and anecdotal evidence, the Military is behind the President. If the military was ordered to remove the President, I think that they would take their oath to uphold the Constitution would kick in. It’s been frustrating because following the Constitution has stymied President Trump’s agenda, but he seems to be the only one following the Constitution. The Uniparty in DC has been and is running roughshod over it and I think the Military will support the Constitution, which means supporting the President.
That was kind of a grim and gloomy intro to W.O.O.D., but the situation report you’ve laid out does not make me want to throw my hands up and give in to the Egg Beaters. (That’s what their YSM propaganda arm is trying to get us to do with 24/7 “It’s hopeless. Abandon Trump. Give up. Give in. Submit.”) I am just sobered that it may fall to me to do my part in evil times.
And with that… a cheery “Good Morning!” to all the Chiefio readers out there in cyberland.
It is a sobering thought, H.R. I know what I think about the situation, and I keeping asking myself,
” Are you actually ready to do this? ”
I still have trouble coming to grips with the knowledge that I have friends and relatives, good people on an everyday basis, otherwise thinking people, who refuse to see where all of this could end. They think they have no choice but to oppose the President and their neighbors. They never consider that the control they want always consumes so many who desired it.
@red – History is just a string of tyrannies imposed on people who then have to fight to remove the tyrants.
EGGEBs just about sums it up, substituting tyrant for bastard. They take advantage of the fact that non-Egg Beaters are too busy with every day life to nip their tyrannical schemes in the bud. Then when the tyranny becomes too great and there is no ‘normal everyday life’ left to lose, either the tyrants are taken down or the whole tyrannical system collapses into rubble. The remaining non-Egg Beaters are left to rebuild society into something that allows people to go back to living ordinary lives.
All those super secret societies in novels and movies created to protect the Holy Grail or The Book of The Dead or the Alien Crystal Skull or some such? Howz comes nobody has thought to create a super secret society dedicated to taking out a GEB whenever one lifts his/her head above the parapet?
BTW, being filthy rich doesn’t automatically qualify you for GEB status. It’s when you start using the wealth to buy politicians instead of yachts, mansions, and Faberge eggs that puts you in the GEB category. But it is hard to resist buying a politician or two when you have enough money to buy the toys and the politicians. It’s that human nature thing.
Having pondered the “third world” situation where governments, be it dictatorial or otherwise, corner all the resources and rule with a bloody hand; I don’t see a clear path forward helping those beaten down peoples. We’ve tried war in the Middle East and IMO it’s too high a price to pay, and at that doesn’t seem to work long term. We won’t do things like bomb entire families of, say, the Somali pirates or those of bloody dictators; so presumably that’s off the table.
It seems the thing that worked the best, although not perfect by any means, was when we manipulated governments, elections, news, and whatever with covert methods. It’s a lot cheaper and got better results.
@jim2 – When the CIA manipulated governments, elections, news. and whatever it was for the purpose of our GEBs to get the tyrants in place that would play ball with them, cf HWSRN and Egypt, The Muslim Brotherhood.
I don’t believe for a second that it was for the benefit of the American people, though sometimes it did work to Joe Aveage’s advantage.
Big War Inc.® is a wholly owned subsidiary of EGGEB®. The CIA is just the expediter in the Logistics Department.
I’m of the opinion …
A – the impeachment thing won’t happen until after the State of the Union speech, and that might not happen until after the immigration/wall episode is settled;
B – mood around the Western nations seems to be Venezuela folks need to get rid of Maduro (& Cuba/Russia) before outside help will be available [no Operation Just Cause-Panama in sight];
C – Ukraine/Russia: In 1954, Crimea was given (said to be symbolic) to Ukraine. Both were parts of USSR, but Crimeans were less related to Ukraines than to Russians. As long as the USSR existed, this arrangement made little difference.
Now, there is “eastern Ukraine” – likewise much Russian-ethnic folks. Getting those folks into the new-Russia has some of the same character as Crimea, but also a real big difference. It would be exponentially more than undoing a symbolic gesture to Nikita Khrushchev’s favorite republic.
D – The USA should decide directly where $$$ get spent helping others, not those of the UN and its Green Climate Slush Fund, or its other slush funds. Most of the decent activities can better be done without a UN. Close it down.
Oh, c’mon!
“Think of all the hate there is in Red China
Then take a look around to Selma, Alabama
Ah, you may leave here for four days in space
But when you return it’s the same old place
The poundin’ of the drums, the pride and disgrace
You can bury your dead but don’t leave a trace
Hate your next door neighbor but don’t forget to say grace
And you tell me over and over and over and over again my friend
Ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.” – October 1965
Not to mention the Cuba Missile Crisis 3 years earlier.
(In a year when it seemed as if the USA and the USSR were conducting Nuclear Weapons every other month.)
Now that would have given Greta Thunberg something worth worrying about.
Nuclear Weapons TESTS, of course. Sorry.
Hi E.M.,
another point for your list of things that “the entire world is going Bat Shit Crazy”: in Germany, the final step of that great socialist dream called “Energiewende” has been announced. Germany will get rid of all coal-fired power plants by 2038. Since we already decided to get rid of all nuclear power-plants by 2022, this will lead to quite a gap in power generation capacity, probably around 30 GW. This will be replaced by wind, PV, biomass and a lot of hope that the rest of Europe will be happy to sell us enough power to keep the power grid stable.
Price point? Expensive. Very expensive. We’ll see if that decision (which is not yet put into law, but it is likely that the results of the “Kohlekommission” will go basically unchanged through parliament) will survive the next economic downturn. We already have by far the highest price per kWh for the average non-industrial consumer in Europe. And probably in the world.
“Is it just me wondering this, or does it seem like the entire world is going Bat Shit Crazy?”
You are not alone and many of us feel that things are getting worse……that slippery slope, Gaddarene swine, lemming feeling!
When a socialist autocrat in Latin America (e.g. Chavez or Maduro) gets replaced don’t expect things to get better. There is a greater than 50% probability that things will get worse. Argentina has not yet recovered from Peron.
@HR: I hear it as EGG-GEBs.
GEB being like the proper name Ebb, with a hard G on the front…
Though I do soften the leading Egg into something leaning toward Ick as a schwa-harderG.. Iigg…
:-)
@Jim2:
Your concern implies a belief that the 3rd world govts are not EXACTLY as the EGGEBs want them… broken, corrupt, and controlled…
@Hubersn:
The higher prices started showing up in my German car parts… so “going forward” I’ve bought my last of them. From here on out it is Subaru. Costs about 1/2 to 1/3 as much per repair. Just did front half shafts on a 4Matic and Forester. 4Matic was $900 per shaft FOR THE PART while Subaru was about $125. I chose to use a Chinese knock off at $400 when my Mercedes mechanic said the Mercedes parts came back in again in a few years but the Chinese ones didn’t fail… (the rubber boot gives out around the U joint… Germans great at steel…rubber??…)
This will get worse over time…
@GC:
I’m hearing echos of that Ron White line: “But ya cain’t fix stupid.”
Is it just me wondering this, or does it seem like the entire world is going Bat Shit Crazy?
No that is a pretty good summary, lots of problems that have been festering for a long time have all begun to manifest at about the same time. People and societies are pretty resilient and adapt to slow changes but eventually you stretch the elastic too far and things try to either snap back or break, and jump to a new configuration.
South Africa is busy destroying its farming economy (ie white held farmers are being systematically murdered or driven out of the country), meanwhile the much touted amnesty was only a temporary delay in the accounting process and the inherent turmoil of such a troubled country is about to bubble to the surface. You know you have a problem when your country has road signs telling people not to drive on certain roadways after dark because of the likelihood of bandits killing them.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission restorative justice was just a facade for slow totalitarianism by the blacks for pay back against the whites. It is a country about to descend into the horrors of Rhodesia and similar chaos that Africa seems to be particular vulnerable to (much like the middle east) due to their tribal societies which collect stamps (keep a tally of past wrongs and look for opportunities to pay back). This is a Hatfield and McCoy blood feud that is not going away in any nearby century, until that whole mind set of keeping score goes away.
Syria and Ukraine are tied together, Russia has a huge stake in both locations. Personally I think they realize if global cooling sets in then Russia must absolutely have warm water access and Ukraine and Syrian bases are the anchors for that Mediterranean access.
Russia has been building troops and weapons stocks near Ukraine over the last few months so expect a new round of fighting soon, as they try to take total control of the Kerch straits, and sea of Azov. This will cut off about 80% of Ukraine’s shipping and effectively blockade its access to the sea, finishing the process started with the seizure of Sevastopol and the Donbas area of Ukraine. This will effectively partition Ukraine into two countries the western European half and the Russian eastern half.
map of Ukraine with divisions highlighted
For the naval bases at Sevastopol to be effective, Russia absolutely must keep Turkey happy to guarantee free used of the Turkish straits (the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosporus). Without free access out this southern passage Sevastopol is useless, and black sea becomes and inland salt water lake.
Meanwhile the GEBs / EGGEBs are busy trying to crush national boarders in Europe and Russia is simultaneously trying to collapse NATO (big plus for their efforts to cut Turkey out of the herd)
While all this is going on, China has nearly achieved local military dominance in the south china sea and off shore islands out to the fortified manufactured islands, while simultaneously completely modernizing their missile and air forces and moving to dramatically expand their Navy especially their SSBN submarine forces. They like Russia are now or very soon will be equal peer states to the US in a strategic war setting. Russia is planning on operational production of the SARMAT nuclear missile in 2021 which will completely unbalance strategic forces for first strike.
https://thediplomat.com/2018/10/russias-rs-28-sarmat-icbm-to-enter-serial-production-in-2021/
RS-28 SARMAT (10–24 MIRVs approx. range 10,900 kilometres (6,800 mi)
Topol-M (1 Mt warhead 11,000 km range)
RS-24 Yars with 3 MIRV 500 kt warheads
It is likely China is at or near the same point with their DF-5 and DF-31 missiles
ICBM
DF-5A (CSS-4 Mod 2) ICBM
quantity (20) range 13,000+ km
DF-31A (CSS-10 Mod 2) road-mobile ICBM
quantity (24) range 11,200+ km
SLBM
JL-1 SLBM (12) 1,770+ km
JL-2 SLBM (24) 7,200+ km
Both Russia and China have repeatedly referenced operational upgrades of strategic systems in the 2020-2021 time frame.
I think they are building toward achieving strategic dominance over the US by then and what you are seeing is the final stages of preparing the ground for such a show down in 2-3 years.
Not to be a negative nancy but I think that is the back story for disruptive actions by both Russia and China.
Meanwhile it is in the self interest of Russia, China,Iran & the Islamists and others to conduct a shadow war on the US via drugs (currently killing 70,000 per year of your best and brightest young adults in their most productive ages). This is not to mention bleeding us dry in perpetual foreign wars while European countries get a free ride on defense on the back of our NATO commitment.
The Drug cartels are natural allies for smuggling and a great way to raise revenue for Russia and China. The billions of dollars in US currency dumped into drugs has to go some where, and you know with HBC bank and others working together, it provides a lucrative cash flow for all sorts of bad actors.
https://21stcenturywire.com/2016/07/13/fbi-director-comey-board-member-of-clinton-foundation-connected-bank-hsbc/
https://www.thestar.com/business/2012/07/17/hsbc_laundered_billions_of_dollars_for_mexican_drug_cartels_senate_investigation_finds.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2012/07/16/hsbc-helped-terrorists-iran-mexican-drug-cartels-launder-money-senate-report-says/#306b527e5712
“Howz comes nobody has thought to create a super secret society dedicated to taking out a GEB whenever one lifts his/her head above the parapet?”
The League of Assassins in the Batman comics? Or the Assassins’ Guild in the Discworld novels?
Crowdsourced funding to hire a professional, so as to out-bid the GEB who might at present be holding the seat (perched atop a pile of cash and skulls…) ?
It would be very tough on the Ukrainians, but perhaps well for the Venezuelans, were Putin and Trump to reach a deal that we’d stay out of their backyard providing they’d stay out of ours. Which is to say we’d let their GEB’s plunder Ukrainian oil and gas while our GEB’s exploit the petro resources of Venezuela.
This, in public, of course. Secret deals aren’t worth the paper they’re encoded upon.
I guess I didn’t state that well. I’m not against bloody dictators as long as they serve the interests of the USA. For example, keeping a jack boot on the back of Muslim radicals.
E.M says:
“What saddens me is that all of those areas could be rich, prosperous, and with well fed happy people; but for their governments being run by GEBs (perhaps with the manipulation of EGGEBs). There is NOTHING at all technologically nor economically limiting the ability of a Free People to prosper, other then their lack of willingness to work for their own gain, and their tendency to introduce corrupt and envy driven governments with redistributionist policies. Nothing so kills Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” as telling it you will take what it produces. We live in a world of abundant natural resources, with unlimited human resources, with more technological skill than ever before: all that is required is for Government to get out of the way and “leave the people alone” in liberty.”
You name the enemy within EGGEBs, think I’ll call ’em GlobeGEBs when I spread the word of who they are and what they’re up to on every occasion I can. Those of us of democratic and sceptical persuasion seem less inclined to group and act as do the leftist followers of Saul Alynsky, infiltrating institutions, propagandizing, attacking targets by any means they think will work. Whereas we discuss, analyse, explore problems of AGW-Cli-Sci, and renewable energy and guvuhmint RETs, and UN and EU globalist drives to control nation states. But while, as in Oz for example, we identify the problems , still the enemy advances, more regulations and prohibitions. We gotta nail the complaints on the cathedral door, plan and act on some effective fight back.
http://joannenova.com.au/2019/01/irish-greens-try-to-inspire-mass-yellow-vest-protests/#comment-2098756 Another sickening move by Glbegeb ists.
On a positive note, I found the Buckeyes that HR provided when we met up at the lodge. I figured I would hide them, and did it a bit too well, untill tonight :-)
Otherwise, from a world view, Davos, Venezuela etc., not so much good…..
I spoke to some folks tonight about how we took what the news provided in the old days as fact. Not so much today, sadly…..
Buckeyes! Very good!
This song reminded me very of much of the yellow vests. Think about it…
@ossqss – Blackmail material! Better finish them off before I tell your family about the Buckeyes. What’s it worth to you for me to keep quiet?😜
😆😆😆
Too late HR, they found them. Doh!
As a follow up on my prior post, this popped up on my playlist after the other song. Go figure!
I spoke to some folks tonight about how we took what the news provided in the old days as fact. Not so much today, sadly…..
Yes makes you wonder what we “know to be true” in history which in fact was actually someone’s cover story.
We presumed that the major media were reporting facts and true accounts of events as they knew them, and assigned “fake news” only in retrospect to William Randolph Hearst “Remember the Maine” and William Durante’s accounts of Russia. Makes you ponder how many false stories American took hook line and sinker back then as the alternative voices had such small reach that they were simply invisible to most everyone.
Interesting to note the following commentary by William Randolph Hearst
Hearst answered, “Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”
What not everyone remembers is that after the war started, Hearst signed an article in his New York Journal that blared out his bellicose credo:
“Under Republican (?) government, newspapers form and express public opinion.
They suggest and control legislation.
They declare wars.
They punish criminals, especially the powerful.
They reward with approving publicity the good deeds of citizens.
The newspapers control the nation…”
I think the Democrats and the Deep state (including establishment Republicans) have internalized this reality and actively use it. The General public after WWII forgot it for a generation and trusted the media as a result of their coverage of the war.
With that in mind what do you make of these items where suddenly it appears some folks in Democratic ranks are tossing the leadership to the wolves. Are they trying to prevent being served warrants for illegal activity and pushing the blame up hill to the senior leadership?
Is the Democratic party starting to eat its own to save themselves or is this an internal power struggle and the old line Dems are fighting for control with the new Dem Socialists?
http://the405media.com/2017/03/29/obama-aide-evelyn-farkas-squeals-live-on-msnbc-i-helped-spy-on-trump-for-obama-video/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
Meanwhile the Q phenomenon is starting to go mainstream. Only time will tell if this is some how a well connected group who knows things or some LARP game being played on the world, but recently they have been issuing warnings that things are about to break.
For what it is worth
https://twitter.com/PennyStocksMomo/status/847232973401235456
Ooops wrong link
More for what it is worth: ( note I am not a rabid Q fan but consider them a piece of the puzzle)
May be fake may be true literally who knows but at the very least Q posts make people think and self investigate which is half the battle.
Larry
Two approaches to history:-
“Of the events of wr, have not ventured to speak from any chance information, nor according to any notion of my own. I have described nothing but what I saw myself, or learned from others of whom I made the most careful and particular enquiry”
Thucydides, “The Peloponnesian War”
“I’ve just jazzed mine up a bit” Milligan, World War II.
Oops “war, I have” above
Hard to trust Q, as much of the predicted ( massive arrests and revelations) have not happened, yet many leaks of what the deep state has and is doing continue to occur. At times PT appears to be moving without a plan against the deep state and their well documented crimes.
I think PT must be doing more then tweeting complaints about the witch hunt and the deep state, but I simply do not know. The crimes ( Bengazi, fast and furious, the IRS, the Clinton foundation pay to play, the blatant destruction of evidence – smashing phones and use of bleach bit, excessive immunity that turned evidence on no-one, Awan brothers, Iran cash, incredible FISA abuse, mis-appropriation of billions of funds, etc and feel free to add) are real and the evidence overwhelming, yet the prosecution is mute.
The above, plus the relentless insanity of the openly Socialist- Racist (against older white people and older white men in particular) gender confused, perpetual victim, war mongering leftist ideology and infiltration into every aspect of culture is actually quite depressing at times. Makes one think “the world is going insane”!
Yet life moves on and P Trump survives incredible forces against him, at times making the impossible inevitable. The man has the will of a great warrior. I will not bet against him.
The man has the will of a great warrior. I will not bet against him.
Agreed, when you consider he is dealing with the nearly decade long works of the Four Whores of the Apocalypse, (Obama, Hillary, Brennan, Comey) and all their minions and fellow travelers like Loretta Lynch, Eric Holder, Soros, John Kerry, Debbie Wasserman Schultz & the Awan Brothers etc. He is dealing with and trying to take down the equivalent of a great world wide corporation like General Motors, Microsoft, etc all rolled into one.
I keep my hopes up that Q is at least a representation of all the good folks working in the shadows to take down this huge criminal conspiracy which is trying to break the industrialized west and turn back the clock to the power politics of medieval Europe with princes and kings abusing the serfs to create their kingdoms.
I sometimes wonder what label history will hang on this period – the age of corruption, the collapse of the nation state, etc. as I think we are immersed in a pivotal historical epoch the the Reformation, and the wars of religion in Europe, that will probably last 100 years and change the face of the world. Being inside it, it is hard for us to see the whole scope when the average person is largely powerless to affect the outcome other than mass movements like the Yellow vests, or MAGA, or the Tea Party (which although is gone sewed the seeds for MAGA).
Given what I see I am both hopeful and scared to death I am right about what is coming in the next couple decades.
On another topic:
Discontent for Linux. Security and non-Open-Source, or Open and insecure?
https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/1/23/840
Interesting twitter thread that compares Donald Trump to Martin Luther (yes that Martin Luther who nailed his 95 thesis to the cathedral door and kicked off the Reformation).
Start of the thread is here:
[https://twitter.com/STUinSD/status/1089910476916563969]
So what’s really going on in the background?
Interesting thread from twitter:
@Pouncer:
That is mostly a rant about GRSecurity not complying with the GPL licence terms.
For the Linux kernel in general, it means nothing about security. The source is out there for anyone who wants to, to improve it. It is more secure than Microsoft and other OSs.
I have saved copies of sources from various eras, so could restart from any level if needed. So have thousands of others.
Furthermore, really “Linux” is only the kernel, not userland. There have been several ports of the userland to the BSD kernel over the years. While they have not gathered a big following, IFF the Linux kernel ever was found a problem, it is a quick “plan B”.
Where there is some truth, is that Corporations have seen the power of Linux to shape their businesses, so are now trying to shape for their own ends (most visibly Red Hat and SystemD). They have effective control of The Linux Foundation. (Including Microsoft who bought a seat…); so there is cause for “watchful waiting” level of concern; but not yet reason for revolt…
FWIW, my Plan B is a BSD system. I’ve just been too lazy to commit to it… so far. I did do a system build, from sources, on a R.Pi.. just didn’t do the X config and move in. About a day or two of effort.
FWIW, nothing prevents others from taking The Next Step and writing a different kernel. Mach from Carnegie Mellon is open source IIRC. Then I have a book on OS design where you write your own “Unix like” kernel. Thousands of students have such a book and experience. Yeah it would be a piece of work, but remember that Linux started life as the product of one man too.
Oh, and Honorable Mention for GNU Hurd, the same folks who make the userland have their own kernel in early release…
There is a lot of mysticism about kernel programming and Linux in particular. The reality is much more bland. Schedulars. Memory manager. Device drivers. Lots of modest sized small jobs… Then impliment the System Call services defined in your API Applications Programmer Interface. Things like pipes, malloc, etc.
I’d likely want a staff of about 4 to build a replacement inside a year, as a rough estimate. In reality, starting from existing Linux sources would be about a month, and BSD kernel swap about the same (mostly picking an old distro and just updating it…)
Maybe I’ll look around for who still makes one…
Oh, and then there is Plan9. In many ways a superior idea. Have built in design for distributed processing… I ran a copy o my R.Pi but then had other stuff to do…
That’s the beauty of Open Source. No big worries. Only the little worry of when a group needs to form to fix a real problem (once it shows up…)
I really like that comparison to Luther. Very thought provoking.
Debian on BDS kernel:
https://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu
GNU Hurd:
https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd
Based on Mach, it is likely to be very good once done / accepted..
Waiting for confirmation but first mention of this:
Aaron J. Carpenter 🇺🇸
@aaronjcarpenter
10 minutes ago
More
🚨 Nancy Pelosi just “invited” Trump to deliver the State of the Union on February 5 (next Tuesday).
Finally saw some confirmation from a solid Democratic friendly source:
Dragon Empress Retweeted
NPR
Verified account
@NPR
49 minutes ago
More
JUST IN: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has invited President Trump to deliver the State of the Union address in the House on Tuesday, February 5th.
AG Whitaker: the Mueller investigation is “close to being completed.”
https://dailycaller.com/2019/01/28/whitaker-mueller-probe-nearly-completed/
Reading between the lines sounds to me like he got briefed and told Mueller to wrap it up he is done!
It would be nice to see the “Mueller Your Memory Is not PERFECT!!!” inquisition come to an end. It has accomplished nothing, wasted $Millions, and ruined a few folks for nothing.
I hope once it is done and gone Trump gives everyone persecuted a 100% pardon and expunges their records.
IMHO, the “Mueller Probe” is a criminal conspiracy under RICO rules… If just holding $thousand or 2 of cash is up for “confiscation” then endlessly bilking $Millions from the US Govt. is worse…
Sometimes reality is just plain funny
AFP news agency
Verified account
@AFP
4 minutes ago
More
The “beef” came from Romania but the country has no cattle industry — that was one oddity which tipped off French investigators testifying at the trial of four men charged in a “horsemeat-for-beef” scandal that hit Europe in 2013
https://www.yahoo.com/news/fraud-inspectors-tell-french-horsemeat-trial-unusual-origin-204901478.html
President Trump accepts the invitation to present the SOTU on Feb 5
Re: Politicians – I am reminded of Groucho’s quote – “I would never belong to a club that would have me as a member.”. Kind of speaks volumes about the DC sewer rats.
Hmmm why are French riot police carrying hammers?
I don’t see many armored knights in the Yellow Vest protests, perhaps there is some other use for hammers while dealing with crowds of protestors.
Perhaps because they are more effective than swords or knives in combat and never run out of “ammo”?
Yeah, go ahead and make a gun ban… just makes the Battle Hammer more effective in comparison…
In Fairness: Getting people out of cars, especially if on fire, and getting through doors in an Aw Shit, are major issues where having a hammer can be very helpful. There’s lots of times something just needs a good smash and breaking. As “Battle Hammers” the ones shown are not best. Grip about 1 foot long and about a 3 to 4 lb head. Much better is a 2 to 2.5 foot handle and a 2 lb head.
Although I have no proof this is true, the background info is credible.
Someone somewhere knows the details, someone some where can provide other tips to validate or refute this.
Similar to LL, I am both hopeful and scared to death of what appears to be the path of our country. I’m hopeful mainly due to Trump and his disruptions of the so-called elite and their plans. I’m scared because it appears the left is riding multiple tidal waves to control of just about everything. It sucks.
This was somewhat useful. I just finished relocation with using the WiFi diagnostics, but didn’t need to put any throttle controls on as band width is not an issue. Still no Kodi aside from screen mirroring with a Kodi enabled device, which does work quite well with no lag.
https://www.lifewire.com/roku-hacks-4168171
@ossqss; Fancy that! I did not know that you spoke Greek. 😜
I did get ‘WiFi’, but I don’t think that’s Greek. The rest was Greek to me. 🤔😁
New RPi in four flavors:
Today we bring you the latest iteration of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module series: Compute Module 3+ (CM3+). This newest version of our flexible board for industrial applications offers over ten times the ARM performance, twice the RAM capacity, and up to eight times the Flash capacity of the original Compute Module.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/compute-module-3-on-sale-now-from-25/
I wonder when we’ll see RPi M4xxx
@Larry – Re: Buzzy – reminds you of the Russian Colds of the 20th century,eh?
How many of these goals sound familiar?
Take special note of item 35.
https://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/watchwomanonthewall/2011/04/the-45-communist-goals-as-read-into-the-congressional-record-1963.html
Facinating the parallel’s in todays CAGW movement with such. I just finished watching this, and it appears this is the same one.. Hey, it was on my Roku, and I found the same to share on UTube! For the time being ;-)
Scary, no matter accuracy. Just sayin….
Cheezy-pete, ossqss! It’s deja vu all over again.
An amusing aside apropos of nothing. Mrs. H.R. and I stopped at a second-hand store to look for a a vacuum cleaner for the trailer.
The trailer has a smidge of shag carpet for the slideout, which is necessary given how the slideout works. The small bagless vacuum I bought works well on the vinyl floor in the rest of the trailer, but is piss-poor on that shag carpet.
We scored a Hoover® bagless stick-type vacuum cleaner for nine dollars. I plugged it in at the ‘Nu-2-U’ store and it ran strong. It seems it was missing a gasket on the dust cup, which is why the prior owners probably gave it up. Without the gasket, it barely pulled vacuum. I bought some 4.5mm diameter window screen spline to form a gasket, jammed it in the gasket channel at Home Depot and the vacuum works a treat now. It pulls hard. Their loss, our gain, and only nine bucks. Retail is around $100.
Cat hair and dust futures are DOWN!
I’m having a good day. 😁
Nice OTSI (off the shelf integration) there HR!
Here is an interesting bit not mentioned much.
https://econimica.blogspot.com/2019/01/depopulation-and-monetizationlike-peas.html
That article is interesting, ossqss. I didn’t see that the author discussed that many people in the US are working longer now because they can’t afford to retire. I don’t know what that number is, though.
I think I’ll take a break and see if I can find something on the trends in age at retirement. It was a few years ago, but I recall reading that the average 401k account was only $10,000 or $20,000; some shockingly low number. I’ll have a look for that number, too.
That article also mentioned problems with housing prices in rural areas. There is inflationary pressure on housing prices, some rise is due to speculation, but the thing I’ve been most aware of is housing size inflation, which of course drives up house prices on material cost alone. When I was a kid, the average house was about 1,000 square feet. That started creeping up and the average was 2,000 square feet in (can’t recall exactly) the early ’90s.
We bought our current house in year 2000 and it was only 100 or 200 square feet above the average which was around 2,400-2,500 square feet then. I don’t know what the current average is nowadays, but they are building like crazy in my area and most houses are above 3,500 square feet with a lot of houses in the 4,000 to 5,000 square foot range.
I’m not so sure that the author is taking into account that those 1,800 square foot houses on 5-10 acres out in the country may start to become more attractive as people get tired of maintaining their McMansions. That’s something else to have a look at.
If I find anything really interesting on those other numbers I mentioned, I’ll put them in comments here later.
OK. The Motley Fool has a good article on baby boomers’ retirement savings.
https://www.fool.com/retirement/2016/12/17/baby-boomers-average-savings-for-retirement.aspx
That low number I was recalling probably included all ages of workers, so the younger workers would have less time to build up savings and would pull down the average.
Still, some boomers won’t be retiring any time soon. Check out the table in the link.
The UK House has just voted to “support the Withdrawal Agreement if the backstop is replaced with an alternative” 317 for, 301 against. Majority of 16.
So now they will cook up some trivial change to the “backstop” and then the permanent lock-in to EU rules can porceed…
I am one of those working longer, I simply cannot afford to go on full retirement at this point, but likewise I am now at my peak life time earnings so the longer I work the better my Soc Sec benefits will be.
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/06/11/why-people-are-working-longer
Well, the articles on average house size are mixed, but as best as I can determine, the average is now up to 2,660 square feet, up from 1,660 in 1973.
The best info I found was in a comment on one of the articles. No numbers, but it reminded me of what I know from experience.
https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/size_of_average_american_house_doubled_since_1950s/#comment-91482
I know that downsizing is happening with baby boomers. The Mrs. and I have discussed it ourselves. I do know that builders are beginning to put up stand alone condos of around 2,000 square feet for boomers who are starting to bail out of their McMansions. The problem is that they are building them with deluxe features – marble this and exotic hardwood that – so we found that they actually cost more than the larger house you’d be be selling. The neighbors were looking and the found the same thing.
Getting back to ossqss’ linked article, I’m not so sure that rural property prices are in trouble, but I haven’t run across any definitive information, pro or con, to say for sure.
The other issue is one of health in old age, as a population a larger fraction is in good health into their 70’s and up and still active. Sitting at home watching soap operas waiting to die is just not tolerable, and you an only travel so much.
Our generation have watched our predecessors retire early burn up their money traveling to all their favorite spots and then die of boredom when they run out of places to go. The physical labor jobs of that era also used people up, someone who worked all their life as a tradesman or laborer on an assembly line generally retired with only 10 years of remaining life expectancy, now that number is closer to 20 on average as typical life expectancy inches up toward 85 year on average and 90+ for a significant fraction of the population.
One of the driving forces for larger houses is zoning and tax base issues. A community gets a lot more property tax on a $800,000 dollar house than a $300,000 house, and if you can put a 1.2 million dollar home on the same property, why not?
It is actually getting difficult for builders to build smaller starter size homes as the zoning and permit approval process pushes them toward multi-family affordable housing complexes. Again more revenue for the same land usage if you can build a 300 unit rental community on a lot that would support maybe 10 large homes, with big yards.
This would interesting, and welcome, if it turns out to be real.
https://m.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/A-cure-for-cancer-Israeli-scientists-say-they-think-they-found-one-578939
Thanks for the input, Larry L.
My older brother will be working until he is 70 years old. Life happens, and for his financial situation, that’s how it looks like it will be for him. He would have had to work several years longer, but a small windfall brought his target down to age 70.
The article in ossqss’ link uses US Census data, but it somehow struck me that the data was selected to make the author’s case (OK by me. We all pick things to support our points). I think there is more going on that might change the conclusions of the article. I don’t recall much discussion on government policies affecting his conclusions, for example.
But the author wasn’t trying to write a “Theory of Everything” 4 volume finished work, so I’m looking at the few things I know that might affect what he did write about.
That’s the last thing I was going to look into; retirement ages. Headed there now.
@Ossqss:
That was an interesting link…
I’d only also point out that excess interest rates put stress on economies that then reduces births as folks don’t feel secure enough to add to the family. It’s a feedback loop in both directions…
The movement of rural folks to urban has also been ongoing for generations. While nothing prevents a company locating a factory “in the middle of nowhere”, it is rarely done. Why is an interesting question, but often, IMHO, answered wrongly. The personal preferences of “management” drive things as much or more than actual costs. Never expect a manufacturer to locate a factory far from headquarters in a low cost rural area if they must train the workers there and the local restaurants / night life are not conducive to visiting… They would much rather choose a “cheap enough” place with nearby “urban amenities” and a large labor pool ready to go. They don’t do “If you build it, they will come” (for workers) but rather “If you pander, we will build it” (for those in charge…).
The general mind set is that THE only industry needed / desired in rural areas is agriculture. Had that been true, none of our big cities would ever have formed… Chicago, for example, started as a major shipping location, then added a lot of meat packing and then other industries (like banks, Sears,…) It is the intersection of different modes of transport that tends to form cities. Originally mostly sea and rail. Now including airports and interstate highways. Increasingly “the internet” (i.e. where to locate your Cloud Server Farm? In an urban jungle over a major intense networking hub…)
So in fact we could build a major telco / internet hub, next to an airport and an intersection of Interstate highways, and industry would start to grow, then a city form. But we mostly don’t. You can see this happening to some degree next to the interstates in California (and elsewhere?) where various companies put in place regional shipping / warehouse sites next to a freeway and on a rail line. They have now started sprouting “suburbs” around them… One is at the base of The Grapevine in California and started as an obligatory gasoline stop, then added restaurants, then there was enough “trucker amenities” for the warehouses… Another set is in the Vacaville – Tracy I-80 line. Now filling in with houses too.
Yet there is a statistical artifact that clouds the issue. Once those places cross a population density threshold, they “become” urban and then the population moves from “rural escapees from the urban jungle” back into “urban population moved from rural” all by doing nothing… We would have been one of them (were ready to place a bid on a house in Tracy when I was at Apple) but a parent was diagnosed with Cancer and we “focused elsewhere”… Had we bought, then in the ’80s we would have been an Urban to Rural move, and now would be classed as Rural to Urban “migration” in the statistics. I doub’t that is handled well in the statistics process.
At this point the ports / rivers are pretty well built up. The basic interstates are done (only “ring roads” and “bypasses” along with the odd toll road from here on out). Then Rail is essentially sclerotic at this point. Nobody will be making a new Right Of Way through any urban areas (even the “train to nowhere” in California is being built only where the land is cheap…when it costs you $million / 100 feet to buy right of way, it doesn’t happen. We could still roll out more / better airports and add large capacity internet in rural areas. It is unclear if that, next to an interstate interchange, is alone enough.
Honorable Mention for Trucking: Trucks are dominant in the “under 400 mile” range. Over that, inter-modal with a box on rail works better, or straight rail. So there is the potential for a trucking hub to serve as a growth center, but it needs a long haul “something” nearby to be a big factor (rail, ships, airports). So in theory you can do air-freight / trucking (interstate) / {something else} and make an urban spark. To some extent Federal Express did this with their major hub system You also see some of this in the “industrial parks” near airports – they usually have good trucking support too.
@Ossqss:
The cancer link is interesting as well. The good news is that I think their “Story” is largely valid. The bad news is that their is a fair amount of the usual biotech “sellers puff”. The “we have done it and it is great” spin; when the reality is “we have a bright idea with interesting lab results, and a decade plus of human trials and licensing and the inevitable negative surprises are in our future”.
Many shooting star biotechs have broken their teeth chewing on human trials and drug approvals. A few have knocked it out of the park with an OMG winner… Those odds matter.
So, have they done it? Not yet. Can they? Very likely. Also very likely not in the remaining lifetime of anyone currently diagnosed with cancer OR most of those in a high risk group…
FWIW, my personal favorite approach would be finding what signals are needed to revert a cancer cell to a normal one. In some cancers it has been observed. So what “magic sauce” does that? Very few folks looking there. The mushroom guys seem onto something…
So hopefully the Israeli drug testing / licensing process is faster than the USA / EU and they can be in “field trials” for the most common cancers in under 5 years. Then another 5 for approvals in The West… while loads of folks fly to the M.E. for treatment…
IF the cancer story were true (and haven’t we all read similar stories many times?) then the relevance to the retirement/pensions theme would be massive and unpredictable. We would be talking about more people fitter for longer and absent other advances a rise in dementia in the future. Curing cancer is good news, but we need to think about the other implications.
Rhoda, back in the UK, wishing I was still in SWFL.
Separate comment about housing. When just the two of us were looking for a house in TX, we had loads of choice of mcmansion at 3500sqft in housing tracts up and down the 75 north of Dallas. They all have master bedroom downstairs nowadays. We could see how we would never need to go upstairs at all, to the other three bedrooms, game room and media room. We didn’t want to furnish it all either. Eventually we got a new-build 2400 sqft in the historic centre (center) of McKinney, walkable to the square and its restaurants and bars. Plenty big enough (the UK house is 1800 sqft, four bed, and considered big here.). Washing machine upstairs. How strange, we thought, but so sensible in our experience, dirty clothes and bedding never come downstairs.
It turns out that the average age is much like the meaning of life being 42.
For a variety of reasons, many having nothing to do with whether or not it is the best economic choice, the average age is 63 years old.
After E.M.s analysis (with a few yah buts he threw in) to the demographic article, Larry L’s comments, and including Rhoda’s observation on a cancer cure and how that would affect demographics, I have put my finger on what it was that had me babbling and bumbling about.
The author’s points were solid and valid – Japan is the perfect example of his analysis – but things change and there wasn’t any, “but if the government does X” or “but if people start rejecting Y and favor N” and I am aware of some Xs and Ys and Ns.
One possibility I see, given that President Trump is setting up America to be a manufacturing economy again, is the return of ‘Company Towns.’ My state used to be full of little 2-3-4,000 population towns that were dependent on one or a couple of manufacturers. We still have a lot of those, but not nearly as many as during the late 1800s up to about the 1970s.
The one big advantage a company town offers an employer is loyal employees and the allure of small-town life; a sense of community. So what if you don’t have skilled workers ready to hit the ground running? My experience is that a manufacturing company has to train its workers anyhow, so once they have the locals trained, they have low turnover, which is a valuable intangible.
Small towns are the way “things used to be” and I hear people wishing for things to again be “the way things used to be.” Getting rid of manufacturing and growing government seems to me to necessarily put people into large cities, where they spend their time plotting how to move to the ‘burbs to get away from the city.
People take care of each other more so or at least differently in the smaller towns and that changes the dynamic of the age imbalance. There may be more retirees than young’uns, but the older people have more opportunities to contribute in small ways that add satisfaction and purpose to their lives and also ways to cover for the lack of a younger population.
My two typing fingers are getting tired, but all that babbling I’ve done has been to say that the author is right if things continue as they are… but I have these nagging feelings that people are getting tired of how things are. Changes are in the air.
Oops! The average age of retirement in the US. Last thing I was looking for. (I’ve heard it’s considered to be polite to let people in on what the heck you’re talking about.)
Why they don’t have to worry about retirement in Romania
https://twitter.com/i/status/1090685335606984705
@Rhoda Klapp: You built a 2400sq ft in central McKinney? Great choice and excellent value.
@All: Retirement? What’s that? Most of the people I know are so engaged with challenging and interesting work that we have no time for Retirement. I turn 66 in 15 days, and plan to keep on going… (Energizer Bunny sound effect here…)
Steven, we bought it from a local builder. When we had to leave Texas we sold for 15% more after 18 months. I would gladly live there again, a fine town. But the weather this winter..brrrrrr.
@Steven F.: I hear you, but my wife has health issues and I had friends who retired ‘on time,’ only to lose their spouse shortly thereafter. I gave up money to make sure I had some time to spend with the missus. I wasn’t going to play the odds.
I also don’t miss the 12-14-18-36 hour days, sometimes not getting a day off for a month. The vacation time I had accrued paid for a good portion of the first year of retirement.
Stimulating and challenging work. There wasn’t a single day that I could honestly say I wasn’t looking forward to going to work. It was not a job.
@Larry L re the traffic video: Romanian rush hour?
I effectively “retired” in about 2016. I’ve spent down a fair amount of my 401K since, and my first SS Check arrives in Feb. It ought to be more than is needed for house payment (that ends in about a year) and other bills. So I traded money for time.
Which is also why my stock postings have been more slim,. I’m not so active in trading anymore as I’m “home fee” at this point. So it is more a ‘historical interest’ than necessity.
The spouse and I are in active “negotiations” over what the future brings. I’d be fine with a Class A in an RV park. She wants 4 bedrooms so several “friends” can visit at once and go to Disney World on her annual pass. We’ll see how i tall turns out…
I’m supposed to fund a “Europe Tour” for her (and can), but at present it is unclear why we would want to go. Greece? In an economic funk and a bit of kaos. UK? Having an existential moment and most of my aunts & uncles are gone so visiting who again? France? “Yes, drear, we are going to watch the street riots of the citizens as they protest not being able to afford basics.” Germany? “Oh, look at all the North Africans and Arabs!”… So we WILL do a European Tour at some point, but it is now a race condition between our health and European Decay / Collapse.
Personally I’m more keen on a South America tour, but we’ll see ;-)
FWI: That Romania video was classic!
Exit stage left –
https://www.foxnews.com/world/russian-plane-in-venezuela-takes-20-tons-of-gold-flies-to-unknown-location-lawmaker-claims
Denisovan article in Reuters, with some interesting dates.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-denisovans-idUSKCN1PO2UG?utm_content=5c525eec04d30149a1e79477
I am embarrassed for my state now. To think that the governor now considers post partum children eligible for abortion. Now they just have to keep creeping up the age until they can define a child as anyone living. And eligible for abortion.
@PhilJourdan:
I grieve with you. How one can say that any viable human is suitable for death is beyond me… That includes 50 year old guys on Death Row for {whatever} and 8.999 month fetuses…
Three interesting items on water purification
https://newatlas.com/princeton-water-purification-filterless-c02/49534/
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2012/05/16/to-disinfect-water-cheaply-just-add-sunlight-and-salt-or-lime-juice/
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/520706/how-to-build-a-plant-xylem-water-filter/
The last one would be a great way to prefilter water before putting it through a high quality ceramic micropore filter to keep it from clogging and increasing its life time.
Just find me a cheap filter that can remove fluorine from tap water and I can stop the weekly Aquafina (reverse osmosis) purchases…
Amazon lists several reverse osmosis filters in the low $ hundreds….. My sister in law has one with the spigot in the sink as a third faucet and it works well. About $400 I think it was…
Fun little read about the media:
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2011/08/the-murray-gell-mann-amnesia-effect/
No, you’re not being paranoid. They really are watching you.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/walgreens-tests-new-smart-coolers/581248/
Put down the malt liquor and grab the green tea. Or better; ‘accidentally’ smear the camera lens with Vaseline as you reach for that diet cola.
Interesting look at the credit landscape for various generations
https://www.experianplc.com/media/news/2015/millennials-have-the-lowest-credit-scores-of-all-generations
@HR, or maybe they would feel sorry for me buying Busch light and give me a discount! ;-)
Looks like time to not take your wrap around sunglasses or mirrored aviator glasses off in the store.
@ossqss – No, the Busch marketing manager for Southeast United States has been dying to find out who the guy is that keeps making them the #1 sales territory in the U.S.
When he finds out it’s you, expect a Christmas card from now on.
😜😆😆
Back on political shenanigans – looks like things are about to break wide open on the spying on Trump cell at the FBI
https://tracybeanz.com/2019/01/31/oig-summary-report-stunning-implications/
RE places to visit. My spouse also wants a trip to Europe. I’m not so hot on the idea. Actually, I would like to spend a couple months in Beth the Serf’s homeland. Maybe even visit the Queen of the Serfs. There is so much country to see there.
This is going to be a mess.
Faith healer in Brazil who was featured by Oprah turned out to be running a human baby mill according to allegations.
https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1091058432017383425
@H.R.:
They have bandaids at Walgreens, don’t they? What’s on my laptop….
@Larry:
What I call my Florida Tollway Kit is an Indianna Jones hat, those big squarish over glasses sunglasses, and an artfully held 16 ounce coffee cup as though drinking… you can almost see my ears :-)
They snap a photo at the tollway on booths…
On the Wall President Trump just gave a peak at how he is going to play this hand.
Donald J. Trump
Verified account
@realDonaldTrump
3 hours ago
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Republicans on the Homeland Security Committee are wasting their time. Democrats, despite all of the evidence, proof and Caravans coming, are not going to give money to build the DESPERATELY needed WALL. I’ve got you covered. Wall is already being built, I don’t expect much help!
My guess is in 5 days he will tell everyone in the SOTU address that the Democrats are refusing to negotiate in good faith and have abandoned the DACA kids, so he has no choice but to use other means to build the wall.
I would not be surprised if one of the methods is to have military engineers and Seabee battalions build segments of the wall as part of their training activities, after the corp of engineers does the design work.
I will also speculate he had been stockpiling materials at military bases near the border and some of the most critical segments will go up very fast (legacy of his under budget on time pattern for his own construction projects.)
@Jim2 – I am with you on travel choices. A friend went to Serf Land a couple of years ago. Upon his return we asked him about it. He said “Everything can kill you there!” Despite that (he had a great time), it is still #1 on my list.
But I did see that video of the chinese person handling the deadly octopus. I want them to pick out my lottery ticket! :-)
@jim2 – On my bucket list, too. I want to see Ayers Rock, among a few other things.
Beth, keep a light on, will ya? 😁
On the use of military for border wall construction.
Looks like clear statutory authority.
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/pentagon-confirms-president-trump-can-build-the-wall-without-declaring-national-emergency/
@H.R:
One of the best trips I ever took was to Australia. Drove to The Back ‘O Burk… then kept on going….. until the “road” was two wheel tracks in the dirt disappearing into the distance.
It had been a few days driving out of Sydney. The eucalyptus started out hundred foot tall, and got regularly shorter the further inland you got with decreasing rainfall. At one point I’d not seen another car all day. Just stopped in the middle of the highway, left the door open, and strolled over to inspect the landscape…. Whenever you see any gas station, buy gas. They are about 3/4 of a tank apart… at the pub in Back’o Burk they had said to carry gas cans if going further, so I only went about 1/3 of a tank further into the outback… then stopped…
Got out of the car turned around, and nearly fell over. The shrubby bits were about 2 foot tall, max, and I was the tallest thing to the horizon… felt vagely like vertigo… had to look at the car to not feel like I was 50 foot tall… towering over trees. All sense of perspective lost.
After a few minutes, I was oriented again and just marveling at how big the sky was… and 100 mile of dead flat straight empty dirt track disappearing to the sight limit. As much as I wanted the reccomended 4×4 and 40 gallons of gas cans, I was in a red compact rental with about 8 gallons left, so just turned around and went back.
I still want to finish that “walkabout” some day… It is remarkable there are still places so isolated and Big Empty…
Then in Melbourne, had a great steak dinner in a place that was a converted warehouse with high ceilings… that were needed for the jugglers, guy on a very tall unicycle, and other strolling entertainers. Great night life.
E.M.
Is WordPress playing games again? Windows 10 with latest Firefox
Both your site and CTH are doing this. When you click on a thread to go down a level for fine detail it won’t come back up one level with a single click and a double click will likely dump you on what you looked at last.
Doesn’t happen with Small Dead Animals or Jo Nova (but I think Jo uses a different version).
I’ve met this before but not for a while.
“Is it just me wondering this, or does it seem like the entire world is going Bat Shit Crazy?”
Unfortunately, centralization always begets power. Power which is coveted by psychopaths. It attracts them like flies.
Wanna get rid of them? Remove the stink attracting them.
I’d be more inclined to think it F.Fox. They have added a few misfeatures, IMHO. One of them being that if you spin a mouse wheel too fast you change pages… I’ve found myself on unexpected pages and tabs from moving a regular motion too fast. (Click while mouse moving can pop tabs out into new windows…). Took me while to figure out why, and how to fix it, then stop it.
E.M.
Thanks. More bloody time finding things.
“Update on Tesla from The Conference Call Today”
https://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2019/01/update-on-tesla-from-the-conference-call-today.html
Plus
“An Update on Tesla in Advance of 4Q Earnings”
https://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2019/01/an-update-on-tesla-in-advance-of-4q-earnings.html
Yahoo Finance does that also. You can be reading an article, click somewhere on plain text and you get dumped back where you came from. I think it may be a way to increase clicks.
And on “features,” I’m almost afraid to highlight text in Windows. Half the time it rearranges a perfectly good word in to gibberish. Just give me a few often-used things like copy and paste ON A MENU fer chris sake.
BTW – I’m using FF also, but can click on plain text or margins here and nothing adverse happens. Are there some settings that change that behavior?
Here’s another troublefree FF user, so it’s gotta be in settings somewhere.
Just a minor follow-up on that Linux Kernel discussion. There’s a wiki page listing all the odd ways folks have glued the GNU Userland onto different kernels. There’s even a couple I’d not known about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_variants
I’d mentioned the HURD kernel, and the discussion was about moving away from the Linux kernel if ever it went whacko, so I talked up my favorite alternative the BSD kernel. I completely forgot about the OpenSolaris Kernel as a possibility, and ignored the Darwin Kernel (though it is a great one). Then what is “crazy time” is it looks like folks have used the Windows Kernel.
Not that I’d want to do that… but worth pointing out it exists.
So as much as I’d like the Linux Kernel to stay at the center of the GNU Userland / Linux Kernel ecosystem, it isn’t really essential. Whenever Stallman gets the HURD kernel going production quality, I want to give it a try on general principles. I almost swapped over to a BSD kernel build but some benchmarks showed it just a bit slower on (something? what was it…) that I cared about. I really liked Solaris, so an OpenSolaris would also be an interesting option.
Thus my lack of A Peptic Moment about Linus & SJWs having “a moment” and some kernel developers saying they will leave the project.
To the extent some really good “old hands” abandon the Linux Kernel and want to continue to “contribute” to Free Software, then the speed of development of HURD & BSD builds will accelerate.
Frankly, with SystemD I was about a week away from committing to BSD anyway, then settled in on Devuan (as it was a very smooth upgrade path they provided). I’ve been tempted to put at least one board on BSD “just on principle” (keeping skills up…) and may do it anyway.
My F.F. troubles only show up on my recent Linux systems, and only with the mouse. (On the trackpad systems & Android Tablet I can’t make a fast enough “motion” to make it happen. The Mac can’t install newer Fire Fox, nor can the old Windoz boxes.). Even then, it takes a fairly energetic “spin of the wheel” to trigger it. It only showed up once every few days at first. Then I realized it was on a “vigorous” wheel spin and that let me both a) stop or start it at will and; b) find the fix.
Lots of folks complaining about it, once you know what to look for:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=FireFox+mouse+wheel+change+pages&t=ffnt&ia=web
Then the other one that drives me nuts is “tab tearing”. I’ll go to click a tab and I’m not slow enough (click, full release, pause THEN move mouse) so it thinks I’m clicking while dragging and BAM! I’ve got a tab in a new window when I NEVER want that. Took a while to figure that one out, and that it is named “Tab Tearing” and THEN could find the fix.
They are making the interface and total actions available so large and complicated that all sorts of unexpected things can happen from minor variations in mouse handling and speed; and then it’s a PITA to find out how to shut them off.
I don’t know if they are your negative experience or not; but I do know Fire Fox has been adding crap that makes the browser less, erm, predictable….
Oh, and while not *Nix, the “Son Of Plan9” does run on all sorts of hardware including the R. Pi:
http://lynxline.com/projects/labs-portintg-inferno-os-to-raspberry-pi/
It has built in support for networked / distributed system builds, so you can have a stack of boards that all just look like one system space. Any device, any file, etc. all “available” to you.
It’s a very fast VM with JIT assembler, so supposedly pretty fast. (Though it can never be as fast as direct hardware…) and for that you get lots of portability (the whole OS is portable once the VM is ported).
Had I time to play with it I would, but I don’t 8-{
Since THE major thing that prevented adoption of Plan 9 (better in most ways on most things OS like distributed computing support and more) and Inferno (born of Plan 9 as a more portable VM base) was the existence of a “Good Enough” Linux; were Linux to ever start that long slow slide… it’s just waiting…
Open source, so anyone could make it happen…
Again: While I have great admiration for the folks who do kernel hacking- it isn’t magical and you do not need God-like skilz to do it. It’s a LOT of detail and drudge, but still at the end of the day it is just a program… There’s lots of kernels to choose from and lots of folks trying to make a better one.
European ANTIFA are now posting generic instructions on how to assassinate their opponents.
These guys really want to go there and are encouraging any crazy willing to do political violence.
I think Europe is going to have a very bad summer this year.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/02/there-will-be-blood-antifa-leftists-in-germany-publish-assassination-instructions-as-part-of-2019-election-strategy/
Suddenly my mouse wheel does not scroll a page as … – Mozilla
Yesterday I noticed that my mouse wheel no longer scrolls from anywhere on a web page. On some pages it works well but not on others. It’s almost as if it hits a blind spot and will no longer scroll.
I have noticed the same thing but have not figured out the actual trigger action which makes that behavior occur. When that happens I just kill the browser and restart and everything returns to normal ( I have browser set to clear cookies etc. on closing, so might be a cookie that is triggering the misbehavior)
Well they wanted to get back to nature, so I guess a return to rats, pestilence and plague is about what you would expect. One more step in that direction.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/02/typhus-epidemic-spreads-across-liberal-utopia-of-los-angeles-due-to-mountains-of-trash-growing-homeless-population/
Yr want ter get back ter Naychur,?
Say, yer welcome ter visit down under,
land of kangaroo and addjusted climate data,
someone’ll even offer yer a vegemite sanga.
So now is meteorite season? And I was worried about hurricanes down here at SRQ!
I am not Hannibal Smith, and this is not what he said exactly, but…..”I love it when I am proven right!”
I called Northam a racist bigot 6 years ago when he ran for Lt Gov. He was. He showed it then. Now I have been proven correct. He is truly the scum of the earth. If any of my children had ever been a patient of his, I would be looking into a lawsuit for malpractice right about now.
@NOYB – that is very similar to what I have said. You want to get money out of politics, get money out of government! Stop allowing the feds to suck up all the money and the lobbyists will desert like rats on a sinking ship.
PhilJ
This bloke?
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2019/02/01/this-is-awkward-4/
E.M. FYI
“DID MUHAMMED REALLY DICTATE THE KORAN?”
“Linguist and theologian Mark Durie has written a brilliant new book: The Qu’ran and its Biblical Reflexes. (I interviewed him here.)”
Link via
https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/did-muhammed-really-dictate-the-koran/news-story/7c7a776ac8b23392b7160ce9284aaa57
Hard for CNN to dodge this as fake news! Picture at
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2019/02/02/this-is-cnn-15/
Re the Lancet diet etc
“What’s Really Behind The Plant-Based Diet Agenda?”
On the same topic, deep fake videos are rapidly approaching life like quality where almost any person could be presented doing almost anything. Like photoshop images everything will have to be carefully vetted.
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/jennifer-buscemi-deepfake/
So, in 2014 under the Idiot Administration, new rules were issued for the amount of lead in copper pipe. If you have ever soldered copper pipe inside a vanity or kitchen cabinet – see what you think of the soldering technique required now. It is explained at the end of the article.
Click to access A4108-NoLeadSoldering.pdf
@Another Ian:
I thought it was well known that Mo. was an itinerant minister and spoke to crowds in sermons, but that only some (30 ish) years after his death, a different guy compiled bits of his sermons collected from various folks notes into the Koran.
Per vegetarian politics:
I have a few vegetarians in the family. I’ve cooked and eaten vegetarian. It can be done reasobably well. That said: IMHO in many cases it is done badly and leads to a kind of subtile mental disorder. Like many addictive things that are bad for you, the advocates do not realize that it is doing ill. One neighbor was prescribed “eat fish” by her M.D. to cure her dietary deficiency problems…
It is another of those things being politicized that needs removal from politics…
@Jim2:
The pdf didn’t load on my tablet, so I’ll read it later on the desktop…. but I thought lead solder was already banned in drinking water pipes… certainly in California. Some 15+ years ago I bought a bar of solder that was mostly tin and free of lead. The copper pipes looked like pure copper too. (But you can’t see trivial % lead in an alloy).
Similar story for a friend of mine, his wife was a confirmed vegetarian, after a couple years of marriage her doctor told her if she wanted to get pregnant she needed to start eating meat, eggs etc with high quality protein.
Just a short time after changing her diet she got pregnant with her first child. The body works better if given the building blocks it needs in adequate quantities.
On a similar note to the politics behind vegan eating:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-film-legomovie2-coffee/everything-is-awesome-as-lego-movie-2-star-pratt-turns-barista-idUSKCN1PQ4VA
EM @ https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2019/01/27/w-o-o-d-26-january-2019/#comment-107173
The lead rules weren’t for solder. Lead in solder was already banned. These rules deal with lead in the copper/brass pipe/fittings. As one who as a child painted with lead paint and washed up in leaded gasoline, I’m skeptical about problems with lead. Yes it’s toxic and yes there has to be a point where you get too much, but still. I’m betting we’ll never see a competent, honest study showing how much IQs were raised or behavioral problems avoided due to these particular rules.
Science bastardized IMO.
Yeah,, I painted a few houses with lead paint and washed up in leaded gasoline too. Doesn’t seem to have slowed down the thinking… also cast a lot of lead at one time. The trivial amount in brass is just a nutty thing to worry about. The brass doesn’t go anywhere or you would have faucets being replaced after only a couple of years. (Our shower faucets are at least 60 years old now…rubber gets replaced, but that’s about it.)
Paranoid laws, for sure.
@Another Ian – Yes.
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Yesterday, news outlet @thehill deleted a tweet to an article citing a recent study blaming climate change in 1610 on “European colonizers’s mass slaughter of Native Americans.”
Their new tweet replaces the phrasing “mass slaughter” with “death and disease.”
Very good speech by Lauren Southern at the EU.
That is a moving speech – Lauren is a treasure to the profession of journalism, I hope she reaches people with this video. She says what everyone else is afraid to say.
Looks like Brexit is spawning a Prepper movement in the UK
https://www.euronews.com/2019/02/03/some-u-k-turn-brexit-boxes-threat-chaotic-exit-e-n966166
OK the first half of the Superbowl is in the can. Is there anyone reading here that gives a rat’s patootie about the game?
I, along with about 94% of the viewing audience, am just in it for the commercials. Fun times. However, Mrs H.R. and I just looked at each other during most of the commercials to say, “Who the heck is that?!? I am sure they are supposed to be somebody, but I have no clue who it is.”
OTOH, I suppose my grandfather (born 1886) saw Elvis somewhere or other and wondered the same thing,so maybe it is just “life as usual.”
I’m not even going to bother with halftime. I’ll use halftime to catch up on my usual round of blogs. This is the first stop.
I’ve watched the first half, not exciting. I guess I’m rooting for the old man, but not jumping up and down.
Gotta say that Audi heimlich commercial was a hoot.
The superbowl was today? Sorry, I’m not into baseball…
;-)
Really, though, I’ve not watch any NFL for a couple of years now. Once they decide to be a sport and not a political movement I might come back. Or just keep watching hockey…
What do Canadians do when an accident in the snow closes the freeway? Take the Hockey gear out of the trunk and play some pickup ;-)
The Superbowl was the only game I watched and that only because they got the kneelers off the field and TV. I may consider watching some regular season games now.
Top 3 in no particular order:Audi, Gsme of Theones, 1st T-Mobile.
Game of Thrones – spell check fail.
GoT: https://youtu.be/KizhKgRnZiI
Audi: https://youtu.be/Xrgq2CIag6M
T-Mobile: https://youtu.be/gkY6A-Czfks
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-29/amidst-global-warming-hysteria-nasa-scientists-expect-global-cooling
Still don’t feel like I have any stake in this conflict – but it sure is entertaining :)
Disappointed in the commercials, and game tonight. Pretty much sucked, IMHO.
What was the over/under?
BREXIT chaotic exit?
Like the Millennium Bug
chaotic exit?…
‘In western Europe the European Commission issued a report warning that efforts to solve Y2K in many European Union member countries were insufficient, particularly in terms of the cross-border cooperation needed to be ready by 2000. The British government announced that its armed forces would be prepared in time and would provide assistance to local police if utilities, transportation systems, or emergency services failed.
Many other countries, notably Asian countries suffering at that time from an ongoing economic crisis as well as small or geographically isolated countries, were thought to be less well prepared. It was uncertain how this would affect the tightly integrated world economy and physical infrastructure. In mid-December 1998 the UN convened its first international conference on Y2K in an attempt to share information and crisis-management efforts and established the International Y2K Cooperation Center, based in Washington, D.C.’
@Beth – Bill Still recounts a couple of comments from a tradesman about the sad state of affairs… https://youtu.be/Xu4Ad_k2apY
Waves likely!
“Wow – Major Scoop By Gateway Pundit Shows Documentary Evidence of Andrew Weissman Giving “Head’s Up” to CNN for Roger Stone Arrest…”
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/02/04/wow-major-scoop-by-gateway-pundit-shows-documentary-evidence-of-andrew-weissman-giving-heads-up-to-cnn-for-roger-stone-arrest/
@Another Ian:
The only answer to an SJW Crusade, or any form of attempted intimidation into “compliance” with a Witch Hunt, or Public Pillory, is unpleasant, but essential:
1) NEVER EVER under ANY circumstances apologize or express in any way endorsement of the claims. In response to ‘Have you stopped beating your spouse?” the only correct answer is to step off of the “yes/no” axis and answer “Mu! The question is badly formed. You are attempting a trap question and I will not step in it.” Make it about the trap question. Ask why they are so manipulative and duplicitous.
2) NEVER EVER under ANY circumstances agree to a “deal”. That is their goal. To get folks to accept the lesser lie to avoid the big SJW Stick of Injustice. Then they lever the small lie to make the bigger lie. In this case, “crib death” on the small lie is the best outcome.
3) DO point out their motivations, their lies and deceptions, their “abuse for effect”. The best defense is a direct and in their face rebuke and counterpunch.
4) Stoically accept any abuse and “punishment” handed out by the political lackeys and turds in the punch bowl of politics. The path of the martyr is not an easy one, but embrace it. It is, after all, your only decent strategy. Point out the abuse. Point out the spin and the political motivations. Illuminate the political “tools” being used and the method. Do it politely if possible; with vigor if not. While accepting the abuse and punishment, do point out it is NOT justified in any way and that it IS an abuse of power.
5) Rats hate the light and noise. Make as much noise about the rats as possible. Make sure some bright sunlight falls on them, their handlers, their paymasters, their “organizations”, etc. etc. Counter attack is your friend and sunshine is your light saber…
6) Insist on The Truth, the WHOLE truth, and Nothing BUT The Truth. ANY non-truth is to be immediately stated as a flat out lie. Demand it be withdrawn. (They will not ever try to justify it, so why bother with that process?) State what is true. Denounce what is not. Do not accept the “mushy lie” by being polite about it.
7) When asked any question, state YOUR position. It doesn’t matter if the question isn’t about the issues, isn’t a direct attack, isn’t relevant. Editing can turn all sorts of things into damning crap. Keep your answers to 1 sentence if possible (so editing hard…) and crisp. If asked “Why did you stop beating your spouse?” do not answer that. Instead say “Why are you asking such a lie of a question?” or even just say “I love my wife and we have never had any issues.” One points out the lie, the other can not be turned against you. Both are “your position”.
FWIW, I’ve had “how to speak to the press” training as a Board Member of a 501c3 organization. A couple of days of it in an intensive setting. #1 takeaway? Have “Your Position” firmly in mind. No matter what is asked or said, address Your Position in your answer and keep it terse enough there is no opportunity for lying edits. “What do you think of Gay Marriage?” gets “I don’t think about it.” or “I have no opinion..” or even “Do you have a question relevant to our new building opening? We are here today to dedicate this building to our founder…” It is a question that does not deserve an answer, a trap question, and any answer must expect “editing for political spin effect”, so respond accordingly.
Notice that at no time did I use “reflective listening” and reflect the question. At no time did I use the words “gay” or “marriage” in my answers. An answer like “What do I think of Gay Marriage? Well, I’ve not thought about it much, but it isn’t traditional, I guess it might be something we should explore, but really it has traditionally only been between a man and a woman so that’s sort of where we ought to be starting from.” can be edited into “What do I think of Gay Marriage? Well, … really it has traditionally only been between a man and a woman… where we ought to be.”
Why are all your public authorities “mealy mouthed”? Why does Trump never say much specific but uses “a big number” and “really strong” and similar non-phrases? The Edit Board of their enemy.
What others see as “clueless meander” I see as “professional non-answer answer”. Learn it. Be it.
Judging from appearances, and it may be wrong, but it appears the Queen has shunned an opportunity to help her people and instead said, “Let them eat cake.” We know how that turned out the last time.
It seems to me if the Queen turns her back on British Citizens as well as centuries of history, including conquests, adventures, and innovations; why shouldn’t the British Citizens turn their backs on her? Toss her Royal Arse and the Arses of the Royal Family out on the street and turn the Palace into a first class tourist stop, B&B and all the fixin’s. At least that would make the Serfs a few quid rather than taking same from them.
Just the threat of taking away the Royal Gravy Train might be enough to cause Her Royal Majesty to change her Royal Tune to one more of your liking. But like any credible threat, you have to be prepared to follow through should it come to that.
Ahhh the wonderful ambiance of LA – – –
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/investigations/Typhus-Epidemic-Worsens-in-Los-Angeles-505166301.html
Some people are really witty lmao
https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/ana6bj/hahahaah_nailed_it/
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