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:
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/
“Me” News
I didn’t have to go anywhere
It is rather strange. For the first time in many decades, I have nowhere I must go.
All my “stuff” is here (though one truck load still in boxes and needs unboxing and sorting) and I have NOTHING left outside of Florida. I’ve closed the P.O. Box we opened while house hunting, so I don’t even need to drive to Orlando.
Realize that since about 1993 or so I’ve been a “Road Warrior” with clients all over the place. Even if I didn’t leave the San Francisco Bay Area, I’d be spending 2 or more hours a day “in transit”. Now it has “sunk in” that the last few weeks, I’ve needed at most to drive a mile or two to a Publix, Walmart, or Ace Hardware / Lowe’s.
In a way, it’s a very nice feeling. Kind of like perpetual vacation ;-)
So I guess it’s time to start winnowing the “fleet”… I’m no longer going to rack up 50,000 miles in a year or use up a car in 2 or 3… Tires will age out before they are worn out. Strange experience for me, that is ;-)
The Garden & Food Forest
I’ve had running comments on a lot of this. So mostly I’ll just mention the new bits.
The Papaya has a LOAD of big green papaya fruit on it. But it is also frost tender. Seems to be a bit late in the year for them to ripen. I’m going to leave them on the “tree” in the hopes of some yellow starting to show, but if it looks like the rare hard frost is coming, I’ll pick several and bring them in (in case I lose the “tree”). They can be cooked like a vegetable when green, so I’ll get “something” off of them. Oh, and the seeds can be dried and used kind of like pepper.
I’ve planted way too many Avocado trees, OTOH, I likely have 9 or 10 months of the year covered for different kinds of Avocados. Now to just wait 2 years or so for my first harvest… Trees are very low maintenance “plant once” things, but with a long start-up lag.
I’ve put my pink grapefruit tree in the ground, so in a few years I’ll have morning grapefruit too ;-) I like grapefruit with sugar on it, but at OVER $1 each, I’m just not willing to pay that.
I’m looking forward to my first “free” grapefruit, and to “picking dollar bills” off my trees. I’ve got 2 limes (Persian & Key Lime) in pots and the key lime is already making fruit (had one on fish already…)
I’ve still got some minor things to plant, like berries, but the bulk of anything “tree like” are already in the ground.
Lessons Of Florida:
I’ve failed completely with summer squash attempts all around the calendar. I’ll keep whacking at it, but… A pumpkin from Halloween 13 months ago had the seeds dumped in a bed behind the house. A dozen or more sprouted. One survived the irregular water / drought and full shade, put runners on the run, and now has made pumpkins on both sides of the house (where it found full sun). This was a BIG pumpkin with beige like skin and no idea what kind / species (there are several squash / pumpkin species). In any case, it gives me hope that some kind of squash will grow here… My attempts with chayote have so far been mediocre too. I have a vine that survived over a year now, but it still isn’t thriving. I think it’s a mix of too little water when dry, soil that’s just sand and not “amended”, and then perhaps it doesn’t like the Florida Sun / Heat. Several others have just died. So, OK, looking for Seminole Pumpkin seeds… they are known to thrive here.
Surprisingly, the “store package” of pinto beans made a very nice growth of greens. I planted them rather late as an attempt at a ground cover, and it worked well. I’ve seen some flowers, but no beans yet (and it may be too late now… but we’ll see). This showed me that in any real “food emergency” having some “old hard beans” in storage means I can plant a bunch of them and get a large amount of “greens”. (Bean leaves are edible). I now plan to use all my very old stored beans to turn chunks of lawn into garden. (Till, rake out the ‘sod’ and compost it, add one bag of cow poo to each spot covered by a bag of cow poo laying on it ;-), and plant a bunch of cheap old beans of about 5+ years old rather than feeling compelled to eat a lot of mediocre Spam & Beans…
The Sweet Potatoes just love it here. Stick one in the ground and stand back. Pretty soon they cover 10 x 10 feet with edible greens, root where they contact, and make more sweet potatoes under the ground. At some point I need to try the whole “harvest and age” thing, but for now, having an edible landscape plant that looks nice and is very slowly “invasive” is a real treat. They are making beautiful lavender-ish flowers right now. In the Morning Glory family, so that’s what they look like.
The Passion Fruit vine has already grown from about 1 foot high to the top of the chain link fence (so about 4 or 5 feet). Thriving for sure. So if I can’t get chayote on the fence, I may just do passion fruit and grapes.
My #1 Lesson Learned of Florida? IF a plant like tropical or sub-tropical climates, it will likely do well. Trying to grow temperate varieties is likely to fail; and even if you can do it, the effort tends to be very large. So you CAN grow russet potatoes, but it takes a lot of care, timing, work and adapting where/when/how to make it work. Sweet potatoes? Stick it in the ground and walk away…
#2 lesson? It rains a LOT here compared to California, but it comes in “6 inches at a time” then dry for a week or two, during which time the “sand” called soil goes entirely dry. So while the stats say “plenty of rain”, the plants say “water REGULARLY”. I hope that putting a LOT of cow poo “sponge” in the dirt will help with water retention. Ditto tilling in green manure, compost, kitchen scraps, whatever.
The World At Large
Ukraine:
The EU is having a tiff over those countries with brains who can do math and see what is real, NOT wanting to send more buckets of money to the Laundry In Ukraine – so has proposed having member states with any acceptable credit rating (and low on math skills & brains… so might be a hard combination to find…) taking out loans to fund more Death For Ukrainians by loading them up with lots of lethal “stuff” and running them into the Russian Meat Grinder.
Oh, and the EU is proposing to induct Ukraine into the EU despite war ongoing, demographic destruction (i.e. anyone between 16 and 60 dead or damaged in battle – did I mention they gave the “get prepared for the draft” notice to women?), and a destitute non-functional economy. Somebody has a lot of somebodies over a “barrel”, I think… Anyone know if Epstein had an EU branch?
Then the Hopium is strong in the UK. Somehow they think that the Ukrainians have blown up the best Russian Tanks, killed the best soldiers, and overall run the Russian Military into a degraded state. Somebody needs to tell them that Russia has about a 1 MILLION MAN army in the wings, in nice new production advanced tanks, trucks, and fighting gear.
It is only a very small part of the Russian Army & Air Force that are busy doing exactly what Putin said they would do at the start. Wipe out the National State Socialists (N.A.Z.I), destroy the army, and keep Ukraine free of NATO. Though when NATO started shipping everything they had to Ukraine, I think Putin saw a chance to slow roll the war and drain NATO dry too… which he has done for the EU portion (and made a good dent in the USA supplies).
At this point, Mr. Z. may not make it to “negotiations”. Several folks in his government have died. One “playing with birthday hand grenades”… so one gets the feeling that the Purge is underway, and no telling how high it will go. What with elections buggered / banned, The People may just take a different path.
I figure Ukraine is not going to make it to spring. But we’ll see. After all, they have a whole new fresh set of Women Armies…
Gaza:
Israel is going all John Wick on the Hamas in Tunnels. Interesting stuff. Sponge Bombs (perhaps urethane foam?) blocking them off. Some being flooded. Others blown up. Seems they also captured a map of the tunnels when they captured a H.Q. bunker too…
The major disappointment for me has been The Duran. Alexander Mercouris is busy talking about how they really REALLY need to stop fighting and do diplomacy and make nice. Other folks I’ve liked also saying that. Um, folks, they have tried making nice for 1000 years. When you have a blood enemy who only wants to kill 100% of you and won’t “give it up” for 1/2 Century that I’ve observed, the only choice open to you is to kill them first.
Other M.E.:
The USA has started up the war in Syria again. It is technically an illegal war (how one gets a legal war is a bit obscure to me…) since the UN didn’t say to go do it, but the USA doesn’t care about “Rule Of Law” anymore. Just “what I want I get” is the current government mantra… My guess is that they realized they are losing Ukraine, so decided to try taking on Iran by proxy Syria. They must find someone they can beat…
Somebody really really wants W.W.III. The West collectively pushed Ukraine at Russia for a decade until they got a nice little war there. The USA has rekindled Syria (why? Why are we even there?). Iran et.al. have stoked Hamas and Hezbollah to attack Israel, and when Israel counter attacks screams murder… And we’ve got China / Taiwan on the warming table.
Don’t know why they can’t just be happy with commerce and tourism.
In Other World News
Musk is looking to launch Starship on Friday next.
The Electric Vehicle market is imploding. After the first flush of True Believers was filled up with overpriced flaming cars, turns out most folks don’t want to spend and extra $20,000 for an electric Pick Up Truck when the gas one lasts longer, works better, drives further, and costs less. Oh, and it doesn’t burn your house down or sink car carrier ships with massive fires.
The EU is headed into recession. I think it will be a pretty hard recession. See, a manufacturing economy lives or dies on the prices of: Fuel / Energy, Raw Material, and Labor. “Sanctions” have shut off the supply of cheap Russian Fuel / energy and raw materials (minerals, wood, etc.). The war in Ukraine has also shut off the supply of lower cost Ukrainian labor. The other major effect is driving up interest rates while draining the EU of any available capital, what with sending it all to the Ukrainian Money Laundry for cleaning…. So while Germany had been able to make enough surplus earnings to keep the lesser lights of the EU afloat, it presently isn’t making any money.
Companies are moving production to lower cost places as fast as they reasonably can. Others are just going out of business.
The USA has been able to avoid that fate so far via astounding levels of borrowing and money printing. That process is going to come to a screeching halt at some point, and no, you will not have any warning when it happens. Just at some point a loaf of bread will be $10 and China will not be loaning us any of their productivity for pieces of paper… and in a brittle failure moment, folks will just stop buying cars… Oh, wait…
Also of note is that the EU is going full Authoritarian on things like Digital ID and all that, while the USA is going full intrusive spying on everyone. It will become increasingly difficult to just live a private free life. That path eventually ends in revolutions and national collapse. The big question is just who will get there first.
A Positive Note?
To the extent there is one, the various nations of the EU are turning to the folks who can do math and remember history to run their countries. You know, “conservatives”. Though most of them make socialist noises… In the USA the “grass roots” is starting to turn up the heat in some States. So we’re in a race condition. Let’s just hope we can catch up before we are lapped…
In Conclusion
Things are bad and getting worse. Our “leaders” are either idiots or evil or both. Many of them clearly can’t do math (1.5 Million Russian soldiers are bigger than 200,000 Ukrainian soldiers… $5 Billion revenues is less than $6 Billion expenditures, leaving you with negative money) and believe their own propaganda.
That is not how you make a productive and prosperous nation. That is how you end up in collapse. Hopefully we can turn that trend around. Heck, if Disney can stop making Woke Movies and cancel some of the Diversity Stars, anything is possible.
I expect to be working in my garden with or without economic collapse or W.W.III. Though I do need to add a well… or at least buy the materials to be ready for it. Prep, hunker down, and enjoy the roller coaster…
WatchMaga
This will continue to be DIY for a while still.
https://rumble.com/user/WatchMaga
For more recent events, see:
Bongino Report:
Or Whatfinger:
https://generaldispatch.whatfinger.com/
I’ve also gotten addicted to the Top Ten Memes of the week from WatchMAGA here:
They have interesting “bite” to them, along with a tendency to highlight the news of the week in memes, so good as a social attitude pointer too. Plus they are “way fun” ;-)
Musings from the Chiefio 
Well it is sort of about gardening – in a local tradition
“MANGO AUCTION’S SWEET $40K BID FOR FIRST TRAY OF SEASON”
“Everyone loves mangoes, and the whole Brisbane Markets comes alive for the start of mango season,” said Casagrande.
“But really, it’s all about supporting the community. We all need to put our hands up to help when we can and there are a lot of Queenslanders doing it tough right now, so it’s good to give back,” he said.
Proceeds from the 2023 Brisbane Markets Mango Auction benefit Redkite, who provide practical, financial, and mental health support to families who have a child with cancer, and The Lady Musgrave Trust, who provide practical solutions that save lives and transition young women who are homeless or at risk of homelessness to a life of opportunity and prosperity.”
https://brisbanemarkets.com.au/mango-auctions-sweet-40k-bid-for-first-tray-of-season/
Tempus fugit. I didn’t realize you have been in that house over a year.
I firmly believe in a 2-state solution for Palestine and Israel; dead or alive. In the end, they are going to be going to be in those two states. Which will be in which state I cannot say. But that’s the 2-state solution.
FWIW
“Seamus Bruner’s ‘Controligarchs’ Reveals Bill Gates’ Hidden Agenda as He Buys Up U.S. Farmland”
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/11/14/seamus-bruners-controligarchs-reveals-bill-gates-hidden-agenda-as-he-buys-up-u-s-farmland/
E.M.
Re “The Duran”
FWIW on this bloke
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/wild-day-as-the-ukrainian-game-of
and previous items
Seems some car wiring has insulation derived from soya rather than PVC or similar. Tasty for rats and other animals – what could possibly go wrong?
https://www.gbnews.com/lifestyle/drivers-warned-vegan-wires-rats-repair-costs
@Simon:
While “soy insulation” would most likely make the problem worse, rats have been happy to chew through regular wiring for decades that I know of.
I’d “hang out” at my Mercedes Mechanics shop in California. Frequently and sometimes for ‘all day’. (He had back lot BBQ & Beer Fridge ;-) MANY high end Mercedes would come in with “rat damage” to wiring. One I saw had a nice big nest right on top of the engine behind the air cleaner. Piss and poo running down “wherever”.
This problem was worse with cars that were not driven often (which the very rich who were his upscale customers could afford…). He had a spray (peppermint?) he would use to discourage re-infestation.
FWIW, I have just had the same problem. As some of my cars are parked under an oak tree with ample squirrels… and sitting. The ’89 wagon was running fine and just back from the mechanic “when parked”. I went to start it about 2 weeks ago and it was a “no-go”. Not even a grumble. Got out and saw gasoline running out behind the car. My best guess is a rodent (likely squirrel) decided to chew through the fuel line on the high pressure side of the “lift pump”‘ at the fuel tank. They love chewy rubber (for god only knows what reason). I know those fuel lines are recent as they were replaced in California just a few years back, so not an age related failure. Now I get to jack up the car, slide under it, and see what needs replacing…
Also FWIW, in mountain park areas of California (and nearby States), chipmunks are known to remove the rubber seal around windshields. It can take just a few hours and more than one person has “gone on a hike” and returned to find a windshield no longer properly secured and sealed in place… with lots of rubber bits scattered about.
FWIW again, I’ve got a pot of Peppermint plant to start propagating around my cars…
Soy wiring may make this worse, but it has always been a problem.
@Another Ian:
When looking at Gates and farm land, it is valuable to put it in square miles not acres or hectares. Gives perspective. I’ve forgotten exactly how much land Gates has bought. These folks say 270,000 acres: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a42543527/why-is-bill-gates-buying-so-much-farmland/
Now that IS a lot, but it is only 422 square miles. (640 acres to the square mile) Take the square root of that, and it becomes a block about 20 miles on a side. Compare to the USA being about 2500 miles wide and 1000 miles tall NOT including Alaska & Hawaii… 3,796,742 sq mi per the Wiki. So Gates has bought about 1/9000 of the land of the USA. That’s not enough to influence the market for food, but it is more than enough for a Rich SOB GEB to play in the “plant fake meat” business in the hope of big profits from the rubes dumb enough to go for it.
Per Ukraine:
Yeah, the “U Game Of Thrones” is underway. The C.I.A. has a plan. “The Pause” is what they are pushing. BUT, like all things from The West, they did not bother to talk to anyone but themselves in formulating it. Remember that Russia gets the last and biggest vote in all this, and nobody is talking to Putin, or even listening to him.
So Ukraine can ‘pause’ all it wants, but Russia can continue shelling, bombing, and advancing.
The key “issues” for the Pause Plan:
1) With whom can Russia “negotiate”? It is illegal per Ukraine law for them to do it. The West has a decades (multiple) long history of flat out lying, making agreements and then breaking / ignoring them; so can not ever be trusted by Russia.
2) This is an existential threat to Russia, so as stated by Putin: Ukraine can never be part of NATO. That means “no pause to re-arm” and “no pause to induct Ukraine into the EU or NATO. That is the Russian position. Period. Full stop.
3) Russia is winning nicely. So why stop? Ukraine is down to drafting women, children, and old men. A few more months and even they will be gone. Then “advancing” and “capturing land” becomes a drive in the country… As stated by one of their leaders (Medvedev?) “Negotiations will happen at the Polish border”.
4) Putin has stated there’s no “going back” for the Russian Oblasts that have been annexed. (More accurately: Returned to Russia from whom they were hived off by the ethnic Ukrainian Khrushchev by fiat never validated by the Duma, so illegally). Furthermore, several large cities are by all rational measures Russian (if you can remember history longer than 40 years ago…). Odessa, for example. Putin has said they, too, must have guaranteed rights to stay safe for Ethnic Russians who dominate their local population and history.
5) Now mix #4 & #1 in the context of #3. What is most reasonable for Russia to do?
a) Pause so Ukraine can get even more arms, ammunition, and a NATO Army loan?
b) Just continue until Ukraine fully collapses in a cold winter of Throne Swapping, then return it all to Russia. Maybe spit out the bit of old Poland that was glued on after W.W.II and give it back to Poland.
I think it is pretty clear that Russia has called up a Million Man Army and positioned it around the border of Ukraine, outside the reach of Ukraine, so that should NATO go further stupid and get directly involved, Russia can wipe them out too. And if NATO gets a case of “Oh Shit We’ve Lost” and abandons Ukraine, it’s an easy drive to Livov outskirts and the reclaiming of historic Russia is a done deal.
That’s what I expect will happen. We just have no idea when. It could be “happening now” with current Russian advances, or it could wait until this winter for a flood of tanks to wash over Rump Ukraine, or it could be a year from now when the last Women & Grandpa soldiers are dead and the land is empty of life… Depends on what rate of dying and draining NATO / EU / USA of weapons and strength and money is most beneficial to Russia…
FWIW, I’ve found that watching Baklykov Live is highly enlightening about current conditions inside Russia.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/@baklykovlive/videos
He basically picks a Russian city, and spends all day and into the evening live streaming as he does a walking tour. Often ending in a bar with a beer. There is just No Way that can be faked. The cost would be horrific. “Cast of millions” and “full city sets”… And what do we see:
A Very European country & people living a very good life. “Sanctions” have done nothing to the supply of goods other than swap the names on them, or bring in substitutes (from other countries or made in Russia) AND brought full employment and an economic boom. Clean streets. Well kept and beautiful parks. Many beautifully restored historic churches. Happy people enjoying the night life. A wide variety of ethnic restaurants with ample portions and reasonable prices. Streets with flowing traffic of relatively new cars, not jammed up. Well planned cities that preserved their historical sites while adding the new.
In short, Russia is a vibrant and prosperous place full of good things. There is no hope of “regime change” in Russia. People there love Putin and how he has restored the country (and ordered thousands of churches restored / rebuilt).
Our “leaders” are operating from stereotypes set 30 years ago, and not from observation of current “facts on the ground”. They are blowing it big time, and “cruising for a bruising”… I’d not be surprised if the loss of Ukraine coupled with the loss of Russian energy supplies and materials (not to mention markets…) brings down the entire EU and moves the USA to “behind China”. And that’s even before the effects of The BRICS+ bringing an end to western “Economic Hegemony” sinks in…
I just wish it would get done sooner so we can all get on with life. Watching this slow motion train wreck for 2 years is enough already. Another 2 or 5 years for the collective West to auger in and collapse under the weight of their “leadership” stupidity would be just too much ennui and schadenfreude.
Squirrel, and other rodents, teeth never stop growing. The rely on hard shells and foods to wear them down as they grow older. When they have an easier food source that does not provide the wear, they find other ways to grind the teeth down.
I have a neighbor who has been feeding the squirrel roasted peanuts in a shell in an excessive way. This replacement food source provides little wear on those constantly growing teeth. Hence the little buggers have started chewing on everything.
I just had to repair a wire harness in a car ($1,300+), my pool solar heater panels a couple dozen times, some pool wiring. Rats ate my neighbor’s tractor wiring up too upon building a nest in it.
Additionally, the peanuts not eaten will be stashed away somewhere and everywhere. I just had to remove a squirrel from my dryer as he put a bunch of peanuts down my roof vent for my dryer and could not get out when he tried to retrieve them. It is quite thrilling to hear something scratching the crap out of a metal pipe in an interior wall while having coffee first thing in the morning.
Needless to say, the offenders have been summarily relocated.
The same good intentioned neighbor at one point was broadcast spreading corn in the yard to feed Sandhill cranes. These cranes are territorial, so when you see 15 of them in someone’s yard, there is a reason.
Upon this taking place for a few months, we then had a massive rat infestation in the hood. The unintended consequences of this mass feeding activity were terrible. In an effort to fight the plague of rats, several of the neighbors started putting out rat baits to kill the rats. They did indeed kill many rats, but in the process killed off all of the Red-tailed hawks, all the Owls and other animals that prey on the rats.
It is illegal to feed wild animals in Florida, and for good reason.
“The Russian winter is taking its course”, The first -20 °C of the season were measured in Russia on October 11, and the first -30 °C were recorded on October 17. And now the continental cold has reached a new peak: -40°C.
According to the scientific director of the Russian Hydrometeorological Center Roman Vilfand, 90% of Russia is covered in snow.
All of Siberia and the south of the Urals are covered with snow,
It has snowed heavily in the European Alps this week. High levels have been recorded in the northern French Alps, and north-western Italy, have recorded incredible early winter levels. Numerous European ski resorts have already opened their slopes: 2 in Finland, 1 in Norway, 7 in Austria, 3 in Italy and 3 in Switzerland. More ski resorts were due to open this weekend. Operators in France are also preparing for an early opening, as the number of requests has increased following the heavy snowfall.
And the north of the USA is getting snow.
Will this influence the demand for oil and gas in Europe? Will people think that keeping warm is more important than a far off war?
“A 112-page class action complaint was filed this week by plaintiffs represented by Bathaee Dunne. News of a Bathaee Dunne-led lawsuit against Intel over the Downfall vulnerability emerged in late August, when the law firm announced that it was preparing to file a complaint.
The plaintiffs say the Intel CPUs they have purchased are “defective” because they are either left vulnerable to cyberattacks or they have significantly slower performance due to the vulnerability fixes made available by the chip giant.
The complaint says Intel has known about speculative execution vulnerabilities in its processors since 2018, when cybersecurity researchers disclosed the existence of two attack methods named Meltdown and Spectre. ”
More at
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=250101
In comments on EV’s at another blog –
“Plenty in underground shopping carparks. One flash and you’re ash comes to mind.”
E.M.
Just a thought – as well as The Duran there is
https://rumble.com/c/AlexanderMercouris
“World’s Leading Theory on Alzheimer’s in Crisis After Major Drug Trials Fail
At the start of the 20th century, psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer became the first person to notice the strange clumps and tangles in the brain of a person who had died with dementia.
These bundles of amyloid beta proteins have since become the dominant hypothesis for what causes Alzheimer’s disease. And, despite decades of failed studies, finding ways to clear them away has remained an obsession.
Now, in two trials, a drug designed to eradicate these sticky plaques has failed to preserve the cognitive abilities of people with early Alzheimer’s disease compared to people given a placebo.
The monoclonal antibody gantenerumab did significantly reduce the amount of amyloid beta in the brain as intended, but this did not translate into improvements in cognitive function.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2304430
No kidding! Like I said ages ago, amyloid plaques aren’t the problem, they’re produced by the immune system.
Helps if you look in the right place.😁 ”
https://joannenova.com.au/2023/11/thursday-32/#comment-2713748
My 2 cents worth in comments –
“Ah! But just you wait!
To cover expenses it reappears as “a new cure all for something else”?
Actually I am only being half sarcastic there –
If it is properly tested and it passes as “a new cure all for something else” then well and good.
But no more “bums rush” that goes to the “cash cow” thank you”
NVidia has roughly doubled it’s “AI capability” in its new chip.
The key product is the HGX H200 GPU based on NVIDIA’s “Hopper” architecture, a replacement for the popular H100 GPU. It’s the company’s first chip to use HBM3e memory that’s faster and has more capacity, thus making it better suited for large language models. “With HBM3e, the NVIDIA H200 delivers 141GB of memory at 4.8 terabytes per second, nearly double the capacity and 2.4x more bandwidth compared with its predecessor, the NVIDIA A100,” the company wrote.
https://www.engadget.com/nvidia-announces-its-next-generation-of-ai-supercomputer-chips-140004095.html
Well, after a few days of grief trying to move files around… I decided to just say “screw it” and buy Yet Another Computer. This one is an obsolete Intel CPU, but one that will run various odd distributions of Linux that I might like. For all of $89:
UPDATE: DO NOT BUY ONE OF THESE!
Arrived with a bootleg copy of Windows 10 on it and BIOS will not let me boot from USB to put on the (promised, advertised, and expected) Linux. More in a new comment.
link: https://www.amazon.com/ATOPNUC-Celeron-Fanless-Computer-Desktop/dp/B0B51D6PX5/
It is FANLESS which is my requirement that almost all x86 and up AMD / Intel products don’t do. It comes without my paying for a Windoz Licence I’m going to throw away (Ubuntu installed…) and I’ve found discussions from folks putting Linux on them, so unlikely to be any hardware lock to a single OS.
Traditionally, I’ve used an old Compaq for this purpose. It has a mostly quite fan in it, but tolerable. And it is single core. Benchmarks I did some years ago had it about the same or slightly slower speed than the Pi M3 IIRC. I still have it, but it requires a lot more desk space and a different kind of monitor / cable. So a PITA to set up at the moment. Perhaps after the unpacking clears more floor space ;-)
So for $89 I get over double the speed, a LOT more memory, and a SSD built in. Plus, it has lots of USB 3 ports (so I can run my un-powered portable USB 3 drives at faster speeds and without a powered hub – unlike on my R.Pi boards and Orange Pi).
This will let me just do a “plug and go” of the Several TB Disk Drives and move data around between them without the grief I’ve been having.
So what grief?
Some of it likely static discharge related… the RockPro64 no longer wants to boot. I’d put an eMMC card on it, read the contents and a bit more, then powered down and removed it. Then no more boot. It had been set up to boot from uSD and I changed nothing, so what happened? Who knows (and who ain’t talking…). It could be anything from ESD killing the board (that already had one dead USB 1.0 port) to an auto-config miss-feature that swaps boot to the eMMC if ever installed and all points in between.
Then I swapped to a reliable R.Pi M3. Everything goes snail paced USB 1.0 speed, but works reliably. Except after trying a half dozen things, it still closes the session and logs me out if I’m AFK for an hour or so. Killing the data transfer. When moving TB, that has resulted in “100+ GB lumps of failure to complete” that then gets removed (about as fast) from the destination disk and try again. I know it can be fixed (my other Pi doesn’t do this… so I fixed it once at least, years ago…)
But you get the idea.
So soon enough the new toy will be here. Sys Admin Data Shoveling can complete, and I can much more easily try distros like Void et. al. Oh, and it is in a case so ESD risks much smaller…
I’m not abandoning ARM, but it is going to have an in-hand work-around for things like Devuan only being “community supported” on ARM, and FreeBSD not having working WiFi on some ARM boards (like the R.Pi…)
Essentially, I’m going to bypass the ARM issues as needed with added hardware…
In Other News:
I put up a GUI FreeBSD on my R.Pi M3. Process was fairly easy and it works (xfce desktop). One Big Problem: for unknown reasons the xfce is molasses slow. We’re talking “wait a while for the mouse to move” slow. I suspect they are not using the GPU for the screen (a common lazy hack in porting to minor platforms). So it is “on the shelf” for evaluation “someday”. Others in videos say it works fine, so maybe just some odd config thing. For now: “Not my circus, not my monkey”… but maybe later.
With that, back to slaving over a hot computer ;-)
“Toyota Prius converted into camper- with fridge, microwave, running water, climate control & more”
Via SDA
https://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Opinion/059992-2009-10-19-maxine-says-take-down-the-bird-feeder.htm
It would be good if some junior staffer would translate this for our hierarchy
Bird brain leftists cannot understand the bird feeder analogy…so we are stuck literally and figuratively with the ” bird’s” poop now.
@EM
I put up a GUI FreeBSD on my R.Pi M3. Process was fairly easy and it works (xfce desktop). One Big Problem: for unknown reasons the xfce is molasses slow.
Here’s my route to a Pi3 with Devuan with XFCE Desktop that seems reasonably fast (by Pi3 standards)…
From here
https://arm-files.devuan.org/
I took a copy of the Pi3 image zip file
devuan_chimaera_4.0.0_arm64_rpi3.img.zip
Unpacked the image file
devuan_chimaera_4.0.0_arm64_rpi3.img
onto a SD card
The Pi3 boots to a Devuan command line.
Logon with the defaults
root
toor
Then run the setup utility
run-setup
Then the steps to XFCE
# upgrade from Chimaera to Daedalus
nano /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus main
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-updates main
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-security main
#deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-backports main
Then the usual housekeeping…
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
(reboot)
apt install xfce4
apt install xfce-terminal
apt install xfce-goodies
apt install firefox-esr
Launching XFCE from the command line
startxfce4
I’ve not yet bothered with installing a boot manager that would run XFCE automatically.
I might try installing VNC Server to run it headless, but not that needed yet.
@Keith:
I didn’t realize Devuan had a Chimaera port in stock, but makes sense. Mine were already a Devuan Beowulf, so just did a lot of upgrading in place. IIRC, 3 of mine are at Chimaera level. A couple Lxde and one + Orange Pi’s are xfce. All do “OK” as long as you stay away from video ;-)
I’ve been very sporadically doing FreeBSD and the occasional NetBSD installs on various boards / SBCs in the hope of getting one complete and the way I like them. As is often the case on systems that the developers do not think of as “all that important”, efficient use of the GPU tends to be ignored and window intensive graphical things, like YouTube tend to be way slower than expected.
I’ve basically decided I want to move a percentage of my SBCs onto some BSD. So need to “get ‘er done!
Biggest issue historically has been getting a GUI installed fairly easy and working efficiently (with GPU support). Right behind it is “Yet Another File System” so moving disks between systems becomes a PITA. It looks like good progress on the GUI support (but not GPU use on ARM…) and with ZFS on both platforms, moving disks ought to be easier. FreeBSD can now read (not write or repair) ext3 so one way data moves are OK too. Then there’s always using and NFS file server…
Basically, the systems that can easily be Devuan will be Devuan, and those that are harder to convert will be pointed at *BSD. If impossible to get there, for any given computer, it may remain Armbian or Ubuntu… but SystemD is really being a bother when I have to use it. (I edit /etc/fstab a lot, so it keep nagging me that fstab changed so I ought to run sysctl to update systemd… well if it knows that, why doesn’t it just do it? Or better yet, keep fstab as the source of authority as it always has been…)
So I’ll grump and complain when some “teachable moment” bites me, but progress continues… So far biggest “issues” in the “recover and update” have been a heck of a lot more static discharges in the house (I think due to A/C drying air and surfaces being more static generating) and the power flicker from the A/C startup sag. Then third being “Mystery Board Fail To Boot” that needs debugging on a few of my SBCs. Some are just dead (Odroid XU4Q with 12 VDC in the bbl connector instead of 5 VDC – my error) while some seem to boot but then no screen (RockPro64 where just removing the emmc, not used by the system just file space, and reboot resulted in the right blinky lights but no monitor. Literally “Shutdown, remove emmc, reboot to black screen”.
So I’ve chucked some of those bits in a drawer for “later examination and recovery” and just ordered a new Odroid XU4Q (arriving Monday, along with an N2 case to reduce ESD risks in the Odroid N2) AND a new “mini-PC” celeron based where running variety OSs will be easier to try. Void, various BSDs, etc. and where Devuan IS directly supported. That will give me a couple of very reliable desktop computers for reliable task completion on things like cleaning up disks… It will get me out of the “sporadic failures” mode… I’m also going to order a Soft Start installed on the A/C to stop the light flicker / volts drop out ;-)
2 minor notes:
1) ATM it is T -30 minutes to Starship Launch of the fully stacked ship for testing.
They are trying to get Starship to stage, light engines and make orbital height.
2) My HP Chromebook, bought about 2 years ago for cheap ($299) as an expedient workstation while all my stuff was in boxes, has started to have “issues” with the c key not always registering. That’s with almost constant daily use. One of my units of wear measure is keys without letter text on them anymore. I’ve worn the tops off of 5 of them. E A D C and L. So lots of use.
Starship launched successfully with all engines firing. Stage separation was successful. Starship continuing powered flight to orbit altitude.
The booster blew up after staging and start of return. Not sure if that was an AwShit or if they just wanted to use the range safety system to end it.
They are not sure, but Hawthorn is saying late in the burn the Flight Termination system may have blown up the 2nd stage.
So, OK, the telemetry (prior to big badda boom…) ought to tell them why the FTS went boom, so what to fix on both the booster and the Starship.
Major Oh Man points: Booster lit all engines, worked all the way up. Hot Staging worked. Starship lit all 3 engines and worked right all the way to out of sight.
Aw Shit points: Potentially an unexpected loss of the booster after flip burn. Potentially unexpected FTS on Starship for unknown reasons. Just a few seconds from orbital velocity.
Huge Point: Damn near “Starship to orbit” point. This ship is going to work!
MARS OR BUST! whoohoo!
Some explanations of wokeness, and why
DIEDEI doesn’t mean what you think it means, with people talking to John Cleese.https://www.gbnews.com/shows/the-dinosaur-hour/2023-11-12
Possibly most people here already knew that the words didn’t mean what they used to, but some insight given as to what they mean now in that context.
@EM, Bluetooth keyboards are dirt cheap. I have a couple that also have a trackpad on them I use when I connect or mirror my laptop to a larger TV screen.
Osssqss:
I have a Logitech one and nubby that I’ve used on most of my SBCs. But the purpose of this chromebook was a “disposable temporary system”. I didn’t really want a Chromebook, just something cheap enough that I would not care if it died.
When the keys get bad enough, I might inquire about a replacement. For most laptops it is simple, fast & cheap. (If not, there’s the dumper ;-) I might explore putting a Linux on it (supposedly possible) and setting it up as a headless server… if for some reason I’m bored enough ;-)
FWIW, the Odroid C1 “blinky lights” look like it is operating, but still no video. I’m wondering if ESD killed the HDMI port… So “sometime” I’m going to have it “running” and try to SSH into it from another system.
I suppose it also might be that it administratively decided to swap to serial console…
I was having “sporadic failure to boot to screen” on a very reliable Raspberry Pi. Traced it back to having it, the monitor, and the USB Hub / disks all on the same power strip. When cold power on, the monitor would come up too slow for the system to be happy and I’d have a blank screen. Moving the monitor to another power plug and constantly powered, the “intermittent” failure to boot to a screen ended as the monitor was always ready at the right time. I suspect the same effect may have caused the C1 to just move to console… and not come back.
Related: The RockPro64 had a similar behaviour of “no boot” so was moved to the “break room” for a week or so. Fished it out and with the monitor now on constant power, the RockPro64 booted normally too. Don’t know if it was “having a bit of a rest” or something related to “monitor boot lag”… but it back now. The joys of boot bugs, power issues, and timing artifacts…
In Other News: Did new writes of uSD cards for FreeBSD for the Pine64 and R.PiM3. Neither one makes it to the login prompt… Is it the cards? The write process? The particular release / image is bad? System doing the copy is on a UPS, so voltage fluxuations ought not be the problem…or?… So guess what I’m going to be trying over the next few days… again.
FWIW, I’ll probably order a 2nd logitech KB/trackpad. IIRC it was “twenty something” bucks. I spend a lot of time moving it from system to system, and as of now, I’ve also got a SBC set up on the TV in the living room. So one in the office and one in the LR would avoid a lot of walking back and forth ;-)
Ah the joys of catching up on 2 years of delayed hacking around on systems ;-)
You can get keyboard letters stickers for about five bucks.
Link: https://www.amazon.com/Keyboard-Stickers-Replacement-Background-Universal/dp/B09XVL8Q17
@Jim2:
Nice to know, but I touch type. I only notice the key wear when I look at the keyboard as I’m opening the thing ;-)
Or, sometimes, if I need to type just one character and my hands are not near the keyboard… I either take both hands to “home position” or puzzle over what those keys might be… I don’t think about what key is where, I just think “type that word or phrase” and it happens…
It is the dying “C” key that’s the problem. It indicates the high use keys are starting to wear out. So soon to be followed by E and D and L and…
So either I can get the KB fixed for cheap enough, OR I can make it a non-portable workstation (external KB), OR I can just say I spent $100 / year for the services rendered and “move on”… I only paid $200 for the thing and that was a couple of years ago as an “expedient solution”. It’s a very low end Chromebook with ARM processor and not a lot of memory. Works well enough for the purpose though… editing web pages.
Above, here:
Link: https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2023/11/15/w-o-o-d-14-november-2023-eu-borrows-for-ukraine-end-us-rushes-to-m-e-war-recessions/#comment-167612
I said I’d bought a low end cheap i386 Celeron Mini-PC. Well it arrived today.
It arrived as a “floating boat anchor” that does not do what was advertised.
It was advertised as Ubuntu Linux. What arrived is an unlicensed copy of Win 10. Ok, I’ve done enough installs I can just write my own Linux on it… Except that while both F2 and F12 get you to the BIOS config page: Nothing I can do stops it from booting into Windows. IF the BIOS would just do what it says it is doing (disable internal storage boot, boot from USB stick) I’d be golden. As it stands, it is a useless POS.
I’ve got one more thing to try. It has a uSD slot on the front and the bios claims to be able to boot from it, too. So if it works and I can remove Windoze and install Devuan, I’m golden. IF that doesn’t work, my only option is to return the device.
Have done the return process on Amazon. Tomorrow we drop it off at the return counter.
It just smells like a typical Chinese Cheat. Advertise a Linux, then, wink wink, ship an illegal bootleg copy of Windows (unlicensed of course) on the assumption someone would feel they got “something of value for nothing” when instead they could have just installed the promised free Ubuntu and had a happy customer.
The other potential is that they have both Linux and Windows products and just have horrible product packing discipline to get the right thing in the right box. I don’t believe that one, though, as their ought to be certain stickers on the thing if it is a Windows appliance by design…
Such a waste. About 4 to 5 hours of my time, for nothing, with another hour tomorrow at the returns place.
And here I thought this would be an easy “throw money at it” way to avoid digging around to find the parts to the old Compaq box… but I guess not. By now I could have it up and running… with Linux already on it. Knoppix on a USB drive, Devuan installed, and I think I have CentOs on a SD card for it too. Oh Well…
For anyone wondering: Nothing I do needs more processing power than an old Celeron PC or an ARM quad core 1.5 GHz or so SBC. Unless you are gaming or doing a lot of video stuff, that’s generally the case. Shoveling bits down a wire is almost always “wire limited” not computer limited.
E.M.
From “back in BC”
“Five Years Ago Today: California Governor: “In Less than Five Years, Even the Worst Skeptics Will Be Believers” ”
EM – I’ve been running a Beelink box very similar to the one you got and IIRC getting its initial W10 preload off and putting on Linux required holding the Del key down at start-up to get into the system and allow me to replace the OS. I’ve got another one from Bmax that’s similar, but still has W10 on it that hasn’t been hacked yet since I wanted to have a spare (cheap Chinese boxes and of unknown reliability). Turned out the reliability has been good, though there’s a very occasional mis-boot that may be a software problem of precise order in which things get initialised and there’s also some problem in the network where sometimes it loses connectivity and tells me “host unreachable” on a ping. Also probably a software problem, since some days I get a ping reply in the 0.6ms range, other days it’s in the 2-3ms range. Solved by switching networking off then on.
There is a fan in the box, but only runs sometimes and is very quiet.
The internal SSD is also 128GB, with a pretty amazing read rate, so boot-up is fast (could be why it occasionally messes up boot if the ordering of the tasks varies so one bit isn’t fully initialised when called) and it only uses less than 10W so the main power-draw is now the monitor. It’s an Intel processor, yet runs pretty cool (I always used AMD before to get cooler running). Clock-rate varies up to 2.8GHz, but seems to be responsive so I don’t see any delays in the clock switching. Basically, mostly it just works, which is what I want these days. The mainstream Linux distributions just work and I have a choice at the moment of Mint and Ubuntu.
I initially had problems of not being able to stop it booting into Windoze, so had to ask the supplier how to change it, but turned out it was just the new booting standards and the instruction to hold the Del key down during boot was written on the screen for a few seconds. Things change and if you only need to initialise a new box every 5 years or so a lot of what you know will be wrong.
@Simon:
Thanks for the idea on the DEL key. Their “support” web site says to use the F2 or F12 button, and those do get me into the BIOS, but the BIOS then ignores the new settings. There is NO start up text message. It goes directly to a photo wallpaper and clock/date, then a “enter your pin” box. So no text about DEL (even when going into the BIOS with F2 or F12).
As I’ve already done the Amazon return claim, I’m just going to hand the box back at the “returns” counter today. It was advertised as having Ubuntu already installed on it (complete with version #), and it does not. So there are 3 issues, IMHO:
1) NO Linux installed.
2) “Impossible” to bypass boot to Windoze to install Linux.
3) Wrong directions on the vendor “support” site.
So you might have a workaround for #2, that’s good. But frankly, the reason I ordered this was to get an “Easy Linux on x86 with easy OS swapping” and that’s not at all what was received, so back it goes.
I already have an x86 box with Linux on it and easy OS swapping. It is a small-ish Compaq Evo (iirc) with relatively quiet fan. Only a single core, and about as fast as a Pi M3 (again iirc). Found it in the boxes in the garage, and the monitor, so only a video cable to go… (kb & mouse already in use on Pi’s ;-) I was willing to toss $90 at a smaller form factor (less desk real estate) and 2 x cores; but not if I have to fight bad vendor decisions. It’s easier to clear a square foot of desk space…
Basically, the claim of Linux already installed was fraudulent. An unlicensed (so marginally illegal) bootleg copy of Windoze 10 was installed. So I’m not willing to put in a lot of work to endorse a fraud and embrace a bootleg process. Then season with no useful documentation, and a “support” site telling lies. Just all wrong. I gave it a small effort, but now it gets returned for them to deal with their bad decisions.
Sidebar:
I’ve got somewhere around 1/2 dozen “PC’s” in the garage of about this performance level or better. They range from what started life as a 486 box but upgraded to an AMD chip, up to a server class DELL with a hot processor (single core) of about a decade or 2 back. Why was I not just using one of them? BIG Boxes with noisy fans. Figured for $90 I could just “get yet another box” and avoid the “make space” and put in earplugs issues ;-)
But I’ll need to boot them all up anyway (to evaluate and potentially scrub and toss) so I’m just going to proceed to that process set-up. Along the way I can do any OS Playing that I want with them. (Basically, combining that “evaluate and clean / purge” process with the “x86/AMD OS playing” in one space / hardware set / event. A more complicated mix, but not enough to matter.
It isn’t like I was expecting to use this thing as a Daily Driver. It was a limited uses entertainment toy for playing with different Linux distributions (that don’t do ARM or do it with pain…) and maybe assist in some disk to disk data moves with USB 3 speed. I can do the file moves with the SBCs in hand and a powered hub due to arrive tomorrow. Other OS installs can wait until I find the monitor cable AND will be easier with a BIOS I know works on the Compaq Evo.
Re: Simon Derricutt says:
19 November 2023 at 9:17 am
I had a somewhat similar experience when I bought an AMD processor version of the Beelink mini-computer through Amazon. It too was listed a having the Ubuntu Linux OS, but came with Windows 11 Pro instead. Appears to be a legitimate copy as the Windows registered smoothly with Microsoft and I’m getting the periodic Microsoft updates. My Beelink is running without any detectable issues since I placed it into service about 5 months ago. I use the Beelink for several hours per day/7 days per week.
Speaking of global warming being a ridiculous scam, here is an interesting article, where among other things it explains how the hockey stick graph was a complete fraud.
but it is us who are called science deniers…
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/who_are_the_real_climate_change_deniers.html
@Canadian Friend: “but it is us who are called science deniers…”
Perhaps the scariest part of the Global Warming fraud is the high percentage of people who are supposedly some of our brightest thinkers, and who have fallen hook, line, and sinker.
Back around 2008 or so I had not given it much thought; I just assumed that there was probably something to it, but, as I say, I had not really looked at it in any detail. Two of my best friends, both of them VERY bright, became immersed in the subject and both of them were literally so upset at the destruction of the planet that they verged on depression and inability to sleep. Seeing them, I thought, “I guess I need to look into this!” It only took a few weeks to see that the CAGW (Catastrophic anthropogenic global warming) theory was bunk. Too many failed predictions, too many straw man arguments, too many ad homs, too many failure to show data, too many models, too many decimal points on too little data. Even worse, it became clear as time went on that they were even changing historical data. My two friends? CAGW was bulletproof for them. No matter what I said, no matter what sources I found, no matter what logical errors I pointed to, none of it seemed to matter. If you have has similar experience, tell me whether this sounds familiar.
“97% of all scientists believe in CAGW!”
“Well, no, that is not true. (Insert long, documented explanation that it is not true.)”
“OK, maybe it isn’t quite 97%…”
“And that hockey stick is wrong!”
“So you think you are smarter than all the scientists!”
“(Insert explanation of errors.)”
“You just don’t understand basic high school physics!”
Maddening. How can so many clever people be so stupid even when the facts are right in front of them?!
Same here,
I do not have a University degree, just college, but I know a lot of people who do and who have succesful careers
I am not kidding, one is a biologist, one is lawyer, one is an actuary, one has a few degrees and has had articles published in some science magazines ( many years ago ), I also know people who have doctorates, some of them are published authors
and so on and so forth
yet despite their relatively high IQs and despite not being ignorant people, they believe the global warming thing is real
Actually they believe anything the Main Stream Media tell them, no matter if the topic is covid vaccines , global warming , illegals or January 6.
if the media said 2+2 now equals 5 they would believe it.
it is as if they have two heads, one they use when they are in their field where they are good or even brilliant and another head they use when they watch tv news.
It boggles my mind how they can be so gullible, so easily fooled and so easily controlled.
I m not a scientist, I do not have university degrees, but a few years ago I went to the NOAA site and looked at their page, a very long page, actually I think it was 3 pages, that show all Hurricanes since I think 1920.
I grabbed a piece of paper took a few notes, on intensity and how many Hurricanes per year and within minutes it was obvious that there is not more Hurricanes now nor are they more intense now than in the past.
The reasons why ( and you probably know this already ) sometimes recent Hurricanes have caused more damage and in some cases more deaths is because there is more people in the USA than in the past, they live in areas where there used to be no one or very little people ( to be killed by a Hurricane) , and they built houses, businesses and other things like roads and bridges where 50 or 75 years ago there was none.
so when the Media and global warming cultists tells us that Hurricanes cause more damage and deaths today, they are using facts out of context which makes it a lie.
but it is useless to try and explain this to someone who believes in global warming, to someone who is convinced the Media never lie.
It is very strange how intelligent educated people can be as gullible as 4 year old kids…very strange…
Keith Macdonald, here: https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2023/11/15/w-o-o-d-14-november-2023-eu-borrows-for-ukraine-end-us-rushes-to-m-e-war-recessions/#comment-167620
Said he had installed FreeBSD on a R.Pi w/ xfce but it was “molasses slow”.
I had a similar experience on another similar speed board (Pine64 I think it was).
Digging into it some, I found that they were using build target aarch64 not evbarmhf (hopefully I got those letters straight from memory…) where the *hf stands for Hard Float – meaning using the math ALU (arithmetic logic unit). So they are doing all float math in software not using the available hardware. At least that’s what those things used to mean a decade ago ;-)
They also are highly likely NOT writing the code / device drivers nor including vendor “binary blobs” to use the GPU (graphics processor unit), but leaving all that up to the main CPU cores.
That basically means not using about 1/2 the processor speed / hardware available (or worse for some classes of tasks like windows…)
So that’s my guess anyway. In Theory, one can point at the sources and build your own version of the package but including the ALU. GPU is harder to do… Looking in the device tree bundles to see if a vendor binary blob is there for the GPU would be more definitive.
ATM, I’m doing a FreeBSD install to the RockPro64 (who decided it could boot again after “a bit of a rest” (when I think some onboard bits drained to zero…). Up to installing xfce at the moment. IF I’m right, the added processors / speed will make it a reasonable BSD experience. Report to be done later…
Sidebar on ESD:
I think I figured out why sometimes there was nothing and sometimes there was a mighty ZAP. My plastic sole shoes on the laminate flooring made for a large charge. When barefoot, in socks, or other shoes: no ZAP. Unfortunately, I figured this out when getting up to plug in the Pine64… I think I sent a nice charge into the GPIO pins. I’ll give it some more testing, but I think I’ve killed another SBC.
The Pine64 was bought on a lark for play a few years back as it was dirt cheap then. About $20? Something like that. I think now it is up to $24 at Ameridroid. So if further testing confirms it’s dead, I’ll have to decide if I really want to replace it or just “move on” to something else. FWIW, I suspect from blinky light behavior that it is the video driver / chip that got zapped. Likely as the path to ground ran through the HDMI cable. This would explain similar behaviour from the Odroid C1.
In any case, I now do my computer playing barefoot and no more zaps…
So not Florida Weather, or even AC dry air; but laminate flooring and plastic shoe soles… that didn’t make static on old carpet in the California house
Cost of that lesson? Likely about $75 total of zapped SBCs.
Back at BSD:
I’ll likely just keep running Beowulf on the lower end boards and look to put FreeBSD on the faster ones, provided I can find an image that works. Not interested in making a FrankenSystem just yet, or DIY “roll my own from source build”. At least not till the old Unix skills are refreshed and I’ve got some kind of bigger Build Box running. (At one time I was BuildMaster for some software products; one including the Compiler Tool Chain and another being a BSD based OS and appliance, so I ought to still know how to do it ;-)
Oh, and the Compaq is set up, the monitor put back together (stand on) and on a side table. Even found one of the right kinds of monitor cable… that won’t fit as there is a short distance from the socket to the stand and that cable has some kind of 2 inch long solid lump at the connector end. “Somewhere” I have a 90 degree adapter… or I can dig around for a different cable… So likely another day or two for it.
Well, back to watching FreeBSD oh so slowly installing packages on the RockPro64…
@TTN & Canadian Friend:
I’m reminded of the old saw “A Ph.D. is someone who learned more and more about less and less until he knew absolutely everything about nothing!”
There’s some truth in that.
I’ve spent most of my life fighting against the “push” to specialization and making sure I stayed “balanced” and “wide field”. Sometimes there’s a cost to that. But I want to be a Strong Generalist who can do all sorts of things well. (Blame Heinlein for that… and his ~”… ought to be able to” speech about planning a war, fixing an engine, building a house, delivering a baby… etc.
I’ve also often said that high intelligence is not particularly a good thing and does not bring happiness. And I’ve said that being really smart often just means you are really good at making up “stories” to fool yourself.
Now I had the advantage of growing up in a few thousand person Farm Town and being “up close and personal” with all kinds of folks from a very early age. At about 8 years old the Restaurant opened. For the next several years I washed dishes (as one does as the youngest in a Restaurant Family…) and the “cups and glasses” sink was at the counter. So I spent HOURS, no MONTHS with my hands washing “cups and glasses” while the Customers were just one counter width away. I got to listen to all sorts of things from all sorts of people. The local Doctor. The guy who drove trucks. The Stock Broker (who let me see his Rolls…) and all points in between.
I rapidly realized that the “uneducated” farmers who had to “get it all right” to make any money this year were a LOT more careful about their cogitation skills. And the folks with law degrees who couldn’t make it as a lawyer so went into politics were some of the least grounded. That was the start of my notion of The Tidy Mind. It isn’t so much what hardware you have, as it is what crap you let in to gum up the thoughts.
It was also the start of my Law Of Mutual Superiority. Seeing someone well educated who didn’t know why rice was in the salt shakers or didn’t understand that you can’t cook a steak any faster and have it be right … “I only have 10 minutes, can I get the rib-eye?”… I realized that folks IF they are lucky, have an “Expertise Domain” in which they are competent. Outside of it not so much…
So when I see folks who are, say, physics majors (Michio Kaku (sp?) and Dr. Neil Degreasy Tyson, and others) spouting off about all manner of other stuff, especially political things, I know they are outside their (very narrow) field of expertise and likely know LESS than the local farmer about things like weather, wars, economics, and justice… They are as reliable as other folks who are “famous for being famous” like the Kardashians…
You see, folk with a Ph.D. (“Piled Higher & Deeper” — and I have one…of a sort) have spent about 26 to 30 years of their life UNCRITICALLY just sucking down whatever was being told to them in their “education” and spouting it back. If you didn’t do that you didn’t get the top degree… They did this in ever narrow areas of interest until they graduated. Often to the exclusion of those real life experiences that teach us to be suspicious, to expect to be wrong… THEN they are told they are the smartest person in the room and infallible (lots of A grades, after all…) and if they are unlucky, git picked to be the “Star” and asked all sorts of questions about things they have never studied, never experienced, and don’t have any clue about. Then ego prevents from saying “I’m ignorant in that area”, so they just parrot back what they heard on the TV the night before…
And that is why Nightly News and Late Night Shows are such effective propaganda.
Being really smart just means you are much more willing and able to believe all sorts of bull shit, even your own. You can spin a yarn with all kinds of detail in it to fool the Rubs. Heck, even ChatGPT / AI has figured this out and makes up crap all the time. (That lawyer who is “on the carpet” because what he submitted to the court and swore was true was BS from ChatGPT..)
So, IMHO, do not worry about your degree or the “quality” of your school. Worry about your ability to stand up and say two things “I don’t know anything about that” and “That sounds like made up garbage to me”. Knowing where Truth is, and what is not truth, matters a whole lot more to Keeping A Tidy Mind than how fast your hardware runs or how big your database of facts and processes might be. Having a load of “ways and means and facts” that are WRONG is worse than knowing you don’t know.
@Canadian Friend:
The difference between “University” and “College” is a good example. In definition, they really just mean “school with a lot of departments” vs “school with general education departments”. The notion that a “university” is superior to a “college” is a broken one. It is better to get a well rounded broad education that teaches you to question the BS spouted by others, than to go to a “University” with departments as diverse as Medical School, Law School, Graduate Economics… and come out with a degree in Grievance Studies and politically indoctrinated to not think critically.
Basically, I learned more in the restaurant and in the library than I did in school, and then more in my Junior College classes (who seemed to have something to prove) than in my State College classes where I learned more than I did in my University degree program… which was a LOT more than I saw being taught at Stanford University where a lot of students in the campus coffee shop had stories that sounded like “Daddy bought me a degree from Stanford if I just show up and coast”… The “lower echelon Grunts” at the J.C. were expected to actually make things that work and get it RIGHT. The State College was expected to make competent employees who could do their job well. The University was expected to teach you your field in depth if possible, but not flunk you out unless you screwed up a lot. While the Elite Universities had a LOT of kids who were Entitled To The Degree so you best not flunk the future Prime Minister Of Wherever… or the Son Of Endowment Fountain.. though they did go out of their way to let in just enough “commoners” who had real brains and skill to keep up their reputation…
So keep a Tidy Mind, and be proud of it, and do not let the B.S. Artists of Name Universities impress you. The one you want to be impressed by is the kid who was hauled in for his 160 I.Q. despite being from Nobody in Nowhere but who would eventually publish Good Stuff and keep the University Reputation intact (all while Daughter Of Diva and Son of Donor got nice degrees in Showing Up from the same school… and yes, I met those folks.)
For Canadian Friend’s comments on CAGW beliefs, these days I have a fair number of contacts who are obviously bright and competent but also believe that unless we reduce the amount of CO2 the West produces then the Earth will become uninhabitable in their lifetimes.
Back in 2011 or so I went along with the “CO2 is bad” idea, because I hadn’t looked into the data and it appeared to be accepted by top scientists and politicians who I assumed had looked at the data in order to form that opinion. As a basic bit of physics, I also knew that CO2 does indeed absorb LWIR and re-radiate it, and thus slows those wavelengths leaving the Earth’s atmosphere and that that would produce some increase in atmospheric temperature. I figured that the people working on this subject would be competent in their chosen field, since in general that applies. Also, if you don’t know enough to have an opinion, it’s normally a safe bet to go with the consensus.
Bob Norman sent me here to look at the actual data, and I found that the consensus was indeed wrong, the computer models of the climate were terrible at predicting, and that if you look at the temperature data for a weather station in an agricultural area where the population density has remained low over a sufficient period of time then in fact you see a slight cooling over the last 60 years or so, not warming. Also covered in Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear”, with an unusual amount of footnotes and data for a novel.
Net result is that I’m not bothered about there being more CO2 in the atmosphere, and that having more is only beneficial. The planet didn’t become uninhabitable in the past when the CO2 levels were much higher, the weather has become less problematic as the planet has warmed a bit since the Little Ice Age (and some of those historical storms were real humdingers with massive deaths relative to population), and the planet has visibly greened over the last 40 years according to NASA’s satellite surveys. Where’s the problem?
I point these things out now and again to people worried about us not arriving at Net Zero. However, the belief is too strong, and they don’t look at the data. Considering that they get told every day (even every hour on the BBC) that CO2 is the existential problem and that their kids will inherit a world they can’t live in, they believe that instead.
I normally get the same sort of belief problem with some basic physics, where people believe that momentum is always conserved, energy is always conserved, and that to get energy to move from colder to hotter you need to expend energy. I’ve occasionally gone into that here, where EM had a subject that reasonably fitted, and on the “fusion rocket” thread I’ve said some of these things are getting experimental verification and fairly close to commercial product. Should be some of them go public next year. Not that they’ve really been that secret anyway, but being a lab curiosity and a commercial product are different things. I’m aiming for something that anyone (of reasonable competence, anyway) should be able to make. Being able to convert room-temperature heat to electricity is practically possible, and has been demonstrated with a commercial product for a couple of decades, though the materials used were not optimum and the device was too expensive. I can improve on that. For the other things such as reactionless thrusters, I talk to the people doing them. Might have a better structure for those, so I’ll test that when I can.
Funny thing is that when these new ways of getting energy are on the market, they will naturally not produce CO2, and so there’s no valid reason for the “CO2 is bad, bad, bad” people to object to them. Considering that they’ve rejected the obvious solution of nuclear power in favour of wind and solar power, that arguably take so much Carbon in making them that they don’t pay back before they need replacement (or at least it’s a close-run thing when you take everything into account such as the fuel-fired power stations needing to be run as spinning backup ready to take the load when the renewables fail to deliver), I can’t see any reason they could object to these new physics devices unless they want people to just not have power at all. We’ll see….
@Simon::
” I also knew that CO2 does indeed absorb LWIR and re-radiate it, and thus slows those wavelengths leaving the Earth’s atmosphere and that that would produce some increase in atmospheric temperature.”
That’s the line I bought for about the first year of looking into the Global Warming panic. I think most “skeptics & deniers” started out as “believers” until they looked deeper into it.
That’s the basic story told by the Glowbull Warming Industry, and believed by most folks (as that is all they hear). But as I think you know, I’ve shown that there’s a couple of specifics left out. In particular:
1) In the Troposphere, the “CO2 radiation window” is already closed. The mean path to absorption is so short that IR effectively doesn’t radiate to space. That is, in fact, why we have a Troposphere. It is the convective zone and it is that convection that moves heat (in the air mass flow) to the Tropopause and Stratosphere. Realizing that was a BIG “Ah Ha!” moment for me. More CO2 below the tropopause mostly does nothing. It might increase the rate of convection a little bit. It might increase water evaporation / condensation, the precipitation cycle a little bit. But only to the extent there was a need for that to move the total solar input up to the tropopause and stratosphere. (In a desert, for instance, where the lack of water vapor does let some IR move further / faster. Like cold nights vs burning days there, but not over the 70% ocean or the land with good plant cover and transpiration).
2) In the Stratosphere, more CO2 does mean more radiation of IR. But here, it can be sent to space. The IR headed down hits the top of the troposphere, and can not penetrate (due to water vapor et.al.) but that going up or sideways just leaves. The net effect of more CO2 in the radiative zone is to cool more effectively.
In essence, the Tropopause is an “IR heat Diode”. Heat can convect up, then radiate to space, but it can not “convect down” nor can it “radiate down” and added CO2 just makes that diode less leaky.
BTW, IMHO, the notion that Venus is a “runaway greenhouse” is also just wrong. What Venus lacks is the water needed to make the Spherical Heat Pipe work. It lacks the high heat capacity working fluid. Did it get bound up in rocks, or baked out by volcanism and blown away by solar wind?
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus
I think it has clue in the first part, then goes off to Global Warming Is EVERYTHING land…
So the whole “had water and runaway greenhouse killed the planet” is all just speculation…
What is known is that the lack of a magnetosphere let the lightest gasses blow away, and at 18 mass units water is lighter than CO2 at 44 mass units. IF Venus had oceans, they got dehydrated by that demonstrated process. Then, without the high heat transfer ability of water evaporation / condensation, the Spherical Heat Pipe lost efficiency so had to run hotter and faster to move the same heat content. Surface temperatures rise a LOT until the heat flow balance is restored with faster mass flow.
At the surface, it lacks the air density decrease that evaporating water (vapor) makes, so lacks the buoyancy that makes convective clouds on Earth. So air speed is low. Then, the added thickness of the sulphuric acid clouds and all higher up has most of the solar heat (not temperature…) being absorbed (and moved) higher up at greater velocity.
Not a “runaway greenhouse” but a “dry heat pipe”. Every heat pipe has a range of temperatures in which it works. Too cold, the working fluid does not evaporate and it doesn’t move heat very well (conduction of the pipe only). Too hot, the fluid all evaporates and does not condense at the cold end. Again it doesn’t move heat well, but the pressure goes way high. Hmmm… Venus has high air pressure… but now add in that the condensing gas of water vapor gets removed by the solar wind…
Anyway, that’s my rant ;-)
This is a tiny bit off topic but not completely
I mean the global warming scam is why they are shoving electric vehicles down our throats, right ?
well here is something a bit strange about EVs,
most EVs that are totaled in the US or Canada end up repaired and sold in Ukraine!!!
and since the war with Russia began the number of EVs in Ukraine has exploded ( no pun intended ) they have 5 times more than they did in 2020 !!!
Something strange is going on there…
long-ish but interesting article with a few graphs .
https://www.wired.com/story/why-teslas-totaled-in-the-us-are-mysteriously-reincarnated-in-ukraine/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Our most gracious host is quite correct. Us old greybeard gaffers and greyhaired gammers were taught quite a lot in the School of Hard Knocks. We were taught How to Think more than Who to Know. There are no useless eaters. Everyone can teach someone else something. Even when what’s shown is what not to do, almost always.
I have chemistry and biology training. I’ve done a number of different kinds of spectroscopy. Emitters are absorbers and absorbers are emitters. The conditions matter. There is no way the hand full of absorption/emission lines carbon dioxide has can really matter much compared to the large number that water has. Sure, there are a few areas where they don’t overlap; but IR active vapors and gases screen both ways and there is a lot more power incoming, even when the percentage of the total is relatively small, than outgoing (though some is reflected); and that light is not heat. Heat is the internal kinetic energy of a defined sample of matter (which includes the kinetic energy of the electrons) and nothing else. Absorption or emission can, but not must, change said internal kinetic energy. There is no radiation greenhouse effect. Greenhouses have diffusion and convection barriers that the open atmosphere does not have. The most you can say is that there is a gravity barrier but that’s no issue for diffusion.
I am roughly halfway through Mead’s book. It is fascinating to me. Oh do I regret not getting further into mathematics than differential equations and some basic vector/matrix/linear algebra.
Why do we want to starve the plants? Do they really not know or care about the death that would result? Are they really that evil to desire that death? Last one is a bit rhetorical.
My RPi is on a piece of painted cement board laying on a metal shelf. I sprayed the cement board with anti-static spray and touch the metal shelf before messing with the Pi. Experience as an electronic tech pays off :)
Antistatic spray —
LINK: https://www.amazon.com/ACL-Staticide-Static-Sentry-Aerosol/dp/B00K0C1G4W
This is from NetBSD but likely holds for FreeBSD too as if one fixed it, the other tends to pick it up:
https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/raspberry_pi/
So, OK, the easy “fix” for this is to run the armV7 system… The 64 bit ARM chips can happily run the 32 bit instructions. Yeah, you “lose” the double word length in the math, but you gain “less packing and unpacking bytes” for text. And, it seems, a working GPU.
So I’m likely going to be trying that next…
Maybe the answer is just for me to do a full build from sources and set the compiler flags for Hard Float & 32 bit with GPU support… probably a flag like “evbarmhf”…
I know it is a LOT easier to not set the Hard Float flag in the early stages of a port process (no need to debug ALU bugs in the float math – and the software float is know to work) and yeah, coding to use Yet Another GPU is a PITA, but the R.Pi aarch64 has been around for a few years now and Linux moved to GPU support a few years back… (I know…. If I don’t like the pace of development I can volunteer to do it.)
I have used antistatic gloves and the wrist band, but really all you need to do is discharge yourself prior to touching electronics. Hummm, that statement could be misinterpreted. LOL
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2044298/do-you-need-an-anti-static-wristband-when-youre-building-a-pc.html
Ossqss, even if you disavow that method, I’m still gonna try it.
@Ossqss:
This has been the first time in about 50 years of handling computers, boards, chips almost entirely without grounding straps (only used at customer sites that expected or required it) that I’ve had any “issue” with ESD.
That’s part of why it took me a while to figure out why most of the time it was nothing here, but some times I’d get Surprising JOLTS when doing things like turning off a lamp (metal base) or touching the TV/monitor… Or, at least twice, touching an SBC (even just 4 feet away from where I was sitting).
In fact, that was how I figured it out. I had the Pine64 plugged into the Living Room TV and had just shut it down a while before. Watched some TV, and “got up to plug the power back into it”. Reaching for the board, I had that Big Zap feeling to the GPIO pins. WT? How did I get all charged up in 4 feet? Especially when it did NOT happen just a short time before (both set up and unplug of the Pine64). The answer was Shoes. I normally run around the house barefoot, but this time slid into my ANDI brand plastic slipper-shoes. Further testing after the fact has shown that I have NO static issues when barefoot, in socks, or otherwise not in that shoe, or when on the tile and not the laminate flooring.
OK, answer gained. Worth the $24 cost of a Pine64 just for no longer getting jolted when I go to turn off a lamp ;-)
I’d pretty much gotten all the “play time & curiosity satisfaction” out of the Pine64 anyway. Bought many years ago (when it was a new design) just to benchmark it against the R.Pi and find out if “really cheap is good enough”… and it was, but just barely…
We’re into a whole new generation of boards now, some with 2 to 10 times more performance. So I’d been wondering if it was time to just abandon that first generation… ( I still have my original Pi B+ in service ;-)
At present, I’ve found that Pi M3 is about as “low” as I am willing to go. I have several of them ( I need to figure out which of mine are real M3 or did I buy any M2… but 4 in total) that mostly are for “server use”, though one is in a carry around case as a reliable small portable desktop… BUT, what I love using the most are my 3 highest performance SBCs. So I’d be mostly ready to just “move on” and stay on them, but for the greater limitation on available OS choices…
Odroid XU4: I bought more of this guy. Just love the “Octo Core” big/little overall performance. It is also armV7 (32 bit) so just about everything runs on it. Though I did have to put a Devuan “userland” on top of an Ubuntu kernel / boot code to get it as I liked it. Being 32 bit also means memory is about 2 x as performant. I.E. what needs 1 GB for 32 bit needs 2 GB when the code is 64 bit long for the same number of instructions. (Folks who are ‘trick’ can shift to 32 bit or even 16 bit instructions in their program to avoid that memory bloat…). It tends to be my “Daily Driver”. I’ve lost 2 of them to “My Bad”. One from a coffee spill… the other from my recent “put 12 VDC into the 5 VDC power socket”… But other than that, never had a hardware issue.
RockPro64: I thought I might have toasted this guy when he would not boot after I swapped an eMMC card onto it for inspection (worked) and then removed it (after which no-boot). Letting it “rest” in a drawer for a couple of days had it boot again. My best guess is a self setting ‘config bit’ needed to drain so it would forget about the eMMC card… I like this board A Lot. 2 x A72 cores (hotter when running than the A73… so heat limited at 2) and 4 x A53 cores (basically a damn fast Pi inside). Lots of folks seem interested in porting to it, and I have Devuan running on it along with FreeBSD. Only real “limitation” is only one USB 3.0 port. But I now have a powered USB 3.0 Hub meaning I can turn that one into 7 whenever I want. Not sure if I’m going to buy another one but maybe. Mostly due to the software choices being “big enough” given my foibles… But at about $100, not a “Mad Money” thing…
Odroid N2: This one I love from a hardware point of view, but the software limitations are a disappointment. Ubuntu is more or less it (certainly from the vendor). Quad core A73 and dual A53. Again, heat management matters. The A-73 is lower heat for about the same computes as the A-72 so 4 of them, and only 2 of the smaller slower A53. When “near idle” it uses only the A53 and can speed shift, so stays very cool. At very high loads, it has a beast of a Quad Core engine, but a big enough heat sink built on that it just doesn’t get too hot. IF I could get a vendor supported Devuan for it, it would be my favorite. Or a BSD (IF it used hard float and the GPU… ). Mine is STILL running Ubuntu or Armbian even after a couple of years, so not buying another one until that “issue” is fixed. (By more vendor choices -that I like- or by me making a working Franken System out of it..) Other than the Hobson’s choice of which SystemD do I want (Ubuntu, Armbian Ubuntu, Debian) it was problem free until I got here. Then Hardkernel love to iterate hardware fast (too fast to build stable software community interest IMHO) so the N2+ is now what they sell.
So, it has acted a bit flaky in the last couple of boots. So I put it in The Drawer for a while. Having identified (and fixed) the power drop-out issue from AC start (via a UPS) and hopefully it was not ESD related… what remains tends to be “Corrupted uSD card?” that might have suffered in use on other smaller systems (backups, restores, etc) where the added disk drives might have caused volts to drop too… I’ve added a beefed up PSU for the R.Pi group to assure that’s off the table, and will flash a saved known good working copy to a new uSD card and “check again”. Also, I can install the eMMC card with vendor Ubuntu on it and see if it is “Just Fine”, so not a hardware issue. Realize I move disks around a lot, and it is also possible that SystemD was sulking at me ’cause I don’t always run sysctl -p (or whatever…) after I touch /etc/fstab…
So there you have it. My present SBC status… At present I am going to standardize on the Odroid XU4 as my “mostly Daily Driver” Devuan. The RockPro64 also has a Devuan and will be an alternate Daily Driver. I’m ordering cases for both of them to reduce the risk of ESD into sensitive pins… (grounded socket cases most like contact point, or the heat sink). The N2 is “suspect” until I get to evaluate it again and assure it is stable on present power / software etc. So likely a month or 2 until I get a Round-Tuit and figure out what to do in terms of software. Wonder if there’s a BSD for it… There’s an Arch Linux, but just another SystemD… https://archdroid.org/en/images/odroidn2/
but all I’ve found for BSD is “roll your own”. So “great hardware” software choices not so much..
Oh, and I’ve been looking at RISC-V as my next “play toy”. Being all open source hardware, it looks like 2 very important things are happening:
1) LOTS of folks interested in it and playing with it and porting to it. Lots of eyeballs and fingers at work. Lots of Distributions interested.
2) Being open source and with a slower development cycle: It looks like a LOT fewer odd cases and variations for software guys to deal with. This implies they WILL use the ALU and GPU as there are no Binary Blobs to deal with and everything is open, plus it doesn’t “iterate” faster than you can port and ship…
I’m not quite ready to take that step, but “soon”. Maybe in January… At least one tested out as better than the R.Pi on video. (don’t remember if it was the M3 or M4 but I think it was the M4). AND the BSD folks are all over it as blob free and open so provably secure. Expect good performant BSD ports to happen fast.
https://wiki.freebsd.org/riscv
So already Tier-2 and likely to move to Tier-1 as board sales increase and volume picks up / bugs are found and removed. FreeBSD 14 is in Devo/Beta already so likely to happen “soonish”.
So I’m thinking by about January I’ll have things (computer wise) cleaned up enough to take on some “play time” with a new ISA / RISC-V board…
BTW: I don’t mind at all that some of my “Pi Model 3 performance level” or less SBCs have “bit the dust” over the last 1/2 decade to decade. They served their purpose then and are mostly hanging around as “hangar queens” wanting me to spend time to find a purpose for them now… So, for example, I’m highly unlikely to want to buy any of: Odroid C1, Odroid C2, Pine64, Rock64. All of those are either “dead or dying” from ESD or “whatever” and served their purpose of “evaluating R..Pi alternatives” for a cluster compute farm (And the desire to make highly parallel codes for weather data analysis kind of died when it became clear it wasn’t about the data, the science or anything but the Political Directives – so wasting my time attacking their data / codes was very much a waste of my time… that’s just picking at the Set Dressing and not the Direction of The Show…)
Well, too long a comment… again. Back to slaving over a hot computer ;-)
There is a Android program called “UserLand” that enables running Linux as an app.
https://userland.tech/
EMS
My thought on the troposphere warm spot is that IR absorption by CO2 is more stabilised by the lower pressure of other gases (and absence of water vapour). This leads to longer time for a CO2 molecule to radiate (whereas near the surface it is about having collisions with other molecules about a thousand times more than the time to radiate)**. But on radiating that energy cannot reach the surface because it has to pass through increasing amounts of water vapour which absorbs most of the radiation and returns it back up again, hence the only way is up.
And in any case the only one of the 3 likely radiation of CO2 likely to avoid being absorbed by water vapour is the far infrared band about 15-20 microns (or in K to ℃) about minus 70℃ which I don’t see warming any of the surface.
** kinetic loss (and averaging every molecules to the same) was, I believe, brought up by some long dead scientist called Einstein about 1915.
Well, it’s confirmed. The Pine64 is dead.
I burned a new pristine uSD card with a pristine Armbian. On boot, it tries to start writing to the screen, then goes a bit nuts on the video. Couple of broad white lines side to side, then some extremely small bit of attempted print at about 5% of a couple of spots at each edge with a big black square in the middle.
Hitting return causes some of that to change back and forth.
My guess is that the CPU is probably intact and trying, but either the memory or the video parts are fried so making errors.
I’d taken a Zap to the corner of the PCBoard where the screw holes look like a grounding plane, and it survived and worked well. A Zap to the GPIO pins cooked it.
So “moral of story” is likely to buy a $7 “case” for your $20 dirt cheap SBC… or not and consider it a consumable. Mine is now consumed.
So “Moving on”, I do not need, at all, another SBC at this time. My “Use Case” has moved on from “build a cluster for playing with climate codes and models on a parallel cluster” (since we now know the “Science” is just a side show to the Political Power Play). It is now “Regular and reliable desktop use”, and I already have a couple of those.
All that’s left, other than that, really, is: Playing with RISC-V as the new shiny thing. That’s not likely before next January or February.
So with that, I’m probably done commenting on my SBC / Computer interactions. With the exception of an Odroid N2 status update once I know, and maybe some kind of BSD update if I find one I like on the hardware I have (but as of now, it is just a bit too slow due to build and config choices… soft float, not using GPU…)
From here on out it will basically just be going through boxes, making the office tidy, and having a Main Computer that I like and use as my Daily Driver (mostly for data movement to larger disks and clearing out duplicates / orderly archive). And saying “I tossed out 1 TB of trash today and moved 3 TB from 3 disks to one to sort it out” is just not very interesting…
So on to other topics…
Oh, and FYI: Chromium browser does not use Hardware for math on the R.Pi unless you change some flags in it:
https://www.linuxuprising.com/2021/04/how-to-enable-hardware-acceleration-in.html
Why anyone would not use all the hardware available is beyond me… Lazy?
FWIW
“WATCH: Joe Biden Admires Little Girl’s Ears, Asks If She’s 17”
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/11/20/watch-joe-biden-admires-little-girls-ears-asks-if-shes-17/
A go at a mathematical expression of that – with help from Oz idiom
“B 4 I sqrtU R U/17”
(abbreviate “sqrtU” to “root U” and “R U over 17”)
Mostly a note to myself:
This is a very interesting video about the “gut biome” where a “microbiome expert” (Dr. William Davis) is interviewed. He talks fast, tends to a bit of “sluring” of words (common in very fast speech) and top that off with a bit of accent or different pronunciation, it can be slightly hard to follow (even the automated captions get more words wrong… so it isn’t just me ;-)
I’m only up to the 40 minute point and have to run off to do other things… It is 2 hours long…
Interesting bits so far:
He uses an “Air Device” too measure H2 and Methane from the upper gut as an indicator of fecal bacteria “overgrowth” or intrusion into the upper intestine. Looks like it is $180 at Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Giorgio-Beverly-Hills-FoodMarble-Bundle/dp/B07V38N6ZB?th=1
Strongly recommends avoidance of modern grains (pretty much across the board) as promoters of SIBO: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/small-intestinal-bacterial-overgrowth/symptoms-causes/syc-20370168 and that SIBO is the source of many other disease problems (from heart disease to arthritis to irritable bowl and more…) So ties together several other “hot topics” in sort of a big picture overview of the others as small view / too focused so missing the root cause.
Matches some of my personal observations over the years as I’ve done various diets in support of family and friends. ( I have only personally done a “diet” once as an “elimination diet” to find out what was causing my big allergies and arthritic hand joints – it was “cow stuff” – but have joined family and friends from time to time as “emotional support” or to research a diet for them, so have had a varied exposure.)
The general conclusion so far: Eat more fermented foods and foods of a paleo type (only one ingredient or things you can name with common words like kimchi) and avoid wheat & other grains (like all humans did 10,000 years ago…) as that supports a better gut environment for getting the “right” bacteria growing in the “right” places.
His general assertion it that if first you get the gut microbiome right, then a whole lot of diseases just go away on their own (and you can dodge the slew of “medications” being shoved at us by the Big Pharma Industry…)
I need to watch the rest of it later, so parking the link here:
The same guy is interviewed in several other later episodes, and Jesse Chappus (the channel creator and interviewer) seems to focus on this kind of health / bio related topic: https://www.youtube.com/@JesseChappus/videos
All part of my exploration of our missing “operations manual for a human body” ;-)
The hydrogen test is also used to detect lactose intolerance.
Speaking of intolerances and allergies…
I have known for almost 40 years that MSG ( monosodium glutamate) and Vanillin ( artificial vanilla which actually is more a flavour enhancer than a substitute for vanilla) cause me bad migraines.
I know not because I was tested for it, but by using logic and going to a process of elimination ( and reading about those ” ingredients” )
Everytime I would eat a product that contained either MSG or Vanillin I had terrible migraines
but I could eat as much of other food as I wanted
trough trial and error I have figured out what to avoid.
but unfortunately not everyone is honest,
… a couple weeks ago I bought maple syrup from a brand I had never tried before, the label says 100% pure in 3 different places, they really insist that their maple syrup is 100% pure.
I added only 2 table spoons to my small yogurt and a couple hours later I had one of the worst migraines I have ever had…intense pain and nausea, I had to take a total of 3 fiorinals ( a prescription that contains some codeine, some butal bital etc )
at first I was puzzled as to what could have caused my severe migraine, but revising all I ate that day, everything else was a ” safe” food item I had had many times before…the only new one was the maple syrup
3 days later as a test I ate one tea spoon of that syrup
and guess what ? within a couple hours I had a migraine!! not as bad but bad enough I had to take one fiorinal
but the label says in 3 places; pure at 100%
and the ingredient list says only ; maple syrup
obviously there is something added to that syrup, to enhance its flavor ( and probably increase profit as a few drops of vanillin certainly cost less than making half a liter of maple syrup )
I cannot prove if it is vanillin as I do not have access to a 5 million dollar test laboratory and I am not a scientist
but in my 64 years on this planet I have had hundreds if not thousands of migraines, and I have been avoiding MSG and Vanillin for over 30 years.
I have filed a complaint with the proper agency here in Quebec ,
they called me once and wrote me 3 emails , but so far I feel like I am the accused or the suspect… they seem more interested in making me a liar than in finding out if the company that makes that syrup is doing something fraudulent.
it is a bit insulting
it adds insult to injury… literally.
Canadian Friend, apparently vanillin can be produced by the process of making maple syrup. You may have gotten into a batch that has more vanillin than usual. Vanillin doesn’t come only from vanilla beans, it is more common in foods than you might think.
In other foods, heat treatment generates vanillin from other compounds. In this way, vanillin contributes to the flavor and aroma of coffee,[24][25] maple syrup,[26] and whole-grain products, including corn tortillas[27] and oatmeal.[28]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanillin
Well, I’ve said a number of times that “There is no chemical that humans can make that the rest of nature can’t, and vise-versa”.
As a fellow migrainer, mostly controlled, I sympathize with CF. That said, my triggers tend to be bright or flickering light and not food. There are so many migraine triggers, though, such that many sufferers can never eliminate many of them.
In the past maple syrup was not causing me migraines. This is the first time I have a terrible migraine from maple syrup and from just 2 table spoons of it.
So there had to be a lot of vanillin in that batch…too much to be just appearing naturally, in my opinion.
Wikipedia also says this,
” … Fermentation
The company Evolva has developed a genetically modified microorganism which can produce vanillin. Because the microbe is a processing aid, the resulting vanillin would not fall under U.S. GMO labeling requirements, and because the production is nonpetrochemical, food using the ingredient can claim to contain “no artificial ingredients”.[38]
Using ferulic acid as an input and a specific non GMO species of Amycolatopsis bacteria, natural vanillin can be produced. …”
Either they added a lot of vanillin or they added that microorganism and a lot of it that produced a lot of vanillin…because that migraine was one of the worst I have ever had..
either way something is not right.
That was not pure maple syrup.
There is no way that maple syrup was not modified in some way.
We are all different
Flickering or ultra bright lights do not affect me.
A strong chemical smell can trigger a migraine for me, but it is mostly food…or more precisely what is added to food.
…
And about Vanillin being produced naturally when certain food are heated, I have not verified but it is either much lower quantities that are produced that way or a different form of it than what is man made.
For example onions naturally contain MSG but I can eat a lot of onions ( raw or cooked) and I get ZERO migraines…but if I eat a bowl of chicken soup that has added MSG in the ingredients I get a wicked migraine.
Added MSG and naturally occuring MSG are obviously different.
and no it is not psychosomatic, I do not convince myself I will have a migraine
and how do I know it is not psychosomatic ?
well please read on,
In the past people have tested me
here is one example,
about 20 years ago the wife of a friend listening to me talking about MSG and migraines did not believe a word I was saying… so she concocted a plan…she made spaghetti sauce and gave me a big container of it.
I brought it home and ate some of it twice, and had migraines each time.
a week later when I saw them again and told them about my migraines and the spaghetti sauce… she apologized and admitted she had added a lot of Bovril to it ( it is beef stock concentrate which contains a lot of MSG ) because she did not believe me and wanted to prove I was wrong. She felt very guilty but now could see that it was real; MSG does cause migraines to some people.
I did not know she had done that, I did not know there was MSG, it was not psychosomatic or a sort of placebo thing, I did not convince myself I was going to have a migraine, i never would have thought she would have dome something like that.
Along the years, two other people have done such ( devious) tests like that on me ( because they refuse to believe ) and they had to admit my migraines were really caused by MSG and were not psychosomatic.
Since most people don t get migraines from MSG or Vanillin, it is very hard for them to believe this is real.
Oh, yes, there are lots of migraine triggers. Sadly, what you experienced is not unknown. As far as monosodium glutamate goes (that is what MSG stands for), it is just the one sodium salt of the amino acid glutamic acid, versus the two sodium salt; since glutamic acid is diprotic. So, what could be different? Dosage and racemic mixture. Good luck finding out what the exact dosage is in a given food and what its racemic mixture is. While typical metabolic processing tends to preserve the racemic state, decomposition can and will change it, whether done by human processing of varying kinds or not.
I, for one, would accept your word for it, given that I am also a migraine sufferer. Sadly, too many don’t want to accept that a person’s actual experience is true. You will, unfortunately, be doing the “elimination diet” thing, a lot. That’s worth it, for you, CF.
“A timely warning for gift-shopping”
“Those of us with children would do well to heed this warning.
Toys that “spy” on children are a rising, “frightening” threat, a new study from a consumer watchdog has warned.
The U.S. PIRG Education Fund noted that certain toys that record children’s voices, images, locations and other information pose a risk to children’s safety and privacy.”
More at
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2023/11/a-timely-warning-for-gift-shopping.html
FWIW
“Heads-up for AR-15 owners”
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2023/11/heads-up-for-ar-15-owners.html
The toys also spies on everyone that is in that house…it can hear what adults are saying in the next room…
There is a synthetic derivative of vanillin i.e. Ethyl vanillin which has a stronger but very similar smell to vanillin. Industrial vanillin may not, indeed most probably not, come from the vanillin Orchid but as a byproduct of woodchipping.
I don’t know what the source of this is in maple syrup but people become desensitised to vanillin and someone adding a dose to the maple syrup might have thought (from his lack of sensing the odour) and added extra.
In praise of “Liver and Lights”
“Ancient Secret: Native American’s Key to Longevity Revealed”
https://www.zerohedge.com/sponsored-post/ancient-secret-native-americans-key-longevity-revealed
And
“Liver and Lights”
https://hardcorepreppers2.weebly.com/blog/liver-and-lights
Points out that people are still eating it but diluted in manufactured meat
@Another Ian:
I grew up in a farm town where we regularly ate liver & onions, steak & kidney pie, Beef Heart (in gravy or sandwich), chicken “innards” (liver, heart, gizzard slow cooked in spiced gravy) and more. I’ve eaten Haggis and liked it. ;-) Oh, and while I never personally ate it, “scrambled brains & eggs” was also “a thing” (and I saw it in a can in The South a few decades back).
There is a definite burst of energy from eating liver.
One of my petty annoyances at being unable to eat much beef (or the joints complain) is that liver & kidneys & heart have left the menu. Not that you can find them in the local supermarket anymore anyway…
IF I could find LAMB organ meats, I’d buy them immediately. All that loverly stuff going to cat and dog food… But finding lamb at all is a sometimes thing.
Oh Well.
Maybe I need to find a rural lamb farmer & butcher…
Oh! And we occasionally had “Tongue Sandwich” on the menu in the restaurant! Have to carefully remove the tough membranes and slice it thin, but you get a lot of sandwiches from one big cow tongue…
And sweetbreads. Oh My. In a very high end Swiss restaurant I had them once in the Swiss (French?) style. God they were good… I suck the sweetbreads out of the chicken backs from KFC now too ;-)
And at my Mexican Friends home, I got to have menudo (made with tripe – the stomach of the cow).
Tried a Pickled Pigs Foot once. Bit chewy…
Did I mention my saying about my home town? “If it moved, you ate it; if it didn’t you tried anyway!” Bunch of farmers & Mexicans… and then some Amish derived (me via Dad and his Mom) and Mormons. Nobody wasted food or parts of animals…
Probably there will be other naturally occurring molecules similar to vanillin. Those also might trigger a migraine.
CO2 is bad? No, could be put to good use on those Hamas tunnels.
@Beng135:
Interesting idea…. Maybe just roll up a jet engine and duct the exhaust …
Who killed JFK? Here’s an article with an interesting viewpoint.
The author knew Oswald and Marina. Maybe better than anyone.
Oswald tried to assassinate General Edwin Walker (but failed).
The author thinks that Oswald was working in that building before Kennedy’s route was chosen and he had the gear, so he took the opportunity.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/jfk-assassination-60-years-later-we-know-truth-about-real-killer
Interesting. But in that case why was the Warren report kept secret?
In any case, his theory does not prove that there were not also other shooters.
We “know” pretty well that there were lots of groups that would have liked to get rid of JFK. One of them could have planned the route to give Oswald a shot, but not necessarily relied on him to do it. Patsy or just a good cover-up story?
@YMMV: For some really interesting and in depth discussion about the JFK assassination check out YouTube channel America’s Untold Stories:
In comments at SDA on the Canadian border incident –
“People who eat bacon are statistically, much less likely to blow themselves up!”
FWIW
“Lithium Crash Deepens With Battery Metal Now Down 78% From Peak ”
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/lithium-crash-deepens-battery-metal-now-down-78-peak
Speaking of “sweetbreads”, another reason to like Thanksgiving is that you usually get giblets with that big ol’ turkey. I stew them and then cut them up and put them in the cornbread dressing and gravy.
I’ve started writing up documentation for each year’s Thanksgiving feast. I give each dish a grade:
A = Good enough to repeat as is.
B = Not bad; could use a little tweaking.
C = Better than nothing.
D = Don’t do this again without drastic revision in ingredients or prep method.
F = Don’t do this again!
I haven’t done it the same way twice. I keep trying to replicate the dishes my mom and grandmother used to cook together every year (especially the cornbread dressing). They usually had no recipe, but collaborated to get the job done. Good times!
Even though I’m usually only cooking for the two of us, I grew up in a family of six. So when I try to cook like Mom did, I cook for at least six! I end up with lots of nice leftovers to take to work.
My grandmother got me started cooking a turkey overnight (or all day, for 8-9 hours). It’s amazing how little work it takes to get such a lovely main dish!
FWIW
“Ukr Hard Day: Avdeyevka Cauldron, Kherson Bridgehead Cut Off, Wilders Wins; Biden BRICS Gaza Plan”
Russian night vision adaptation to drones for use at night now in use
https://rumble.com/v3xgdvy-ukr-hard-day-avdeyevka-cauldron-kherson-bridgehead-cut-off-wilders-wins-bid.html
And
“New Raft of Articles Tighten the Screws on Zelensky, Plead for Course Correction”
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/new-raft-of-articles-tighten-the
“Two Interesting Reads: AFU Commander Interview, and a New Polish Book”
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/two-interesting-reads-afu-commander
FWIW
“Does red wine give you headaches? Buy a cheaper bottle, scientists say.”
” https://nationalpost.com/life/food/does-red-wine-give-you-headaches-buy-a-cheaper-bottle-scientists-say ”
Via https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2023/11/24/november-24-2023-reader-tips/#comment-1832931
” In some more terrific news, get ready to enjoy that feeling of being proven right, again, this time about a critically-important subject. The Daily Coffee News (it’s real) ran a story Tuesday headlined, “Study: Regularly Drinking Coffee Reduces COVID-19 Infection Risk.”
In today’s Covid and Coffee Newswletter
In a few months they will say voting liberal reduces covid infection risks…and some will believe that…those who were going to vote liberal anyway !
A “threefer” for you
“The failure of wind, then solar, and also batteries, in three stories”
https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2023/11/24/the-failure-of-wind-then-solar-and-also-batteries-in-three-stories/
And in comments at SDA the other day –
“People who eat bacon are statistically, much less likely to blow themselves up!”
FWIW
“We were always at war with Eastasia”
John Mearsheimer
Via https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2023/11/24/we-were-always-at-war-with-eastasia/
FWIW
“New free security tool for pc users
Portmaster can monitor your sysyem for spyware, malware, tracking, network information, remote port host countries, stops M$ telemetry, browser data theft and lots more.
This is actually a very nice product and free.
Suitable for mid-range competency pc users.
A “must have” utility, especially for W10 and W11.
Free version:
https://safing.io/download/ ”
https://joannenova.com.au/2023/11/saturday-34/#comment-2715437
Things archeology digs up –
“Winged phallus wind chime found at Viminacium”
https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/68784
@Another Ian
“Does red wine give you headaches?”
Reminds me of a story from an old friend who was (by profession) a qualified Master Brewer, working for one of the major UK beer makers. It was standard-operating-procedure to put Sodium Nitrite in the brew. Which was justified as a “preservative” for any beer that was bottled and left on the shelf for a long time. But Sodium Nitrite is also toxic.
Symptoms of [nitrite] poisoning can vary depending on the amount and duration of the exposure. Those with very mild methemoglobinemia might not have any symptoms at all, or might appear a little pale and feel tired.
Which, of course, is par for the course the morning after a good beer session. And also, with dehydration, a thumping great headache. The general public would assume it must have been really good strong beer that caused that. Actually, it was weak but toxic beer.
Nitrate or Nitrite? Nitrate is the one usually used in beer and wine. Either could be in meat. Whether that’s good or bad depends on the fine details, but either could become nitrosamines, which has been flagged as a carcinogen
The human body needs nitrates and nitrites. These additives serve an important bodily function. Your body breaks down nitrates into nitrites, which it then converts into either nitric oxide or nitrosamines.
https://www.webmd.com/diet/is-sodium-nitrate-safe
FWIW
“Gee this bloke is good.”
Javier Milei
Via https://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2023/11/gee-this-bloke-is-good.html
FWIW
“FWIW – “China’s Running out of Safe/Clean Food”
Some music from the ancient past:
Tommy Mottola lives on the road He lost his lady, two months ago Maybe he′ll find her, maybe he won’t
Oh no, never, no, no He sleeps in the back of his grey cadillac Oh my honey Blowin′ his mind on cheap grass and wine Oh ain’t it crazy baby, yeah Guess you could say, hey hey, this man has learnt his lesson, oh-oh, hey, hey Now he’s alone he′s got no women and no home For misery oh- ho, cherchez la femme Minnie Bonicha′s very upset She’s sick and tired of livin′ in debt Tired of roaches Tired of rats I know she is So her noble man says “baby I understand” oh my honey Now he’s working two jobs at 6th Avenue bars Oh ain′t it crazy Now she complains That her man is never present So she goes next door, I know she’s just playing the whore For misery, my friend, cherchez la femme They′ll tell you a lie with a colgate smile Hey baby Love you one second and hate you the next Oh ain’t it crazy, yeah All I can say Of one thing I am certain Theyr’e all the same All the sluts and the saints For misery, Cherchez la femme
“US Department of Health official who conspired with Anthony Fauci to downplay COVID lab-leak theory reveals ‘agonising’ over his actions”
https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/us-department-of-health-official-who-conspired-with-anthony-fauci-to-downplay-covid-lableak-theory-reveals-agonising-over-his-actions/news-story/f568f544d4b5eb05fb26dc3e198f50ae
Quite a good watch to the end.
Looks like WordPress has been “improving”?? I can’t seem to do a paste. Same at The Air Vent
the comment box is acting weird… or was earlier anyway
Look at 5:10 to 6:40. People who merely flew into the Washington DC area in the Jan 2021 time frame are being monitored.
https://rumble.com/v3xvesi-war-on-the-working-class-whatfingers-7.html
They have “upgraded” the interface. The comment box works, but you’ll have to adjust to the changes.
For what it’s worth:
I despise the “block editor” they forced on us blog writers a couple of years ago, so I’ve worked carefully to keep using the “old editor” (with increasingly complicated work arounds year after year…)
Well, it looks like they have brought that abomination to the “comment box”. I edited the comment on Israeli Women being ignored to get the blockquotes to work, and the thing is full of the same “block markers” and other intrusions from the Block Editor.
This means there will be many new things to either figure out how they work, find ways to avoid them, or I’ll be editing a lot of comments to “fix them”. For one thing, you have to click on the text line saying something like “Write a comment” to get it to start letting you enter a comment… Sigh.
Looking at it, they insert an OPEN BRACKET !– /wp;paragraph –CLOSE BRACKET every time you do a blank line or end a text block. When that came in between your text and the O.B.blocckquote C.B. the HTML was not interpreted as HTML but the brackets were substituted with the text to display them (ampersand yada yada ;)
My guess is that this means any HTML you want to stick in will need to abut some text… maybe…
Testing blockquotes.
<blockquote>
This is a test
</blockquote
Testing blockquotes <blockquote>
This is a test.</blockquote>
No Joy. Even with the text abutting the thing commented, the HTML is ignored. So block quoting “long hand” is busted. Probably need to use one of those cryptic symbols in the comment box above… or complain at Word Press enough they revert to the nice old form…
I don’t recall seeing the function items above the textbox before but may have never noticed it until now. It does have a drop down for inline code there also.
Paragraph 1
Another paragraph, does “quote” do what we used to do with blockquote?
I’m not logged in for this comment.
I’ll use the old HTML for quoting and see what happens.
Testing – Link to what I was going to paste here
What a cocked up bloody system!
https://joannenova.com.au/2023/11/wednesday-33/#comment-2716156
Hmmmmm… Not logged in and the blockquote and strike functions worked just like they always did back when Abe Lincoln used them when writing on the back of a shovel with a stick of charcoal.
Here’s a video I found a couple of weeks ago that was interesting to me.
This fellow is an arrowhead collector and is getting some arrowhead/dart/spear points from the banks of the Ohio river.
It’s 26+ minutes, but you can save time and watch this at 1.5X and not lose a thing and some will have no problem with it at 2X.
What I found interesting:
1) The site above the river that produced the points had been used for thousands of year. He didn’t go into the ‘why’ other than it is a flat area above the river.
2) At about 10:45 in, he explains why he can find so many projectile points at the location.
3) He goes into the evolution of the projectile points and the different cultures which made them.
4) He shows the book he uses to identify the various points he finds. I would be interested in getting a copy and maybe check into some other books on the topic of N. American projectile points.
Here’s the link. It’s an interesting diversion on a different technology from what we are used to. It’s a good watch when you are sick and tired of politics and the antics of GEBs and could go for a little downtime.
Fascinating, H.R. This guy knows his arrow archaeology.
Used to make bows and arrows from willow wood with my young niece
and nephew. Got quite good at hitting targets… No arrow heads but.
Hmm… Looks like they backed out the Block Editor Comment Box. Hopefully it stays this way…
In other news:
Looks like an EV Truck went up in flames in Melbourne. Here is an epic rant about it. Note that it has lots of NSFW & F-Bombs in it. John Cadogan is like that ;-)
The first 12 minutes is a royal rip on the failed tech and the Idiots In Charge who bought it. At 12 minutes, he transitions to a very good description of how Engineering ought to be done, and why Idiots In Charge just don’t get it, and can’t, so screw things up regularly; and IMHO ought to be required watching for our rulers and their minions.
The basic story is that a big Cement Truck (think Kenworth) was converted to use a giant swapable battery. A development truck had gone on in flames some months ago, but This Time For Sure! they were certain that it was fixed… except it wasn’t, and the early adopter version had what looks like thermal runaway flaming truck self destruction too… shutting down a major set of roads for 12 hours of “wait for it to burn itself out”…
So when will we start to class EVs as “hazardous cargo” when it comes to tunnels? Requiring them to take the “bypass”? There have been a couple of fires in vehicle tunnels that have killed dozens as there is no good escape. These resulted in “rules” that things in danger of bursting into flames are forbidden in the tunnels. Isn’t that an EV Battery? What do you do in, say, the I-10 tunnel in Mobile under the river, 2 lanes wide, when that Tesla in the “fast lane” burst into flame with a tongue of fire shooting out the side into the “slow lane” and everybody stops. Then the fire starts to migrate from car to car and the heat driven convection starts the blowtorch up the tunnel?
……I survived thanksgiving, didn’t even end up in the psych ward…. but damn is it ever good to be home.
as per ev fires, there were a lot of train wrecks before westinghouse invented the airbrake, i imagine in time someone will find a solution
I’ve lived in Mobile. I know that tunnel. Lots of vehicular traffic through there daily as folk commute from Baldwin county into Mobile county for work, in addition to the other through traffic from FL to NOLA and points west of New Orleans. Yeah, an EV fire would be ugly there.
Well, we have some solutions now. It is called battery chemistry. The downsides are that those are either heavier, have less electrochemical energy density, or both.
Pay attention to the IgG4 stuff. Just sayin. . . >
“Going Bwoke”
“Investments in trendy ‘ESG’ assets collapsed by $5 trillion in just two years…”
https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2023/11/30/going-bwoke/
Wildlife for the night
“We often speak of “pink elephants” in regard to what an alcoholic may “see” during his more inebriated moments. Nevertheless, some baby elephants are, indeed, born pink, although they lose that color as they grow.”
First bath at
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2023/11/too-cute.html
And welcome to life in the wild in the second video
Thought this would interest — huge organized censorship development. Getting REALLY going in the Obamination regime. https://public.substack.com/p/ctil-files-1-us-and-uk-military-contractors
Wildlife for the night
“We often speak of “pink elephants” in regard to what an alcoholic may “see” during his more inebriated moments. Nevertheless, some baby elephants are, indeed, born pink, although they lose that color as they grow.”
First bath at
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2023/11/too-cute.html
And welcome to life in the wild in the second video
How to make money non-fungible, eliminate cash; Titanic, meet Iceberg.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/what-100-million-unbanked-nigerians-can-teach-canadians-about-central-bank-digital-currency-5537535
“Canada is one of about 100 countries that—in uncanny synchronicity—several years ago joined the race toward retail central bank digital currency (CBDC).”
You might recall that Canada is the country that froze bank accounts of people who supported the Truckers Protest.
Following in China’s ESG “social credit system” brave new world order, making it easy for a government to cancel all opposition.
The Epoch Times article links to a longer, more in-depth article:
https://c2cjournal.ca/2023/11/hush-money-the-untold-dangers-and-delusions-of-central-bank-digital-currency/
the following countries that have launched CBDC (in chronological order), so far none has implemented offline wallets: the Bahamas (Sand Dollar), Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (DCash), Nigeria (e-Naira), Jamaica (JamDex), China (eCNY), India (Digital Rupee), Russia (Digital Ruble).
@YMMV:
I would add to that meme:
Can be unusable during natural disasters (hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, floods) or even things like electrical power outages (to become ever more frequent with a ‘green grid’…) and an go POOF! and be gone from things like computer center fires / bombs or banking collapses… and more…
Extending the “extent of human stupidity” – an example from Oz
“”Killing koalas to “save” polar bears”
“”This blog will detail the lack of environmental scrutiny of the wind factories and pumped hydro projects built or planned in Queensland as the state sanctions the wholesale clearing of remnant native forest on the coastal ranges straddling the Great Dividing Range.”
More at
https://www.robertonfray.com/2023/12/01/killing-koalas-to-save-polar-bears/
FWIW
“Real pushback: Corporate America eliminating college degree requirements for new hires
November 30, 2023 11:35 am Robert Zimmerman
Increasingly viewed at useless educational institutes
According to a new survey of 800 American companies, about half say they have now dropped their requirement that new employees have a college degree, with some businesses replacing this requirement with actual apprenticeship programs.
For example, Accenture launched an apprenticeship program in 2016 through which it has since hired 1,200 people, CNBC reported. Some 80 percent of those people joined the company without a four-year-degree.”
More at
https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/real-pushback-corporate-america-eliminating-college-degree-requirements-for-new-hires/
https://patriotpost.us/memes/102517-2023-11-30
It only took 3 years for someone to tell the truth about masks.
FWIW
Vitamin I and the latest out of China
“Let’s talk mystery diseases! The “Chinese mystery pneumonia,” which is not a mystery, is “overwhelming” Chinese hospitals (meaning not overwhelming them), and “spreading” to other countries. The UK Express ran a story yesterday headlined, “Full list of countries affected by Chinese respiratory illness.” ”
And following
https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/rats-friday-december-1-2023-c-and
That new pneumonia is China helping Democrats rig the the 2024 election
with a new “scary” pandemic, mail in ballots will be used twice as much as in 2020 and Democrats will be able to very easily steal 2024 election.
There will be no Mueller type investigation into Biden-China collusion, there will be no impeachment, those are only for Republicans such as Trump.
The last 70 years or so were relatively great, but it is over, the USA ( and in fact the entire West) are now heading into a new age of tyranny, a new dark age.
In England and Ireland they already arrest people just for their opinion, and after Democrats steal 2024 the same will happen in the USA.
After Democrats ( with the help of China – again ! ) steal the 2024 election, there will not be a Republican President for 50 years or maybe for ever.
We are entering a new dark age.
“The Magic Moment”
Check the bit around the Moderna board of directors!
(In the financial sense “Highly Principal-ed” I guess)
Conclusion –
” What follows from here in this new civil war of truth against untruth is that untruth will lose because untruth is fundamentally unsound and can’t stand on its own. The US bureaucratic blob, like the fictional product Soylent Green, is people. There are, obviously thousands of them, virtually a whole army, guilty of crimes. The whistleblowers are popping out all over now. We’re approaching the magic moment when the whole blob army flips and rats out each other in the attempt to save their asses. Wait for it.”
https://kunstler.com/clusterf*-nation/the-magic-moment/
I really hope I am wrong but I am not as optimistic as Kunstler is.
I think the criminals will simply become more authoritarian, more totalitarian, more tyrannical, will control and limit more of what we can say on the internet, will punish more harshly those who refuse to follow the new rules, and just like they do in England and Ireland, they will start arresting people for their comments on the internet.
That way the criminals will be able to sleep at night knowing no one can tell the truth about them.
my girlfriend says my pessimism is annoying, but I see it as realism.
If I had the energy and patience I would dig for comments I posted over 10 years ago on various blogs in which I was saying that I was surprised the left had not yet begun to use censorship and threats of prison time to silence those who were publishing the truth about how evil the left is and that we have the receipts.
I was called pessimist back then too yet look where we are today…I could sense the left would become more tyrannical and it turns out I was right
I could not predict the FBI would take control of Twitter, I could not predict precise things or events like that, but I knew the left was very very thirsthy for total power and total control and things would get worse…and things did get much worse.
I hope this time I am wrong, but I fear things will get much more ugly…
I fear the left will make Trudeau freezing bank accounts of people who donated to freedom truckers look like a picnic compared to what they will do to us.
and modern technology is making the job of tyrannical leftists easier everyday
but I really truly hope I am wrong this time.
I might be beating a dead horse here, but I just learned that the House of Representative is blocking Gateway Pundit.
Gateway Pundit being one of the most important site on the planet as far as exposing the left for what it is makes this something not to be taken lightly.
The tyrants are extending their tentacles…
“In England and Ireland they already arrest people just for their opinion”
In Ireland, a sign which says “Irish Lives Matter” is a hate crime.
In England, they arrested a woman for thinking a silent prayer.
But all that pales compared to what the US is doing.
https://www.rt.com/news/588287-trump-twitter-interactions-warrant-prosecutor/
Secret warrants, especially secret to the accused. Freedom and Liberty ain’t what it used to be. Not to forget Clintoncide.
After BIden, Newsome?
“Newsom is the single most ruthless and evil person I’ve ever seen in politics.”
– Tucker Carlson
My wife got COVID about 3 weeks ago. Her throat felt odd, so we took Vit-I. Next day, to the Dr., tested positive. We kept up dosing for 6 days total. I got symptoms about 3 days after her. She ran a fever for a few days, me only one day. Still lethargic, but neither of us hit the hospital ;)
Help Trump fight the idiots!
https://secure.winred.com/save-america-joint-fundraising-committee/5aee594f61b08e09
YMMV,
Yep ! I saw that.
It is turning into a police state
Here’s a question for one of the AI programs.
“If AI was going to eliminate humans, how would AI do it?”
Hmmm… Follow-up question:
“If GEBs were going to eliminate 90% of the Earth’s population, how would they do it?”
It wouldn’t surprise me if the answer was, “They should just keep doing what they are doing.”
I have a question:
Q: Why do the GEBs want to kill off or disable or maim or sterilize most of us?
A: Jealousy; they know their own offspring are not able to truly take replace their (GEBs’) parents and build what they think should be built next.
@HR, how?
Induce an IgG4 class switch through the use of genetic therapies, is one example.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10222767/
Classic “You can’t mkae this up!” stuff!
The “mystery” Chinese Pneumonia is a known pathogen and the pneumonia is typically / frequently due to a lack of Vit-A (almost unheard of now in the West but common in China). Dr. John Campbell has a video about it that I’m watching ATM…
The Who? decided to issue “guidance” that includes all the usual stuff, masks, distancing, staying at home and, strangely, getting a flu shot… but says nothing about vitamins or general health status of the patient and their immune system…
mycoplasma pneumoniae is the bug.
So as long as you are eating your butter, cheese and yellow/orange vegetable and are in generally normal health, no worries…
Want to end this “new threat”? Have China hand out vit-a pills in the poor rural areas where folks have a lousy limited diet…
@Power Grab:
They also believe their own B.S. so think that any day now AI & Robots can be their servants instead of all us troublesome biological entities with some free will… so they want to turn 90% of the Earth into a giant nature park for them and theirs, and get us out of the way, while their robots make anything they need.
What they have missed is that thing they always miss. Logistics chain & technical advancement comes from very unexpected people in all sorts of places. Essentially, you need a large population to maintain an advanced society and move it forward. Robots can’t replace that now, or in the foreseeable future. (Robots are dependent on the same logistics, scale, and economic / technical advancement via people…)
@Canadian Friend:
Which House Of Representatives blocking it where? I get it here (in the Free State Of Florida!):
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/
Odd, they blocked themselves and not us, must be some mistake !?
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/12/breaking-us-house-is-censoring-gateway-pundit-website
Fire up the BBQ!
“Nutrient From Beef And Milk Found To Potentially Kill Cancer Cells”
https://principia-scientific.com/nutrient-from-beef-and-milk-found-to-potentially-kill-cancer-cells/
Via Jo Nova
And bacon on the side as a precaution –
“Bacon eaters are statistically less likely to blow themselves up”
@Another Ian:
All sorts of Doctors and Nutritionists and Health Food Folks keep sayin’ you need a lot of Omega-3 fatty acids for good health. And you can get a lot more from “grass fed” stuff. But ya know what? I have never heard of “grass fed tofu”…
So it’s grass fed steaks and burgers for me… and no faux meat…
FWIW
“Eastern Europe Is Privately Not Quite as Pro-Ukraine as Western Media Claim
December 3, 2023 | Sundance | 127 Comments ”
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2023/12/03/eastern-europe-is-privately-not-quite-as-pro-ukraine-as-western-media-claim/#more-253464
E.M. – FWIW
https://joannenova.com.au/2023/12/monday-32/#comment-2717147
Another “fact checker” attracting “incoming”
“‘The Cavalry Has Arrived’: Rumble Files Lawsuit in Ongoing Free Speech Battle”
https://hotair.com/headlines/2023/12/03/the-cavalry-has-arrived-rumble-files-lawsuit-in-ongoing-free-speech-battle-n596262
“Brian Crossman: I am Spartacus! I am Duncan!”
“Do y’all like gladiator movies?”
“Like all screwed up stories in Canada lately, this one begins with our fearless leader, Justin Trudeau.”
Developments around Trudeau’s “Carbon Tax”
https://pipelineonline.ca/brian-crossman-i-am-spartacus-i-am-duncan/#/?playlistId=0&videoId=0
Via https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2023/12/03/i-am-spartacus-i-am-duncan/
The article says,
” … Of course, common sense dictates that the federal government arresting any provincial government officials would be foolish at best and a world media nightmare at worst. This would be unprecedented in the first world. (It is however standard operating procedure in a “basic dictatorship”) …”
well…liberal governments ( everywhere from here to New Zealand) are more and more tyrannical,
for example, in Canada they froze the bank accounts of people who simply donated to Freedom Truckers,
in the USA they are trying to throw in prison the most popular candidate in US history ( yes I mean Trump , he did and is still beating records in many ways )
So yes the Canadian liberal government would go as far as arrest provincial officials.
20 or 30 years ago I would said that would be impossible and unthinkable, but things have changed .
The left is more tyrannical, more totalitarian, more devoid of a conscience ( like psychopaths and yes I am serious ) every year.
Get the popcorn?
Texas Sues Pfizer for Lying About Vaccine Effectiveness and Conspiracy to Censor Discussions
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/12/01/texas-sues-pfizer-for-lying-about-vaccine-effectiveness-and-conspiracy-to-censor-discussions/
This is what I fight for every day.
@Ossqss:
After listening to sooo many “artists” massacre the national anthem (jazz tempo, unexpected and nuts note swaps, yodel like crap on a note, etc.) it is a joy to hear it done in a traditional yet beautiful way. (Even if they did sneak in some ‘wobbles’ on the last note ;-)
No intro needed.
Perspective, strangely only updated to 09-06-2021 by the IEA.
Why is TES never discussed, anywhere?
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/world-total-energy-supply-by-source-1971-2019
Firefox on the brink?
The Big Three may effectively be down to a Big Two, and right quick.
2023-11-30
Reading time: 3:45 • 843 words
A somewhat obscure guideline for developers of U.S. government websites may be about to accelerate the long, sad decline of Mozilla’s Firefox browser. There already are plenty of large entities, both public and private, whose websites lack proper support for Firefox; and that will get only worse in the near future, because the ’fox’s auburn paws are perilously close to the lip of the proverbial slippery slope.
https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2023/11/firefox-brink/
I use Firefox and noticed it now offers a copy function without tracking.
Ossqss – did you notice the note in the energy chart?
Notes
World includes international aviation and international marine bunkers. In these graphs, peat and oil shale are aggregated with coal. Other includes geothermal, solar, wind, tide/wave/ocean, heat and other sources.
@jim2
Yep, but the most important category is “Other”. Wind and solar contributions are too small to be displayed on their own.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) secured court orders to prevent Google from informing congressional staffers of the DOJ’s efforts to monitor their communications, according to court documents.
Legal group Empower Oversight released the five court orders Monday after filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the records related to the DOJ’s previously unknown attempts to monitor the communications of staffers conducting oversight of the department.
https://dailycaller.com/2023/12/04/doj-blocked-google-informing-congressional-staffers-spied-court-orders/
Yet another way to spy on us …
In the spring of 2021, Sarper Ozharar — a physicist at NEC Laboratories, which operates the Princeton test bed — noticed a strange signal in the DAS data. “We realized there were some weird things happening,” says Ozharar. “Something that shouldn’t be there. There was a distinct frequency buzzing everywhere.” The team suspected the “something” wasn’t a rumbling volcano — not inNew Jersey — but the cacophony of the giant swarm of cicadas that had just emerged from underground, a population known as Brood X. A colleague suggested reaching out to Jessica Ware, an entomologist and cicada expert at the American Museum of Natural History, to confirm it. “I had been observing the cicadas and had gone around Princeton because we were collecting them for biological samples,” says Ware. “So when Sarper and the team showed that you could actually hear the volume of the cicadas, and it kind of matched their patterns, I was really excited.”
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/12/04/2336239/cicadas-are-so-loud-fiber-optic-cables-can-hear-them
Leaders. That’s where we went wrong. It’s the natural state of humans, much like war and other crimes and sins. But we did manage to better ourselves for a short while. Instead of leaders and led, which leads right into kings and peasants, elite and deplorables, masters and slaves, GEBs and disposables, dictators, and authoritarians, instead of that…
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/12/representatives_not_leaders_will_save_this_country.html
Astronomy observation is difficult in urban environments due to the background noise generated by human activities. Consequently, promoting astronomy in metropolitan areas is challenging. In this work, we propose a low-cost, educational experiment called Wok the Hydrogen (WTH) that offers opportunities for scientific observation in urban environments, specifically the observation of the 21 cm (f21=1420.4 MHz) emission from neutral hydrogen in the Milky Way. We demonstrate how to construct a radio telescope using kitchenware, along with additional electronic equipment that can be easily purchased online. The total system cost is controlled within 150 dollars.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15163
Inconvenient fact checking of Newsome ASSertions during the Newsome/
De Santis debate… California’s homelessness record, numbers of people,
( like E.M. ) leaving the State, Covid mandates, the only State to mandate
student vaccines for all grade levels and more.
And “Kerry Punctuations”
“Loud Fart Erupts: John Kerry’s Speech on Climate Change Overshadowed by Audible Call to Reduce Personal Methane Contributions (VIDEO)”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/12/loud-fart-erupts-john-kerrys-speech-climate-change/
“FULL: Rex Murphy delivers speech to Israel supporters at Parliament Hill rally – YouTube”
For things dietary
“Adventures with sweeteners”
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2023/12/adventures-with-sweeteners.html
About Xylitol,
I had tried it a couple years ago and it caused me a lot gas and diarrhea, so after a week I never tried it a again.
but I just did a google search and to my surprise Xylitol reduces the growth of Candida Albicans, which people like me who have a diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue usually have too much of in their system.
Interesting…maybe I should give it another try…
And about Monk Fruit,
I found this,
” … Monk fruit contains natural sugars, mainly fructose and glucose.
However, unlike in most fruits, the natural sugars in monk fruit aren’t responsible for its sweetness. Instead, it gets its intense sweetness from unique antioxidants called mogrosides.
During processing, mogrosides are separated from the fresh-pressed juice. Therefore, monk fruit sweetener does not contain fructose or glucose. …”
Does NOT contain fructose ? Wow maybe I should try that too
Off topic, don’t know where to put this, so I ll put it here
on Firefox they suggest articles
one this morning is from Business Insider and it is, well very dishonest
it says that despite inflation, the price of used cars is down.
What ???
Ok here is one example
Back in 2019 a 2010 Kia Forte was selling for between $5000 and 7000 ( Canadian dollars ) …I paid $ 6000 for mine in the fall of 2019…it had about 35,000 miles on it.
Today the exact same car that is now 14 years old – and they all have much more than 40,000 miles now – sells for $ 8000 to $ 10,000 on autotrader.com
The price of used cars in general has almost doubled in the last few years
Business insider telling us that despite inflation the price of used cars is down is absurd and dishonest.
Pingback: China, Pneumonia & Silly “Panic” | Musings from the Chiefio
How did fructose get its name? Fruit sugar. Cane sugar (sucrose) is a disaccharide, the combination of fructose and glucose. Lactose is a disaccharide, the combination of glucose and galactose. Normal human metabolism handles fructose via an enzyme that changes the structure from the ketose form to the aldose form, if I am remembering correctly, after a phosphate is added. Sure, anything is potentially toxic. Show the necessary and sufficient conditions, please.
A “world wide data grab” on that New zealand data
“In viral news yesterday, mRNA contamination researcher Kevin McKernan suddenly and unexpectedly reported that his entire lab’s data, including all his ongoing projects, was deleted by the authorities — because he hosted a downloadable copy of New Zealand’s jab-death data:”
More here –
https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/privacy-please-wednesday-december?r=1vxw0k&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
FWIW
“Your clean green future *needs* another 80 million km of high voltage lines”
https://joannenova.com.au/2023/12/your-clean-green-future-needs-another-80-million-km-of-high-voltage-lines/
@Another Ian:
Maybe it’s time for an updated Ip2 posting showing how to make such a server “go” from a simple home station… I did one a few years ago as an example / experiment. Maybe it is time for me to show a Production Version (now that I’m never moving again so things won’t be shut down soon, and for a couple of years ;-)
FWIW, my approach to “data security” has generally been to have at least one, and preferably 2 copies, on separate media NOT connected to the internet or any computer or power source. There’s very little more reliably secure than a 4 TB USB Hard Disk in a random bank Safe Deposit Box or your own on-site Safe (or preferably one in each…)
“The Cloud” is convenient some times, but lethal to your privacy and security of your data at others. I got a free “cloud” feature with the Chromebooks for a year. I put some encrypted junk on it, but that was all. (So that should someone take interest in me and my data they could spend months of computer time trying to decrypt it, and IFF they succeeded, get a backup copy of the initial install disk of some *Nix or other ;-)
You have no idea where “your data” is or who is looking at it if it is “in the cloud”.
“It’s 10 O’Clock! Do you know where your data is!”…
My favorite 2 high tech and highest performance / provable security techniques:
1) Air Gap between device and anything electrical (networks, computers, power).
2) Steel.
FWIW
“Fact: It Is ONLY About MONEY
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Why is it that the medical authorities will not tell anyone who is Type II diabetic to quit eating fast carbohydrates?
Ditto for anyone who is overweight, obese, or has deteriorating metabolic markers such as body mass, A1c or fasting glucose?
It makes no money.”
Link for that
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=250244
@Another Ian:
A few “friends and family” have “cured” their Diabetes (or more often the silly “Pre-Diabetes” given that “pre-sick” is called healthy…) by going “carnivore” or “keto”. Or even just “Mediterranean” without too much bread & pasta…
I have to admit that the whole Covid thing has moved me from “suspect some doctors are mostly motivated by money” to “it’s a racket from the front door of the local clinic to CDC / FDA / WHO head offices including all drug companies”.
I will no longer take any medication nor have any intervention / treatment “because the doctor told me to”. Everything will be “taken under advisement until I’VE done MY homework on it”.
So it goes. Generations spent to earn a good reputation, lost in one decade… So if they start work on it now, by about 2070 the “medical establishment” might be trusted again…
FWIW
“The warped, demented world view of racial polarization”
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-warped-demented-world-view-of.html
FWIW
“Don’t like your local government? Disney’s response – we’ll just make our own!”
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2023/12/dont-like-your-local-government-disneys.html
@ EM re:
‘I have to admit that the whole Covid thing has moved me from “suspect some doctors are mostly motivated by money” to “it’s a racket from the front door of the local clinic to CDC / FDA / WHO head offices including all drug companies”.
‘I will no longer take any medication nor have any intervention / treatment “because the doctor told me to”. Everything will be “taken under advisement until I’VE done MY homework on it”.’
Bravo, EM! That’s the page I’m on. :-)
It almost seems like, once they instituted Obamacare, then all the docs who had at least a semblance of ethics left, retired. That leaves only the most mercenary ones still working. It’s painful to have to say that. I have some medical professionals in my family tree. But none of them ever ended up with a luxury yacht! My dad did wish he had one of those little fishing boats he could drive around in the back of an old pickup, though!
Does anyone else see that pattern? Or do you think they’ve been mostly mercenary for the last 100+ years? (Like, since the Flexner Report came out?)
I think I’ve made a couple of dentists mad at me. The last one refused to put a crown back on when it fell off suddenly. The rest of the visit was him trying to sell me on either getting an implant for $4,000 or a couple of root canals. Before that last visit, I think he and his partner were curious about the way I was able to get rid of problems without going to specialists. They both had told me to go to a neurologist because they said I had trigeminal neuralgia. I did a bit of my own research and figured it was a perfect storm. The best pain killer I found was a protocol using about 1/16 teaspoon of sea salt and a glass of water. It killed the pain in about 10 minutes, and the relief lasted hours and hours. Nothing else worked that fast or lasted that long. The other things I changed were taking myself off a phytate supplement, changing my eyeglasses to ones that didn’t press on the trigeminal nerve, and switching from whole grain (bran has phytates in it) to white bread, but not much of it. Also, I think I added another magnesium supplement.
The dentist before that had an office gal who literally threatened to do a root canal on me because I made her mad. (I don’t remember what that was about, though.) She came out with that threat when there wasn’t any reason to think a root canal was even necessary.
I used to go to the dentist a couple of times a year. I guess I won’t be doing that anymore. I would like to get that crown put back on, though. I have to avoid eating tough stuff on that side. But sometimes I forget. Also, I have to brush and floss after every meal. But all my teeth are my own. I came up with a bed-time protocol that keeps my teeth feeling great.
I’ve read that implants might last only 5 years. I’ve read Weston Price’s position about root canals. And recently, I saw an article that said that implants can end up having the same problem as root canals (being a focus of infection).
Pretty dire video warning about cars/ownership/insurance/smart apps at WUWT.
IIRC, EM wrote about how not having “clean” electrical power tended to cause flakiness with some systems of his.
I was reminded of that when I found an old Discman in one of my filing cabinets at home. I put some (not new) AA batteries in it and attached ear buds and inserted a CD. It played (REALLY LOUDLY!!), which was a nice surprise. I surely haven’t thrown away its original AC adapter, but don’t know where it is. So I bought one of those new multi-purpose AC adapters with a bunch of tips and many power settings. I figured out what tip and power setting and polarity to use and set it to play through my big system. It worked fine for the short test I did.
However, when I plugged it into a power strip/surge protector and extension cord, then set it up to play a full CD, it kept stopping. I wondered if I need to get a bigger surge protector and/or UPS to make it happy. Or maybe find an OEM AC adapter made for the Discman. (I found some complete sets of old Discman players on eBay, but haven’t decided to buy one yet.)
I hate to discard/permanently retire this piece of hardware that probably could work if I only knew how to hold my mouth right. I don’t have a CD player connected to my big system, but I can play the turntable that’s connected to it, connect with a 3.5mm cord to lots of stuff, and connect to computers that have a headphone port that uses a 3.5mm cord.
I have plenty of CDs. In fact, pretty much all of the music on my MP3 has a companion CD, either because I bought the media as a CD, or because I converted the LP to CD, then ripped it to the MP3 player. But since my MP3 players are all Microsoft Zune 80GB models, and only one works now…I’m trying to keep my options open for playing my collection of music. The Zune I’m playing right now says it has 5,452 songs, 487 pictures, and 51 videos. It is using 25.45GB, with 48.92GB open.
Anyway, back to the question: Could I be using “dirty” power by using a generic AC adapter instead of the OEM AC adapter that came with the Discman? Could that be causing it to stop playing (not infrequently, either)?
It does seem that other CD players I’ve used (e.g., in a”boom box” or in one of those all-in-one thingies that look like an antique wooden radio) can’t play CDs perfectly anymore. The ones in computers are still working, even the ones that are decades old!
FWIW
From today’s Covid and Coffee – starts here
“Pfizer must feel like it’s been one damned thing after another these days. In a year packed with horrible news for the jabs (not to mention poor jab recipients), yesterday saw a critical new discovery of jab problems, possibly the worst and most damning yet. How bad was it? It was so bad that, even though I almost never make predictions anymore, I will predict this: The FDA will be forced to withdraw the mRNA covid shots because of this study.
I’m not even joking about that.
Our investigation begins with yesterday’s Telegraph article about a new study headlined, “One in four who had Moderna or Pfizer Covid jabs experienced unintended immune response.”
And more
https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/nonsense-thursday-december-7-2023?r=1vxw0k&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
“The FDA will be forced to withdraw the mRNA covid shots because of this study.”
Moderna has already withdrawn an mRNA vaccine for something other than covid.
(or was it just aborted the trial study?)
From the above link. This quote does not cover the problem itself; read the link for that. It sounds bad…
Coffee drinkers relax!
“Brewing Truth: Climate Doomsayers’ Cooked up Coffee Crisis”
“So, sit back and drink that morning cup of Joe. Climate is not going to steal your coffee and thank CO2 for keeping the plantations productive.”
YMMV
After thinking about that –
After all that has leaked out so far I guess that I am astounded but not suprised
As soon as they said it was a substituted synthetic for Uridine, I figured there would be trouble. Why? Because every single metabolism is unique, and more so when presented with things “different from the usual”.
Most of us have pretty close to the same reaction to stuff that is always around, because we needed to for the system to work in the presence of it and natural selection weeded out those who were off from it quite a while ago. But even there, not always. For example:
Favism. Lots of folks love Fava Beans. I find them “OK”, especially the little rounder Persian ones I’ve saved. The bigger “horse bean” like Fava beans don’t taste as nice to me, and have a tougher seed coat to get through, but I can eat them, being genetically Western European. Feed the same beans to folks from the Middle East, it can screw up their metabolism due to excess oxidation. The “disease” is called Favism. Genetic Jews need to know about it, genetic Irishmen not so much.
Favism is one of three separate genetic adaptations to Malaria. “We” as a species have been co-evolving with Malaria for a very long time, but different sub-populations were taking different paths. Sub-Sahara blacks have Sickle Cell Gene. That brings one set of differences of metabolism. Middle Easterners evolved a higher oxidative pressure, but unfortunately Fava Beans raise the oxidative stress just a bit more and put them over the edge into a medical event. Those of us from Western Europe developed a higher tendency to allergic responses – thus my food, contact, and pollen / dust reactions…
Well guess what, similar differences exist for all sorts of things. From Nitric Oxide levels that are higher in Blacks to Whites getting all the Vit-D they need just from hands and faces exposed to the sun (with the penalty of higher skin cancer rates if we take our clothes off in the Tropics or Sub-Tropics for more than 1/2 hour at noon…)
That kind of thing is why EVERY drug has some unexpected “side effects” in some people. Each of us is a unique metabolic system with deletions, additions, or modifications of various metabolic pathways. There are sub populations in India that don’t need some of the Vitamins the rest of us can’t make – because they had none in their diet for many generations, as another example. So have pathways to make it in their own cells instead of eating it.
So as soon as I heard it was a synthetic and different, I figured some folks will not have the pathway to degrade it (at all, or fast enough) and would have problems.
So some of us can get the jab, degrade it fast, and be fine. Others will have various degrees of trouble depending on their particular metabolic pathways and how long and far the “jab junk” goes and hangs around. Now mix with the fact that it does NOT stay in the muscle, and you have a recipe for any cell in your body to become a spike factory and stay that way until your immune system kills it. Potentially lots of your cells. In your heart pacemaker, nerves telling it to beat, you brain (you didn’t need that part that tells you to breath, now did you…) so “brain fog” and “the shakes”. No telling what parts get damaged IN SOME PEOPLE.
Only if “some people” is large enough to cause a fuss will a drug be withdrawn. If given to everyone, it will just kill off that particular metabolic oddity. (Sure hope it wasn’t for immunity against some truly horrible disease like, say, Plague… Yes, the populations who survived The Plague are enriched in one of those metabolic oddities that confers all sorts of advantages against diseases… W-something or other…)
ANY Time there is a “push” to give EVERYONE ANYTHING, I think of the metabolic outliers and how we are narrowing the gene pool to a smaller subset, losing God Only Knows what.
@em
favism as a malaria adaptation, reminds me of a mash episode where Klinger has a bad reaction to chloroquine…. at the end of the episode they have a little message about Mediterranean descent as well as negroes having bad reactions, that it was discovered during the Korean “police action”
One catch is that there exists several kinds of sickle cell anemia, too. Not just Sub-Saharan blacks have sickle cell and there are combinations of the different types that are worse than the “normal” SS kind. Think SC kind. What’s forgotten is that malaria exists wherever the right kind of mosquitoes live and infected humans live. Yes, that includes Siberia, northern Canada and Alaska, too. Malaria, yellow fever, dengue, etc. were all common where I live now. The Creek offshoot called Seminole lived in the swampier areas of the USA now and they raided quite a bit because they had to. If you could survive, they adopted you into the tribe.
With respect to pseudouridine, there are hundreds of variations. So, which one was used? A “natural” one, a “semisynthetic” one, a fully synthetic one, a combination? Will we ever be told? (More important, in my opinion and they should stop calling these things mRNA, when they’re not. They are more like transposons.)
Supreme Court considering redefining “income” to include unrealized capital gains.
https://citizenwatchreport.com/peter-schif-supreme-courts-potential-ruling-threatens-to-nationalize-assets-erode-private-property-rights-and-fuel-a-communist-revolution/
More covid happenings via today’s Covid and Coffee newsletter
“Last evening, at the suggestion of an alert commenter, I tweeted yesterday’s complete segment on the Nonsense Protein study. I was skeptical whether Twitter would appreciate the post, since it was waaay overlong for a tweet. But it surprised me by going kind of viral (for a C&C tweet, anyway). Here are the stats as of early this morning.”
Then
“Behold three more preprint studies that are very difficult for the jabs, especially in light of the Nonsense Protein study’s findings.”
“Each of the three studies reports on a different search for a correlation between vaccination and various adverse events. In a sense, this triple-study reminds me of the leaked New Zealand data, except instead of just the data, the whistleblowers reported their findings with details and statistics.”
Then the 3 studies
https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/sorry-about-the-mistakes-friday-december?r=1vxw0k&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
FWIW
“The FAA is seeking people suffering from “severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities” to be air traffic controllers.”
https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2023/12/08/fly-the-die-skies/
More on pseudouridine
“A Smoking Gun”
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=250254
A new “Gotcha”
“Pretty much all Windows and Linux computers are vulnerable to this new cyberattack
Cybersecurity researchers from Binarly have found a flaw that they claim affects virtually every Windows and Linux-powered machine in use today.
The flaw, dubbed LogoFAIL, allows threat actors to execute malicious code on the endpoint in a way that renders practically every antivirus or endpoint protection tool out there – useless.
Regardless of the computer you have, whenever you boot it up, you’ll first see a logo from the device’s manufacturer. While the logo is being displayed, the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is still running. UEFI, the researchers claim, has been vulnerable to roughly two dozen flaws for years now. By chaining together and exploiting the flaw, an attacker could replace this image with a different one, capable of hosting malicious code.
The image can be identical to the original one, in order not to arouse any suspicion. Still, UEFI will read and execute the code hosted there. And given the fact that the code is being executed so early in the boot stage, no security features or antivirus programs will flag it.
Secure Boot, Intel’s Boot Guard, and other similar solutions designed to protect from bootkit infections are practically useless here. These two dozen vulnerabilities have collectively been named LogoFAIL.
The devices deemed vulnerable to LogoFAIL include the entire x64 and ARM CPU ecosystem – UEIF suppliers AMI, Insyde, Phoenix, device manufacturers Lenovo, Dell, HP, CPU devices Intel, and AMD. Patches are already available, but they differ from manufacturer to manufacturer. Users are advised to find the corresponding advisory and learn how to patch the vulnerability up.
https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/pretty-much-all-windows-and-linux-computers-are-vulnerable-to-this-new-cyberattack
NOTHING is safe, including government computers… ”
https://joannenova.com.au/2023/12/saturday-36/#comment-2718217
Per UEFI:
There are other boot loaders in the Linux universe. While UEFI has been pushed as the new way and the light, I have a couple of machines still using GRUB, and the Raspberry Pi series uses its own peculiar boot loading process (that all the GRUB & UEFI fan boys have complained about since the first R.Pi…). And more… but this is not the place for along exposition on boot loaders… so I’ll stop now ;-)
Just know that when they say “Pretty much all” are vulnerable, they are actually saying “All the PCs that they think are entirely the universe of computers, and running UEFI” are vulnerable.
My old Compaq Evo, for example, is running GRUB (Grand Unified Bootloader) but booting up an up to date Devuan Linux (updated to about a month ago…) so immune to this particular LogoFAIL attack.
https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/
For those folks wishing to explore the expanded universe of boot loaders, this article lists 15 of them… Personally, I’ve only got 4 ( I think ;-) in house. UEFI, GRUB, LILO, and whatever you call the Raspberry Pi process of using the GPU…
https://www.ubuntupit.com/best-linux-bootloader-for-home-and-embedded-systems/
So yeah, the authors of that particular LogoFAIL article unfairly tossed “all Linux” into the blender without checking and learning that not-all Linux use UEFI. I’ve generally tried to avoid UEFI since it was first being pushed at people. There was just something sleazy about the way it was being pushed… and it restricted me in some ways I didn’t like.
Anyone who wishes to dodge this particular attack can just swap to a different boot loader. GRUB happily loads both an old Windows XP and a new Devuan on my Evo…
Not sure if some vendors (secure boot?) lock you into UEFI or not. IIRC from a decade+ ago there was some attempt at that… so “some digging required” for individual hardware systems.
Oh, and one could always just pop $100 for a full up Raspberry Pi system used for anything “internet facing” and devote their UEFI Windoze PC to “backroom only” uses so it can be safe ;-)
Secure Boot does lock you into UEFI. You can turn Secure Boot off (I do so I can dual boot PCLinuxOS, which uses GRUB2 and Windows). Secure Boot also locks you into “certified” Linux distributions if you still want to dual boot with Secure Boot enabled, and those, to date where I’ve looked, are SystemD based ones (Ubuntu for sure). I put off going to UEFI as long as I could, for my older build didn’t need it. When I started hitting the legacy boot limits, I switched to UEFI, with Secure Boot off.
That reminds me, if I am not mistaken, Microsoft will let you petition to have your favorite Linux distro added to their list; and even roll your own, for your own use, with Secure Boot. I just say NO to that. The interoperability has improved, though. Windows can host Linux through the Windows Subsystem for Linux, though I don’t think so for every Linux distro out there. Linux can host Windows programs through WINE. Both have virtual machine capability through things like Virtual Box.
@CDQuarles:
Thanks for that brief.
I’ve avoided “new PCs” for about 15 years now just due to that (ill remembered by me) lock in. A big part of why I moved to ARM SBCs. I used to say that I never had to buy a computer. I’d just wait for the next Windows Upgrade and a LOAD of old boxes that were now “too small” for Windoze would work great for Linux.
Then UEFI & Secure Boot put a hole in that process… and I moved on.
I still have about 1/2 dozen old BIOS based PCs that are much more performance than I need (so several in the garage…) and noisier than I like. Hopefully enough to reach EOL for the operator 8-|
Maybe someday I’ll need to confront UEFI & Secure Boot, but so far “avoidance” has worked out OK ;-)
E.M.
Maybe just the thing to tame your Florida garden sand?
https://joannenova.com.au/2023/12/saturday-36/#comment-2718331
“Our vision is to make the earth green again, by stopping and reversing desertification and soil degradation. With our unique product we want to turn degraded land and sand to fertile soil, and at the same time reduce the water usage for green ecosystems up to 50 percent.
Desert Control offers the solution that can revolutionise the war against desertification. Liquid Natural Clay (LNC), can turn desert sand into fertile soil in less than 7 hours. A process which previously has taken between 7 and 12 years. This is a game-changer, fueling our hope to make earth green again.”
https://www.desertcontrol.com/
Or maybe not.
@Another Ian:
It would work. So would just working in some clay dust. The problem is finding clay in Florida… the whole place is a sand bar. Nearest clay is likely up in the Carolinas. Somewhere with eroded mountains and rotted rocks.
I’d thought of looking for bags of construction clay somewhere. Tilling it in.
What this sand soil needs is some clay (or similar adsorbent) and some organics. Then a green manure tilled in. I’ve started my Test Plot. A garden square about 15 x 15 feet. Put down a 2 cu ft bag of “potting soil” in each area the bag covered. (so lay down bags to cover the area, cut and dump, till.
It mostly seemed to disappear into the sand, being more sand than soil. But some stayed visible on the surface and things are growing in it OK.
It has now grown a very nice Cover Crop of pinto beans (thanks to a jar of about 5 year old stored pintos that I figured would be a bit hard with age, so instead of cooking, planted). Now I’m going to pick the dry beans (they are about ready now) and till in the rest. Enough cycles of that, the biomass will build up, the worms will come, and tilth will improve.
I think what I need to add next is a small amount of clay (either construction clay, or “oil absorber” or even cat litter – depending on price, availability and probable purity). Then I’m going to try adding some “Natural hardwood charcoal” crushed up and tilled in to make a kind of terra preta. Wood char lasts a long time in soil so maybe won’t be washed out so fast. I think that will give me a good 1-2 feet or so of decent soil after about 3 years.
One 15 x 15 block at a time, it ought not be too much work or too much cost. Hopefully each square then stays good as long as I’m tilling in the “slash” after any harvest plus any compost and oak tree leaves I have to “dispose” of.
That’s the plan anyway.
Oh, and in about 3 years when the Food Forest parts (bananas, papayas, mango, avocado) get big enough to have lots of leaves drop, that whole cycle ought to pick up.
Also, the Sweet Potatoes have been a champion in this soil. I’m going to start planting them into every place I intend to “someday” be a garden square. In one year, one sweet potato has covered an area about 15 x 6 feet. Nothing but water added… LOTS of green leaves on the surface. Don’t know how much below ground as I’ve not harvested anything (yet?). But I’m sure there’s a good quantity of biomass if all I wanted to do was till it in. So a bunch of them will be planted along the periphery fence and they can do the work of making the 4-6 feet out from the fence into something more fertile and with more tilth. They also prevent sun drying of the sand (via shading it) and choke out most of the weeds (nice surprise!) AND have some very beautiful blue/purple flowers ;-)
So I’m going to have a kind of “perennial cover crop” of them in any “someday future” area, and then convert it to a seasonal crop when the square gets attention (or if I get sweet potato pests in any area so need to do crop rotation)
In any case, a LOT more biomass will be going into the dirt to stay there, compared to the prior owner “mow and haul away as yard waste”… mining of the limited nutrients in the soil..
Oh Oh OH! And while we are talking about the garden: I have TWO Papaya fruit that are showing color! (Called breaking color I think). That means I could pick them now, or can let them go to get more color and sweeter (and run out to pick them just before any predicted freeze ;-) So I’ve now at a minimum got seeds that succeeded here and can start the process of selecting for a better match to local conditions. I also “planted” (meaning tossed on the ground and vaguely watered in) the seeds from a store bought papaya and had 3 sprout and survive (the start of Darwin’s Garden Papaya ;-) One is getting ready to make flowers. IF they survive any cold this winter, and then fruit, I will propagate them. So I’m on my way to a locally adapted Papaya variety. I’m right on the edge of where they will grow to maturity… The neighbors lost theirs last year. Hopefully with a few generations of challenge and selection I can get a variety just a tiny bit more cold hardy…
E.M.
Re your clay content – check out drilling mud if you are near any oil industry
FWIW
“Stranger Than Historical Fiction: The Haavara Agreement”
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2023-12-09/stranger-historical-fiction-haavara-agreement
They might deliver several yards if you need it …
https://midfloridamaterials.com/product/clay-fill-dirt/
Here in Alabama, at least where I live, we have plenty of clay, the red (iron containing) kind. I’m not so sure about Mobile and Baldwin counties, though.
@em
link https://www.amazon.com/Bentonite-Drilling-Foundation-Waterproof-Grouting/dp/B010IL7ZUS/ref=sr_1_5?crid=3Q4FRQIH23BAU&keywords=bentonite+clay+50lb&qid=1702240769&sprefix=bentonite+clay+50lb%2Caps%2C185&sr=8-5
I hauled a couple of loads of this from Greybull, Wy to la, once upon a time
@power grab
as per discman/transformer& tips.
I can guess, with a high degree of confidence that your issue lies with the tips.
not going into the whole story but i recently had a similar experience and am 99% sure “MY” problem is the tip, will hopefully have confirmation soon.
FWIW on the current “Harvard Saga” –
“More: Claudine Gay first came to my attention about a month ago, when she emerged as the central figure in the Ryan Enos data fabrication scandal, as documented in these 3 articles… ”
https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2023/12/10/if-women-ran-the-world-48/
And around that subject –
“First, allegedly UPenn President Liz Magill “resigned.”
Well, she resigned as President. But she did not leave; the announcement says she is still a professor and still will be filling her student’s heads with DEI, CRT and similar related crap.”
More at https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=250275
Salty in places
@E.M.: “The problem is finding clay in Florida… the whole place is a sand bar.”
Not the whole place! There is a soft limestone spine running north-south down the peninsula, the Ocala Arch, and (at least in the central and northern parts) just above the limestone is grey layer of clay as part of the Hawthorn Formation. Large parts of north Florida are pine forests underlaid by the clay. Locals call it hard pan, and because it is clay, whenever there is a heavy rain, the water will percolate through the surface sand down about a foot or two to the clay and then stop, flooding the forests. Of course it eventually drains, but if you want to put in a septic system be prepared to excavate a big hole or bring in a LOT of surface fill.
One interesting thing about the grey clay is that it is difficult to penetrate by radar. I once helped a company do some tests for an airplane mounted ground piercing radar system.
@TTN:
Golly, some actual clay here, somewhere… wonder if theirs a place a fella can fill up a pickup truck load… Maybe I need to make friends with some septic system folks where that Hawthorn Formation is at…
That bentonite from Amazon is about $2 / pound. A bit pricey for dirt… OTOH, shipping was free, that really surprised me ;-)
It isn’t exactly an urgent thing. (“Shovel limited” at the moment ;-) More like a “Lil-bit at at time”… IF I’m lucky, the Food Forest litter will cover most of it. To some extent, biomass can make up for clay in the holding water department, just needs replacing after a while. I’m hoping “bio-char” is enough.
FWIW
From a connection in Israel
@EM, talk to some local farmers on how they fortify their fields, and you will get the best answer to your question.
EMS – you can probably get a pickup load here:
https://midfloridamaterials.com/product/clay-fill-dirt/
Or get 50 # clay here for about 90 cents a #
Clay link again: LINKhttps://www.amazon.com/ANF-BRANDS-50-Granular-Absorbent/dp/B0CGL5L9X3
@ josh from sedona:
I look forward to hearing more about your experience that confirmed your problem was with the tips. :-)
@Jim2:
That “Mid Florida Materials”is active in my city, so likely I can get them to just deliver a load… Thanks!
FWIW
“Why The United States Military Is Clueless When It Comes To Ukraine”
Several links there
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/12/why-united-states-military-is-clueless-when-it/
FWIW
“There’s a temple in Washington D.C. that deserves a visit from Jesus…”
“A SACRILEGIOUS decision by the National Cathedral of the Episcopal Church (the even woker, if t’were possible, estranged American child of the C of E) in Washington to charge $7 per person for attendance at their Christmas Eve Eucharist has provoked a rightful furore in Christian circles.”
More at
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2023/12/theres-temple-in-washington-dc-that.html
No miracles? No “gimmies?”
Sounds like a quick way to a negative exponential decrease in congregation?
And advertise the availability of silverware
Interesting:
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/religious-denomination/episcopal-church/
Mostly a bunch of old white women who go to church once a week but don’t read the Bible much and think it isn’t “the word of God” but just nice advice… Yet are sure they are getting into heaven… 31% of them “conservative” but mostly not… believe Gov’t Aid to the poor is a great idea, 79% pro-abortion, 74% pro-homosexual marriage (guess that not reading the Bible thing has an impact ;-) and Gung-Ho on more Govt Regulation on the Environment… so one presumes bought into the Globull Warming Swindle…
Yeah, I could see them thinking paying a $7 ticket for The Christmas Show was a nice “deal”…
FWIW
“A few thoughts on preparedness for hard times”
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2023/12/a-few-thoughts-on-preparedness-for-hard.html
Covid nurse speaks out. I was impressed with 10:30 to 16:00 in particular. Short short version: Standard forms of care to respiratory problems denied. If you report adverse reactions to vaxx you are fired. This nurse says part of why she spoke out and other did not is that she was home schooled, taught to think and not just follow herd.
Disney is going bankrupt
https://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/451694923
@PowerGrab
“I look forward to hearing more about your experience that confirmed your problem was with the tips. :-)”
I WAS WRONG
i did resolve it, but it was voltage…
They ain’t finished with you yet –
Covid and Coffee mewsletter – One item from today’s edition –
” Um, no thanks! Nature ran a dreadful story this week headlined, “Self-copying RNA vaccine wins first full approval: what’s next?”
“The gist is, some mad scientists in San Diego created a whole ‘new generation’ of new and improved mRNA drugs, which were promptly approved for use in Japan this week. Good luck, Japan.
To create what might be called a “turbo-charged” version of a covid mRNA vaccine, the delirious scientists took a deadly virus — mosquito-borne Venezuelan equine encephalitis, to be specific — and cut out its heart, the biological engine responsible for rapidly replicating the highly-contagious, deadly pathogen.
The scientists — and now the Japanese Ministry of Health — say there’s nothing to worry about, it’s perfectly safe.”
More at
https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/post-acute-wednesday-december-13?r=1vxw0k&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
On WION / youtube I’m watching Putin taking questions from the General Public & Media LIVE. It is an impressive thing. Folks asking hard questions about things the government is doing wrong, and Putin listening, taking notes and saying what will be done to fix it.
Can you imagine Biden taking a question from a soldier about housing issues on a base, or problems at the VA and taking notes to tell the right people to fix it? Or taking a question from folks in Alaska who retired there but want to move to somewhere warmer, but their government housing is limited; so how to fix it?
I can imagine the relevant ministers in Russia scurrying to “fix it” before Putin asks them why he got the question…
Or taking questions about Argentina using the $US and implications?
Putin was clearly uncomfortable when the questions were about various minor failures in some agencies, and stated that those things needed to be fixed. The impressive thing? That these “ordinary people” were comfortable asking Putin these uncomfortable questions…
Putin is “putting himself out there” for direct criticism of him and his government. Impressive. And he listens carefully, takes notes on what needs fixing, and says what can be done (so, to one person, said the budget for this year was done, but it could be put in next year’s budget OR if new revenues were found, it could be addressed using them – and was writing down something that I think was likely a note to tell the relevant ministers to “get it done”…)
He, Putin, also clearly has a handle on how to run a government. I knew he was good at understanding international affairs and finance, but it was a surprise to see him doing what is basically a “National Town Hall”. Live. Unscripted (clearly, give that some of the questions were a bit difficult to Putin…) It was also impressive how there was a degree of comfort and almost familiarity between Putin and these “ordinary people”. Banter at times, visually some emotional upset showing on some folks faces and then grins & smiles about other issues. Just a human give & take.
I think Putin generally likes being connected with The People. Openly accepting things that need fixing or changing at one time, explaining how things work at others. Even taking questions of a personal sort, like how is he handling the insults and criticism from the West. Insults to him and to Russia.
Frankly, I’m impressed with Putin as a person taking the personal / political risk of an open question period Town Hall and how he connects with his people. I mean, can you imagine Biden taking a question from a retired Grandma (via video in a remote district) asking what he is going to do about the price of eggs going up? Putin just did. (and took it seriously, even as some of the live audience was snickering at her…)
This is a real “give and take”, with Putin sometimes taking an issue to fix, clearly a bit embarrassed if he didn’t know it needed fixing; sometimes explaining why a thing “just is”, and sometimes explaining the way an issue will resolve itself. (Like the eggs, where import volumes dropped suddenly – my guess is from the EU – but replacement supplies are arranged and will cause prices to come back down as the shortage eases).
I wish we had government that listens to the ordinary people like this, instead of out of touch Rulers without clue.
Man, who could’ve predicted this?? ;)
https://aussiedlerbote.de/en/brand-new-electric-buses-paralyzed-in-oslo/
@Powergrab & Josh
Those old Sony products required very specific voltage tolerances. IIRC, the D50 I dealt with needed 9v on the dot @800 milliamps. Some of those AC to DC converters had flaky selector switches for the desired voltage and may be the issue. Using a multimeter can verify things with the voltage at the tip. Note, the D50 had the positive on the outside of the tip and negative on the inside. I don’t know which model is involved here, but it would be good to find out and check the spec’s.
I doubt it has anything to do with the power strip if it works with other things since you are converting the AC to DC to the discman.
Putin is not a GEB that too many, who are projecting their own issues, say he is. Neither is Trump (or Reagan, Eisenhower, Coolidge …). Putin is correct when he describes Klaus Schwab, for instance. The US and Russia could have come to mutually acceptable terms, if the GEB PTB had desired it. Sadly, they didn’t.
@ Ossqss and Josh:
Thanks for your input.
I thought maybe the power strip was the problem because the modem (router) tended to do flaky things once in a great while. The company’s tech who came to my house said I needed to get a better (more expensive) surge protector. I think the one I ended up with cost $60-$80 at Best Buy. I don’t usually pay that much for a surge protector. I did have a UPS for some computers some decades ago, but that hasn’t seemed necessary these days.
Re the power strip working OK with other things…it seems that things that use more juice (electricity) tend to be more stable. For example, the old Pioneer receiver makes the room lights flicker slightly when I turn it on. The only other thing that causes that is when the air conditioner compressor at the other end of the house kicks on.
No, wait…the Pioneer receiver isn’t on the same power strip as I had plugged the Discman into. But it was plugged into the same power strip as the old desktop computer that I call the “Media PC”. It is still using one of those CRT-type monitors. It talks to me when I turn it on. It gives out with one of those electric hums similar to the scary ones on Frankenstein movies. It’s the one that has the special video card in it that I could plug the cable TV cord into. I got that computer used from eBay sometime around 2009. (All my own computers are refurbs.) I added the special video card, as well as a CD burner. Oh, and I think I added a bigger hard drive. One thing that kind of amazes me is how much more sturdy and smooth-sliding that CD drive works when compared to the brand new DVD burner I bought last spring for my daily-driver desktop computer. It seems pretty flimsy and was pretty inexpensive. But it works. You get what you pay for, I guess!
I think I eventually will get one of those Discman-with-accessories that I’ve seen on eBay once I get the insurance payment and re-shuffle the budget figures. Hopefully, the AC adapter it comes with will still have good life in it. And eventually, whenever I get around to emptying out my storage units, I will find the original AC adapter that came with my current Discman. Like I said, I don’t throw stuff away. I just don’t know where the original AC adapter is. Yet.
Regarding the insurance claim, the adjuster in my state and the adjuster on the East Coast are at the point where the East Coast adjuster asked “for an estimate, and I’ll write a check.” They both have apologized for the long wait.
A great success of COP 28!
[NOTE: This “berkhathwaybuy” link is dead. -E.M.S.]
https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2023/12/14/y2kyoto-end-of-oil-2/
“Tesla Recalls Nearly All Vehicles Sold in U.S. to Fix System that Monitors Drivers Using Autopilot”
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2023/12/13/elon-musks-latest-tesla-recall-aimed-at-making-sure-drivers-pay-attention-with-autopilot-engaged/
The science wasn’t settled then?
“Scam alert: QR codes”
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2023/12/scam-alert-qr-codes.html
Heavy – beyond my paygrade – read it all
“GREAT NEWS – Senate Majority Predicts Donald J. Trump Will Win 2024 Election – Constructs Bill To Prevent Trump Exiting NATO Alliance, Includes in Recent NDAA
December 15, 2023 | Sundance | 68 Comments
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2023/12/15/great-news-senate-majority-predicts-donald-j-trump-will-win-2024-election-constructs-bill-to-prevent-trump-exiting-nato-alliance-includes-in-recent-ndaa/#more-253803
@power grab
I asked my phone about the “power requirements for sony discman” and it looks like consensus is 4.5v -400mah… how many batteries does it use?
…. so, my deal was trying to get a “car dock” xm radio to work on shore power, like the “home dock” one does. XM did something interesting there, the “home” and “car” use different tips, so you have to buy a separate dock from them, or get creative.
I saw transformers on amazon with the variety pack of tips, and without even thinking about it bought a 12v transformer :( SMH i really should know better… but i assumed, and we all know what we do when we assume, you make an ASS out of U and ME….
anyhow, i found a tip that looked right for the “car dock” and plugged it in, unit powered up, then powered down… so i tried the “home dock” unit powered up and stayed on.
I should mention that the reason i was doing this is that my shop battery died, and i didn’t want to waste money on a car battery when i’m planning on upgrading to a LiFe deep cycle battery soon….. which brings us to jan 07 when the 5 disc changer table top stereo died, and i got creative, scavenged a car stereo and battery and set up a12v system in the shop, at that time i also hooked up the xm from my truck, as it didn’t work that great in Ak.
anyway, I snagged my battery out of my jeep and hooked it up in the shop, plugged in the “car dock” and it worked. so at this point i’m thinking both radios work, the transformer works on the “home dock” but not “car dock” it must be a bad connection on the tip….. then i thought…well maybe well maybe the bases are different voltages, and that’s why they have different tips? BTW i should mention that the voltage labels are illegible (damaged/missing). So i find my multimeter and check the output voltages on both “stock” power supplies, they both read 5v! i get a phone type 5v power cube and a barrel connector hook up the adapter tip and the “car” radio fires right up no issues…. problem resolved. the only thing i’m still scratching my head about is why the “home” radio would work on 12v? and the “car” wouldn’t?
so that is the saga of the power supplies, believe it or not i tried to give the “Reader’s Digest version”
That is strange Josh. Must be a delta in the amps provided or required by each plug/socket?
This is the one I was messing with years ago. Hard to believe this thing is 40 years old now. I think this was the first one put out by Sony. I was shocked to see how much these things are selling for on Ebay (especially the red one). Wow!
https://www.hifiengine.com/manual_library/sony/d-50.shtml
@Osssqsss
both stock power sources put out 5v 1.5amp, i checked it with multimeter, i have no idea why one would work with 12v 5amp and the other would just power up and down. at least i have another use for the 12v-5a transformer, so not a loss, and the tips were necessary…. ultimately it is a win…. problem resolved.
I just wish i had something useful for “Power Grab”. I feel like an idiot for offering advice before i was certain….
@ josh from sedona:
Well, I certainly appreciate your responses and the work you put into resolving the problem. I figure it’s all valuable experience.
Here’s a famous quote along that line:
“Thomas Edison – I didn’t fail. I just found 2,000 ways not to make a lightbulb; I only needed to find one way to make it work.”
Several decades ago, I bought an adjustable AC adapter (but I don’t remember now why I bought it). It worked fine back then. I probably still have it stowed away somewhere. When I bought the new one this year, and then looked into what the settings needed to be, I learned that polarity was one of the variables. I don’t remember having to consider polarity with my earlier device. I’m pretty sure it didn’t have 8-10 different power settings, either!
Since using an adjustable AC adapter was not entirely unfamiliar to me, I might very well have plugged it in after only setting it for the power and plugging it into a tip that fit. But there was a sheet of instructions with the new adapter, so I actually read it (Imagine!) When it discussed polarity, and how to figure out which one to use, I made sure to match that requirement. It never failed to start up, but it tended to not work very long.
This reminds me: I meant to go back to batteries and see how long it would run. IIRC, it takes only two (2) AA batteries. The batteries I put in it first were ones that I had removed from some remote controls when I was trying to figure out what was wrong with my combination VCR/DVD player. It wasn’t responding to its remote control. But the batteries had been in it maybe 2-3 years. There was also the question of which remote control I had programmed to work with the machine. So I got into switching out batteries to see if some were just depleted. I wasn’t sure they were depleted, so I starting putting these somewhat-used batteries into an old battery card/shell and marked it ‘USED’ in big black letters. I just wasn’t sure they were useless enough to throw away. I’m still not sure.
I’m still wondering if there isn’t some kind of weird electrical wiring issue that needs to be dealt with.
Like, I had to have the GFCI outlet replace in the kitchen this summer in the middle of all the expensive stuff breaking. When they were doing that, they tried to make the garbage disposal come on. I told them it wouldn’t. I had dropped a glass in the sink and pieces went down that drain. I didn’t use it for a very long time because I wasn’t sure what would happen if it chewed up pieces of a drinking glass. But now I wonder if the garbage disposal shorted out and caused the GFCI to fail.
I think I need to have the Dummies(r) version of house wiring and/or GFCI outlets. Apparently, a single GFCI outlet can affect outlets/devices that aren’t in the same general vicinity. Is that right?
General information: My house was built in the mid-1980s. The exhaust fan/heater in the ceiling of the main bathroom works like a champ. It looks totally original.
Another old item I have is my first color TV. It’s a GE. I got it with a GE VCR in 1986. It was a floor model at an appliance store. (A guy I worked with told me to get a floor model TV when I told him I was looking to buy one. I hadn’t had a TV since 1976, but some new housemates asked if I would get cable and a TV.) It finally got to where it wouldn’t come on without considerable babying, so I stopped using it. I was happy to keep using it because its sound was better than the flat screen TVs I’d heard.
So I actually have 3 items that developed issues with turning on/off or staying on/off since I moved into this house. One is the old GE TV, another is the relatively new VCR/DVD player, and my daily driver desktop computer go to where it would turn itself off while I was working on it, or turn itself on when I was sound alseep.
Are those symptoms of a general problem in the house wiring?
@Power Grab:
Per house wiring / electric power: There are a great many arcane things that most of the time can be completely ignored (like “ground loops” where some of the electricity gets back to the power pole / power company via an unexpected path through the various “ground” sources in a house – like water pipes and stoves…) Most folks only run into this if they are hooking up a standby generator (where sometimes you connect “ground” to “neutral” and sometimes not, depending on the generator and kind of house wiring). Most likely you can ignore that category unless some evidence comes up to say you ought to pay attention to it.
The general way electricity works is that it comes from the power company as 2 “hot” wires and a “neutral”. The 2 hots are 240 V between them (I’m talking USA power). Each one is 120 V to the neutral wire. They are supposed to also be 120 V to “ground” if things are wired right. A regular home plug for 120 V AC has a round “ground” pin, and two flat pins for “neutral” and one of the “hots”. (IIRC the neutral is the wider one in the plugs with 2 sizes – checking… Yes, it is:)
You can buy a little plug in tester (mine was about $5 some years ago) that is about the size of a big plug. It lights up different LEDS to tell you about any wiring faults. Open ground for example, or reversed neutral / hot. These are GREAT for making sure the gremlins are not in the wall. Looks like they are now $7 at Lowe’s:
https://www.lowes.com/pd/Kobalt-Receptacle-Tester/5001424383
Per GFCI outlets. These can control any sockets that are wired ‘downstream’ of the GFCI. So, for example, say your power comes from the breaker box in the garage, and goes to three bedrooms in a row along the same wall. IF the wire just goes the first bedroom, then the SAME WIRES go on to the 2nd, and then 3rd (so they are all on one breaker): IFF you put the GFCI outlet in the first socket of the first bedroom AND wire it to pass power on down the line … then all the sockets in that string are protected. But not any anywhere else in the house. Also, IF the box with the GFCI has the power spliced directly to the rest of the string, so the GFCI is not between them and the power panel, only that one socket /outlet set is protected.
Per the 12 VDC working vs not: When power comes in, usually the first thing it hits is a voltage conditioning circuit of some kind. This can be as simple as a diode and some capacitors (to assure DC of the right polarity only gets in and gets filtered and smoothed a little) or as complex as an ALIC Advanced Linear Integrated Circuit voltage regulator. These can take voltage of one strength and drop it down to a target voltage. The exact range depends on the particular device. I would speculate that the device that ran on 12 VDC had such a regulator (set to 4 or 5 VDC to be fed to the rest of the device) and it was able to handle a 12 VDC input. Where the one that did not work had some different circuit that refused the power…
Generally, you can think about electricity just like hoses and valves. Voltage is the pressure in the hose, amperage is how fat the hose is / how much volume of water is delivered. THE big difference, is that there has to be a “return hose” that carries all the water back where it started, or it just will not flow. That’s the ground or neutral.
Where some gremlins can show up is mostly with poor supply (too low a volts from batteries or from the wall – like the lights blinking when my AC kicks on and sucks down all the electrons ;-) or when a switch gets dirty / worn.
Another is when there’s an “informal” electrical path. This was more common in the past with non-polarized plugs. But can still happen now. In California, my Fridge socket was not quite right… I had some amount of “leakage voltage” to “ground”. This meant that IF i was touching the Fridge and the stove at the same time, I felt a “tingle” of electricity going through me (theoretically very risky…) and that is what a GFCI is intended to sense and cut power. You can think of this has a hose of high pressure carrying water in, and a lower pressure return to source (from, say, a water wheel) BUT with a big pan under the water wheel and connections that catch any that leaks out and his its own small hose back to the source. The “tingle” was me getting between the leak and the catch pan ;-)
Can that kind of thing cause an appliance to “just come on”? Most of the time, no. The input power lead ought to have a hard switch to cut off power, so ground loops ought not be able to bypass that. But, what if neutral and hot are reversed? Now you might be able to get power in through the reverse wired neutral and have it go back out via the ground. Besides being high risk (metal case of radio is now hot and if you touch that and, say, a stove grounded via a gas pipe, you get zapped…) it may also be intermittent depending on when the “neutral” to “ground” path completes (like if the metal radio touches the stove, or has a knife touching it and the stove).
That is very uncommon these days with everything having plastic cases.
A computer “just coming on” is most likely due to an internal “wake on event” setting. Like “wake on LAN traffic”. Where turning on some other device might send traffic to it and wake it up (like your telco router waking up – so IF you turned it off to go to bed, but hubby turned it on again to watch late night TV, that might poll known devices and cause a ‘wake on LAN’ event to power up the PC.
FWIW: I have ALL my computers on a UPS and that is on a drop cord with a switch at the set of sockets. Same thing for the TV. When I want things off, I turn them off AND flip the switch on the power strip. For me, off means OFF and I don’t want my computerized TV talking to anyone when I turn it off… (no auto-update, etc.) That also helps protect against things like lightning power surges too.
Hope that helps.
@Power Grab:
The very short form of that is:
Go buy one of those socket / wiring testers and walk around your house plugging it in every socket. Note any errors it reports and try moving the Problem Devices to sockets that report correct wiring.
Example $8 one from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Southwire-Equipment-40022S-Receptacle-Tester/dp/B07HB2J3ZG
Fancier $22 one with voltage display: https://www.amazon.com/Receptacle-Electrical-Klein-Tools-RT250/dp/B08QW7K1JJ/
That will give you a basic “good / not good” on every outlet (and voltage correct / not with the $22 one).
(There are dozens more and those two were chosen at random for illustration, not as an endorsement of a given brand).
@ EM:
Thanks for the replies. I think I can handle that tester idea and get a better idea of what might be not quite kosher in the wiring. I ought to get a UPS, too. Now that my daily driver PC, and the Media PC, and an old-style TV, the Pioneer receiver and speakers, and two 88-key synthesizers are in the same room, would it be a bad idea to plug them all into the same UPS? Oh, and the phone charger, too. ;-)
BTW, the computer’s turning itself on and off was fixed when I bought a new switch on eBay and installed it. A buddy at work said in no uncertain terms that the switch needed to be replaced to solve my problem. It’s been working fine since I replaced the switch. When I bought this PC for home, I deliberately bought a refurbished one that was a close match to the models we were using at work. I am entitled to support even on my home hardware, but I wanted to piggyback on the vast store of knowledge my buddy has from supporting all that similar hardware. I used to be in his position until 1999, but things have changed since then. Matter of fact, when I sat down to open the box and install the new power switch, I had brought my tools to the desk. It turned out you no longer have to unscrew lots of screws to open a system unit box now. Joke’s on me!
I did think of the wake-on-LAN thing when the computer first started turning itself on in the night. It also occurred to me that, now that I live in a place that has commercial (as opposed to self-managed/professional) internet access, there might be some unauthorized (by me) access going on from outside the house. That was a pretty creepy idea. I was relieved it was simply a matter of replacing the switch.
I like your UPS idea, though. Another weird thing that happened very recently was that my cell phone was on when I went to get it on a couple of mornings. I wondered if the power had flickered in the night, just enough to trigger the phone’s wakeup process. However, there weren’t any other clues that would lead to that conclusion, such as plugged-in digital clocks reset and blinking.
I like to turn off computers and other devices when I’m not using them. And I want them to really be OFF when I turn them off, and to stay off until I turn them on.
Thanks again for the instruction. :-)
One more thing about the old Discman: It takes four AA batteries.
Power Grab – I use a power strip. I turn the power strip off every evening. No one will be using the “wake on LAN” feature.
@Power Grab
this one says it is for sony discman….pretty affordable too
link https://www.amazon.com/Power-Supply-Walkman-Clock-discman/dp/B0B151SP6L/ref=sr_1_4?crid=CXUS4WCNRXEE&keywords=power+source+for+sony+discman&qid=1702753366&sprefix=power+source+for+sony+discman%2Caps%2C247&sr=8-4
BTW, i don’t mind finding a couple thousand ways that don’t work, i just wish i had waited till i had my issue resolved before i offered advice, i hate giving bad advice.
Disney
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GBfPJy6W8AAdosC?format=jpg&name=large
Interesting info.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/97-trillion-of-global-debt-in-2023/
A suggestion for the loss of that F 35 –
Last night I was exposed to “The New Captcha” and so far it is”winning”
The aircraft system likely blinked and the pilot got lost in “The New Captcha” trying to re-establish contact
Looks like the Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that Trump cannot be on the ballot because of J6. Not sure what jurisdiction the US Supreme Court has on this. It is a State election matter, which normally would mean the State has original jurisdiction — but the case is based on Amendment 14, so maybe that gives the US Supremes a voice in it. Either way, this is a VERY BAD ruling and shows just how far the courts have gotten away from any semblance of unbiased justice.
http://www.stationgossip.com/2023/12/trump-disqualified-from-colorado-ballot.html
@TTN:
It isn’t like Colorado was going to vote Trump anyway…
BUT: This makes it abundantly clear that the DNC, party hacks & hangers on, and ALL their appointees to anywhere are lacking in moral compass or fiber and not to be trusted to think (well, or at all). They will do anything and say anything “for the win”, and are highly likely to be corrupt to the core.
Until and unless the Democrat Party Members take it on themselves to clean up their house, one must assume every Democrat In Office (at any level any where) is part of the corruption machine.
Sad, that.
I remember about 20 years ago, my Texas Uncle saying how, as a life long Democrat, it pained him that he was ‘gonna hafta’ vote for a Republican. (Remember that it was the Republican Carpet Baggers who abused The South in “reconstruction”… thus the then prevalence of “Blue Dog Democrats” who were often conservative in their values.)
One wonders now how many “Southern Democrats” are getting ulcers… of if they all left long ago…
Oh Well. Not “new news”, just confirmation that Colorado is corrupt. Expect this to be the starting gun to a race condition as all the OTHER corrupt Deep Blue States fall all over themselves to “catch up” to Colorado and Ban Trump too…
I was quietly hoping for a peaceful “do over” of the Biden Fraudulent Election but with better scrutiny to assure legality. Looks like we’re not going to get that, and it is to be Lawfare & Fraud all the way… The end path of that is “not pretty”. I suspect there’s a HUGE part of America who decided to just bite their lip (or tongue) and wait for “the next election” for redress. IF “redress via the ballot box” is denied, then it goes to “the other boxes”… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_boxes_of_liberty
Well, we’ve had the Soap Box, and then the corrupt ballot box (but hoping for a clean one this time). It looks like the Jury Box isn’t going to get a chance, what with The Biden Crime Family being given a 100% Pass and Lawfare being applied to non-DNC folks… Doesn’t leave much hope of a redress via ballot or jury… but there’s still a little time… a very little time… 10 months.
There’s a move to force Texas Republican Primary to have a question on support for succession. I may end up buying some dirt in Texas… OTOH, maybe Florida and “The First Lone Star Republic” can join them….. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=108363
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_West_Florida
So there’s that…
Maybe Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia & Florida can apply to joint BRICS+ as a block… Claim we were “forcibly annexed” in 1810 and again in the War Of Northern Aggression… Maybe even get the Native Americans in Oklahoma to bring them along too… they have a pretty strong case (and the Supreme Court gave them about 1/2 the State due to their legal claim being clear).
Well, 10 months and counting it is.
FWIW
“Interesting… Will Enola Gay ride again?”
“I was interested to read that the US Air Force is restoring the huge World War II North Field air base on the island of Tinian, from which the atomic bomb missions were launched against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Nikkei Asia reports:”
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2023/12/interesting-will-enola-gay-ride-again.html
“The real impact of inflation: another view”
“In so many words, the “official” rate of inflation is a sham, a fake, and a public lie.”
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-real-impact-of-inflation-another.html
This old Southerner has said, repeatedly; I’ll never vote for a Democrat for a national position unless I personally know them. (And even then, think twice; for I know too much about the history of the Democrats.) That sad war was a war of aggression by both sides. Some Southerner leaders, in particular, were not innocent and the agenda has always been slavery and death (they did the Trail of Tears, for instance). This is also why the business with the reconciliation memorial at Arlington galls me so much. Reconciliation was the point of it, people. “Marxists” can’t have that.
@E.M.: I had never heard about the Republic of West Florida. Very cool! But there was another short lived independent breakoff of Florida. In the summer of 1817, Scottish General Gregor MacGregor (fresh, so he said, from fighting alongside Bolivar in South America) led a revolution in the far north-east corner of Florida, leading the little town of Fernandina and the rest of Amelia Island to declare themselves to be the independent Republic of Fernandina. They lasted until that fall when James Monroe sent US warships to recapture the island and return it over to Spain. Monroe was negotiating to buy Florida from Spain and did not want any complications.
link: https://www.amazon.com/General-MacGregor-rogue-Charles-Bennett/dp/0970498721
@E.M.: “This makes it abundantly clear that the DNC, party hacks & hangers on, and ALL their appointees to anywhere are lacking in moral compass or fiber”
Speaking of the Colorado ballot ban — I just saw this:
“The Colorado case against Trump was brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), headed by President and CEO Noah Bookbinder…. who sits on the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Advisory Council (HSAC)”.
Who would have guessed?
FWIW
“We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars”
Continuing the U.S. decline of the brand, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that approximately half of all Buick dealership in the U.S. have opted to take a buyout from GM, as opposed to spending millions in retooling, restructuring and retraining their staff to accommodate the EV influx.
Most of the EV’s shoved onto the dealer lots sit idle without customers to purchase them.”
https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2023/12/21/we-dont-need-no-flaming-sparky-cars-151/
FWIW – more covid horror stories for the morning –
1. ” If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a vaccine. The UK Daily Mail ran a curtly-headlined story yesterday which seemed to acknowledge how ridiculous this is getting: “Now scientists develop a vaccine to lower CHOLESTEROL.” ”
“There’s a new gold rush, except this one comes in a needle and rhymes with “Maxine.” The covid shots opened up a brand-new frontier in pharmaceuticals: the genetic engineering of viruses to prompt an immune response targeting virtually anything doctors don’t like. You’ve already heard of the ‘cancer vaccines.’ But why limit ourselves to targeting diseases? Healthy but unwanted tissues can be included in there too.
For example, you won’t need testosterone suppressors; just engineer a virus with a bit of testosterone in it and let the immune system do its job. How about a fat vaccine? A vaccine that targets headaches? Eye floaters? Unwanted back hair? Underarm sweat? You name it! They can now make a “vaccine” for it, no problem. It’s a CRISPR for everyone! Vaccines for healthy human proteins.
What could go wrong?”
2. ” Entertainment Weekly ran a story Tuesday headlined, “Celine Dion has ‘lost control over her muscles’ amid battle with stiff-person syndrome, says sister.” The Canadian pop mega-star, 55, announced a year ago she’d suddenly and unexpectedly been diagnosed with stiff-person syndrome, an ultra-rare, perfectly horrible neurological autoimmune disease with a deadly prognosis.”
But
“But is that true? Is there really no evidence? One year ago in the December 9th C&C I offered the following evidence: first, Pfizer oddly included Stiff Person Syndrome as one of the known “post-authorization adverse event reports” in its regulatory documents:”
And more.
3. “Brownstone’s Jeffrey Tucker penned a short but thought-provoking counter-revolutionary piece yesterday titled, “This Silence Is Not Golden.” ”
”Mr. Tucker marveled at how the Establishment seems to be sweeping the pandemic’s totalitarian excesses — and all the resulting casualties — right down the memory hole:
Hardly anyone can be found today who defends what happened, except perhaps in the most sheepish terms, and nearly always with the obviously false proviso that “We just didn’t know then what we know now.” That seems like a shabby excuse for what’s resulted. These days – again, mostly in private conversations – hardly any apocalyptic prediction seems beyond the realm of plausibility.
The public silence over this entire subject is beyond bizarre. There are political conventions happening all over the country. They are attended by thousands. Everyone is rallying about and for something. But the Covid response hardly comes up. When it does, it is quick and perfunctory conversation and quickly dropped.
Hardly any revelations about Big Tech censorship, excess deaths, contaminated shots, misused funds, or corruption of public officials and academics get media attention at all. To many of us, what is happening and what is revealed daily amounts to a parade of scandals, except that the national media doesn’t care in the slightest.
Mr. Tucker was frustrated by the bizarre media silence, but I take it to be evidence of progress. He said hardly anyone defends the pandemic response anymore except by arguing ignorance. He’s frustrated that they aren’t calling for heads on pikes yet, and I get that. But look how far things have come, how the Overton window has shifted.
Basically, at this point, the government’s pandemic response is now literally indefensible. Nobody’s seriously defending it. That’s progress.
Also, Mr. Tucker meant to say that the steady drumbeat of new revelations hardly gets any attention at all from corporate media. The breaking news gets plenty of attention here at Coffee & Covid and at other aligned independent media — like Brownstone. But we take his point — there’s a tacit omertà among the establishment types; an all-new “move-on-dot-org” conspiracy of like-minded actors implicitly agreeing to shepherd the bruised population along toward some shiny new distraction.
Still, Mr. Tucker is on the right trail and his article is worth a read.”
Via Covid and Coffee
https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/clustered-thursday-december-21-2023?r=1vxw0k&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Sooo, if this is record from yesterday is real, what do you think the military has?
Remember GPS? :-)
@Ossqss:
Flying Mines.
A concept weapon I thought of a couple of decades ago, but didn’t tell anyone as the notion was scary and the tech needed some tweeks. Well, now the tweeks have happened.
So you send your cargo plane near an area, and dump out a few thousands of these, they deploy into the desired space and make a mined area to stop airplanes getting through. Good for a fairly long number of hours (longer than duration of most jet fighter bombers). At end of battery life, they do a “suicide attack” on the enemy ground positions.
They can also “swarm” any approaching target, air or ground.
The weather gods opinion on EV mandates?
“Talk about terrible timing. Fox News ran an article yesterday with the intentionally hilarious headline, “Maine forced to delay vote on EV mandate amid widespread power outages.” The sub-headline piled on: “’A storm like yesterday’s would render 80% of cars useless is, to say the least, ill-advised,’ Democratic Rep Golden says.” ”
More at
https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/not-croquet-friday-december-22-2023?r=1vxw0k&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
And a look at progress on the latest Peking Pox beat up
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The Supreme Court refused to fast-track Jack Smiths request for a ruling. Now it has to go through the entire process. Ha Ha!