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/2019/08/30/w-o-o-d-30-august-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/
I’m deprecating the use of “tips” pages. As the open discussion pages caught on, tips dropped off. For a month or two now I’ve not had a “tips” page put up, and nobody seems to have noticed. All the old ones remain for historical reference:
“Tips Pages”
What’s Going On?
Space: The Last, and Next Frontier
So China has a rover on the moon. India has almost got one and did get a very competent orbiter in place. Musk / SpaceX had the “hopper” to a very nicely controlled 140 meter or so “hop” from one pad to another, demonstrating all systems worked. (Though it did lose a gas bottle on landing that exits Stage Right in the videos). NASA? Running computer fantasies about trace gasses…
SpaceX is rapidly building the next test vehicle in Boca Chica. It is expected to go sub-orbital and perhaps to an orbit or two. These folks have a photo of the ever higher build. As the Hopper was nicknamed “water tower”, this one looks like “Grain Silo” is a fit. ;-)
SpaceX Starship Could Make First Sub-orbital Flight in September
Brian Wang | August 11, 2019
Another nice photo here:
https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-prototype-elon-musk-photos.html
SpaceX’s Mars-Colonizing ‘Starship’ Prototype Coming Together in Texas (Photos)
By Mike Wall August 08, 2019 Spaceflight
And we’re getting a Starship design update on Aug. 24.The first orbital prototype of SpaceX’s Mars-colonizing Starship vehicle should be ready to fly soon, company founder and CEO Elon Musk said.
SpaceX is building two orbital Starship forerunners — a bit of intracompany competition intended to improve the design of the final spacecraft. The prototype known as Mk1 is coming together at the company’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas, whereas Mk2 is being built on Florida’s Space Coast.
The Mk1 and Mk2 craft are different from the stripped-down prototype known as Starhopper, which recently made its first untethered hop at Boca Chica. Starhopper has just one Raptor engine and will stay firmly within Earth’s atmosphere throughout the testing phase. Mk1 and Mk2, on the other hand, will feature at least three Raptors and are designed to reach orbit, Musk has said.
So I’m watching and waiting. It would be nice to be a space faring nation again. FWIW, Branson is about ready too, but that’s only “hop and pop” barely over the line to space, then fall back.
https://www.virgingalactic.com/news/
Virgin Galactic Opens the Doors to the ‘Gateway to Space’
Read moreVMS Eve arrives home to Spaceport America – a view from Chief Pilot Dave Mackay
Read more
So they have opened the Spaceport, positioned the equipment, have a waiting list of commercial customers, and launches start in…. someday.
And Blue Origin? Started way early. Still playing in the desert. Nice demonstrators, but actual flights with people? It’s a someday thing too…
Saudi War Escalates
(h/t Larry Ledwick here and links following it)
So a drone attack (reportedly with 10 drones) has set fire to a major Saudi oil refinery. I speculate that these are smaller “man launched” drones, not big ones like the USA uses. You would only need one 100 kilo bomb from a big drone. I’d guess these are either commercial units with modifications to carry a hand grenade sized incendiary, or a new product from Iran.
Israel, take notice… You will need to expand Iron Dome to include low, slow, and small devices.
I’d further speculate that these are most likely not human guided. From the ground, it would be hard to do that over much distance (and hard to get close to the facility anyway). I’d expect these to be one of two classes. High and far away with “smart bombs” that can angle glide to target, or more likely, small and GPS guided to coordinates. IF the latter, then we’ve entered the era of robotic warfare attacks.
Yes, lots of folks have already used drones. Yes, we have GPS guided cruise missiles that are also quasi-robots. But so far those have been limited to a few major super-powers and under tight human control (often with real time video feeds and abort facilities). If my speculation is right, and these are small autonomous devices, they are independent flying robot attack vehicles. Yes, particularly stupid ones, but things start somewhere.
With groups like Houthi Rebels and minor state actors like Iran making these, it’s now open to all players. Since this attack succeeded, everyone with a grudge will be looking to do it too. Anyone who thinks “GPS Geo-fencing” will stop it is mistaken. There’s now at least 4 GPS or GPS like systems on orbit and programming drones (any programming really) is a high school level technical task.
So watch the fires and the response with interest, but pay attention to what this means for the geo-politics of warfare.
Hurricane Season
Dorian destroyed the Bahamas, but mostly gave the USA a pass. Death toll in the thousands and rising. We are unlikely to ever know the actual total (who will ask about missing relatives when the entire village is gone?) Global Warming Hysteria continues. I wonder what they will do when a “big one” hits Rhode Island or NYC as they have done in the past? The devastation is entirely normal and to be expected on a low island in the middle of hurricane country. Build your home of concrete and steel or expect it to eventually be “Gone With the Wind”.
The season isn’t over yet, so keep an eye out…
Deep State Skate
Or maybe not? Looks like McCabe is waiting to be papered. Hey, CNN, hire Felons much?
Hopefully the start of something big…
Ebola Watch
Still expanding (but out of the news now as The Media would rather indulge TDS Snowflakes than real issues):
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/ebola/drc-2019/
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is grappling with the world’s second largest Ebola epidemic on record, with more than 2000 lives lost and 3000 confirmed infections since the outbreak was declared on 1 August 2018. The outbreak is occurring in North Kivu, South Kivu and Ituri provinces. Neighbouring countries are taking steps to mitigate the risk of spread. The World Health Organization has more than 650 staff on the ground supporting the Government-led response together with national and international partners.
Latest numbers as of 11 September 2019
3099 Total cases
2074 Total deaths
938 Survivors
So about 1/3 survive, even with the newest treatments (that quasi work).
But do remember that some significant percentage of survivors become carriers for an extended period. So with over 2000 dead and over 3000 total cases, let’s all fixate on a dozen or so shooting victims from a nut-bar somewhere…
https://www.who.int/csr/don/12-september-2019-ebola-drc/en/
Gives a sliver of hope:
Ebola virus disease – Democratic Republic of the Congo
Disease outbreak news: Update
12 September 2019Ebola virus disease (EVD) transmission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo continued to ease this past week, with 40 new confirmed cases reported in North Kivu and Ituri provinces; this is the lowest weekly incidence since March 2019. While these signs are promising, it remains too soon to tell if this trend will persist. Emerging hotspots continue to pose challenges in terms of accessibility, insecurity, and violence. Surveillance indicators highlight that public health risks of further spread remain very high.
During the past 21 days (from 21 August through 10 September 2019), a total of 157 confirmed cases were reported form 15 health zones (Table 1, Figure 2), with the majority coming from the health zones of Kalunguta (19%, n=30), Beni (18%, n=28), Mambasa (16%, n=25), and Mandima (13%, n=20). Alimbongo, Oicha, and Pinga health zones recently passed 21 days without a new confirmed case of EVD.
As of 10 September, a total of 3091 EVD cases were reported, including 2980 confirmed and 111 probable cases, of which 2074 cases died (overall case fatality ratio 67%). Of the total confirmed and probable cases, 56% (1737) were female, 29% (886) were children aged less than 18 years, and 5% (157) were health workers.
So we may have battled our way all the way back to the level of 6 months ago…
With any luck, they will eventually have enough vaccinations done that the level of potential hosts becomes too low to support the continued spread. OTOH, IIRC, the efficacy of the vaccine is about 60%, so even 100% vaccination of the population will not be enough in population dense urban areas.
So we’re not out of the woods yet, but have a little bit of hope.
Socialist Policies On Parade
Anyone remember Venezuela? Looks like part of the reason Bolton was booted was that he was saying that Maduro was going to be pitched out, and he wasn’t. So “watch this space” as the USA shifts policies / actions and as Venezuela continues to decay into complete ruin. My guess is they will reach the point where the neighbor States deal with it, as the total population of Venezuelans outside the country eventually exceeds those inside. But that’s only a guess.
Oh, and note that since the Socialist Argentine Government blew off $100 Billion of debt, Argentina has had trouble getting more loans. Makes it hard to pay for all the “perks” established in the Socialist regime as your economy was shrunk… Now they have entered a bit of a food crisis as the IMF whacks them over recent debt. Taking the Heroin of Socialism sure feels good… right up until you need to do the painful withdrawal as you run out of Other People’s Money to spend…
‘The situation is dire’: Argentines protest over food crisis
Protesters gathered in Buenos Aires, demanding government take more actions to aid poor.
13 Sept 2019‘The situation is dire’: Argentines protest over food crisis
Thousands of Argentinian protesters have taken to the streets of the capital, Buenos Aires, demanding the government take action to address the deepening economic crisis.
Protesters gathered outside the National Congress in Buenos Aires on Thursday, for a second day, when the lower chamber met to pass a food emergency plan amid reports of rising hunger.
The bill was unanimously approved by legislators, but it is now awaiting approval by the Senate. If approved, the law would provide a 50 percent increase in food assistance programmes to the most needed ones.
The bill was first passed in 2002, when the economic collapse left one in five people unemployed, and now legislators are seeking to extend it once more.
So misery in a land that has more agricultural potential than most in the world. Once known for exporting huge amounts of beef and wheat. Takes a lot to destroy that kind of productivity, but one turn on the Socialist Wheel did it. Now trying to dig out is nearly impossible and very painful.
Though perhaps some of it is Street Theatre from the Left (as they just love to do):
‘Manipulate the agenda’
However, some members of the government still remain sceptical and believe these demonstrations are organised by the opposition to manipulate the agenda ahead of the presidential elections slated to be held on October 27.
“We have lifted taxes from basic food items, increased a minimum wage, increased cash handouts and lots of other things to help those who need it,” Jorge Ricardo Enriquez, an Argentinian Congressman, told Al Jazeera.
“I don’t understand why people continue to protest because we are giving them what they need.”
Yeah, that’s how to fix things, have lots of Government Handouts and Intervention… Such a “conservative” approach. /sarc;
Crisis amid electoral times
Argentina has been in a recession since last year, and has one of the highest inflation rates in the world, running at more than 54 percent. Unemployment has soared and the economy shrunk by 5.8 in the first quarter.
According to data from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization the country is also among the Latin American countries where hunger increased most during 2018.
Last year, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) also agreed to increase the size of its bailout to $57bn, while Argentina’s government agreed to cut pension benefits and public utility subsidies. The measures crippled the poorest sections of society.President Mauricio Macri’s popularity has fallen and in August his government suffered a crushing defeat in the presidential primaries.
Following that the peso lost 26 percent of its value against the dollar, the country’s risk index soared, and bond prices sank to record lows.
The government quickly imposed foreign-exchange controls and also requested a rescheduling of its debts.
“Now that you have capital controls there is some degree of tense calm to the markets,” Alan Cibils, an Argentinian economist, told Al Jazeera.
Capital controls. Government handouts. Subsidy. Big government pensions. Yeah, like that’s gonna work.
So the IMF says “Stop with some of the big government handouts and we will loan you some $Billions” and that’s going to hurt the “poorest sections of the economy”?
Somehow I doubt it.
So this is where Big Government with fat government pensions and high taxes and debt leads. Call it whatever you want, Socialism, Socialism Sequelae, Conservative In Name Only, whatever. I tend to make the distinction as “Central Authority” vs “Libertarian Free Markets”. IFF you just leave the people and the economy alone, it will tend to self repair. The higher the “dick with factor” from Central Authority of any sort, the greater the destruction, market failure, and overall misery produced. Yet all the major monetary authorities all push for Central Authority Actions and all encourage debt and borrowing.
Cui bono?
What was once a bigger and more vibrant economy than many European nations, is now a shambles.
Debt and Central Authority? Just say NO!
FUD Watch
“Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt”.
Mostly now circling around Brexit. Though we have seen more insanity from the Climate Pants-Wetters. Any weather event, natural disaster, or even human caused problem (like building shanty cities on a tropical island in the path of normal natural hurricanes) being played up as FUD “give us all your money”…
I’ve not kept count this last couple of weeks as I was sucked into the Brexit Obstruction Parliament Follies…
Brexit
Parliament is out of session until their next chance to cause mayhem in middle October. I expect this section to be quiet for a while. Boris is off to the EU to see what kind of “deal” they will offer, now that they know they can just say “T. May’s deal is it.” and either put Britain in chains forever if it is excepted, or push the FUD button big time if it isn’t and likely force an extension until they can get BREXIT stopped.
At this point, the EU must believe they have zero reason to negotiate as they will believe a “No Deal” Brexit is dead. One can only hope the assertion that the “commenced” prior law is overriding as it is EU law now too.
So at this point it looks to me like it is all down to Boris and The Courts. HM Elizabeth having basically shown no interest in preserving her kingdom or peoples. Perhaps Boris can find some little country that’s really pissed at British actions in the EU (say all those folks looking at their “new” EU Parliament seats being handed over to Brexit Party folks in droves…) to refuse an extension…
Speaking Of The Democrat Primary Race
CNN had a several hour snooze fest of a “debate” on all things Green Shackles, with the Dems falling all over each other to be the more radical. Happy to ban anything that moves, makes product, keeps us warm and fed, or generally works well.
I, like a huge majority of the nation, didn’t watch, but did read some summaries. Not one of those folks has a clue how much damage they are advocating and how horrible their polices would be for the economy. Nor do they seem to recognize that Trump has, in fact, delivered stellar economic performance. They are off in some fantasy land while Trump is working in the real world, and “winning big league”.
The Party also continues their insider manipulative games to keep Tulsi Gabbard out (one of the few with a working brain) and promote Biden.
All while Biden manifests lots of symptoms of dementia. Yes, as his wife’s “endorsement” said, Joe’s a nice guy. I just wish he was oriented to person, place, and time. (He has made “gaffs” where he didn’t know where he was, had time off by decades on where he was, and got it wrong about people…)
Hillary may have been a lying manipulative shrew, but at least she was functional. Biden looks to me like he’s maybe able to read a teleprompter most of the time, but beyond that, not so much. I don’t want that finger on the nuclear football…
Then that jedi Master Beto, (say it really fast ;-) who swore to Texans that he was for them keeping their AR-15s is now strongly advocating for flat out confiscation. Um, no. 2nd Amendment and all that. Note it specifically says that we need an armed populace as militia and that means “weapons of war”. It is NOT about murdering Bambi. The Dimocrats just made sure a huge swath of voters will reject them immediately.
IIRC, there’s about 20,000 heroin related deaths / year in the USA. That’s about 400 / week. 60 / day. How about looking at that as the bigger “health crisis” and taking action to block smuggling at the border / whack China for pushing fentanyl? What, oh, Trump is already doing that you say?…
So you want to drum up a “crisis” to “never let go to waste” to remove my RIGHTS under the Constitution, rather than actually take action against a much bigger real health crisis…. OK… got it.
Every time I look at the DNC, and what the party does, and the issues pushed by The Left, I find lies, manipulation, emotional sop, and hiding from facts and truth. This does not endear you to me.
(Do note, I’m a center of the bird type, neither right wing nor left. I know that from the Dim perspective I look like I’m “radical right”, but I’m not. I’m Libertarian who thinks things like criminalizing drug use is stupid as it is a medical issue, and thinks you ought to be able to grow any plant you like. I also think the USA needs to stop policing the world.)
I’m repeating my closing paragraph from the last posting:
You Go Dems! Keep on building trust with the American People by publicly manipulating systems, shooting down the candidates that have the most appeal to We The People, and promoting your internally selected Best Suck Up Loyalists. After all, you are the George Soros Bought And Paid For Shills… (by your actions it looks that way to me).
Musings from the Chiefio 
First Robert Francis came for your AR-15. Stupid move, he should have come for your drone!
The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Italy, or even Greece could nuke this extension. It seems like a multiple of ones on this list would have good reason to do it.
It’s interesting that a guy supposedly representing the state where Janet Reno’s BATF arson-ated a fringe religious cult is all hot (so to speak) to “take those guns”.
You know, if you had some number of drones all tuned to the same frequencies, you could set them down in a grid pattern, all oriented the same way. Then, one person could fly the group as a unit over a group of the bad guys.
@Jim2:
We already have commercial drones that fly computer directed patterns. Remember the Super Bowl Pepsi emblem in the sky? Drones….
All you really need is that level of commercial drone (that can light a light on demand) and some programming time. Swap out the light for a bucket of ignition goo (magnesium, road flares, thermite bomblettes, whatever). Now you just say “go” and they will automagically fly to their assigned grid coordinates and all ignite / drop at the very same moment.
I’m pretty sure I could make one in one weekend from the commercial product.
Note: Current product includes GPS geofencing around airports. The drone will refuse to enter the restricted air space. It might take a few days longer if you want to crack the geofencing barriers. There’s probably a “How To” on that…
(a quick search later…)
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+to+defeat+drone+geofencing&t=ffnt&ia=web
Soo… looks like that’s just a quicky too…
So you want a swarm of incendiary drones that fly in formation to pre-programmed spots, ignite and drop? No Problem. Relatively cheap, technically achievable. AND, you can even have them make your “Logo” in lights just before they “assume positions” and ignite! A 2-Fer!
If entry to geofenced areas is desired, add a day to the schedule… and hire a high school level geek who likes toys…
Nice video of SpaceX Starship construction. Also has a reprise of the Hopper flight and some other history. Elon Musk is saying October launch. Seems a bit aggressive to me, but who knows. He does seem to know how to do rapid prototyping and all it needs to do is be a taller version of Hopper…
Elon should be on the first peopled flight of anything he makes. Eat your own dog food Elon.
“The Competence Vote…”
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/09/14/the-competence-vote/#more-170861
“If I hear people saying something must be done I know that they contemplate something damned silly”. Lord Melbourne
(Via J.C. Masterman “The Double-Cross System”)
CAGW and a few other things come to mind
for those with a suspicious mind.
Regarding the drone attack, ISIS has been using consumer drones to drop small ordinance (mortal shells and 40mm grenades for a few years now – they also exported the information on how to 3D print fin packages for 40mm grenades etc. It is now a technology that is in the wild and will only get more prevalent and effective with time.
Personally I think the next step is drone fighters to take the fight to the opposition drones – possibly with 20 ga or 12 ga shot guns or ramming. Conventional small arms fire is very difficult to get on target of a small rapidly darting consumer drone.
https://www.droneshield.com/isis-dropping-grenades-from-drones
https://www.droneshield.com/isis-reportedly-using-weaponized-drones-in-iraq-and-syria
https://www.droneshield.com/isis-use-drone-to-drop-grenade-on-tank-1
https://www.droneshield.com/witnessing-an-isis-drone-attack-the-new-york-times
“Oh, and note that since the Socialist Argentine Government blew off $100 Billion of debt, Argentina has had trouble getting more loans. Makes it hard to pay for all the “perks” established in the Socialist regime as your economy was shrunk… Now they have entered a bit of a food crisis as the IMF whacks them over recent debt. Taking the Heroin of Socialism sure feels good… right up until you need to do the painful withdrawal as you run out of Other People’s Money to spend…”
And you aren’t worried about our own trillion dollar deficit during a period when the economy seems to be doing well?
Hope there is a special place in hell for both parties given what they did here……
[Reply: Failure to mention every possible point anyone might want made does not constitute “lack of worry”. I think our deficit spending will destroy the nation. Eventually. But space and attention spans mean I can not mention everything I care about in one small comment. So a comment about Argentina is kept focused on… Argentina. -E.M.Smith]
EM One of the lesser known features of Argentina is that they effectively have an “Open Borders” policy. Anyone from Latin America can enter Argentina without a visa and stay indefinitely with access to free health care and free education and that includes university as well !
So the poor of many South American countries have migrated there in their millions from Bolivia, Peru, El Salvador, Venezuela etc. Estimated migrant population in 2015 : 3-4 millions..And lots of them wind up as beggars on the streets of B A’s.
Another aspect of dopey ‘progressive’ ideology government. I guess you already know that from the past decade or so of the same policy in the USA. The USA is wealthy enough to manage it for awhile. But Argentina does not have that sort of wealth at all.
“IIRC, there’s about 20,000 heroin related deaths / year in the USA. That’s about 400 / week. 60 / day. How about looking at that as the bigger “health crisis” and taking action to block smuggling at the border / whack China for pushing fentanyl? What, oh, Trump is already doing that you say?… ”
I’ve thought about this a lot. First with incredulous awe that so many conservatives were OK with locking up people for committing slow suicide. Then for allowing these suicidal folks to contaminate insurance risk pools.
If you’re an addict, I propose “rest of us” just let you die. Free will, with none of the dogooder do-overs. Your choice. Your consequences. And no penalties for employer discrimination either…
And if you become too great a public health nuisance – society has a right to force you to move. Wherever we see fit.
We’ve just lost 40 yrs of solid progress on tobacco thanks to this vaping craze, and most of the other “drug treatments” have proven just as effective. It’s time to face facts as we know them instead of this endless wishful thinking which passes for deliberation these days.
Regarding the Democrat marathon race? (more like the marathon hurdles). Could it be that the “Central Committee” of the Party is allowing all the ‘whackos’ (translate that into american) all the free publicity they crave in order for them to be completely unelectable, then “good old uncle Joe” becomes the candidate to sighs of relief from what remains of the MSM. Tulsi is being kept out as too much of a threat to Joe, but if Joe should become ineligible** then she could be the surprise reserve.
** I am not sure what that would require, brain death doesn’t seem to be a handicap; being embalmed? Being run over by a self driving Tesla? Perhaps saying something nice about the President?
Insanity – the act of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
The left is that definition of insanity. Cuba, Venezuela, Argentina. Just 3 of the recent ones. There are many others such as Cambodia, USSR, etc.
But what do you expect from a party that is allowing the children to lead them?,
Fake news alternative description – “drip feed”
@philjourdan:
Ever think maybe “This behaviour is by design”? Who benefits as a country goes into deep debt and has asset stripping move ownership to the lenders?…. WHY does George Soros promote socialist policies and internal conflicts? Think having made his first $Billion off of the Bank Of England that might be an inducement to create more of the policies that made him incredibly rich? What happens if he isn’t the only one?…
@Graham No.3:
Interesting idea… Like when they tried to make Hillary the Appointed One by having her run ONLY against an unknown junior black guy with radical ideas… and when that didn’t work, used a completely unattractive useless sop as her “competition” for the nomination…
To the extent that’s true, the question becomes “Who is the appointed one?”. I could see Biden as he’s being pushed as “most reasonable” and “in the lead” by the YSM. (Yellow Stream Media) but it looks like they may have decided they needed to open the gates to the folks who had been held back for 14 years of Hillary / Barak / Hillary dynasties… So they got the “cast of dozens” running.
The real “tell” for me is Tulsi Gabbard. She put a hard dent in Kamala in that first debate and was immediately shoved to the sidelines. Even when her poll numbers showed she qualified for further debate time, the DNC kept her out of sight. So we know Kamala is on the connected short list.
With Tusi out of the game, when I look at the rest, it seems like there are 2 driving forces. The first is “Party Loyalists” getting “Their Turn”. Biden. Kamala. Elizabeth Wo-Wo Warren. The other is trying to capture the “Bernie Craze” voters. Bernie & The Other Socialists. I could also see some kind of “screen testing” potential younger voter appeal V.P. possibles (so the Beto type…)
But the end result of that is you have a 3 way split of “theme” into:
1) The Old & Tired, uninspiring.
2) The Crazy Uncle Bernie Socialists.
3) The Crazy Woke SJW useful idiots.
Not one bit of it is “The appealing competent manager”… and all of it comes off kind of crazy on average, especially as the Biden Cohort can’t match the energy of either one of the other two and certainly can’t get both of them back in line.
So this mob of muppets has run Very Hard Left and it’s too late to pull them back.
Had the DNC let them dribble out on stage over the last 14 to 20 years, they would have been slapped down one at a time and the seasoned candidates that have broader appeal (and some experience…) would be on stage now. Instead, they kept everything bottled up for Hillary, and now with the cork out of the bottle it’s spewing everywhere in a mess.
So they take the ONE candidate who’s centered and not frothing, thinks clearly and calmly under pressure, and makes effective cogent points; and sideline her… TSIBs. (The Stupid, It Burns). All so Kamala gets her “shot” unimpeded by effective competition.
You need the wolves to thin the herd or you end up with a herd of old decrepit grazers and some young defectives toddling along behind them…
But I guess it makes sense. The Democrats are all over “managed direction by authority” (the Central Authority approach) while the Republicans were headed that way, but still had enough “competition to improve the herd”; so we got the Alpha Male Lion. They end up with the weak herd of dumb grazers for candidates. Trump gets a big lunch…
I just still can’t quite accept that the DNC were so stupid as to sideline Tulsi just to protect Kamala from effective heel nipping. Now Kamala is headed for the dustbin AND they have lost their most effective candidate who won’t turn to jelly, or look like a useful idiot, in front of Trump.
Like Bill Maher said “All the Democrats have to do to win is to come off less crazy than Trump, and, of course, they’re blowing it. ” (Source: https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2019/08/02/maher-democrats-just-have-to-be-less-crazy-than-trump-and-theyre-blowing-it/ and several others including the video where I first saw it).
Had Tulsi stayed in the game, she would have kept the “kiddies” in check with pointed barbs, then the Democratic Field would not look so much like an out of control brats playground (Beto,…) with emotionally disturbed adults (Sanders, Warren) watching things go open loop while the Principle is asleep in his office ’cause he forgot how to make coffee… (Biden).
Sky UK is saying that 2 Saudi refineries were hit.
France 24 is saying Saudi has said a “temporary” shutdown of oil production is happening.
This is huge. Especially for Europe & Asia.
Trump has said the USA is committed to stability in the oil market during this event, and I take that to mean “exports from the USA are open to those in need”. Perhaps even some releases from the Strategic Oil Reserve.
One hopes that mass of refineries along the Gulf Coast have seen what happened and are making their own preparations.
Sky UK said they were “small drones” and showed images of Palastinians with man-portable converted commercial drones as examples. It would be interesting to know the source of the intel on size…
Bottom Line though is with Saudi facilities shut down for an unknown period of time, Saudi’s P.O.’d, Europe thirsting for oil “soon”: My conclusion is that if the oil outage is very long, you are going to see the Houthi rebel areas just wiped out. Who is going to come to their defense? A cold and immobile Europe? An Asia with manufacturing on hold? All they have is Iran and maybe Syria. I could see a possible in Russia, IFF they want to make that much of a fuss about it (but I doubt they will).
When it was the one or two odd missiles from Yemen to Saudi, the irritation was small enough it was just a modest military effort against them. Threaten the stability of the House Of Saud, the nation of Saudi Arabia, cost them $Millions / day, P.O./threaten Europe and Asian oil customers… well, in that context “dustbin of history” has an attractive ring to it… So my expectation is that right now Saudi Military are being told to “Fix this NOW. No limits.” and Saudi have a LOT of very nice aircraft, tanks, etc.
The only way this doesn’t happen, IMHO, is if the oil shutdown is more like 2 or 3 days rather than weeks to months. IF there is a “double tap”: follow on hit to Saudi, it’s not going to matter how long the outage.
I would guess the Kamala had the blessing/ backing of the Soros machine, a part of the Lenin /Communist drive to control the security forces to inflict their brand of socialism on the population from the top down. Tulsi Gabbard would be a real threat to that outcome. Like A.O.C., Kamala has not real political power or money on her own and we know Kamala will do ANYTHING to succeed…pg
When you consider the bombing effort needed in WW2 (Look at Op Tidal Wave and its results) it is difficult to see production being slowed for long unless it is intentional, not for what a few drones could do.
@Rhoda Klapp:
The question is what did the resulting fire do… The drone might only be a lb of burning stuff, but if it set off a million gallons of fuel…
Essentially it is likely to come down to how well the Saudi oil depots were built to withstand accidental fires. (Well isolated tanks, spill basins. Berms around them. etc.)
At first I figured, like you suggest, “no worries” oil refineries are made to withstand a fire.
Then I saw the file with huge fires even from a distance and Saudi announcing a shutdown on oil exports. At that point it’s a bit of a WT?… They ought to be able to ship lots of crude oil without refineries… So “something is missing”…
@P.G.:
Yeah. It is very clear that the DNC is owned by some moneybags (and Soros is a known big funder of them and their projects, or rather his projects that he pays them to push…).
I get the feeling the DNC is just a control engine. IF you do whatever it tells you and stick it out for “your turn” you get the advancement and the nod. If not, drop kicked out the door. Not the place for free thinking pro-American folks…. At least, that’s what their actions look like.
Republicans were somewhat that way, but not (yet) fully controlled. Then along came Trump and broke it loose form the agents of control. (Or maybe that ought to be, best Agent Smart voice: The Agents, of Control ;-) For a while the Globalists had a hold on both parties (Bushs vs Clintons) but that blew up on them.
Oh Well. As one wag put it (Timecast?) “The Democrats have become a parody of themselves.”
More Chinese shenanigans in the international routing of internet.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/11/strange-snafu-misroutes-domestic-us-internet-traffic-through-china-telecom/
The initial production cut backs of the 1973 oil embargo was 5% drop in production with gradual reduction of production to eventually reach a 25% drop in Mideastern oil production. So this attack on Saudi Oil production is going to have an impact, although US Fracking may actually benefit us as our surplus as the largest oil producer in the world puts us in a very different position than in 1973 when we could not produce enough to back fill the short fall, if global oil export prices go up due to the shortage as we fill part of that loss to Europe etc. we would benefit from the better pricing and higher gross sales of oil exports.
Kelly Ann Conway says the Trump Admin if necessary will tap our strategic oil reserve to stabilize global oil supplies after the Iranian attack on Saudi Oil processing facilities.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/energy/us-strategic-petroleum-reserve-saudi-oil-attack-kellyanne-conway
How long for Saudi Arabia to train a cadre of hawks trained to take down small consumer drones?
info on how to detect and disable COTS drones:
@EM – I was talking about the true believers, not the carpet bagging opportunists like the Clintons and Soros.
“World economics explained”
https://www.boredpanda.com/corporation-economies-explained-cows-ecownomics/?utm_source=duckduckgo&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=organic
Interesting observation about the Saudi Oil Refinery attack
For anyone who has been following this, Tommy Robinson has been released from Jail in Britain.
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/09/13/anti-child-rape-gang-activist-and-street-organiser-tommy-robinson-released-from-prison/
https://archive.is/VJcq2
US Military Hasn’t Fought a Real Foe in Decades – Russia, China, Iran Could Deliver a Nasty Surprise
There have been worrying trends in the military for some time….Social Justice poop is everywhere….The military has turned itself into a federal jobs program.
Pointman update on Brexit
“US growth recession forecast ”
https://www.queenslandcountrylife.com.au/story/6387292/us-growth-recession-forecast/?cs=4699
Al Jazeera and France24 both said the loss of oil was 5.7 mbbl/day or about 1/2 of Saudi output. That’s not too hard to cover.
Saudi has said they will do some shipments from oil storage so I take that to mean there’s a lot in storage that was not hit (perhaps those rumored fleets of parked tankers…)
Donald Trump (as noted above, but also reported on A.J. and F24) has said the US Strategic Oil Reserve is available “if needed” to stabilize things.
Trump is also reported to have said the USA is “Locked and Loaded” to aid Saudi Arabia if that becomes necessary. (Given the size of the Saudi military and their equipment, I don’t expect that to be necessary… but I’d be surprised if the USA were not providing a hoard of technical intelligence from satellite photos to troop and base locations and communications taps. I’d also be surprised if we ddn’t have high resolution photos of the area during the event or at worst, starting a couple of minutes after the first Aw Shit moment as a satellite was pivoted… so someone celebrating in a field and exfiltrating would show…)
A Saudi rep stated the outage would be for “weeks not days”… so this is going to show in prices.
There was some reporting that the USA was saying it was an Iranian operation. I’d not put it past them to ask the Houthi to take “responsibility” (raising their street cred while confusing the real source) while Iran used some fairly sophisticated gear and didn’t leave many fingerprints.
It will likely be weeks before we know who really did it, if ever, as countries also don’t mind hiding when they know who really did things so their own sneak-revenge is masked…
I would expect the USA to have a larger fleet presence in The Gulf and be issued orders to “defend yourself and our friends” (unlike the prior POTUS and his surrender and be meek orders…) so I’d not be surprised if we shoot up some Iranian gear.
I can’t see the Saudi’s letting this one slide. IF they don’t know for sure who did it: the reasonable thing from their POV is to wallop both the Houthi and Iran. Especially if they know they have USA “Top Cover” for air superiority and intel sources… and “emergency resupply” for any orders of a lot of nice fighters, bombers, bombs, etc. etc. They simply MUST show that when you attack the oil facilities, it’s a losing move on your part… so something must happen. “What” is a bit unclear though…
@PhilJourdan:
Oh, I know you were. I was just tossing out the other half of the problem ( 1% of the people…) for consideration too.
@Another Ian:
Yeah, the Democrats are trying to talk us into a recession for the election. While it is true that since we are at full employment, it’s hard to keep growing fast, they don’t think we can just hold at full steam. I think Trump is going to show them otherwise. I don’t see any of the normal precursors of a recession. Add in all the people with jingle in their pocket who haven’t had any in years, well, there’s a lot of new “demand pull” out there.
@Larry L:
I’ve tried to follow his story, but just not enough time. I know there was some kind of political rail road going on, and I’ve seen video of him refusing to knuckle under, so kinda get it… but not followed the specific in/out/in/out cycles… Nice to know he’s out again.
Per the China Games:
I’m getting seriously interested in going with a VPN for just that reason. OTOH, all they will find is my blog postings and TV feed, so there’s that… Any financial stuff is encrypted already anyway and kept minimal. But yeah, it’s a pretty big chunk of abuse going on…
@YMMV:
Personally, I’d go with about a 10kW to 100kW radar set with the frequency chosen to best fry their electronics and heat their structures to melting…
A Friend, decades back, designed some USA Radars. They would wait until the Russian “Trawler” was looking their way (figured out by passive reflection analysis) and then stuff 10 kW down their antenna… Said you could see smoke coming from the radio house before it would turn back toward Russia ;-)
Think about what happens with aluminum foil in your 1 kW microwave. Now make that 100 times as strong… Track it with a kw or so modest power, and once the GO! is given send about a 100 kW 1 second pulse… Crispy Copters ;-)
Just make it a policy to put one of these on each side of any important assets. Could likely even make it computerized and fully automated so only need one person with a rifle and grenade to “run” it… As the drones pile up in a nice 1/2 km ring outside the asset, folks will learn to read those advisories about restricted flight areas…
Though I do have to say there something attractive about a 50 kW industrial laser and just slicing them in half… If you can cut 1/2 inch steel, you can cut a drone further away… From the wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_cutting
Cutting rates using a CO2 laser [cm/second] Workpiece material Material thickness 0.51 mm 1.0 mm 2.0 mm 3.2 mm 6.4 mm 13 mm Stainless steel 42.3 23.28 13.76 7.83 3.4 0.76 Aluminium 33.87 14.82 6.35 4.23 1.69 1.27So “only” 3/4 cm / second on 1/2 inch stainless steel…. but for 1 mm aluminum, you get 15 cm / second. I figure that’s about 1 drone / second…
Yeah, I know, weapons lasers take more power for distance and a different focusing / directing and and… but we also have them and they work well from the ground…
For industrial cutting, 1 mm aluminum takes a 1 kW laser. So, OK, make it 10 kW or even 50 kW for one second. Just not much of a problem… 10 kW sec x 10 targets is 100 kW-seconds. That’s 0.02 kW-hours. As I can get 1.5 kW / hour from a standard wall socket, I just need nice capacitor bank…
The problem with lasers as weapons is trying to cut big thick hard fast moving vehicles. Make it a small, fragile, slow vehicle with thin parts of plastic and aluminum, no problem even in a small package. Besides, think how spectacular it would be to see them “light up” and plunge in flames ;-)
Admittedly, the microwave approach is easier and likely have better range and great foul weather function… but the laser would be more fun.
Maybe make it a platform with both… Laser if you want it and weather is good (maybe even for closer in use) with Microwaves for further out and bad weather…
RSBN is reporting that youtube has cut off their ability to live stream President Trump Rallies via youtube.
I’m surprised it took YouTube this long… The good news is you can get it straight from their site and they use BitChute too.
“Live: President Donald Trump Holds Rally in Rio Rancho, NM 9-16-19”
BitChute has a relatively primative search function and don’t seem to have channels (or at least, no easy way to find them).
Guess maybe I’ll need to start monitoring RSBN and putting up live links when they are at rallies…
It is just amazing to me that while under investigation for abuse, they do this to a set of folks that Trump knows about and likes…
Pointman: “each of which votes in an MP whose job is to represent the broad will of the people who voted for them”
When was the last time that happened? Those politicians always seem to vote according to their own interests, if they are allowed even that and not forced to vote to the leader’s wishes.
That’s the problem with hoping one of 27 countries will vote against an extension. Those “countries” voting are really just EU enthusiast politicians.
The guys who wrote the American founding documents were clever, reasonable men, and they invented a form of government for reasonable men. Of which there is currently a shortage. But the founding fathers failed to prevent the take-over by political parties.
On a more entertaining note,
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/brexit-labour-party-politics/
argues that the prospect of a Corbyn government may be scary enough that the EU will not risk an extension.
“Essentially the Labour party’s position is that Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement is not good enough, and so they will negotiate a much better one. But their position is also that once the details of their Brexit are hammered out, the people deserve another vote on it. In other words, Labour will delay that bloc from moving on to new business, get them to agree to another deal, one that very well may be rejected. And perhaps a considerable number of Labour MPs would campaign against the deal their party leadership has just negotiated. If the first years of Brexit negotiations were already a farce, what would Brexit 2 Electric Bugaloo and Referendum 2: Remainer’s Revenge be?”
Hi E.M. Re: Brexit: I just listened to this excellent discussion on Brendan O’Neill’s Spiked podcast. David Starkey is a popular historian and puts the whole thing in perspective regarding the French, US and English revolutions (Oliver Cromwell etc.) It is a bit profane at times due to the passion with which they hold their views, but I found it fascinating, as I hope you do. About an hour. https://youtu.be/jUxV6SvQHc0
One potential spanner here, and that’s hurricane season. We are just past the peak now, and for the US Gulf coast, still a risk through much of October. Also, Alaska needs to get its act together. Boy would higher North Slope production be nice right now.
What’s capital spending doing right now? That is a leading indicator. I have not heard anything negative there, so that’s a tell.
Pingback: A Clear Explanation Of Brexit Games In Historical Context | Musings from the Chiefio
It is raining right now in San Jose. This is rather unusually early. We often do not get our first rainy day until Halloween…
If this keeps up, winter will have arrived about a month early… From the history of San Jose airport at wunderground:
https://www.wunderground.com/history/daily/us/ca/santa-clara/KSJC
Note the historical average is zero… Note the record ever is “zero”. This is a new record.
They are showing the actual as 4/100 ths inch, but it’s more than that out my window. I think it is just lagging the reality.
So when the historical average is zero, it’s abnormal rain… and winter is early…
I would say we just received 0.25 inch here above Chico. Not unheard of for here, but a bit early for the first cold front rain storm off of the North Pacific. This has been a cooler and damper then normal year here….pg
Reuters on the Saudi oil facility damage and its impact on world oil production / prices.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-aramco-oil-global-explainer-idUSKBN1W11WH
@Larry L:
I think the key bit from that link is:
Yep which raises the question cui bono on the removal of the Saudi production.
Several countries would be hurt badly if the over supply continues, Iran and Russia are at the top of that list. So the most likely to benefit and in most critical need is Iran, both due to their political and religious war with Saudi Arabia but due to the fact that the Trump sanctions are really starting to hurt.
I think the media frequently over sells Trumps hints at concessions, he is simply engaged in “generous tit for tat” every once in a while he gives an up beat option to the opponent to keep them from digging into an irreconcilable position.
Reminding them that there are positive options if they want to take that path.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/these-are-signs-irans-regime-close-crumbling-80326
I would think that the key piece is that “Iran could make up the total short fall, If the Americans, TRUMP, would lift his sanctions on others purchasing Iranian oil.”
The attacks on Saudi materials and refineries seem to come from the direction of Iran..The size and coordination of the attack would preclude it being the work of rebels…pg
Looks to me that this is pretty clear evidence of the type of attack used.
I suspect the drones had either a simple platter charge that they placed near the domes or perhaps an RPG warhead. Very simple technology, and relatively small package needed to get the job done.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-aramco-usa-intelligence/u-s-considers-more-intel-sharing-with-saudi-arabia-after-attack-sources-idUSKBN1W11J9
Here is an image of simulated platter charges used for training. Nothing but a cylindrical container with a flat platter in the front with a high velocity explosive pressed into place behind the platter and center primed. At close range it propels the flat platter at several times the speed of sound toward the target and punches through even intervening obstacles like chain link fences.
It is a recommended expedient method for insurgents to blow POL (Petroleum Oil, Lubricant) tanks, as the platter not only breaches the tank wall, but has a cushion of super heated air being pushed in front of the supersonic platter which aids ignition of the tank contents.
Very low tech and anyone who has any familiarity with military sabotage techniques has been exposed to this very simple device. It is included in almost every military explosive and sabotage reference since the 1950’s and perhaps earlier.
Trump in the oval office w/ leader of Bahrain just announced sale of Patriot batteries to Bahrain…
Also said taliking w/ Saudi, that they pretty much know who did it, and while there is no hurry, when they do something it will be pretty big and coordinated (and implied Saudi is picking up the tab for our help).
So not soon, but something is coming…
Food for thought, a Psychologist’s view of Trump Derangement Syndrome and the hard left / progressives and their world view. Why do they see America and Trump as evil and oppressive and ignore obvious good things about both.
https://www.wnd.com/2018/09/psychiatrist-trump-derangement-syndrome-is-real-and-serious/
Interesting case study on gun laws right here where I live.
https://bearingarms.com/cam-e/2019/09/16/colorado-universal-background-checks-crime-rising/
Looks like we are headed down the California path to dystopia here too it will just take a bit longer because the loonies in Boulder have not spread far enough “yet”.
And now….
CA wants everyone else to finance cutting off penises…..
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/09/17/california-adds-iowa-to-travel-ban-list-for-not-funding-gender-transitions/
https://www.al.com/news/2019/09/iowa-joins-alabama-on-californias-travel-ban-list.html
Alphabet people are a very destructive special interest group…..
So the military is finally getting smart and going to provide white hat hacking workshops for important systems to see what vulnerabilities the civilian security researchers can find.
https://www.wired.com/story/air-force-defcon-satellite-hacking/
@Larry L:
At Last…. (per the White Hats).
Per guns:
It has been well proven that more guns leads to less crime. It has been well proven that all the restrictions leads to more crime (that then accelerates the process). Since we’ve seen this play out already in other anglophone countries, we know that:
a) It is an internationally driven effort. Not a domestic origin. Globalists don’t like anyone not on their body guard payroll to have guns.
b) The real purpose is to “create a crisis to exploit” to eventually get gun registration and then confiscation. (See item a.) Also see your above link on TDS:
Arguing with the Straw Man “safety” ruse is pointless. It is arguing with the “lie for effect”. It must be attacked head on as a fundamental right in the constitution and not an inch given.
@”Nobody”:
They don’t cut them off, they turn them inside out… (ouch…) and rearrange the parts. One “Trans Conversion” complained that the resultant “vagina” was too small… and not suited to purpose… One wonders if any wag pointed out the source of the size…
With any luck, California will eventually ban travel to ALL the other States, sparing them the exposure to the infection…
More clipped Californian wings?
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2019/09/17/please-be-true/
Take a memo – scientists do not have enough understanding of very complex systems (biological genetics, weather modification etc.) to go screwing around with them – the law of unintended consequences usually wins.
Just because you can does not mean you should.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/9947305/deadly-super-mosquitoes-accidentally-created/
Drum roll please ! – – – – –
Here it is beginning of declassification.
President has directed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Justice (including the FBI) to provide for the immediate declassification of the following materials:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/statement-press-secretary-34/
Georgia man shoots, kills 3 masked teens attempting to rob him
The Bear Flag Republic of California still exists and it’s Capitol is in ………………..San Francisco.
The Republic of California Voted to join the Union and after that was accepted formed it’s state government in Sacramento. But the Republic Government still exists. California was not an official part of the war between the states, it was exempt from the income tax and the draft that was used to support the Union Army and Martial Law that the Union was under.during the war.
The Communist Party Secretariat still exists and it’s head quarters is in …………..San Francisco
During the fall of the Soviet Union president George H.W.Bush moved the Secretariat and it’s “Eastern European” money into the U.S. to get Gorbachev to leave Moscow peacefully. The money was moved to New York under a little known money manager George Soros…pg
@P.G.:
You are more right than you are saying! (Nice trick, that…)
The Bear Flag Republic was formed in 1846
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Republic
The Bear Flag Republic lasted about 25 days and had flags up at Sonoma (where the thing got started) and at Sutter’s Fort in Sacramento. (Which had the gold and more guns…) But it was over quickly when the asked to be part of the USA (which provided even more guns…)
Note that Sonoma is at the top of the San Francisco Bay Area. Then notice that the first three State Capitols were all at various locations around the San Francisco Bay. San Jose at the far south end, Vallejo back at the north end (San Pablo Bay is the north half of the water, technically only the part south of San Francisco is San Francisco bay but most people just treat it as one block of water… because it is.) Then Benicia in the middle directly across the bay from San Francisco. Then the capitol moves to Sacramento for about 8 years, then back to San Francisco proper for 7. From 1861 to 1865 (US Civil War / War Between The States / War of Northern Aggression) the capitol was mostly San Francisco…
http://www.usacitiesonline.com/castatecapitals.htm
(Yes, I wish then knew it was capitOl not capitAl but they have the dates right I think.)
The S.F. Bay Area tends to culturally dominate Sacramento. Yeah, the administrative buildings are there, but inland California is conservative and California government is straight out of SF culturally.
A hilarious summary of the Michael Mann lawsuit. That is, “A” Michael Mann lawsuit, being one of several. https://www.steynonline.com/9742/michael-e-mann-loser
Best for the link to the judge’s own analysis: https://www.steynonline.com/documents/9740.pdf
Note that one needn’t take sides on the scientific dispute to come down fair and square for the right to have that dispute.
Anthony Watts had the story when it first broke but this is more detail that was available last month.
Interesting summary and observation:
Where it looks like we are going:
https://babylonbee.com/news/group-of-third-graders-to-dictate-nations-climate-change-policy
Interesting article on how California lost control of their homeless situation.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/09/12/why-california-keeps-making-homelessness-worse/#23f9e30d5a61
Looks to me that this law suit against Facebook could find some traction and blow many of their (at twitter et al’s actions out of the water)
If their actions are interpreted to put them into the category of information developer rather than simply providing a passive service to display some other persons content, they lose immunity.
http://www.likelihoodofconfusion.com/fyk-v-facebook-ninth-circuit-brief/
NEWS ALERT!!!
The is a pic going around of Justin Trudeau in black face! Such a sweet memento! Saw it on Drudge.
You mean this one?
https://pbs.twimg.com/card_img/1174456706618855424/FuDwxMxV?format=jpg&name=600×314
Also posted this in the Walmart get woke go broke thread as follow up to video that explains why walmart took the plunge.
Now Colt is stopping sales of the AR-15 to the civilian market.
https://truepundit.com/report-colt-to-cease-ar-15-production-for-the-civilian-market/
By the way on my post above “Drum roll please ! – – – – –”
Yes the one year anniversary of that announcement was two days ago – still a work in progress
Here’s something you don’t see every day; Amish buggy DUI.
https://www.michanews.com/2019/09/19/amish-dui-two-men-flee-after-drinking-and-buggying-reports/
I wonder if they ran the breathalyzer on the horse, too?
Reference Jim2 and the photo of Justin Trudeau in blackface. OK actually brownface…. He’s apologised for this disgustingly racist application of a colour of skin he wasn’t born with, and thus had no rights to apply to himself.
We should thus ban all forms of makeup and anything else that changes your appearance from what you were born with. Lipsticks, face powder, mascara would be the first things to disappear in this aim to get back to pure thinking, since very few people have red lips or dark eyelashes, and they shouldn’t pretend they do since that would offend those that are so blessed. Also of course, we’d need to remove false eyelashes and nails, and all forms of nail varnish. In the interests of purity, we’d also ban all forms of cosmetic surgery, so no more tit implants or butt implants. As we drill down, we’d also outlaw those creams that hide wrinkles…. By the time we get around to banning tattoos, I think enough people would be sufficiently pissed-off to realise that Trudeau was trying to represent Aladdin more accurately with a bit of face colouring to help it along, and that doesn’t mean he’s racist at all. If comedians can put orange on their faces to do a Trump impersonation, Trudeau (whatever faults we may think he has) could put on the colour needed for a representation without being castigated.
Maybe these days you can’t even use a different face colour in “Othello” without someone playing the race card.
The Left did this to our Governor, who had, as a freshman (?) done just this kind of thing at a Sorority party, back in the 60s. It is disgusting. Not that she did this, but that people get outraged over people LARPing and having a good time. I say this as an American mutt that has some of everything in him. [So which one-drop rule applies now? Inquiring minds want to know.]
@H.R.:
It bothers me when the police do that. There were 2 guys in Texas IIRC cited for DUI Horse riding. They had deliberately chosen to go to the bar on horseback as the horse was smart enough to get himself home… Similarly, “drunk in a buggy” isn’t a risk to anyone, really, other than when the person gets home and gets reprimanded.
There was another guy got a DUI / Bicycle. Really. Deliberately NOT taking a car. So we’re giving folks an incentive to get in a 2 ton car at 60 mph instead of a horse or bike at 4 mph…
Further, the ‘stereo and 6 pack on top’ sounds like the buggy was parked, not in motion.
IMHO, just police looking to harass someone and create a story.
@SImon:
Oh, and don’t forget, ANYONE of Mexican, Asian, Black, etc. ethnicity must refrain from wearing:
Sweaters, Suits, Levis, sneakers, etc. as that is “Cultural Appropriation” from the Europeans…
Get back into your Kimonos, turbans, loin cloths, sombreros / chaps, tunics… /sarc;
It’s just incredibly silly.
@C.D.Quarles:
As a kid, we played “Cowboys & Indians”. Now clearly entirely non-PC. (FWIW, I’m guilty of “cultural appropriation” as I like the idea of a feather headdress and being the Indian…). Near as I can tell there are no photos of a 5 year old me doing this, but who knows…
IMHO it is part of acceptance of another culture to “play dress-up”. My Mexican friend gave me a Sombrero (and had a good laugh at me in it too…). My sister was given a “dress up” even by her Japanese friends when she lived in Japan (as a blond she looks good but a bit odd in kimono and gear).
I thought we were supposed to revel in our diversity and enjoy the cultural enrichment. Silly me…
Oh, and what do we do with things like American Jazz? Eh? African rhythms and European instruments… OR Blues. African themes and voicing in European musical context.
I can’t imagine an America without that fusion of Celtic / Bluegrass / African / Blues …
No less a person than Bing Crosby sang African Scat and Jazz and facilitated the cross over.
IMHO, it is nothing less than an evil effort to “Divide And Conquer” and the best thing we can all collectively do is “Just say NO!” and reject it at every turn. So 2 black guys want to dress up as white girls and make a stupid comedy movie? FINE with me. Have a good laugh. (And yes, for the international folks, that did happen…)
“Free speech attempt” – in Oz (/s)
““The Conversation” gives up conversing, admits defeat on climate, bans all skeptical scientists from commenting!“The Conversation” gives up conversing, admits defeat on climate, bans all skeptical scientists from commenting!”
http://joannenova.com.au/2019/09/the-conversation-gives-up-conversing-admits-defeat-on-climate-bans-all-skeptical-scientists-from-commenting/
“Under seige: The Conversation pulls the weak “trust your doctor or Climate God” excuse”
http://joannenova.com.au/2019/09/under-seige-the-conversation-pulls-the-weak-trust-your-doctor-or-climate-god-excuse/#comment-2191649
H.R.
“I wonder if they ran the breathalyzer on the horse, too?”
An old time expression here was someone “with a breath like a brewery horse’s blurt”
My Step father served a year in Nam in 68. He was a corpsman, and got some R&R in Hawaii, and my mother went out to be with him. She brought back leis and grass skirts.
There ARE pictures of me doing a hula dance in the grass skirt and lei at 11.
And if I had them now, I would do it again.
EFF the A-Holes and their cultural appropriation. There is NO American culture that is not borrowed from someplace.
Indeed, Chief, indeed. Tell me, what ‘Boomer’ didn’t play Cowboys and Indians (remember, Westerns were a thing back then!)?
@Phil, This is why I want to remind folk that there is only one race: human; with a number of different subgroups. Some of these were more isolated than others. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Every group has been subjugated by others. Every group has migrated and mixed with others, again, to a greater or lesser extent. That said, some cultures *are* better than others and there are objective measures of comparison. The West has lost its way.
Re “Free speech attempt” – in Oz (/s) – best yet remaming (IMO)
“The CON-traception
Sterilizing the Natural Cycle of Scientific Thought ”
http://joannenova.com.au/2019/09/under-seige-the-conversation-pulls-the-weak-trust-your-doctor-or-climate-god-excuse/#comment-2191686
(My spelling correction)
This is a hell of a lot more disturbing than any UFO speculation. If the POTUS can’t have a private phone call, who can??? From the article:
Trump has denied doing anything improper. In a tweet Thursday morning, the president wrote, “Virtually anytime I speak on the phone to a foreign leader, I understand that there may be many people listening from various U.S. agencies, not to mention those from the other country itself.
“Knowing all of this, is anybody dumb enough to believe that I would say something inappropriate with a foreign leader while on such a potentially ‘heavily populated’ call,” Trump wrote.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/whistleblower-complaint-about-president-trump-involves-ukraine-according-to-two-people-familiar-with-the-matter/ar-AAHyi0V
Splendid trolling:
Trudeau says blackface is racist and blames it on white privilege. The hypocrisy, it burns.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-justin-trudeau-blackface-blaming-you
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/christie-blatchford-in-cutting-himself-slack-its-trudeaus-hypocrisy-that-is-so-galling
Oh, and never mind the wandering hands.
Well I’ll be. Never thought these would exist on Amazon. Quite a number of varients on the market too. Don’t let HR see them ;-)
Interesting little side bar on the efforts of the sea lift command to do a major exercise and see how prepared they are for a quick mobilization to support combat operations in some future conflict with current resources.
Anticipating China getting testy over Taiwan – or sending a message that we have the capability to support major operations??
https://warisboring.com/sealift-command-performs-massive-readiness-test-largest-mobilization-in-more-than-15-years/
@YMMV: I keep waiting for someone with enough spine to just say “Any bigotry and offense is in the mind of the offended. I enjoyed playing dress up and there is nothing wrong with it.”
Maybe someday folks will realize the Appology Parade is just a mock hanging and refuse to be the victim dangling.
@OssQss: Exploding pellets? Wow cool!,
HEY H.R.: Look what Ossqss found for you!,
:-)
@Ilanfar:
OMG Trump knows how to troll!
@Jim2:
Why do you think they do physical meets? Any phone call is a party line… even yours… Only question is who has the most interesting calks so gets the audience.
@ Another Ian:
The irony of that “The Coversation” oppression of skeptic posts is that it was exactly that which made me a skeptic. A decade plus back, I ask some questions on a warmista blog, got abuse. At the time, I though global warming was a big deal and wanted more information, but asked some reasonable questions… The abuse included an assertion I must be influenced by Denier WUWT. That was how I found WUWT in the first place.. The rest is history…
@OssQss: Exploding pellets? Wow cool!,
Hmmm $9 for 50
Make your own, take a standard lead pellet, fill it with white light anywhere match compound, insert backwards in pellet rifle and fire at hard surface.
(been there done that – ;)
Come to think of it would be a great way to scare away garden pests without hurting them, deer eating your lettuce, bang a couple pellets off a rock near them and I bet they leave.
Interesting looks like Lowes and Homedepot have been doing customer face recognition capture for years.
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/home-depot-and-lowes-accused-scanning-millions-customers-faces
Of course I knew spooks were spying on all citizen’s private phone calls without a warrant. But the friggin POTUS ought to be able to get a secure line no matter what. I’m shocked he can’t. That’s just wrong.
Now it’s coming out the Ukraine president was asked by someone in the Trump admin to help get the goods on Biden’s son. This is one of those things that could easily turn into a Dimowit trap.
We the Dimowit’s demand you turn over the goods! Trump tweets out the damning evidence on Slo-mo Joe. That would be sweet.
“I enjoyed playing dress up and there is nothing wrong with it.”
Drag Queens and what used to be called Trannies before there were real ones.
Somehow it neither offends women nor feminists, or not that I’ve heard.
But you are quite right. It’s hard to keep up with the imaginary crimes being created. And enforced retrospectively.
Although I am tired of white dudes calling each other bro and doing fist bumps and wearing gold chains, and doing everything to be black except the blackface.
Speaking of imaginary crimes – Australia is going down hill fast.
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/aussie-cops-now-confiscate-loose-coins-cars-because-safety
The push for a world wide cash free society is on.
We need to clue in the millennials that socialism and communism were created by old white men.
@CD – I grew up with a mother who constantly told me the “Indians” got a raw deal. So I went outside the box and learned about Wounded Knee and other atrocities. Needless to say, I always played the Indian when there were cowboys and Indians.
Something I noticed as well, watching old John Wayne movies – he had a lot of respect for them. He seemed to view them as an honored foe, who played by the rules, but the white man did not. He is one of the few “Cowboys” that I had no trouble watching.
Re POTUS and the Surveillance State…or the state of surveillance…whatever…
I always figured casinos were hotbeds of surveillance.
If POTUS can’t tell when it’s being done, then who can?
I figure he’s got the goods on a bunch of people. If they want to play rough, he’s likely got plenty of dirt on them.
Larry
Re “Speaking of imaginary crimes – Australia is going down hill fast.”
The precedent has been set – at least one bloke has been fined for having an unrestrained object in the tray of his pickup.
The potentially highly dangerous object? A thong – footwear type I think but either way – – .
E.M.
Re the way to WUWT.
Things like that do tend to peg the reading of the “pissedoff meter”.
Incidently Jo Nova used to be green
First I’ve heard of this; underground tunnel networks about 10.000 years old. I’m not sure if there is anything to it. It appears to be just one German Professor looking into it and he may be a one-track, lone nutter type.
OTOH, the lone ‘nutters’ are sometimes what is needed to get the mainstream archeologists to change their narrative of ancient societies. We are seeing that happening now as archeology is finding ancient civilizations to be far more advanced than was thought possible by looking in the right places, such as a bit off shore.
This is an short, entertaining read with enough pictures that satisfied me that the tunnels were manmade (check out the arches).
https://www.ancient-code.com/12-000-year-old-underground-tunnels-stretch-scotland-turkey/
I think earlier humans advanced much further than modern humans give them credit for. But then stuff happens and a LOT of technology is lost. I can see that happening again with our modern world.
RE: underground tunnels. The date of the organic matter is not necessarily the date of the stone tunnel construction. I think more skepticism is appropriate here.
Just a note for anyone who is looking to assemble a set of personal riot gear equipment for SHTF type riot situations.
Check your local thrift store.
I went down to the local thrift store today to just poke around and found a half dozen of the boxing / martial arts style full padded head gear for $2.50 each and a set of barely used foot ball shoulder pads tagged at only $4.99. with just a little effort a person could easily approach the same sort of protection level the riot cops use.
I know most of us here have no great desire to go participate in a riot, but discussion has opened the question of how an average person would protect themselves if they had to get out of such a riot situation.
It would not be a bad idea to have a bit of protective gear available. I have a generic bike helmet in the car, which I have carried for years for protection against large hail from when I was storm chasing. and some hard shell knee pads for working on the car. If things were go to watts riot over night you would not be able to order in from amazon or cruise the sporting goods stores. At these prices, just call them Halloween costume bits.
(Hmmm now were do I find a Jason hockey goalie mask ??)
I imagine as the school foot ball season finishes up, you will see more of the shoulder and rib pads show up.
I figure you could put together a full set of riot gear for under $30 – $150 depending on if you buy some of it new and according to how full coverage you want to go and how hard core you want the protection level.
Looks like CIO has some competition :)
At Oracle’s OpenWorld convention on Monday, the company showed off a Raspberry Pi Supercomputer that combines 1,060 Raspberry Pis into one powerful cluster.
According to ServeTheHome, which first reported the story, the supercomputer features scores of racks with 21 Raspberry Pi 3 B+ boards each. To make everything run well together, the system runs on Oracle Autonomous Linux.
ServeTheHome asked Oracle why it chose to create a cluster of Raspberry Pis instead of using a virtualized Arm server and one company rep said simply that “…a big cluster is cool.”
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/oracle-raspberry-pi-supercomputer,40412.html
A little humor on international affairs
https://twitter.com/rama_rajeswari/status/1175280153510854657
View video clip full screen if you can.
Okay, I have a fun, yet serious, question for the brain trust here.
How do you know when Limburger cheese is bad?
I bought some Limburger on a markdown – 6oz for $1.99… excellent price – and the ‘best by’ date was in November. All fine and good.
I can’t remember which comedian had the line that goes something like, “Why do they put a ‘Best by’ date on sour cream? They make cream go bad and then sell it. How do you know it’s bad? By definition, it’s cream gone bad” Funny stuff. Was it Howie Mandel? George Carlin? I can’t recall.
Anyhow, it’s snack time, I’m going to have some Limburger and onion on crackers, washed down with a beer, and I got to thinking, “How do you know when a stinky cheese like Limburger is bad? It smells worse than it already does?”
I have no clue, but it’s an amusing conundrum.
@Jim2:
Ooooh! That’s Brilliant! Socialism, the Old White Men Government….
@PowerGrab:
POTUS knows when it’s a party line on his side. That’s “always”. He likely also knows it is the same on the other side.
Per “the goods”: I think he’s likely had a rapid education in mole rats… and is now slowly working down the list of leakers and back stabbers…
@Another Ian:
I’ve been bothered since about 1982 by a decision to NOT take a job with an Australian company and move to Australia. The last few years have let me “get over that”… unfortunately…
FWIW, I was a “member” (subscriber, whatever the PC term is) to Sierra Club AND Greenpeace at one time… Not any more.
@H.R.:
There is remarkably solid evidence for a major celestial impact catastrophy at the Younger Dryas. Debris and other artifacts, along with massive extinction events, over all of North America, some of South America, and into Europe.
Couple that with the evidence for a prior advanced society (megalithic building that can’t be done now, Sphinx enclosure and body with heavy water erosion, …) and I think you can get close to the right story. The weave in how Solon reported that the Egyptian records included “many destructions of mankind” and about a 30,000 year historical record…
There was an advanced, global or nearly global, civilization as the Ice Age started to end. This was giving them a LOT of trouble as there was massive sudden sea level rises (story of Atlantis… and other flood myths). Then, literally out of the blue, a massive rock fall over North America, breaking up with shards of it hitting all over the globe, messed up the climate and agriculture for decades (centuries?).
That pretty much will end a civilization based on cities. The survivors will be those who can do that hunter gatherer thing and live without the niceties of “civilization”. After one generation of that, it’s gone.
So were you faced with a lot of “crap fell out of the sky and screwed things up”, or were you advanced enough to know crap was coming, you build underground shelter / transit / refuge spaces. Heck, I’ve made route plots to the nearest sub-sub-basement big buildings and subway underground tunnel entrances “just in case”. England did it in W.W.II and Russia made it a formal plan. Switzerland is about 1/2 underground… It just makes a lot of sense.
@Larry L:
Amazon:
@Jim2:
Such clusters are fun toys, but it really is an error to call them a “Supercomputer”. The official definition of Supercomputer isn’t just some cluster with a lot of nodes, but in the top N% of total computes. As the top computers are now measured in PetaFLOPs, nothing anyone can build at home is a “supercomputer”. Just a parallel cluster.
Then in my testing of the R. Pi: It doesn’t make all that good a compute node. Basically, it’s the wrong hardware choice. (That’s why I went off trying other bits of hardware). The GPU is hard to use. The OS has only now gone to 64 bit (and userland is still 32 bit) AND it is horribly under cooled. All up you end up throwing away about 90% of total available computes (mostly in the GPU) and can’t use your CPU at more than about 1/4 without adding some serious cooling.
Then you run into memory and network speed limitations…
So for a proper parallel cluster of SBCs, you want a board with about 1 GB of memory per CPU, a full 64 bit OS, an easy to use GPU, and USB 3.0 disk ports (all glued together with a better memory bus and IO network drivers…). Odroid seems to have got those bits “more right” than anyone else I’ve bought / tried. The Pine folks do OK on their newest hottest board, but you must buy your own heat sink separately… Nothing like leaving a mandatory $5 item off the board to make your price look better…
So, IMHO, anyone making a hundreds or thousands of node Raspberry Pi Cluster is just showing their ignorance or deliberately wasting money on a P.R. Stunt using the popular name even though it isn’t the right thing to use.
That, BTW, is also why you’ve not heard a lot from me about my Pi Cluster lately. I did enough tests to figure out it wasn’t going to be worth it, and bought some bigger faster boards instead (that so far have not needed to be clustered for anything I’ve wanted to do). The Pi Boards are being given relatively low level infrastructure work to do. (DNS server, Ad Blocker – Pi Hole, NFS server, time server, etc.)
When I get back to doing something in clusters again, it will be using v8 instruction sets in Devuan on either Odroid XU4 (for a 32 bit cluster that would tie in the Pi boards as low end nodes) or using the Odroid N2 / RockPro64 as a 64 bit cluster (currently software is an issue in that it is not fully ‘right’ on the database / Python graphs side and doesn’t have Devuan or other non-SystemD infested option) in which case using 64 bit Devuan would also let me add the Pi boards as very low end compute nodes.
As you can see, that description is a bit of a mess, which is why I’ve not pressed on with trying to make a bigger cluster out of all that stuff… it would be a bit of a mess too.
Basically, other than the RockPro65 and the Odroid Familiy, everything else has too little heat management (i.e. no heat sinks at all…) and suffers from too small a memory (good old Amdahl’s Second Law about a balanced system…) and / or poor I/O. Having LOTS of GHz of compute speed is useless if you can’t keep the data stream fed, constantly stop to play with swap space, and squash your clock to avoid overheating…
Anyone worth their salt ought to have notice that with their first tests of the sample boards…
UPDATE:
Noticed in the bottom of the article:
So they know / knew. It’s just a P.R. Stunt, it would seem… Either that, or they spent first, learned later and now it’s a “learning experience”…
@Larry L:
That’s a good one!
@H.R.:
That’s an easy one. “When you buy it”.
;-)
In reality, cheese usually goes bad via a very few mechanisms.
1) Mold. If it is fuzzy, you have a problem. Sometimes the fuzzy bit can be cut off and the rest saved, but…
2) Bacteria that don’t belong. If your white cheese starts getting red, black, blue whatever spots on it, most likely that’s a colony you don’t want. See #1 for advice on saving it…
3) Drying out. If your cheese is turning from soft or semi-solid into hard tough translucent chunks, it’s drying out. You can still eat it though. (Or if you are Italian, grate it and sprinkle it on pasta and call it a ‘feature’ ;-)
4) Liquefying. “something” is eating the cheese and exuding digestive enzymes to do so. See #1 for guidance on “saving” it. (Personally, I’d not bother if it is liquefying… ooze kind of spreads in a wrapper).
5) Funny smells. Unfortunately, this one is a bit of a fail for your particular cheese. Some of us would say it isn’t a fail but is still working Just Fine (see my direct answer without a number…)
I assume by now you’ve had your snack, so will look forward to your reply in a day or two when the spouse finishes hosing you off and lets you come back in the house…
Cheap bridges ahead?
http://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2019/09/wework-looks-to-be-the-new-pets-com.html
@HR ~ answer = you know it <12 hrs later. Simliar to the doppler effect, but different ;-)
Cartooning
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/09/22/september-22nd-2019-presidential-politics-trump-administration-day-976/comment-page-2/#comment-7381152
If you can, catch Giuliani on Fox News Sunday. The Dimowits may want Slo-mo Biden to run, but that ain’t going to happen. This whole Biden-Biden son – Ukraine thing is about to blow sky high. And it is being done as a defence of Trump, not a political hit job.
California Rep. Devin Nunes predicted on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” that Joe Biden’s campaign is likely coming to an end — all because of newly resurfaced reports about his possible misconduct in Ukraine that “first originated back when Hillary Clinton was trying to make sure Biden didn’t get in the race.”
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bidens-campaign-coming-to-an-end-thanks-to-ukraine-story-linked-to-hillary-clinton-nunes-says
Meanwhile back at the media silence on Antifa thugs.
This is why people are concerned about getting caught in one of these Antifa protests, they have folks embedded in the black bloc that are serious about hurting people for no reason other than to create chaos.
Just a quick note on Tech Stuff, the Odroid XU4, Devuan, and “network quasi broken by design”:
I’ve FINALLY got the Devuan 2.0 install networking working. Partly this was related to a configuration oddity of my internal networks (that I consider a security feature) and partly it is due to the SystemD Boyz playing with their network bits and making “everything you know is wrong” again.
Bottom line is that I had IPv6 turned off (so as to assure no IdiOT devices would automagically have network access as they are pretty much all IPv6. Partly just because I’m using NAT and don’t need long incomprehensible hex network addresses. Partly as I don’t WANT my devices all known to the internet by their actual network addresses.
Turns out the new install (UN-like the R.Pi Devuan 2.0) comes configured in IPv6 ONLY networking…
No problem, you say. Just change it and give it an IPv4 address in /etc/network/interfaces…
There’s a long story here that will be in a WT? How To Fix It posting once I have this all finished (build script, etc. etc.) AND got it back to IPv4 “somehow”… BUT basically, SystemD due to the async way it brings things up was handing out interface names (like eth0, eth1) quasi randomly. Rather than admit that’s a serious bug (imagine a firewall rule that says anyone on the internet can get to eth0 but that’s now the other secure interface…) and bring them up in order; they implemented a Whole New Interface Naming Scheme (or two). Now your ethernet may be named with the MAC address, or something else… (Mine is an incomprehensible 15 characters of gibberish). Supposedly you can over-ride this in a boot parameter, but that didn’t work for me. (Not clear yet if that was my bad, or someone else’s)
So, for now, I do have ethernet working, and I have done and update / upgrade and I can now add nice little things like a GUI environment AND all those lovely tools you expect to be on a Linux but are not in the base install…
What made it work?
Turn on IPv6 in my boundary router. Plug the XU4 DIRECTLY into the boundary router (not in my internal lab environment that’s nicely protected and all IPv4…). Edit /etc/network/interfaces and put in the 15 incomprehensible characters instead of “eth0” and a dhcp setting choice. (You can get the incomprehensible list by “ifconfig -a” or “ip a” and look for something that looks like an ethernet but with a crazy name instead of the expected eth0). Then reboot.
Sigh.
Why I HATE SystemD AND the jerks who keep breaking *Nix with it…
OK, so I’m going to be getting this “cleaned up” for a few hours. After which I’ll have Devuan 2.0 with networking and a GUI up and running. I’m migrating off of the Armbian / Devuan uplift due to it having reached EOL.(no more updates) and since there’s a direct Devuan 2.0. We’ll see how it goes.
Well that was a short lived bit of “joy”…
I did my install of all the usual things (plus a couple). Rebooted.
It now does that ‘something is wrong enter root passwd for maintenance or Ctl-D to continue’…
Just continuing, it does give me a nice GUI login panel. I can log in. It seems normal.
Looking in syslog the error messages don’t look like they ought to be causal.
So just went right on an mounted file systems after that… I think that’s a laptop power control function that doesn’t exist on this board, so irrelevant.
So I don’t get it…
Other Notes:
htop only shows 4 CPUs. Syslog shows all 8 starting, so not a clean htop port I think…
Chromium fails to launch. Claims a file isn’t in my home directory that is there and with me as owner.
Firefox launches and immediately crashes.
To say I’m disappointed in the quality of the QA / Build on Devuan 2.0 for the Odroid XU4 is a big understatement. It isn’t like they have a whole lot of supported product lines to test. X86/AMD64, Raspberry Pi, Odroid XU, and then the SunXi chipset is about it.
IF you are going to ship something as finished product, and it goes on FIXED hardware, seems like just “boot it up and test the typical programs launch, like say the browsers” would be the minimum possible effort.
This looks a whole lot like “compile and ship” with at most “boot the minimal kernel and check you can ‘apt-get install’ something then ship it.
I’m not happy.
For now I’ll just go back to that Armbian Jessie with an “uplift” and accept that it is out of date with any changes. (Extended Support releases get long term support, others just have about 6 months after they “move on” to the next release…)
I’m thinking about trying a DIY hybrid with the Armbian kernel under the Devuan Userland, but that has risks in it. I’d need to evaluate how the “No SystemD Shim” process works and figure out how to get things aligned with each other.
For today, though, I’m done with this.
Success:
I can talk to the internet, install software and updates, and get to a GUI environment with tools installed via Ctl-D at boot / hang.
Failure:
It boot hangs for no reason I can see at the moment.
Common browsers crash on launch. (I’ve not tested other userland codes).
It is stubbornly IPv6 with an alien ethernet device name. Supposedly this can be fixed, but with how much effort? (The boot parameter didn’t fix it).
Overall, it just isn’t a Ready For Prime Time (or even ready for normal tech users) level of QA.
Sigh.
Looks like in Armbian Buster I’m gong to hit the same “mystery interface name” issue / PITA:
https://wiki.debian.org/NewInBuster
Maybe I’ll stay back at “Stretch” for a while… It is still newer than Jessie…
Over on The Conservative Treehouse, Sundance has been covering President Trump at the UN.
Anyhow, this link is to President Trump’s arrival at the UN. Sundance made note that President Trump walked right by Greta without a glance or a word. When you click into the article, there are some clips of Greta and her reaction.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/09/23/president-trump-arrival-at-u-n-general-assembly/
Trump: “Lessee…. do I want to waste time listening to some kid talking nonsense about some ‘climate emergency’ or do I want to talk to other World leaders about, trade, peace, security, religious freedom, and other topics that I can do something about?”
Good call, Mr. President.
Linux, it worse than we thought!
@HR – Perfect! Her look was worth every minute of the crap the liberals have been yelling for the past 3 years!
@phil – Yup. That was priceless.
You can read St. Greta’s face.
“He’s coming through…. He’s coming through…. There he is…. Get ready… ready… I’m gonna really lay it on the President of the US…….. There he goes… Hey wait… He didn’t stop?!? He didn’t even look at me! Grrrrrrrrr…. GRRRRRRR…. *poisonous look*
Interesting Rasmussen study on trust in political new providers – looks to me that the media have so completely blown their credibility that like a plane in zero visiblity and neutral turn they are in a death spiral.
Is interesting to note a few things – women have a higher distrust of news than men (might be that woman’s intuition thing and superior ability to read body language tells).
Looks to me that the cohorl that is most likely to still trust the news are men who are between 40 – 64.
Interesting little bit from the UK, they also have local activists who are taking on the government’s job of controlling the border and setting up local watches of the channel to try to limit channel crossers.
https://www.britainfirst.org/photos_britain_first_patrols_beaches_around_dover
@Larry L:
Looking at that chart, it looks like only old Democrats think the news is unbiased and trust it. Self confirmation bias…
Per Gretta: See looks emotionally unstable to me. Common in actors… Why would I want to be berated by an emotionally unstable child with wrong information and propagandized ideas? She needs psychiatric help, not media attention (that would reinforce her combined persecution complex and savior complex…)
@Jim2:
Linux IS becoming more of a PITA. IMHO this comes from Red Hat having achieved a dominant position in the development community AND being a for profit company. No longer are core decisions being made by a widely distributed marketplace of ideas where a developer floats some change and it gets voted into, or out of, the pool. Instead, the profit driven quasi-monopolist make capricious changes and you either take it, or complain but can’t change it without a staff of hundreds…
For a little while it wasn’t too bad, but with the onset of SystemD it has become a PITA. As the follow-on crap shows up (like that renaming thing) the (obvious to some of us) bad effects of SystemD are spreading.
It is a bad idea, poorly implemented, against The Unix Way. And it shows. Unfortunately, that cancer has spread through most of the major releases as most of them look to Red Hat as their “upstream” code base.
So I spent a chunk of yesterday afternoon contemplating long term choices. Gentoo uses OpenRC as their default init (but does have an option to use SystemD for folks who don’t realize how bad it is) and I might try installing it. I did a Gentoo install on the R.Pi some years back and it wasn’t too bad. (IIRC they start with a tarball and then you compile from sources most of the rest. There’s a huge number of “flags” you have to set to get it tailored right for a given system, though) I’d like to run BSD, as they will not be joining the parade of idiots to SystemD. Unfortunately, BSD has a much smaller developer base these days so can’t get ported to the gear I want to use in anything like reasonable time. (FreeBSD, last I looked, was still using v6 instructions and software floating point math on the R.Pi, for example. Yes, it works, and you didn’t need to make a new v7 port, but…. )
So SystemD makes for rapid spin-up of Virtual Servers in large data centers. Great for giant commercial clients with professional staff who don’t mind dealing with things like device names made of gibberish and spending a week learning what was diddled in the new release. That’s what Red Hat cares about. The home gamer who doesn’t want, or need, that and doesn’t have a week to sink into the tech changes with the next big release is not of interest to them. Obsoleting 30 years of accumulated documentation, books and experience? Just an opportunity to sell more stuff and classes (R.Hat gets big bucks from their “certification” program).
Oh Well.
Either a “big enough” community based fork will develop that’s comfortable to use, or it won’t, and life will go on. I know I’m in the edge case being on ARM not Intel and on new cheap SBCs, not large expensive commercial “home computers” or laptops; so at the end of the food chain. Worst case is that I just don’t bother buying new SBCs and use other more “supported” product.
But I doubt it will end up there. Devuan seems to be surviving. Gentoo is also sticking with OpenRC as their base. Slackware never left the BSD style init so you know they are not going to move (and Slackware has a fairly large following). With luck one of them will become a major “upstream” for other releases as Red Hat continues to distance themselves from The Unix Way…
Oh, and for folks who just want something to stick on a PC without a lot of fuss, folks like Ubuntu do a pretty good job of dealing with the crap layers and hiding it from the user experience. As long as you like their choices, and don’t mind their corporate behaviours (some information harvesting for example in their desktop – that ended up being rejected by the community…) it can still be easy to run a Linux on a home PC.
So Armbian / Ubuntu runs on the XU4 just fine. You get the decisions and choices made by Red Hat and Canonical (Ubuntu) but most of it is hidden from the casual user. It mostly just hits folks who don’t wish to be herded that way…
All you really need to know about Gretta:
The Actress and her Patron; This Drive to take power by the Communists is reaching a crescendo of noise and photo ops. Their world of slavery for the masses is in the balance as is ours of personal freedom. They know that they are losing the argument and must close the deal NOW by stampeding world leaders into selling out their constituents. The Scam of the Global Climate Catastrophic religion is about to go bust on major cooling already under way. The next question is can they pivot again? HUMANS are the cause of Global Ice Age!! WE must SAVE the world, Give us your money and allegiance. Only WE can save you from the Wrath of the Gods ! This line has been used for 10,000 years, will it work again? …pg
p.g.: “This line has been used for 10,000 years, will it work again? …pg”
“… and you can fool some of the people all of the time…”
~ A. Lincoln, I believe.
So yeah, it will still work, and with the destruction of our educational system by the Marxists, it may work on enough people next time. We’ll find out just how many people suddenly got some street smarts about scammers and grifters after the cold winds start to blow.
.
;
.
@E.M. – I’d heard about a photo of Greta with Soros but had not seen it until you posted it. Thanks for that one.
Hmmm this is interesting – would love to see a full length english publication of his observations.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/toplevel_climate_modeler_goes_rogue_criticizes_nonsense_of_global_warming_crisis.html
I don’t have a kindle so not very useful to me, anyone want to do a summary?
500 scientists write declaration that there is no climate emergency
https://www.breitbart.com/environment/2019/09/24/500-scientists-write-u-n-there-is-no-climate-emergency/
I am so glad that Judicial Watch is fighting the important fights that the political folks ignore.
Bet you did not see any coverage of this speech on the major media.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/trump-un-future-does-not-belong-globalists
Regarding Colorado electors…
Why would the state not copy their neighbors in Nebraska and break up the “winner take all” pot? Each congressional district gets an elector and the state as a whole gets 2 (for the Senate). No US constitutional issue at all. Maine does this too, I think.
It has the same effect. Keeps presidential candidates from bothering the state’s voters overmuch…
Pouncer – Maine has two congressional districts. Even if the Electors are split, it’s a rounding error.
Why would the state not copy their neighbors in Nebraska and break up the “winner take all” pot?
Because they don’t care about what the people want they know that the Denver Boulder Democrats will out vote the rest of the state and all our electors from then on will always be for the Democratic candidate. It is a way to back door neuter the electoral college and make the rural conservative counties of Colorado irrelevant.
How to catch cat fish in Florida
https://twitter.com/i/status/1176691553747841026
Greta Thunberg’s mother is an actress. She taught Greta to act. Then they concocted this story about how Greta complained about “climate change” so much that her parents became vegetarians. This entire s***show is staged and a lie. Typical of the left. That’s my hypothesis.
Interesting read.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/09/carbon_dioxide_known_only_since_1930.html
Reference the picture of Saint Greta with Soros:
https://fullfact.org/online/greta-thunberg-george-soros/
Looking at the picture with mark 1 eyeballs (somewhat degraded but still good) it does look photoshopped, so I’d expect the picture is false even though the thought behind it is probably true.
Source: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/09/24/a-line-by-line-response-to-greta-thunbergs-un-speech/#comment-2805474
Method to prevent use of smuggled cell phones in correctional institutions.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/national-telecommunications-and-information-administration-releases-report-effectiveness
It would make more sense to me to use a stingray like device and interrogate the phone for gps info or at least signal strength from several sensors to pin point the cell / location the call is coming from so the offender could be located and the contraband phone confiscated (or monitored to gather intelligence like who he was calling and where they were located.
Sometimes…..
So a few weeks ago the Odroid N2 would not boot. Into the box it went for “later” and I flowed around the problem and onto another board… While downloading some OS images for another board, saw a nice couple of alternatives for the N2, and remembering it had a “boot from SD” card switch (so I could boot from another OS there, and fix whatever was hanging in the regular boot on the emmc…) I spent a few hours getting a nice up to day 6 GB image onto an 8 GB SD card. Put it in. Switched over to boot from SD, and booted…
Right into their mini-boot shell. (think BIOS). WT? Not booting the new image?
After a few minutes poking around, decided to just try switching back to the emmc, and let it play with itself while I went to make coffee. “Maybe it’s just hung in a systemd service timer”… but I didn’t get to the coffee pot. It booted up relatively fast and launched Ubuntu.
So, why?
“Why? Don’t ask why. Down that path lies insanity and ruin.” -E.M.Smith
Only guess I’ve got is that maybe the selector switch was nudged a bit out of contact and cycling restored contact? I’ll ignore for now why I would not boot from the u-SD card as there are too many possibles…
I did run smack into the “Ubutnu doing things for me against my will” problem. There’s dozens of them to turn off. I suspect some auto-update “feature” is changing my OS as it is a little doggy for this fast hardware and an attempt to install “ubuntu-tweak” (so I can shut off the popcorn sound every time I open a menu and select items… ) says someone / something else has the apt locks.
I remember the last time I ran Ubuntu it had a very aggressive automation layer and wants you to just pretend to be an idiot and not interfere.
Well, at any rate, it’s working. I’m going to leave it plain Ubuntu Mate for now. Sometime later I may revisit the “alternative OS boot” feature / switch…
Another odd thing. FireFox is aggressively parallel on this board (perhaps on others and I just didn’t notice…) with over 35 processes spawned for a 4 tab open session. Clearly being a bit of a pig. It might be more than that but htop is open from top of screen to bottom and there may be more off the bottom of the page.
At first boot it was surprisingly doggy. IIRC that’s because t first boot Ubuntu runs off to Canonical and does a lot of chatty stuff. (Not my kind of OS…. I like my OS to only talk to me unless I give it permission….). We’ll see if it picks up a bit later.
I got tired of the R.Pi being just slow enough to be a bother, and the XU4 being “out of support” as Jessie at Armbian is now obsoleted. Tried the RockPro64 (and liked it!) but when I went to download a bunch of new OS images, found that the USB ports were not recognizing disks…. OK… So decided to work on getting the N2 going and fixing it. Now it’s going and doesn’t need fixing. Maybe it’s somtehing in the air.
I have had a couple of power blinks, but I’m on a UPS and a surge arrestor… and nothing crashed.
Well, enough rambling. I’m off to make dinner.
Maybe after that I’ll try some of the other OS images. I found a Slackware and a NetBSD for the XU4, so may just move to a whole different *nix that never has had SystemD stuff in it… ;-)
@Pouncer and Larry – Neither does Colorado have a US Constitutional issue. The US Constitution left the selection of the EC up to the individual States. Indeed, they can decide not to even have a vote (and some in the past did not – they were chosen by the legislature in early America).
I am not privy to the Colorado Constitution so there may be an issue there. But each state can select its electors any way they want according to the USC.
In a time when it took months to cross an ocean, I suspect the US Founding Fathers had no glimmer of an idea the global CF that could and would materialize in our time.
A good overview of Iran’s current military capability in cruise missiles which has largely been ignored. With in their sphere of influence they appear to be developing an effective local strike capability.
https://warontherocks.com/2019/09/under-the-radar-irans-cruise-missile-capabilities-advance/
Well, part of the mystery solved… The letters MMC are next to one side of the switch, but that’s also where the mmc chip is located. Except THATS the side that uses the uSD card…
So, OK, it IS booting from the new uSD image and the OS on the emmc is not right… I replaced the stuff in /boot but it’s still not right. I’d not configured this system hardly at all, so blowing it away and doing a new install on the emmc is “reasonable”. Bit of a surprise to know that the emmc was so fragile with the bits that it just lost some somewhere and doesn’t boot anymore…
So, mystery solved, sort of. eMMC lost some bits. Need new install to it. Or maybe I’ll just keep running from the uSD card (as it is much easier to replace / backup / etc.) and put active partitions like /tmp and /var on the eMMC and call it done ;-)
In any case, now I know…
@Jim2:
Oh, I think they knew about CFs. Look how much care they put into strangling governmental power at the center. They also clearly knew even that would be subject to attack “A republic, IF you can keep it.”. They knew of Empires…
@Larry L:
We’re at the point where a drone the size of go-kart can carry a nuke and be a small radar signature, while going to within 10 feet of goal….
Oh, and yeah, they ought to just set up the miniature cell tower decoy gear, capture the call, and GPS their ass when they have al the intel…
Ah, on the N2 the boot process is a ‘3 way’ with a branch to the “Petitboot” boot loader being one side of the slide switch and the other, labeled MMC, gives you the MMC if it is present with a boot image OR the uSD card as the second choice.
https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-n2/software/boot_sequence
So for some reason it thinks the MMC card isn’t bootable but does boot the uSD card.
So that’s why you must put it on MMC to get to the uSD card. But you only get to it if the MMC Card is not installed, or doesn’t boot.
It also points to what’s most likely the bits that are bad. Not some random stuff but the boot image or boot.ini / bootloader bits.
Redacted whistleblower complaint
Let’s try that again: https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/20190812_-_whistleblower_complaint_unclass.pdf
Well the next socialist push has started with AOC leading the charge.
This short video clip is her introduction to 5 bills and a resolution that enable a full on socialist economy.
It all sounds good on the surface but the uninformed will not anticipate how this will be manipulated to facilitate big government intrusion in every aspect of society.
https://twitter.com/kbq225/status/1177296489820971009
We already have a “Just Society” – it is called equal opportunity and all you need to do is find your niche and work hard and you can get out of poverty easier here than in any country on the planet.
Old article but worth re-reading in view of the last few years of behavior by the hard left overlords of data like Google
https://twitter.com/i/status/1174203127358271488
Ooops wrong link but in a weird way applicable.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/23andme-is-terrifying-but-not-for-the-reasons-the-fda-thinks/
My sibling talked me into sending in my spit. I would rather not have done it, especially now that I know that Jeffrey Epstein maintained his own DNA database. :-P
I wonder if he was connected with the other collectors of DNA data?
I also have trouble shaking the thought that, what with the huge shortage of organs for transplants, these DNA databases could help someone decide that you had the perfect replacement organ for someone they knew who was rich enough to pay for it, whether you were willing to give it up, or not.
I used to think that checking the “organ donor” box was an OK thing to do. Now I’m not so sure.
https://twitter.com/systemdsucks?lang=en
https://suckless.org/sucks/systemd/
79 Linux distros that don’t use systemd:
https://distrowatch.com/search.php?ostype=Linux&category=All&origin=All&basedon=All¬basedon=None&desktop=All&architecture=All&package=All&rolling=All&isosize=All&netinstall=All&language=All&defaultinit=Not+systemd&status=Active#simple
@Power Grab – why didn’t your sibling send in THEIR spit? Think about it. The only people that you can be assured of having the SAME percentage of neapolitan ice cream are your siblings.
@Jim2:
Looks like someone else has been having SystemD (D for Demented…) issues ;-)
Thanks for reminding me to look at the Distrowatch list of non-SystemD systems again. I had no idea it has ballooned up to 79. Looks like a lot more folks are getting the idea ;-)
Also found the image of Tux and Tux on SystemD amusing ;-)
FWIW, I’ve managed to recover the Odroid N2 eMMC boot. What was wrong? A silly thing…
Last time I has used it, months ago, I had mounted a couple of hard disks on it. And then forgot to remove the entry from /etc/fstab so at boot, it tried to fsck them. A Very Normal Failure that usually shows up in the boot process and drops you into a “give root passwd for maintenance” along with a message that it couldn’t fine the disk. However…
As shipped, Ubuntu hides the boot process and never presents that to you. It is likely on a serial console somewhere (as if anyone still has serial consoles other than Unix Devs…). In any case, it sits and hangs “forever” waiting for that password on the serial console that never comes.
Looking around, I found a patch you can apply to get the console on HDMI during boot….
Yeah, when your system can’t boot, just boot it up and apply a patch to find out why it can’t boot…
Ah, well, I’ve recovered it now.
Root Cause: My being silly and repurposing some disks, and forgetting to clean up fstab.
Contributing Cause: Stupid boot process hiding console.
Fix: New OS on uSD card, booting to where I could figure it out. (which would be easier with text logs not needing some binary reading magic tools from SystemD…)
Sigh.
Maybe I’ll just put Armbian on it. Armbian lets you see the boot process if you ask it nicely…
(As very new hardware the OS choices are still fairly limited. I have the “factory” provided Ubuntu on the eMMC card and was hoping to not get into the whole painful process of reflashing eMMC. Yeah, Odroid has tools to let yo do it, but it isn’t like you just dd an image to it… there are some magic bits in an invisible sector at the front… at least, that’s how it reads in the descriptions…)
Oh, and loved that thread about how a DBUS message can crash the system ;-) Never saw the point of dbus….
Well, with that, I’ve (finally) completed my task for the last couple of days of “Get the Odroid N2 working again” and can proceed with “What’s next?” ;-)
I just need to remember that it is “console hostile” and doesn’t like having disks not attached once added to fstab…
Now I’m off for a more complete browse of that list of SystemD Free Systems ;-)
It can be fun to watch awareness gradually spread over folks… and more than a tiny bit gratifying to see my original instinct from first contact with SystemD being fulfilled in practice…
I was kind of eyeballing the Slackware entry …
Daniel Horowitz
@RMConservative
·
All the while not voting on a single bill about criminal aliens, identity theft, sanctuary cities, shielding localities from the cost of the border surge. We simply don’t matter.
Quote Tweet
Mickey Kaus
@kausmickey
Is Breitbart the only outfit covering this major immigration bill now sluicing to passage? It’d give all tech green cards to Indians & Chinese for years-will “allow US investors to annually recruit hundreds of thousands of Indian graduates” to fill US jobs https://breitbart.com/politics/2019/09/25/s…impression=true
MAGA! I say Horseshit! We’ve been conned. Wake up.
The SELL OUT is by both parties. Impeachment, blah, blah, blah is just for the Show, as the Corrupt Show must go on.
From a private board
@Jim2:
I’ve run Slackware and it’s a decent distribution. I’ll likely try it on a newer platform again. I was always fond of the old version 7 / BSD init style (rc.d) and found System V init kind of an artificial construct to make System V “different” for no good reason just so AT&T could get new license terms.
At present I’m juggling Gentoo vs Slackware (OpenRC vs rc.d) and both look pretty good. I think I’ll need to take the plunge on them and see which works and what’s hard to make go…
I still love Devuan on the R. Pi and PC. It goes in slick and just works. Unfortunately, they seem to not put nearly as much effort into other board types… I know they are a very small new start-up operation and as an all volunteer gig, well, if I really want the XU4 version fixed I could “contribute”… But I have other priority things I’m doing. So need to narrow my focus more to the whole Climate Fraud thing and away from Sysprog Linux Dev areas.
So, Oh Well.
I’ll use Devuan anywhere it “just works”, and find an alternative SystemD free distro for my other boards “as time permits”. Then run a SystemD afflicted distribution in those cases where that’s the only alternative (short of DIY building…), Mostly that will be entirely a choice between Armbian (that I like more than Ubuntu) and Ubuntu (that ships from the “maker” more often).
Basically, for SBCs where I’m willing to just run it as an “information appliance” and don’t do much configuration nor work on it much, I’m willing to just let it be SystemD until it bites me (they I rip it’s brain out and put in one not quite so insane ;-)
Devuan is fine on PC type hardware, so it’s the default there, no question. Ditto the R. Pi boards. Just drops in and works great. So it’s almost entirely the “odd duck” cases of low volume SBCs where the OS becomes an issue and I’m off in experimental land. Hopefully Devuan will get more resources over time and do the “typical” expansion of quality and board coverage.
So, summary table of preferences:
1) Devuan – great on PCs & R.Pi
2) Other non-SystemD TBD – Slackware vs Gentoo candidates at present.
3) SystemD OS from Vendor or Armbian – usually Ubuntu from vendors
4) “Whatever it takes” or experimental or special purpose. That router on the Pi original ;-)
Usual new board entry point is #3, then I try to get higher on the list…
Hi, chiff. Long time no see. Good to see you out and about.
Yeah, my wife mentioned that there was movement towards increasing H1-B visas. Unfortunately, your link went to the main page at Breitbart and not to the article. I was interested in more info on that topic.
Anyhow, the US Chamber of Commerce, which is the lobbying group for the big globalist multi-nationals, is no doubt spreading the love and the $$$$$$$$$$$$ to get this passed. The CoC is also paying both parties to stall immigration reform that would in any way stall the illegals coming in through our Southern border.
I haven’t heard President Trump’s stance on this. If the bill is going to give away too much of the store and cost a lot of American jobs, and the bill is stuffed with all sorts of unrelated add-ons because nothing has been going through Congress, then one would think President Trump might veto the bill.
I know President Trump wants controlled immigration as he is expecting that we’ll need more workers if businesses come back to America from overseas. I don’t know his views on this particular bill.
A long – but quite interesting – read: https://theamericanreport.org/2019/09/27/the-real-whistleblower-story-dennis-montgomery-the-hammer-the-hard-drives-the-wiretapping-of-trump-and-the-prosecution-of-general-flynn/
I public service announcement! ;-)
https://mobile.twitter.com/Ffs_OMG
Well that didn’t see to work from a phone. 2nd chance?
https://mobile.twitter.com/Ffs_OMG/status/1177175525342765057
In astronomical news:
NASA observes a star being torn apart by a black hole.
(animation of the event from the data gathered)
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nasa-black-hole-star-image-visualization-simulation-swallowing-planet-transiting-exoplanet-survey-satellite/
@ philjourdan:
My sibling sent in spit first. Then paid for the rest of us siblings to send ours in. IIRC it was supposed to be a Christmas present.
I think one of the motivators was to see if it would document the Choctaw, Cherokee, and Iroquois ancestry we are supposed to have. The story was that our ancestors didn’t want to be on the Dawes Rolls, so it’s hard to document our bloodline.
I was not surprised that the reports made no mention of that. From my ex’s dealings with renting tribal lands, and how hard it was to find the owners so he could pay them, and other observations relative to their data at work, I got the feeling their people prefer to stay off the white man’s radar to the extent possible. So I figure if they don’t contribute spit to the databases, they won’t be treated as a big enough part of the landscape to show up on reports.
One interesting thing was that only one sibling was said to have evidence of a Far Eastern connection. That sibling was the one who spent a few years in a Far Eastern country.
Then when I read articles that said a large proportion of your genetics are found in your microbiome, I figured that probably accounted for the Far Eastern connection for that one sibling.
@H.R. – The flood of illegals into white countries is UN policy (Agenda 21/2030, Coudenhove-Kalergi), so unless Trump has explicitly withdrawn the US from all contact with the UN and its evils you will find it continues apace. I keep pointing out to fellow Brexit voters that leaving the EU won’t make any difference in that direction in the UK, but usually just get accused of being a “conspiracy theorist” for mentioning Agenda 21. (Sigh)
Love that Britainfirst link above re the beach patrols. Next step, decent nightsights …
@Power Grab – Interesting! I had not heard that. And it makes me wonder how accurate those 23 and me reports are.
As for me, I did it the old fashion way (well, my Uncle did – he picked up genealogy when he retired and traced my father’s side back to the British isles and a smidge of Cherokee). I traced my mother’s side back to Arcadia and Haiti.(when they emigrated to NOLA after the uprising).
So I do not know 100% of my ancestry. But enough to know I am mostly Frog and Brit with a small percentage of African and American as well. Might have some other stuff. But hard to get records before 1800. (I do know that one ancestor was born on the trip to Jamestown in 1611, but then emigrated back to England, before returning to NE. Where the family tree splits with part going to NC and GA, and the part that stayed in NE invented the – get this – Frisbee! I am from the part that came south).
The part I really enjoy about the tracing of genealogy is learning about who the people were. In the late 19th and early 20th century, my fathers side consisted of 2 main types – preachers and bootleggers!
So give me a stiff shot and say a blessing over it :-)
@Ossqss:
That’s a good one!
@PhilJourdan:
So my family were running your family booze in our ships? ;-)
For a while I’d been fond of saying I was a mix of English, Irish, German and French (just a minor fraction of French on Dad’s side) as a Euro-Mutt. Then I started tracing some of that further back. The German were Amish, from Switzerland… but the Swiss Amish originated in the Netherlands (when it was Germany).. So eventually I realized that all my ancestors came from a few hundred miles along both sides of the English Channel… “They’ve met”… But had to separate across Europe and then cross the Atlantic to meet again in me…
Even the Irish portion originated in the area of Spain that was Celtic. So It’s Iberian & French Celts, and Anglo-Saxon / Vikings further up the way. All along that Atlantic Coast of Europe. All along that one sailing route.
Lots of sailing ancestry (at least 3 generations we can trace), along with smithing (obviously and smiths typically also made their own beer used to keep cool while working ;-) even on their own farms, as it’s a thirsty business) and only part of the time were some of them Summoners Before The Crown “Sumner” royal ‘bounty hunters’ basically… A fairly physical lot, but also in crafts that take a fair bit of thinking too.
Turns out the Spouse has a similar mix of English, Irish and French. Her Grandmother was the nanny charged with taking the Belgian Royal Children across the channel to England to escape the WW.1 invasion and did so in a small boat while the fireworks were starting. So a connection as “servants to royals” on her side too. Later the King & Queen came to the Firestone Estate (where the spousal family worked in later years) and they had tea together ;-)
I guess we’re just compulsively loyal and like helping others… Wonder if Trump could use a “summoner” or nanny ;-)
As a sidebar: Part of what makes the Serioso insults so mindless is the long family history on both sides of Service in positions requiring honesty, loyalty, and fealty to truth. You don’t have that without a strong family ethos for it… Sometimes I think it may be a genetic trait it’s so strong. Remember that the Smith was also the maker of locks, keys, and “chastity belts” so had to be an honest and honorable person if you were to have any faith in the locks. Though there is the ‘inside joke’ of calling the ‘skeleton key’ the “blacksmith’s wife” ;-) Yeah, my ancestry has included locksmiths and lock picking for generations… I’ve just moved into the digital age ;-)
@EM – sorry. When I said “bootlegger”, I meant ridge runner. As in,they transporter the moonshine. Some may have run the imports, but the ones I have heard about were just the “Uncle Jessies and Boss Hoggs”. My Great-great grandfather and Great grandfather (my grandmother’s father and grandfather) were arrested and convicted of the crime. You can actually find the court records under the name of “Boots Williams”.
When my Uncle told me the story,he was hesitant at first as he was unsure how I would take it. As you can see, I am not embarrassed, and actually am proud of them in a family sort of way. After all, they are recorded in history!
@phil – Who could be ashamed of any ancestor who spit in the face of taxation? @#%! Revenoors!
Awesome! Embrace it… own it!
Who shouldn’t have the freedom to make a little hooch? Nunnuva the dam gubmints bidness.
@Phil:
Nothing to be sorry about! I was just making a joke of the family shipping connection. I’d pretty much figured you were talking about a land operation (though there was a Canada / USA boat run off shore – but my side was out of England so not involved… that I know of ;-) “The Real McCoy” comes from the name of a shipper / bootlegger that was known for real Canadian booze and not fake stuff…
So I’m with H.R. on this one. Your family was just carrying on the Whiskey Rebellion ;-)
This is amusing (not)!
Can you say fatal flaw?
https://brassballs.blog/home/cia-and-fbi-and-hillary-clinton-use-crowdstrike-software-to-tap-and-collect-and-sell-surveillance-information
@Larry I put up a link yesterday about how it was really HAMMER – and not the 702’s – that was the foundation upon which the coup plot was based.
“Why Haven’t the Tropics Warmed Much? A Tantalizing Piece of Evidence”
@HR and EM – Yep! Whatever rebellion, I am for it!
I should note that my Uncle is a lib, so he probably thought it was not PC. And on the lib side, it is not. But then I do not give a s—.
@ philjourdan:
“Preachers and bootleggers” huh?
Hmmm…my grandmother told me that her father was the one who donated the land for the first church (likely Methodist) in their territory. On the contrary, her husband had a strong tendency toward drunkenness. I was pretty old when they finally told me there were times when my dad (her only child) had to go visit them for a while to dry him out. All I knew was that I never saw my parents drink.
I hadn’t realized before how much conflict the contrast between her sainted father and her drunkard husband might have caused.
Other things she told me about her father were that he liked to use modern stuff. He was the first one in the county with a tractor. He also used carbide gas lights in the house. There was a container of water outside the house, and they suspended a chunk of carbide over the water. One evening they were getting ready to host a party and he was making sure they had plenty of carbide. Well, it dropped in the water and exploded. It didn’t kill him right away, but it didn’t take that long. Grandmother was 10 years old.
I understand the Kennedys made their fortune bootlegging.
Going round the pipeline blockade
“First solid bitumen test shipment on its way from Alberta to China”
HAS BOM STUFFED UP ?
It’s been a while since we focussed on climate here. So Here is an update of the investigation of BOM’s entire weather station network here in Australia.
////////
The Bureau of Meteorology ( BOM ) is saying that Australia’s climate is warming up due to climate change. It bases that view on the temperature records from it’s network of over 700 weather stations all over Australia.( As Roy Spenser’s website points out Satellite evidence does not support any evidence of a major warming. Ummmm ? )
But are these 700+ weather stations recording the temperature correctly ?
In June outside on the lawn of my garden I had 8 days of continuous frosts. My house is on a hill and usually cold air flows down away from my place, Frosts are rare ! But it was a cold Wintery June.
I went & looked on the BOM’s weather station webpage for Mt Barker. It said that there were just three days of frost in June with two of them continuous :
http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/ncc/cdio/weatherData/av…
Even more very puzzling
I then actually looked at where the BOM’s Mt. Barker weather station is located. I found out to my surprise, it is just 150 meters away, in the front garden of a neighbour’s place. Now that was a big surprise.
Even more surprising, the temperature gauge is on a raised mound and a couple of meters from a house with an A/C unit on the wall. There is also a high fence and another house over the fence; and there are lots of shrubs & trees.
The BOM’s own guidelines for ensuring accurate temperature records were being completely ignored !
I went and took some photos of it. I sent them to a mate in Qld named Ken who is interested in such things and does a blog about the weather & climate.
And he did a blog post about the Mt Barker BOM weather station. You can read it and see my photos, here: https://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/…/the-wacky-world-of-we…/…
That was back in July. Since then Ken has been, on an unpaid basis, been checking the BOM’s network of 700 weather stations; one or two a day for over two months. So far Ken has found 118 weather stations in SA, Vic. Tasmania, NSW & Qld, which are not compliant with BOM’s own guidelines. That amounts to 25% of the ones he has checked so far.
I have been looking over Ken’s posts each day as he makes them for the past two months as well. And checking out the locations and adding comments where appropriate or needed.
And there are still over 300 BOM stations to go.
But one thing is plain. Without accurate temperature readings from it’s network the BOM cannot make any accurate scientific statements about global warming or climate change.
The fact that it is doing so indicates a level of hubris and incompetence which is not acceptable to Australian all the tax payers who fund it.
Bill
@Larry L:
That brassballs link is interesting, thorough, and distressing.
Does explain why the DNC only wanted them to see their server…. and why Trump named them…
@Ilanfar:
Finally got time to read that link. My worst worries confirmed… I basically try to never use email for just that sort of reason…and it is why I do things like rotating what systems are used. Always be a moving target and repeatedly doing full new installs of open source os builds and avoid the nearly black box of systemd.
This paragraph does seem to explain how Roberts turned left…
Might also explain how the CIA complaint had such perfect timing. Not heard around the water cooler, but via the HAMMER tap…then embellished.
@Bill in Oz:
Yeah, the Brexit and Dims Follies have deflected my focus lately. That, and every so often infrastructure must be tended. So a few days went into figuring out the issue with the Odroid N2 SBC (that really was just a silly fogotten config issue by me). And the XU4 being out of support software with Devuan on it not working (despite being fine on the PC and R.Pi) So at some point I need to do a trial install of Slackware and / or Gentoo on it. Not exactly good posting material…
I wanted to get newer faster hardware in play for the updated sql / Python database system. So things kind of backed up behind that.
Sound like your friend is doing an Australian version of the WUWT station audit. Good!
It’s been a fun day here on the Chiefo’s Blog. Lot’s of topics covered. Good insights on politics, ‘Climate Change’, gub’mint, football!, rum running, Serioso v2.3.8, genetics, and… I know I’ve missed more than a few.
My thanks to all and now I’m off to beddy-bye, perchance to dream.
Here is a fairly concise description of what THE HAMMER is/was.
It has been well known for a long time that this sort of thing was in the works, only news here is the given name used for it and a very brief outline of what it was doing.
(basically it is/was a system for pushing browser exploits etc. to targeted computer devices)
Interesting that some of this info actually comes out of Sheriff Arapio’s investigation of the Obama birth certificate case.
“White House Considering Block or Restrictions on U.S. Investments in China…”
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/09/28/white-house-considering-block-or-restrictions-on-u-s-investments-in-china/#more-172257
One of the founders of Wikipedia broke off and started a new on-line encyclopedia called Everipedia. His problem with Wikipedia is that some contributors there play a social game in order to dominate the content.
Everipedia uses block chain technology to create IQ Tokens used as a reward for contributing. Token holders can vote on content, so social games are more difficult to play.
I searched on “climate change” It is comprehensive in that many lines of evidence are presented, but still tilts toward catastrophic climate changes.
There is a link to “1,000 year temperature record”. In that, it mentions the Mann-McIntyre controversy, but gets the facts wrong concerning McIntyre’s finding, classifying them as merely a statistical problem, not a totally flawed method (the hockey stick generator).
Nevertheless, it has a lot of potential to be better than Wikipedia.
https://everipedia.org/about
Minor note from the Sysadmin “not paranoid when they are out to get you” department.
I’ve had some odd timeouts and a dropped connection to the blog the last few days. Aligning nicely with the C I A discussion…. and the Serioso comments.
Now most likely, up around 95%, it is just heavy web traffic, some maintenance activity, or hackers doing some kind of dds games. But… It IS quite curious. The ChromeBox has taken to frequently not understanding my correctly typed password on the first try. That’s a signature of a pasword harvesting hack (but can be bad typing or keyboard…).
Or maybe the sun did it
Some of the slow and drops are with no TV running, so about 100 times more bandwidth available than needed. In some cases it could be the proxy server having issues, but it also has happened on a non-proxy connection. And at night west coast time when general net traffic is low (but maintenance cycles are higher).
So could be nothing, probably is normal junk (maintenance, bugs, hacks), but I’ll be on higher alert for a while and will be retreading and rebuilding some parts of the kit. As both the tablet and Chomebox are EOL on software so no more security updates, it is likely time to retire them or move them to Linux.
FWIW I’d never seen “connection dropped” to the blog before last night, nor the delays on some page loads to the extent now. So “something is different”.
Not quite ready to do a full rebuild from secure build box. I want more monitoring data and examination first. But maybe soon.
So if suddenly I seem like a different person start worrying :-)
My grandson and I have also noticed problems with our connections of late. specially yesterday and early last night. We are running Wintel boxes because of our software needs, but that seems to be coming to a deadend. …pg
I have also noticed the web being a bit slow to load pages etc. the last few days, not just on your blog.
Interesting reference here:
https://twitter.com/HarveyStaub1/status/1169326989930577920
“Big Gov Octopus squeezes Russia into sending very mixed messages”
http://joannenova.com.au/2019/09/big-gov-octopus-squeezes-russia-into-sending-very-mixed-messages/
“Mark it in your diary. Straight answer coming:
In fact, when asked if embracing the Paris pact means Putin now agrees with the scientific consensus on the primary cause of planetary heating, his spokesman was unusually blunt:
“No,” Dmitry Peskov said by text message.”
Would you believe?
“‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Author Claims Warming Oceans Will Cause Traffic Accidents.
“Because if the ocean warms too much, the marine algae that makes 60% to 80% of the oxygen we breathe will die and we’ll choke to death.”
“We’ll have a lot of traffic accidents first because our brains will be oxygen-starved . . .”
I’ve got news for you sweetie — your brain has already been oxygen-starved. I’d stay away from warm algae if I were you.
https://dailycaller.com/2019/09/20/handmaids-tale-author-warming-oceans-cause-traffic-accidents/
”
http://joannenova.com.au/2019/09/weekend-unthreaded-279/#comment-2196715
So much for melting glaciers in glacier national park.
September blizzard is pounding Montana. In some areas snow fall is being measured in feet.
https://weather.com/forecast/regional/news/2019-09-25-september-blizzard-montana-northern-rockies-snow
Montana snow reports
Stuck in the snow, waiting for a tractor to pull him out.
https://twitter.com/rbgibbfarms/status/1178344724802834433
Another opinion
“Why I hate Subaru”
https://www.redpowermagazine.com/forums/topic/124829-why-i-hate-subaru/
When I view this blog using Chrome, I have been seeing images flash on momentarily, then disappear.
The image with this comment flashed and disappeared:
Larry Ledwick says:
29 September 2019 at 7:40 pm
The image with this comment flashed and disappeared also:
Larry Ledwick says:
30 September 2019 at 5:22 am
However, when I view it with Internet Explorer or Edge, the images stay visible.
I’m not really seeing a different in speed
Those are both images from twitter, so sounds like Google Chrome is playing games with twitter images, might want to check your settings. Works fine on Dissenter which is a fork of chrome.
Wow talk about double think and – this is an article that was tweeted out by Jack Dorsey CEO of twitter. He presented this to those in the left to help them maintain the mirage that Trump is failing and the Democrats are winning and the champions that will carry the US to a prosperous new future.
It is actually more like a push poll trotting out a fairy tale view of the Country that they can use to convince their fellow leftists that they are the white knights (Oops is that racist?) riding to the rescue of our troubled country.
It paints a glowing picture of California as a dynamic and forward looking leader in the charge into a new century, when it is in fact swirling the drain and about to undergo an historic collapse that will make the Detroit experience look like a dress rehearsal.
Read it carefully and understand that many of the Left really believe this delusional tale.
View this collection on Medium.com
He gets a few things right, the chasm between the hard left / communist Democratic party and Trumps overhauled Republican party is no longer amenable to compromise, because that both sides share some common ground. Unfortunately the hard Left is 180 deg out of phase with the Democratic Constitutional Republic we were given by the founders and if their vision prevails the Republic and rule of law collapses into a dark and distopian clone of the worst aspects of the 20th centuries totalitarian socialist empires.
Hmmmm while reading that other topic above I stumbled on another Medium article (caution you only get a limited number of free views).
Elon Musk and Tesla are filing patents on a “million mile battery” which charges fast and does not have the internal crystal cracking failures of current batteries.
https://marker.medium.com/tesla-may-have-invented-a-million-mile-electric-car-battery-c3c11cc76d84
Based on the text of the warning, the 3-article limit should reset tonight.
I’m betting they won’t have a production version of any battery described in a patent or academic paper in a year. When it is scaled up and cycled, we’ll see what happens. I don’t trust Musk. He is crazy and has made a string of bad business decisions. I especially don’t like supporting him with subsidies funded by my taxes.
If you never heard of it, now you have. Scorigami? 2 new ones this weekend……
https://nflscorigami.com/
The earth and the moon viewed through a gap in the rings of Saturn from the Cassini space craft.
Might want to blow up the image a bit in a viewer to see the moon.
Per The Magic Battery:
Following the link to the Scribd paper (where you can read the first page) it looks like a standard LiMgCo / carbon battery with the big claim to fame being some kind of Artificial Graphite. (isn’t most of it?) but one made with / as a “single crystal”.
So, OK… since THE problem is dendrite formation from the metal outward puncturing the membrane and shorting to the carbon, how does that fix it? Yeah, it might give more cycles on the intercalcated carbon degrading issue that slows charge rates and eventually reduces capacity; but it does nothing about the eventual self-shorting Flaming Batteries Batman! problem…
I don’t really care if I can charge it in 20 minutes and do so for 5 years if that just results in a higher percentage of Flaming Cars as the dendrites get more time and depth of cycle to grow.
@Another Ian:
Per Subaru Brakes:
I did my own. It took a couple of hours on a Saturday in the driveway. IIRC $240 for ALL rotors and pads all around.( I bought the more expensive rotors that don’t rust as easily…).
I’m thrilled with that.
For the Mercedes, it costs about 2 x as much (aftermarket parts, make it 4 to 8 times as much for OEM parts) and is a MUCH harder job. Had to buy a piston compressor tool to get it done. If done by the shop, ti’s about $1000. (“only” $500 if you just do one axel…)
As pointed out in the article: You have a choice of rotors / materials and the ones that rust fast are the cheep Chinese ones. It isn’t about Subaru, it’s about road salt and cheap parts.
But, frankly, at $240 (or about 60 gallons of gas in California…) it just isn’t a big deal. I’d rather do the brakes on the Subaru than tune up the Banana Boat. (Required special “claw foot” wrenches to adjust the valves).
@Per N2 / Ubuntu Follies:
So I hanged the /etc/fstab as I’d removed a disk, and rebooted…. and it didn’t. So I’m back in dead land.
Digging into it, SystemD is “special”. At boot time it looks at /etc/fstab and builds “Unit files” (so fstab is “only a suggestion”), which it didn’t do right, so now it won’t boot again as it is fiddling with disks that don’t exist. Found a 2014 reference to it hanging on boot if you have NFS or CIFS file mounts ( I have those too).
So the idea of “Well, I’ll just leave the vendor Ubuntu / SystemD in place” would seem to be a non-starter… Don’t know where the bug is, or what it would take to fix it, and don’t care anymore. I’ll be installing some other OS onto it later today.
So this is being posted from the R. Pi M3 on Devuan that just seems to always work, even if a bit slowly.
So I decided to try One Last Thing before “moving on”. I’d turned a disk entry from auto to noauto and removed the disk. This works FINE everywhere else on the planet.
But what if I just entirely removed that entry? Commented it out? Might that let SystemD have an easier time with it’s “unit file” creation step?
Yup.
This works:
while this hangs the boot:
Typically I have a definition for each of the disks I commonly move from system to system with “noauto” specified. and “0 0” for the fsck setting. No fsck, no mount, no problem.
Stick a disk in, you don’t get them automounted /mount/user/blah-de-blah and cluttering your desktop, but can just mount them manually as needed.
Seems this gives SystemD a belly ache and it can’t boot.
Just wrong.
But at least I have the N2 working again (this is from it).
But I’m sorry, I’m tired of dealing with this kind of pernicious crap. It’s just wrong. I’m off to explore options…
(But at least now you know what to watch out for and ‘here there be dragons”…)
I’m missing the difference in the fstab listings, other than some extra spaces. What’s the diff?
The “#” at the start of the lines that makes them a comment instead of an “active” line that ought not do anything (noauto 0 0 ) but confuses the Ubuntu SystemD.
Being an active line, but noauto 0 0 works on every other Linux I’ve got. Not on this Ubuntu… Drove me crazy for a while too since, as you’ve noticed, not much looks different at all (and it ought not be…)
FWIW, this is being posted from the N2 Odroid using Armbian / Buster. So far, nice. Still has systemD but they seem to debug things better. I’ve not tested that particular failure on it (yet) as it requires moving the uSD to another system (booting…) to fix it and I want to get something done today ;-)
THE biggest advantage so far is that it lets you see the boot-up process and dumps you into a “Ctl-D to continue or root passwd for maintenance” panel so maybe, just maybe, you can a) see what went wrong and b) fix it without moving the uSD card to another system to edit files…
So with that, I’m going to finish the “moving in” process a little bit (home dirs, particular programs) make a backup copy of this uSD, live on it for a while, and then decide if I want to try flashing the eMMC or not.
I’ve not yet found a copy of Slackware or Gentoo for the Odroid N2, so I’m likely to swap over to the XU4 later on to try them. We’ll see how much other stuff I get done.
For now, this at least works and is fairly familiar ( I’m running Armbian on at least 3 other systems, though usually with a Devuan “uplift”, but that “uplift” is only from Jessie and Jessie is now archived / EO Support.) The Organge Pi that’s my NFS server is just straight Armbian as it just need to boot and do NFS.
So on something familiar, that seems a bit more technical oriented, and lets me know when the boot fails and gives a chance to fix it. That’s some degree of progress ;-)
Well, now I’m much happier ;-)
Just added a test line with “noauto 0 0” to the /etc/fstab in Armbian and it worked, surviving the reboot just fine.
Note the lack of a “#” in front. So this SG2/ext mount is an active line, but it says to NOT automatically mount the disk and with the “0 0” says “and don’t worry about doing an fsck in the boot process or hanging because the disk isn’t there”.
So now with Armbian it works like it is supposed to work.
That means it is a bug in Ubnutu’s SystemD (or they think that’s an ok thing to do..) where the Armbian folks fixed it (or know how things are supposed to work ;-)
Bottom line is that Armbian is “livable” on the N2 where Ubuntu was just painful due to the sporadic failure to launch hangs in booting.
Hmmm looks like BLexit is gaining ground even black lives matters realizes the Clinton’s are just using them for photo ops but not doing anything that they need.
Just maybe these folks will realize the “systemic racism” they complain about is mostly in the far left and Democratic party communities.
https://americanactionnews.com/articles/breaking-black-lives-matter-issues-shocking-statement-about-the-clintons
Ahhh now it is clear what the game plan is.
Former President Obama is producing a $90 million dollar Net Flicks series on “President Trump’s Impeachment”
https://twitter.com/kbq225/status/1178670045372788736
The Obama / Net Flicks deal should be renamed American Pravda.
Apparently the NYT put that story out as satire – – – – but I have my doubts it really is satire.
We will see what actually hits the air.
Having composed Unix shell scripts before, I already knew # begins a commented line. What I can’t explain is why the brain didn’t “see” it. Oh well.
@Jim2:
Because you were looking for something significant and substantial… while the real issue is a piddly stupid bug…
Hey, it took me weeks to figure it all out, so don’t ding yourself! ;-)
BTW, it’s amazing what a difference a Linux Release can make. On the N2, now, it’s blindingly fast, not having that “doggy moment” when it first starts up and Ubuntu “phones home”, doesn’t have that slow boot, doesn’t have the non-boot if you touched /etc/fstab, doesn’t force you into a slime-green login screen, knows what Chromium is (on the Ubuntu version I couldn’t get it to find an chromium to install), AND I was able to turn off IPv6 fairly quickly using “armbian-config” where it’s a check box.
I just wish I’d done this a few weeks / months ago ;-)
Any Linux can be good or bad. IMHO it mostly depends on how much the vendor puts time into performance tuning, bug squashing, and Q.A. checking. Then there’s a chunk about “performance porting”. Things like using the GPU for math when possible and using the full 64 bit width for instructions and data instead of “cheaping it” and just sticking with v7 32 bit (or worse, that BSD that runs v6 16 bit instructions… on a 64 bit CPU…)
So it isn’t really fair to say it is an “Ubuntu” bug. It is a bug in This Vendor / Version of Ubuntu. And the fact that Canonical Ubuntu clearly tunes up everything expecting Intel Arch and doesn’t care at all about ARM chips, while ARMbian is 100% about tuning for ARM chips.
So with that out of the way:
I now have a very nice platform running in the Armbian “Buster” Odroid N2. Next up will be installing it to the eMMC card. (The board has both an eMMC and a uSD slot so you can have both). I’d ordered it with the “Pre-installed Ubuntu on eMMC” figuring that would be the most trouble free way to go. I was wrong…
Interesting to note: Most of the time the CPUSs are cruzing at 666 MHz for the 4 BIG ones 4 x A73 loafing and with the 2 x A53 cores at 999 MHz. Then it will burst the A53 cores up to 1.9 GHz when I do something and occasionally the A73 cores hit 999 MHz and then even more rarely will blip to 1.8 GHz.
Clearly it’s got a lot of left over OOMPH! for me to put to use ;-)
Chromium is 100% zero waiting, even when a video is playing, and I’ve had none of the “strange problems” trying to get sound to work. Just launched a video and it worked. (Hopefully it stays that way over time ;-)
Needless to say I’m MUCH happier with the board than I’ve been at any time since I bought it. What a difference an OS makes….
Living in the state, I of course heard about this – https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/sep/30/hoax-girl-who-accused-white-boys-cutting-dreadlock/
But my first reaction was the correct one. I said – wait a couple days and see if it turns out to be a hoax.
Wolf! Wolf! Thank you Smollett.
Hmmmm is this Trump pay back for Googles behavior or based on sound legal and computer coding practice and the need to protect intellectual property to encourage costly development cycles?
https://dailycaller.com/2019/09/30/trump-google-oracle-copyright/
After about an hour of reading a dozen different ways to turn off / turn on automatic logins on SystemD, all different… I’ve finally decided to try this one (as all the others either did not have the referenced option set, unset, or present or whole referenced directories didn’t exist… seems a lot of Sysadmin Potstirring in the SystemD world…
So I’m documenting it here just so that I’ll know what I did if this machine never comes up again and I have to start over ;-)
By default, Armbian sets up an automatic login to the first UID you created… without needing a passwd…
FWIW, I’ve got a vanilla Armbian Buster running on the XU4 now as well. At least until I can find a working, up to date, non-SystemD distribution and get it installed and running, I guess this is better than running a few releases back and out of support…
Hey it worked…
As an inventor I have always been troubled by the use of copyright laws to protect computer code. The basic laws involved in invention and copyright and the object of protection of intellectual property being balanced with the need of progress of society require a limit to the life of exclusive use. Invention patents have a limited life, are expensive and difficult to obtain, Where copyright is fairly easy and inexpensive to secure and can be extended for extreme lengths of time.
In my opinion code is merely instruction sets for switch setting, little different then circuit wiring diagram that is changed from cycle to cycle. A machine invention that is changed from cycle to cycle. Copyright is protection for works of art to be enjoyed by one or many but still artwork that does not do work ..pg.
@P.G.:
You and the entire open source community…
In the Early Days of computing, pretty much all code was “free” (as in freedom). Folks regularly exchanged things like compilers and such.
Then, in about the 1960s to 70s companies started to copyright all sorts of stuff and often bits that made it hard to get your job done. While IBM and other were busy trying to lock down everything under copyright / license / fees, there was one company prevented from raking in the money on software. AT&T, thanks to a monopoly practices suit, could not.
They issued an “educational” license for their operating system, Unix Version 7, to Berkeley. It included a clause that Berkeley could sub-license to others. All at essentially no cost.
Suddenly a whole generation of computer graduates new BSD Unix… and many companies started using it as an easy way to get an operating system on their hardware.
By the ’80s, AT&T was allowed to make money on software and tried to recover the property rights via capriciously changing a lot of the Unix v7 style code to be “System V (consider it standard…)”. IMHO, it wasn’t as good.
With all the “free” BSD licenses floating around, and professors and grad students exchanging free code too, it was not possible for AT&T to monetize the way they wanted. But they did put fear into folks.
So an effort got started to make a from scratch “work alike”. Linux / GNU. The Government got into the act by standardizing what they wanted as “POSIX” (which was precisely defined, frozen in time, and didn’t really “standardize” things at all in the end.
Roll forward another 25 year to 35 years and “Copy Left” free software dominates the server, education, research, and many other domains. It sits at the heart of the Macintosh OS and is installed alongside Microsoft’s. It runs almost all phones and other “embedded systems”.
Is there still proprietary code? Certainly. Yet I’ve not used much of it at all for 30+ years. Small “binary blobs” to make some device driver “go” in a computer (inevitably free “as in beer” even if not free as in unencumbered and open source). Some odd bits of “codex” used to decode sounds (also “free as in beer” and embedded in things)
Purchased software? Not really. It came packaged with my tablet and phone (Android is also open source) and I’ve not paid for any “apps”.
Last time I visited Fry’s (local computer supermarket) I couldn’t even find the software section… if it still exists.
The Copy Left dominates the Copy Right now. A “license” that says you must let it stay free…
THE one place where purchased software has kept a hold is in the Microsoft Desktop. I’ve not had a new license since a 2nd hand XP that came on a machine bought used for about $80. Just don’t see the need.
I have a full office suite, music, video player, graphics editor, and browsers and I pay exactly zero. Yes, it takes a little bit of fussing with it from time to time (less if I didn’t actually enjoy the fussing ;-) but a lot less than in prior years. And, if you stay on more mainline systems than I do, you can even skip a lot of that.
So hope that helps you feel a little less alone ;-)
On the flip side:
Programming is a lot more than just “setting some switches”. At the most basic state, that’s a valid metaphor for what the computer does, but there’s a few orders of magnitude difference in the scale of it, and a lot of it is switches that know how to set other switches or themselves…
It really is more akin to writing a cookbook, or drawing up blueprints for a ship (that gets built by a ship building robot…). It is thought embodied in painfully precise instructional language. Having worked for days to get one page of code “right”, I know the amount of hard work that goes into a large program. The folks who do that work deserve to own the product of their labor if they so choose…
Pingback: W.O.O.D. – 1 October 2019 | Musings from the Chiefio
It really is more akin to writing a cookbook, or drawing up blueprints for a ship (that gets built by a ship building robot…)
Just the same thought I had after finishing the above. I have just spent months creating the Art work in CAD for my Airwasher and then “tell” my 3Dprinter Robot” to make it. Is that a Copyright or a Patentable creation? or both?..8-) …pg
Pingback: A Minor Tech Talk Page & “Dead” Boards | Musings from the Chiefio