07:51 – The MDR-1 test kit for Colin showed up yesterday. It contains two tiny little brushes to do cheek swabs. The instructions said that food can interfere with the test, so we decided to do the cheek swabs first thing this morning, before Colin had eaten.
So, Colin was lying on the love seat in the den while Barbara was sitting on the sofa opening the envelopes that contain the brushes. I sat down beside him. His ears went flat as he watched Barbara opening the brush envelopes. I could tell exactly what Colin was thinking: “You’re going to stick those in my mouth and use them to obtain specimens of my squamous epithelial cheek cells, aren’t you?” I told him that was exactly what we were going to do. He cooperated pretty well. I’ll send the swabs off today for testing. My guess is that Colin doesn’t have the MDR-1 mutation, or if he does it’s heterozygous. But it’s worth $70 to find out for sure.
The paper this morning reported a horrible accident in Yadkinville, which is just down the road from us. A three-month-old baby was killed by the family dog, which apparently mistook a multi-colored stocking cap she was wearing for a ball and bit her head repeatedly. What surprised me was that the paper reported that the police had investigated and ruled the incident an unpreventable accident. Nowadays, it seems that nothing is ever an accident. There’s always someone to blame. But apparently the authorities recognized that no one was at fault here and that the family was going through enough already without criminal charges being filed.
09:50 – Riots have broken out along the southern tier of the eurozone. Riots as in Molotov cocktails and rioters throwing bricks at police, who are responding with rubber bullets. (Those, incidentally, are no joke; they can seriously injure or even kill people.) Greece is really at the tipping point. Even moderate, formerly middle class people are now talking about revolution. As one commented, what do they have to lose? As another said, all it’ll take is a spark. And they’re going to get that spark as it becomes clear that what Greece has agreed to will not be enough to secure any kind of long- or even medium-term funding.
I was amused by the list of demands made by the European Trades Union Convention, nearly all of which are utterly impossible to meet, for both political and economic reasons. Here they are:
• Economic governance at the service of sustainable growth and quality jobs,
• Economic and social justice through redistribution policies, taxation and social protection,
• Employment guarantees for young people,
• An ambitious European industrial policy steered towards a green, low-carbon economy and forward-looking sectors with employment opportunities and growth,
• A more intense fight against social and wage dumping,
• Pooling of debt through Euro-bonds,
• Effective implementation of a financial transaction tax to tackle speculation and enable investment policies,
• Harmonisation of the tax base with a minimum rate for companies across Europe,
• A determined effort to fight tax evasion and fraud,
• Respect for collective bargaining and social dialogue,
• Respect for fundamental social and trade union rights.
16:14 – I’ve spent a little bit of time visiting some of the prepper sites that have been linked to in the comments recently, and there’s something I really don’t understand. A lot of these folks seem to be overly-concerned with the shelf-life of stored foods. I mean, are they really storing 25- to 50-year supplies of food? If not, why do they care about the difference? Or perhaps they’re stocking grains and other foods by the ton, figuring that maybe their great-great-grandchildren might have some use for them.
I also think it’s interesting that they take stated shelf-lives as gospel. For example, we just bought some canned chicken chunks at Costco. They have a best-by date three years from now. I promise you, they’ll be fine a lot longer than that. After 10 or 20 years, they might show some darkening, but they’ll still be perfectly edible and will have probably 95% of the nutrition that they have now. Heck, they’ve found 4,000 year old Hostess Twinkies in Egyptian tombs, and they were still edible.
I also wonder about some of their choices of specific foods. Do they eat this stuff now, or are they figuring that it’ll be better than nothing if they get really hungry? I suppose cost is part of this. People decide what they can afford and how much food they want to store and then buy whatever that multiplier dictates. Still, I think that’s a stupid way to go about it. We buy stuff that we eat anyway. We just buy extra. So what if the canned and dry stuff we eat is a year old? If nothing else, it provides a buffer in case anything we buy is contaminated with salmonella or something. In terms of flavor and nutrition, year-old stuff is fine. Two-year-old stuff is fine. Geez, five-year-old stuff would almost certainly be just as good as new stuff. Sterile is sterile. Preserved is preserved.
Sounds a bit like the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Bill from the Seventies.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphrey%E2%80%93Hawkins_Full_Employment_Act)
Well, the real problem is that very few people realize that any government is, by definition, a net consumer. It can’t produce anything on a net basis. All it can do is take what people have produced and redistribute it, inefficiently and ineffectively.
There is a lot to that dog biting baby story than “mistook the head for a ball” BS. I find it very hard to believe that a normal dog couldn’t smell that the ball was actually a baby. In my experience, the vast majority of dogs become over-protective of babies, and don’t tend to gnaw on them. OTOH, I would never have put a three month old baby on the floor near dogs, in the first place.
As for rubber bullets, they most certainly are not jokes, but neither are Molotov cocktails and bricks, which can also maim and kill. I’ll guess that the bricks and bombs were thrown first.
Let’s see if real bullets are used in the near future. I suspect it won’t take long.
I can’t believe that a dog would *continue* to attack a baby. I mean, surely the first scream would stop it.
I’ll probably get a dog next year but it will have to be a good-with-children breed and I would never leave it alone with a young child, no matter how docile it was.
We’re getting our revenge on the Japanese:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-14/redback-menace-creeping-towards-tokyo/4372294
That list of demands is simple commie boilerplate pie-in-the-sky dreaming. Any chance these cretins might have had of implementing even one of them is most likely gone forever. Unbelievable. Someone must be joking; they can’t be serious. It’s almost a parody.
I think we’ll eventually see some of the scenarios going on in Greece right now over here in some places; as lights go out and the Grid flickers and store shelves go empty.
I’m nervous about Colin being around children, not because he’s vicious–far from it–but because he’s a BC. A lot of what kids do engages the instincts of BC’s to herd, and when they’re herding they use escalation when a herdee doesn’t obey orders. That can easily lead to a child being nipped, which of course the parents would see as a bite.
I’ll never forget a block party when I was a kid. There were a dozen or more little kids running around yelling and playing in the back yard, along with our first BC, Abby. At some point, my parents noticed that the back yard was silent. We went out to see what was (not) going on, and found all of the kids gathered in a tiny little cluster with Abby pacing the perimeter to make sure none of them made a break for it.
Abby was never leashed or tied, but she knew she wasn’t allowed to leave the yard without permission. She knew exactly where the boundaries were, too. The only exception was that she’d watch little kids playing, and she knew they weren’t allowed out in the street. If she spotted one a block away toddling toward the street she’d be off like a shot to force the kid back into its yard. All the parents loved her.
The spider article starts out
“Venomous” is redundant in describing anything growing or living in Australia. That’s why I’ve never been tempted to date a sheila, despite the cute accent: I’m sure Australian girls have poisonous fangs or something.
A determined effort to fight tax evasion and fraud,
I’m surprised this made the list. Tax evasion is one of the problems the southern Eurozone, especially Greece, faces in trying to raise any revenue. There is a huge amount of “off the books” commerce there, it’s almost a national sport.
All that’s missing is that the whole continent be forced to hold hands and sing Kum – Ba – Ya.
RBT, that’s the approach I take to buying emergency food: just buy extra, especially when it’s on sale. I usually find that looking to buy, say, dried beans in 25-pound bags over the internet works out much more expensive than buying the one-pound bags on sale in the grocery sale.
As for the odd opinions vehemently expressed, -shrug-. Unless someone’s come up with an AI that can pass a Turing test, the opinions are being expressed by humans. You know, those irrational beings almost entirely programmed by their body chemistry and upbringing.
It would seem to me to make more sense to stock up on the food that you normally use when it’s on sale. That way you have food in case of disaster, and food in case of just plain old nasty inflation. Why buy a few hundred dollars of food to have on hand in case of disaster, when you can buy a few hundred dollars of food you normally use, and you can use as a hedge against inflation if that happens.
Nasty inflation is in my opinion a much more likely scenario than a doomsday disaster. Of course you need to stock up on the kinds of shelf stable foods you normally use. Or have a freezer full of food, and a way to run it if you lose electric power.
Hi Bob,
I had some MRE’s that I ate after I had them for a dozen years (and I’m sure they had been lying around a while before I bought them) that were still quite edible; even tasty.
I think I paid three for $5 in the early ’90s for real GI ones, which are now no longer available to the public.
Cheers,
Rod Schaffter
Canned goods should last a long time. Look for bulging or degradation in the can. Open it and use the “smell” test. If it smells OK, I’m guessing it’s OK. I know most can lids are glued on, that could be a problem with long term storage.
Freeze dried has the advantage of lighter weight for the Barackalpse if you need to bug out. You need a water source, though. Make sure you have filtration/purification equipment.
RBT, a question: How difficult would it be for a moderately chem-savvy person to make and deliver useful amounts of chemical or biological agents. That is, could you or a person who can run a meth lab without blowing it up make WMD?
Emphasis: I’m not asking for step-by-step instructions. Just a guesstimate whether you could procure the precursors, make the agents, make a delivery mechanism, and deploy them in a useful fashion. Survival of the operator is not required. Also to emphasize, I’m not talking about just scaring people and shutting down the NY subway or something; all you need is some white talc powder or a pound of baking yeast to do that.
As frequently mentioned, I don’t know crap about doing chemical fabrication stuff, but from a military, and especially a counter-terror, point of view I knew quite a lot … twenty-five years ago. Making mustard or nerve gas was not considered hugely difficult for someone with decent lab skills. (I’m not sure where the threshold was. I do know that do-it-yourself terrorists generally managed to kill themselves.) Getting the equipment and the precursors was difficult. Getting the gas to deploy reliably and do any damage was a bitch. I don’t know what’s changed since I last needed to be an expert; presumably the equipment is better but the materials are harder to get without being tracked.
The reason I’m asking is, once again I’ve encountered someone asserting that “anyone who can make meth can make WMD”.
MrAtoz is watching, remember. And there is at least one other entity on these boards who may also be keeping tabs.
On the preppy canned goods thang; one neat tip I just saw was to slide over to Costco or similar big-box deal and grab three storage bins. Then race around and take one item from each of the sections of the canned goods; should take all of thirty minutes and cost around 200 bucks and enough food for two people for six weeks. I will try that out shortly and let y’all know the scoop accordingly.
BBC is a pretty good source on those armament questions. Within the last few weeks, I heard an interview with a guy who is supposedly expert in weapons and disarmament (have no idea which program it was on or the date of it), and he claimed Iran does not need weapons-grade material to do significant damage. Industrial-grade uranium and a bread truck for portability are enough to do about 60% of the damage that weapons-grade material will get you.
Chemical weapons aren’t difficult to make. Incidentally, there’s nothing moderate about the skills of people who can run a large scale meth lab without blowing it or themselves up. Paul Jones commented one time that he’d love to have such people as lab assistants. They’re very, very good. But then natural selection has that effect.
The problem with chemical weapons, as you say, is delivery, whether or not the person delivering the weapon is expendable. Even with an enclosed area like the Tokyo subway and even using nerve gases with very high toxicity, it’s very difficult to get concentrations that even approach the mean lethal dose.
Biologicals have their own set of problems. Sure, it’s easy enough to get pathogenic microorganisms, and it’s usually pretty easy to culture them, other than viruses, which introduce their own whole other set of problems. With biologicals, the problem is weaponizing them for delivery and finding a suitable vector. Even if you do that, you run up against the latency/burn-rate issue, which is probably the main reason Ebola, Marburg, and other filoviridae haven’t made the jump.
SteveF wrote:
“That’s why I’ve never been tempted to date a sheila, despite the cute accent: I’m sure Australian girls have poisonous fangs or something.”
Our girls would run for their lives from you. Although they tolerate Americans in small doses they do have standards.
“…he claimed Iran does not need weapons-grade material to do significant damage. Industrial-grade uranium and a bread truck for portability are enough to do about 60% of the damage that weapons-grade material will get you.”
I think you’d need HER to get a decent bang. If it’s not HER it’s just contamination. Not nice if you’re near it but the effects are more psychological.
If you want a good read on this stuff I recommend The Curve of Binding Energy by John McPhee, where he discusses building small nukes with Ted Taylor, one of the smartest small, light and portable bomb makers in the US in the Fifties. He designed a 20 pound nuke, that was never built and tested to my knowledge.
The Soviets built up an impressive biological weapons industry, even while they were signatories to pacts forbidding them. I don’t know why they bothered. Conventional weapons are best for small scale fighting and nukes if you want to blow up the world.
Wow. A friend has indicated how unnecessary journalists are today. There is a blow-by-blow account of the Israel attack on Gaza going on via Twitter
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23gazaunderattack
Warning–blood in some of the pics and videos. Click on “All” and it sorts by most recent. People sending tweets via smartphones, even though the Internet apparently has been shut off in Palestine.
Imagine what it would have been like during Vietnam, had such technology existed. People tweeting pics of their demolished homes and dead kids, like is happening now.
They didn’t care what was happening to the Vietnamese. The guys who interrupted the My Lai massacre were pariahs for years.
I just cannot, in any way, recommend Win8. Because my work schedule has been busier than usual, I have not had uninterrupted days to work with the new computer, but here is where I stand.
My computer came with Win8 pre-installed. Since I am not going to use Windows on the computer anyway, except in Virtual Box, I took the ‘no additional cost’ version of Win8, which is pre-installed and you get no disks. The product sales literature said you can create your own installation disks, so buying the disk set for $40 additional was not necessary.
Well, the bottom line is that it is NOT possible to create backup installation disks. Gamers are pretty upset about that, because they want to reconfigure computers they get at Best Buy, to use 2 x HD’s and reinstall Windows. Not possible. Not even possible if you upgrade to the Pro version of Win8 for $80 additional. To say they are pissed is an understatement. Me, too.
Still have a couple more options to try, one of which is a ‘complete factory reset’ that is supposed to take it back to the way it was delivered before I first turned it on. Then I am supposed to be able to produce disks at first startup. I did not see that option, nor have several others in various places around the Internet, but I have nothing to lose in trying.
I am spending hours and hours on this and am not even to first base. Big editing project begins next week, and I have not even gotten the hard drive swapped out to the bigger WD A/V one yet, much less Linux installed and running. I should have been able to get all of that done within hours of first turning the machine on. I easily have 24 hours invested in this now, although it is not consecutive hours—and that slows me down.
Grrr. Steve Ballmer cannot retire too soon. As Pournelle has so often pointed out, M$ did not get to be the king of the hill by treating customers this way during its ascendancy.
Chuck, why not just swap the drive out and install linux. Then put the original drive in when you have time.
This give new meaning to a Denny’s “Slam”:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2233221/Dennys-charge-5-Obamacare-surcharge-cut-employee-hours-deal-cost-legislation.html
Our girls would run for their lives from you. Although they tolerate Americans in small doses they do have standards.
Greg, Greg, there’s nothing wrong with female Texans or even Oregonians (particularly those from the dry country). Well, every one I’ve met certainly met my standards, anyway – or would have if they’d said yes.
What I was trying to do is swap out the drive, install Linux, then install the Win8 that came with the computer in Virtual Box under Linux on the new drive (my computer only holds 1 drive—it’s the same size as a Mac Air). But from reading of trials others have had, it appears that it is impossible to install the Win8 from the old drive on any other drive—especially if you do not have installation disks. Somehow, Win8 is tied to the drive, not just the machine. Those who somehow have gotten an image onto a new drive (drive has to be the exact same size and my new drive is twice the size), have not gotten approval from M$ to activate. Apparently, M$ realizes—with all the newness of Win8—that you are not replacing a broken drive, but changing the drive for your own reasons, and for that, you need to go out and buy a new Win8 at retail, screw you very much.
I am leaving this afternoon for an overnight stay and a job tomorrow clear across the state. When I get back, I think I will just give up on Win8. I can get along without Windows on the new computer, and the place I bought it will no longer sell computers with no OS. Actually, they will no longer sell computers that are not Windows, but I suspect that has happened at the Asus corporate level. Six years ago, they were quite willing to sell me a computer with no OS, so it looks like M$ has been able to tighten the screws considerably since then.
Bob, as far as food storage goes, there’s three basic rules that all too many ignore:
1. Store what you eat, eat what you store.
2. Inventory your stores, and rotate your stocks.
3. Take account of what it will take to prepare your stores.
Number 1 basically says you are going to store what you can and will use, and that you’ll work your way through the least recent purchases before they spoil. Implicit in it is also that you can look at what you eat compared to shelf life, look at the longer-lived storage items that you don’t currently eat, try some of the long-life stuff to find whether maybe it would make a pleasant change to your diet occasionally, and if so branch out.
This is important! If you have some sort of major or personal disaster that means you have to swing over to unfamiliar and unaccustomed foods. Quite a few of them may have high fibre or fat content, and gastric upsets are just what you don’t need on top of other troubles.
This also applies even to people on limited budgets. They may not be able to buy big stocks, but if they store some canned tuna and salmon, rice, dried onion and chilli, mung beans (good for sprouts, which are all the vegetable you need for quite long periods) each week, they’ll pretty soon at least build up a month’s stock – and that may be the biggest value they’ll get. WhenTSHTF it may not be TEOTWAWKI or TEOCAWKI (search on the acronyms if you need to, yo’all). It may well be a personal rather than a widespread emergency, but still having stocks to fall back on can make all the difference.
Number 2, properly adhered to, ensures that you don’t get orphaned cans of tomatoes sitting at the back of the cupboard and exploding all over you other stores after three years or similar disasters or accidents (tomatoes are fairly acid, and they DO NOT have a long shelf life in cans, as the acid corrodes the can).
Number 3 is my personal addition. Some stuff you can open and eat out of the can. Other things, particularly dried stores, may need cooking. If they need cooking you need fuel. Many people completely overlook that. Beans may look good at first glance, but you may need to store a lot more fuel than you would the beans themselves.
Small things cook quicker than big, so lentils, dried split peas, adzuki and mung beans are better than common beans. Again, the Asian beans (adzuki and mung) are good for sprouts as well, whereas common beans are poisonous until they’ve had about fifteen minutes of vigorous boiling (slow cooker packed solid just doesn’t work).
Pressure cookers are your friend (if you watch them).
In addition, there is home preparation of long-life stores.
You can do home canning (glass jars). I understand the AllAmerican pressure canner is the best here, as it has steel-to-steel seal, rather than rubber gaskets. Pressure canning will work for anything including chicken, beef, pork, fish and other meats. Pressure canned bony trash fish will come out like canned salmon, with the bones soft enough to eat. I speak from reading here rather than experience – we don’t have that system available in Australia except for special imports at exorbitant cost.
You can also dry things at home. A dehydrator can be used for fruit and vegetables, and a slow oven for low-fat meat products. Lighter and longer-life than things stored in liquid.
Run a search on “Kurt Saxon thermos cooking”. Some whole grains can be used whole, and cooking cost is not exorbitant.
Also look at “solar cookers”. You can get the effect of a crock pot on sunny days, for no fuel cost.