11:13 – I’m going to hell for this. I’m writing a sidebar in Chapter I-14 on Preparing for Financial Emergencies. The sidebar is about inflation and fractional-reserve banking, and I’ve titled it, “Money From Nothing (and Your Checks for Free)”. I may be drummed out of the Austrian School for that one. Or not.
Crap. I just Googled that exact phrase and came up with six hits dating back to 2009. Oh, well. I thought it was original when I coined it a few minutes ago. I guess it was far too obvious not to have been coined years ago. Actually, it was probably coined by you-know-who. As Dorothy Parker famously observed, “I never seek to take the credit; We all assume that Oscar said it.”
We don’t have a vacuum sealer. As usual, before we made our Costco run Sunday we looked through the coupons. They had a Food-Saver vacuum sealer on sale for $120, which was something like $40 off. I checked Amazon for a price comparison and found that Costco’s deal was in fact a good deal. Fortunately, I also checked the reviews on both Costco and Amazon. There were a lot of very negative reviews, many of which said that they were on their second or third vacuum sealer, that they’d bought the Food Saver brand in the past and that it had worked well and lasted a decade or more. Their comments about the current models weren’t so kind. Dying in a couple months if not DOA; wasting the (very expensive) Food Saver brand bags, and so on. From these reviews, it seems that Food Saver products made years ago were excellent but newer models suck. I ended up ordering a Nesco model from Amazon, which was half the price and had excellent reviews on Amazon and elsewhere. It’s a very new product, so it has no track record yet, but we probably won’t be beating it death as some people do, so it’ll probably work just fine for us.
That phrase was coined by Dire Straits so fah as I know:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAD6Obi7Cag
That wunnerful mayor of Houston who takes in poor wittle chillens with her and her “partner” shows her true colors:
http://www.crisismagazine.com/2014/clerical-freedom-academic-freedom
Pipe up about them wunnerful unisex baffroomz down there in church and you’ll get yer sermons and emails subpoenaed by the commissars.
How is this different from Stalin’s regime, pray tell?
No, no. Dire Straits was “Money FOR Nothing (and Your CHICKS for Free)”.
I know; but I figgered you just swapped out “for” with “from” and “chicks” for “checks.” Was there an actual phrase somewhere about “checks for free?”
Checks for Free as in fractional-reserve banking, where banks steal demand deposits (your money, something that does not belong to them and is not under their control) and lend it to other people. That’s how banks create Money from Nothing. That’s also why every bank in the US (world, come to that) is actually bankrupt.
OK, which one of you guys north of the Mason-Dixon line left the polar door open again? We are freezing down here in the Land of Sugar. OK, close to freezing.
It’s 50 in Vegas. My Chihuahuas are all piled together in their basket. Brrrrrr!
“Checks for Free as in fractional-reserve banking…”
Yes, OFD understands all that. (It’s actually worse than that, currently, and the chickens will be coming home to roost sooner or later.) I simply assumed you had swapped out a couple of words from the Dire Straits lyrics to roll yer own sidebar title.
“…which one of you guys north of the Mason-Dixon line left the polar door open again?”
Hey, Algore said it was OK; the polar bears were dying and then we were all gonna die so Chief Scientist of the Solar System Gore told us we hadda balance out all that warming. (sorry about yer faux doggies, MrAtoz…)
I was gonna do a bunch of outside yahd work today but the wind makes it impossible. Oh well, plenty to do inside here…
Hate not having a garage again. We need robotics to clear the snow offa my car, because it sure ain’t happenin’ by itself. Gotta do a PO run before they close at 17:00.
Never heard that particular co-opting of Dire Straits before, so if you hadda not told me about the other fellas who beat you to it, I wudda tho’t you was a morpheme and lexicon genius.
Jetstream forecast shows a warm-up coming for the weekend to the Heartland and the Lone Star state — on into Monday, but another whiplash from the north follows that. Average temp around here this time of year is 51/31 and today it is 20/8.
I don’t mind the lower temps but the wind is a PITA when it’s blowing 35-40 steady and 50+ gusts again here; I walk the mutt out at a 45-degree angle and stuff has blown all over the yahd again. It’ll be nice when we get the contractor guy in soon to replace six of our worst offending windows, and once we get all the others done, this place will be wrapped up nice and tight. (also when we seal off the damn back porch; I had some of it done with plastic sheeting last week and it’s since all blown off, like it was nothing.)
Oh look! Sunlight! Typically around here this time of year we have overcast all day and then the sun peeks out for the last hour of daylight, just to tweak us. After that it gets dahk fast and substantially colder and windier. Next time there’s a full moon I gotta get a good shot of the town hall with the lights on against it, with the trees swaying; you’d swear it was a lit-up castle on a desolate north English moor.
That wunnerful mayor of Houston who takes in poor wittle chillens with her and her “partner” shows her true colors…
This is an old story. And is much ado about nothing. The subpoenas were in response to a lawsuit filed against the city. The first thing an attorney will tell you about discovery is to ask for everything and expect the other side to object and to negotiate it down to what you really want. That’s what happened here. The pastors involved were possibly giving instructions to their congregants on filling out petitions to put the equal rights ordinance to a vote, possibly with instructions that promoted bad signatures being added to the petitions. They also had been coordinating protests at city hall. (Some of this might be a violation of their tax-exempt status. There have been complaints in the past that some pastors have been electioneering from the pulpit, which is a violation. Most of those accused have been liberals. This time some conservative churches, as well as some liberal ones, have been caught up in this controversy.)
And all-in-all she’s been a good mayor, and will soon be term-limited out. No tax increases, better city services, etc. And she is married to her partner, and has adopted the kids they have.
As an aside, the adoption issue is what may lead the Supreme Court declaring lack of same-sex marriage unconstitutional. It’s an equal protection violation for the kids. Married couples and their kids have access to various governmental protections that same sex parents don’t. It’s been brought up in a few of the more recent Appeals Court decisions that ruled in favor of SSM, and appeared to have swayed at least one conservative judge.
Thanks much for the clarification, Mr. ech; I ought to know better about verifying story intel from various sources.
“…access to various governmental protections…”
I’m generally in favor of government keeping its nose out of marriages, period, one way or the other.
“…some pastors have been electioneering from the pulpit, which is a violation.”
This is tricky; I would argue that pastors/clergy have a responsibility to speak up about contemporary politics and elections, short of actually ordering parishioners how to vote. Some pastors spoke out about events and situations in Germany and the Soviet Union and got sent off to early deaths. In our time, the State has seen fit to use taxpayer funds to promote practices which are in violation of some taxpayers’ religious beliefs, and of course that cuts all ways, too.
And OFD the propeller head discovers that it was stupid of him to get a 3TB external hard drive (WD My Book) a few months ago, because the system won’t see beyond circa 2TB anyway and roughly 750GB simply goes to waste, evidently. This just after seeing 4TB drives for sale at the Wall-Mutt yesterday. (along with several kinda scary characters, per usual; scarier than me, you ask?)
Here in Nebraska we got down to 0°F last night and we have about 3 inches of snow on the ground, but temps should hit 48°F this Saturday.
We had our little dance with snow yesterday, gone now. 27 and “feels like 15.”
As I say, t-shirt weather, if you don’t mind being blown all over the landscape. (dirty minds will find other meanings here, naturally…)
OFD the propeller head is considering, after backing up the remaining movie and tee-vee files to the My Book, whether it’s easier to just plug the drive directly into the damn tee-vee from now on, or wire up the latter to get them streaming from this machine.
OFD the propeller head
I am hoping you know that I meant that with much respect.
My brother wears shorts year round. In the depth of Winter he’s wearing a hat, gloves, winter coat, long-sleeve shirt, and SHORTS.
“…I meant that with much respect.”
Oh alright; I’ll back off from setting up claymores outside yer hooch now. I am actually sort of a propeller-head sometimes; mechanical chit fascinates me, even though I got a crappy score on that Armed Forces entrance test or whatever it was in mechanical chit. Once the AF got me over to the other side of wunnerful Lackland and onto all the firearms and explosives, I was good.
“… In the depth of Winter he’s wearing a hat, gloves, winter coat, long-sleeve shirt, and SHORTS.”
Yeah, they do that here, too; sometimes kilts. Of course all the womyn are wrapped up tight in the northern New England version of burkhas.
I’ll back off from setting up claymores outside yer hooch now
Hmmm, that explains the mysterious vehicles parked across the street.
I got a crappy score on that Armed Forces entrance test or whatever it was in mechanical chit
I remember those tests. I aced the scores on all the tests, scored perfect in all four categories. First time that happened in the Portland Oregon induction station. Personally I think someone screwed up on the scoring of the test. Regardless, it allowed me to choose a different career path while I was in basic training and completely skipped tech school.
And speaking of induction testing, one of the tests that had to be done was some sort of check for hemorrhoids. The test was real thorough. 100 of us in a room with one guy at the front. He had us all turn around, drop the towel, bend over and spread the cheeks. Surprisingly after 1.87 seconds we all passed the test with flying colors.
Ray: yah, I maxed the ASVAB, too. My recruiter really really liked me — he got a point for me enlisting, one for good ASVAB, one for having started college, one for signing up for ROTC, one for being willing to go into a reserve unit immediately. (More or less; I don’t remember the exact details, but all by myself I got him a good chunk of a year’s quota.) He sent me Christmas cards for years.
Chad: Give your brother my regards. I wear shorts year-round, too. But I don’t wear a winter coat, and very rarely a hat. Boots when shovelling snow (for traction), otherwise sneakers or bare feet. I’ll wear a T-shirt or short-sleeve knit shirt and a light flannel shirt and usually a hoodie over that. Sometimes gloves. Yes, I get a lot of funny looks and some profanity during the winter.
I hope you don’t think I’m so dorky as to actually park vehicles anywhere near yer hooch. Jeezum, gimme a little credit for some spookworthiness after all the years as a whatever for Uncle and then cop afterward.
I did OK on the electrical and admin portions of them tests and they had “promised” me intel skool at Lowry in Colorado, a whole year of tech skool, where I woulda learned, no doubt, to push papers and stare at green monochrome for 40+ hours a week and talk on a telephone. Luckily they badly needed Air Police at that time and that’s where they sent me after Basic. Meanwhile the induction into the Armed Forces took place at the old Boston Army Base, and for much of it we were starkers or in our skivvies in a big cold-ass room just off the hah-buh while civvies, male and female, strolled by openly in the corridors outside. I know they actually did the bunghole checks and we also got a series of cold-ass shots. Then they swore us in, all branches, and handed out Gideon’s New Testaments; I lost mine somewhere over the years but had it a very long time after I got out. Now I have my dad’s, plus his 1928 Book of Common Prayer, both of which I use in preference to the stale pablum of the modern Roman Catholic translations, for which I will be going to Hell of course.
During my training for Air Police they changed the name to Security Police and divided us up into Law Enforcement (think white hats and gloves and similarity to stateside civvie cops in duties, only under UCMJ of course) and Security Police, now known, I gather, as Security Forces. Stateside we did air base security and defense; in the war zones we were the AF’s de facto infantry, esp. in absence of any nearby Army or Marine troops. Some overseas security units were designated Heavy Weapons and had armor, including tanks, APCs and them rubber duck vehicles that could theoretically go underwater.
In ‘Nam I was mostly air base defense, with occasional outside ranging patrols and several times working with the white mice (RVN MP’s) in downtown Saigon. Up at Bien Hoa we were designated security for, if you can believe this, the Green Berets. This is where OFD picked up his first enemy ordnance souvenirs to take home with him.
Second tour was at Ubon RTAFB in northeast Thailand, again, air base defense and longer-range patrols outside the wire. Then NKP, further north near the Laotian border, where OFD got volunteered for enlisted air crew gunnery jobs and worked with JUSMAGTHAI and the 56th SOW, while picking up some more enemy ordnance to take home, courtesy of his little Khmer Rouge buddies near Pnomh Penh.
And then home again, home again, jiggedy-jog, to five inches of heavy wet snow and sleet in lovely suburban Boston.
I hope you don’t think I’m so dorky as to actually park vehicles anywhere near yer hooch
I figured they were decoys. The real stuff is in the wooded area behind my house.
Ah, a wooded area behind yer hooch; got it wired with trip flares, mines, claymores and sentry dawgs yet?
We have a lotta trees around this hooch but it’s all pretty open for a ways, plus a big ol’ open expanse of lake wottuh. If the zombie invasion ever occurs from either Megalopolis South or Megalopolis North, we’ll take up Dr. Bob’s suggestion and block the several roads into the village here with piles of wrecked vehicles, which will themselves be mined and booby-trapped. They’ll be overseen by sniper teams, of course. I’ll direct the intel and interrogations of politicians, lawyers and financial speculators here at HQ.
Speaking of which, yet another chopper flew in just now overhead, kinda low. During the day there are some that do crop spraying or related agricultural stuff, plus the obvious searching for pot farms along the watershed/valley from the border down to nearly Maffachufetts. At night I’m not sure yet what they’re up to, but I aim to find out pretty soon.
This is tricky; I would argue that pastors/clergy have a responsibility to speak up about contemporary politics and elections, short of actually ordering parishioners how to vote.
It is a fine line. In general, there has been great deference in the US to allowing freedom of religion within the confines of the church. However, non-profits aren’t allowed to do partisan politics. There are churches that invite candidates to speak at services – it is a strong tradition in the African-American community. However, when I’ve seen coverage of these, they always have a (D) candidate there, but never the (R), (L) or (SWP) candidate. If they were telling parishoners, from the pulpit, how to go out and solicit signatures, it’s problematic. Telling them to oppose the ordinance, to work against it, is not a problem. My sister lived in a RC diocese where the archbishop decreed that every homily had to have some kind of anti-abortion message worked into it. Made for a very strange homily on Xmas eve one year when we visited them. Fortunately, the bishop retired.
I’m generally in favor of government keeping its nose out of marriages, period, one way or the other.
Yeah, but as long as they offer protections and benefits for married folks, it ought to be as expansive as is consistent with public good. I’d argue that polygamy is a problem, as having large numbers of sexually frustrated males has been proven to be detrimental. We don’t have the concern that many tribal societies did of a surplus of females, where many males were killed off in conflict or hunting. IIRC, there have only been a few places that practiced polyandry, and never for long.
ech, you mean polygyny, not polygamy. The former means multiple women for a man, where the latter is pretty much any grouping greater than 2.
I think polygyny is a fine idea, in the current legal environment. The women can leave any time they want and get the kids, child support, and most of the common property. Any man stupid enough to sign up for that deserves what he gets.
Looking at polygyny from another perspective, given the US Ruling Class’s obvious desire to keep meddling in world affairs, we should infect a lot of economically valueless men (especially young men, the main troublemakers) with something invariably lethal, but not quickly lethal. Form them into a separate military branch and send them off to bring peace to the four corners of the Earth. Since they’re going to die and will never be allowed back to the US and don’t have any women in their group, they should be not only allowed but encouraged to kill and rape the population wherever they go, and spread their disease while they’re at it.
Back home in the US, there’ll be a million or more excess (mostly young) women. Men who are so inclined can invite them to join their families. Everyone wins!
(Speaking solely for myself, I don’t want another wife. The one I have spends me broke and nags me most of the way into a killing frenzy. Why the hell would I want another?) (Similarly, I don’t want a hot teenage girlfriend, either. Teenage girls are the most annoying thing on the planet, narrowly beating out pubic lice and teenage boys. Any middle-aged man who wants a teenage girlfriend must be insane.)
“Teenage girls are the most annoying thing on the planet, narrowly beating out … teenage boys. ”
Heresy! Teenage girls are far far far more annoying than teenage boys. At least going on my experience with two nieces and two nephews.
“…However, when I’ve seen coverage of these, they always have a (D) candidate there, but never the (R), (L) or (SWP) candidate.”
Once in a blue moon they’ll have a Repub candidate in, but it’s only to set him or her up to be browbeaten and bullied and nagged, unless said Repub is just a total RINO with a really outstanding supportive record for them, i.e., distribution of spoils.
“…they should be not only allowed but encouraged to kill and rape the population wherever they go, and spread their disease while they’re at it.”
Sort of what is happening with the ISIS boyz and their related litters around the world nowadays, and the sowing of seeds department was certainly replicated in our inner cities over the past 70 years. Rinse and repeat.
“…Teenage girls are the most annoying thing on the planet, narrowly beating out pubic lice…”
Agreed. Just the voices are enough to fry my brain and make my hair stand on end.
“…Heresy! Teenage girls are far far far more annoying than teenage boys.”
Agreed. I’m with Mr. Greg in Oz on this one. Teenage boyz are a piece of cake by comparison. Rarely a problem, unless one is accosted by a group of them on a city block late at night when said group has been heavily imbibing various substances. Then you gotta get creative.
[snip] How is this different from Stalin’s regime, pray tell? [snip]
No Walter Duranty to write fiction in the New York Times?
(And yes, I know – story behind the story, churches vs. politics, etc.)
Exactly, but these guys will be fighting for the US of A, so they’re GOOD, contrasted with those other guys, who are BAD.
Ha, ha, most peeps out here have never heard of Duranty, that p.o.s. If older, they’ll confuse him with Jimmy Durante. In any case, he’s been superseded by our corporate media behemoths, who’ve been selling the Murkan mythology around the world since the days of MOH winner and Rough Rider Pharaoh Roosevelt and the Hearst Machine.
Only now much of the world ain’t buying it anymore.
“…contrasted with those other guys, who are BAD.”
Ah yes, thanks for that clarification. Of course.
So hahd to keep it all straight nowadays.
Like Oceania and them other two places in “1984.”
Speaking of which, yet another chopper flew in just now overhead, kinda low
I see you. Damn are you hairy Mr. OFD
I see you got me on your newfangled high-falutin’ infrared toy, MrAtoz…
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/25/Smalfut.jpg
Apropos of nothing, Dr. Michael Johnson sends me email about the opportunity of a lifetime. Some poor Frenchman was in a plane crash, and happened to leave an account in London containing 15 million…pounces? Oh, darn, that’s something for my cat, not for me…
This one is written in German. At least, the words are German, but the grammar is so horrible that it’s actually pretty hilarious to read. Just an an example, the money is deposted not at the “branch” of a bank, but rather at the “forking” of a bank. Tree branches do fork, but someone spent too much time with a thesaurus.
I wonder just who is crazy or desperate enough to respond to these things?
Teenage girls are far far far more annoying than teenage boys
Like, are you like sure that like teenage girls like are more annoying than like you know like teenage boys like you know like you say?
Like, wow, is that Valley girl speak?
OFD, are you running XP? Everything later (certainly W7 onwards) will read much larger drives than 2 TB.
Nope, it’s Windows 8, and after hunting around on the net I kept running into guys who reported not being able to “see” that other 740+ GB of disk space, using the Disk Management utility or Control Panel or Windows Explorer. I have a 3TB Western Digital My Book external drive and Windows only allows me to format and use up to 2TB of it. Meanwhile, WD, Seagate and others are selling 4TB and up drives; am I missing something here??
(right now it’s a formatted/allocated 2TB partition and the rest of it is an “unallocated” 746 GB partition which I can’t do anything with so fah)
My Windows 8.1 box has RAID 1 arrays of 4 TB drives. No problems. I have some 3 TB external drives around somewhere, I’ll try ’em out.
am I missing something here
Format as NTFS, not FAT-32, and see what happens.
I have several 3 TB and 4 TB external drives and they are all setup as a single partition each. In fact, they came formatted as NTFS as FAT32 is limited to 2 TB partition sizes.
At this point I’m about ready to throw the WD My Book as far as I can into the lake. And possibly this Windows machine, too.
The default format is NTFS. That’s what it is right now. It still only sees 1.99 TB of the supposedly available 3TB, of which 746 GB is “unallocated” and I can’t do a damn thing with it, either in Disk Management, File Explorer, or Device Manager. Periodically Windows 8 won’t see the drive at all, and then I have to assign it yet another new drive letter, which disappears in turn, leaving me with several more ghost drive letters that I’d already managed to get rid of earlier. Tried formatting it as xFat and no joy.
It should be fairly trivial for the Windows 8 box to see the external drive, and then let me format it again in its entirety as NTFS, but I can’t. Whine, whine. It’s divided into those two partitions, one “allocated” and supposedly OK, and the other one “unallocated” and I can’t get rid of it or format it.
Plus the drive will show up in Explorer but only as a letter, not accessible anymore, at which point I go back into Disk Management and re-assign another letter, rinse and repeat, all to no avail.
I’ve had similar problems with other external drives, whether WD or Seagate and now have a small collection of them, with partial space available on each one.
I just want one or two sizable external drives to do backups on, and due to the noises I’m hearing from the box, I should probably grab an SSD to replace the C boot drive on this machine ASAP. And clone it.
You left out the near-ultrasonic shrieking and giggling. The only saving grace is that a lot of them spend most of their waking hours glued to their cell phones and snapchat and twitter and what-not. This saving grace is, alas, vitiated by their continuing to giggle and shriek to people who can’t even hear them.
It’s against the law to throw shrieking imbeciles out of a moving car, but no jury would ever convict…
“You left out the near-ultrasonic shrieking and giggling.”
Yes, that’s a given, and it continues well into the late teen years when there are more than one of them together. It was what I was referring to when I mentioned how it makes my hair stand on end and brain get fried. Usually over nothing, too.
“… giggle and shriek to people who can’t even hear them.”
Like at the tee-vee, their iPad, and phones.
I once heard a group of them talking on their cordless phones during an afternoon and it was amazingly dull and about nothing much yet they continued to yammer for hours and hours and hours. I’ve since read that scientific/medical studies indicate their brains are mush during this time of their lives, ditto for teenage boyz, but the latter are nowhere near as annoying. If one of them becomes annoying, one of the others will usually smack him.
@OFD: Is it possible that you’re fighting the WD Smartware?
I don’t think that’s on the drive; there was only 39MB of unaccounted-for space in a separate partition that comes before the 1.99TB partition. In any case, I pretty much gave up on it. I got tired of assigning drive letters so that Winblows would see it, and then have it disappear again, leaving me with the ghost drive letter. I’m about ready to take all three of my defunct external drives out to the gun range this week.
Open to suggestions for a no-hassle, reliable external drive. Or maybe I’ll just plug in successive 16, 32, 64, whatever sized USB sticks to back up files. One other thing I’m not happy about over the time of my experience with all these drives is the flimsiness and persnicketiness of the supplied power and USB cables; slightest twist or pressure and it’s useless, but only *that* cable works on *that* drive.
USB sticks are a lot less hassle and take up fah less space.
Ah, you are running Windows 8 x86, right? Not Windows 8 x64?
The 32 bit version of Windows, the x86 version, cannot create (format) partitions larger than 2 TB. If this is the case then you need the x64 version of Windows.
On the changing drive letter for external drives, I have seen this also very occasionally on my Windows 7 x64 office pc. Sometimes I get the drive letter G instead of F. It is strange but, I accept it and move on. After all, it is standard Windows operating practice for things to be funky on a fairly routine basis.
No, no, no; it’s 64-bit Windows 8! That hasn’t helped me, though.
“…it is standard Windows operating practice for things to be funky on a fairly routine basis.”
Well-known. I’m probably just gonna do with the USB sticks for backups from now on; cheaper, more portable, and take up less space, no fuss, no muss. The large external drives I’ve had over the years have every one of them been a problem of one sort or another.
OS X has no problemo Senor.
Of course, amigo, but I no like to pay a premium ticket price for entrance to the inna gadda da vida, baby…doncha know I ain’t lovin’ dat…