15:24 – Barbara and I made a quick run down to Winston yesterday, where we met Frances and Al and hauled a bunch of stuff back up to Sparta. We got home by noon.
Last night got down into single digits F and we got a half inch or so of snow today, but it’s tonight and tomorrow that we’re supposed to get 3 to 5 inches of snow and ice. Tomorrow we plan to stay in.
Dat’s a very good ideer, ’cause I bet ya not many folks thereabouts are good drivers in snow and ice. But ya know what? Not many around here, either, apparently. Except regular local yokels who’ve lived here all their lives. But go out on the interstate and main roads during inclement weather and you’ll see one damn cretin after another, switching in and outta lanes with no signals and no warning, peeps doing 90 on slush ’cause they gots 4WD, and other peeps crawling at 20 all over the road. We stay home, too.
8 below now and tonight and then mid-20s tomorrow and low fotties Tuesday-Thursday, the weather liars say.
Daughter’s Matrix fired up this morning after sitting in the snow for three weeks; took a couple of tries but it started. GG’s Saab and wife’s Saab, no dice; they’ll have to be jumped. Both cars from Scandinavia, of course, and the other two from Japan. Not that that necessarily means anything, of course.
Finishing up the Salisbury book on the 900 days of hell in Leningrad during the winter of ’41-’42 after Hitler’s sneak attack; makes Dante’s Inferno look like a day at the beach. Lessons learned for northern tier regions over a bad winter if no power, no heat, no lights, no food, no medical help, no burials and being under fire 7×24:
1.) Don’t be there. And if there, GTFO by hook or by crook.
2.) If trapped there, you got a lot on your plate, mes amis. Make sure you can get water. That you have safe shelter. A stove that will burn wood and/or charcoal. Six-plus months of food for you and your family and maybe more to trade. Booze and ciggies for trade purposes. Self-defense capability, i.e., EDC and at home. Look at Selco’s site for his tales from the mess in the former Yugoslavia.
3.) Et sit Dominus tecum.
the week:
http://takimag.com/article/the_week_that_perished_takimag_february_14_2016/print#axzz40BA1g8Nx
And the Maoist online rag Salon headlines:
‘Scalia was the forefather of modern Republican nihilism…’
Whatever that means. Of course Salon still thinks in terms of genuine elections and voting and ballots and parties and all that bullshit, too. You can always tell, when they distinguish between the two alleged factions of the same Party.
Cankles in Vegas yesterday pandering to the unions and illegals. A chicken in every pot sort of stuff. No shame. She should have had the heart attack, not Scalia.
It sure has been a rough week for Cankles, Fox News keeps running a caption “Hillary Gets Hammered”. I don’t have the sound on, just picture so I don’t know what bar/bars/alley she was in. Nothing on Bill, he knows how to keep a low profile.
BTW, back in high school Cankles “hung out” for awhile with one of the well known upper-crust choom gangs (as they are called today). Her cackling was well known even back then. The choom gang dumped her.
[snip] Both cars from Scandinavia, of course, and the other two from Japan. [snip]
The place where the auto was designed & manufactured doesn’t play nearly as big a part as the age & quality of the battery.
GM owned Saab from 1989 to 2010. I know 2 people who were in accidents with Saabs (Americans in America) and the cars were totalled, but both walked away with not even a scratch.
My Roadmaster still sits out front. About once every 2 months I start it and drive it. It jumps to life in less than a second. That is the best-starting car I have ever owned. Even when the battery was on the fritz, it started quickly with one turn of the key.
You’re assuming she has one. Similarly, she doesn’t have to worry about brain cancer.
Her spleen, on the other hand, would seem to be six times the normal size.
Snow raced through here this afternoon. Less than an inch. Thermometer looks like it’s stuck on 18F. Yesterday, as I was making my supply rounds up in Muncie, everybody was talking about 5 inches of snow. Must be the TV, because I do not own a TV and never heard 5 inches. Today’s NOAA forecast called for 4 inches on one page, 2 inches on another, and 1 inch on yet a third. I get the impression those guys at the weather bureau are really in chaos, or smoking something pretty heavy. The whip of the jetstream is supposed to lift an undulation north of us and by Friday, temps should be 56. The jetstream forecast is the best indicator of what the weather in my territory is going to be. And that switches between hot tub humidity from the Gulf or Arctic ice from Canada.
Meanwhile, old residents across the alley to my west moved out and new ones moved in. I say old, but only in the sense they are now former residents who lasted less than a year. Both old and new are 30-something couples. No visible means of support for either. I cannot shake the smokers—everyone living there since I moved into the house built by my grandfather’s hands have been smokers, and being to their east with zero insulation, when they smoke, so do I (second-hand for me).
New couple has a 5 year-old Caravan for her and a 2 year-old Ford F-150 for him. As I say, no visible means of support. Neither goes off to a job. I’m going to begin calling this place the Tiny Town with no visible means of support. Only the guy down the street with the two boys and a girl (all teens now) and I ever go to work on this street. Oh, and the woman across the street who moved in with her 2 daughters; she works in healthcare somewhere around here.
Speaking of her, she signed up with the same company that provides my fiber broadband and got Internet-only, same as me (she can’t afford cable, she says). I thought I heard them agreeing on the $35/mo as the price, and she later confirmed that for me. I pay $62/mo for Internet-only.
Long story, as all of mine seem to be, but I had occasion to be speaking with my fiber provider because I have never been able to get their email service running. Before I hung up with the support person, I challenged the rate situation. “Oh, no,” she responded. “They’re getting their Internet from somebody else, because we have only one rate for Internet for everybody and that’s $62 a month.”
Somebody’s lying somewhere, and I am pretty darned sure it is not my neighbor. They have the same box on the side of the house as I do, and the sales guy—after signing her up—passed by my house as I was out on the porch and waved, saying, “I see you’re already our customer.”
Over in Indy, there is a fiber-provider that is a monopoly—Ninestar—and is raising their Internet pricing by $20/mo (I am not kidding about that rise). The economy is clearly sinking (even Yellen now says so), but monopolies can price at whatever they want, regardless. Internet is now as mandatory a utility as water, electricity, and natural gas. Meanwhile, my relatives in Europe pay a much more reasonable $14.95 or $19.95/mo (close to that after currency conversion) for speed not much slower than mine with unlimited data and zero throttling, unlike the pervasive practices here. Whatever the backbone and connection to your house is capable of, is the speed of your Internet where I lived in Germany.
I know Miles was doubtful of those prices, but he checked them out some time ago, and accepted that the US and Oz charge unreasonable rates for Internet. As far as I am concerned ALL utilities need to be delivered by government (the people) at wholesale prices, not by privatized utilities at high profit-margin ripoffs. In Indiana alone, there are repeating examples of utilities being turned over to for-profit companies, who within a few years more than double the rates, with many, like Duke Energy, being found with egregious felony violations of law, but yet their political connections with fundamentalist Republicans who dominate the state (and make LGBT life miserable here), have yet to result in any criminal charges by the state authorities.
So I am screwed, and so is my friend who will have his Internet shoot up to $100/mo for the same 100mb/s speed I pay $62/mo for (how long after that do you think I have?), and we both should be paying a lot less for—and would be, were Internet delivered by government, or at least if there were a half-dozen other providers to insure some degree of competitiveness.
That old story about mom asking if everybody else was jumping off a bridge would you? In America, everybody IS jumping off that bridge—privatizing everything, paying CEO’s outrageously, giving customers the finger, and nary a soul can do anything about it. Meanwhile, virtually every industry has worked hard to make itself a monopoly so it does not have to compete and can screw everybody in the process.
Here is just one example:
http://www.theindychannel.com/news/local-news/greenwood-residents-ready-to-cut-cord-with-metronet
I have looked at Drudge several times today and each time there is a different story of how Scalia died, who found him, what condition he was in. There is something very very wrong here and we will never know the truth.
At least he was not found dead with a hooker on top. Oh wait, the last story is that he was found with a pillow over his head. I get it, “pillow”, the new name for a hooker.
@Chuck W – it just doesn’t pay to not be one of the “chosen classes”.
There are more and more people who do absolutely no productive work, from the people on the dole to the oligarchs sitting in their ivory towers speculating with our money. It’s all one big ponzi scheme and us few productive ones are playing three card monte.
Lot of overweight people suffer from sleep apnea and die from it, if they don’t have their C-PAP machines with them. No question Scalia was seriously overweight. If a pillow was over him, that could have exacerbated the apnea.
My doctor tells me that Michael Clarke Duncan (the giant in The Green Mile) died from apnea. A heart attack was attributed as cause of death, but apparently that was brought on by the apnea. Oxygen levels are low in untreated apnea cases and can cause all sorts of organ problems.
“with a pillow over his head”
I’m not sure what to make of that detail. It’s a strange thing to say. Having your head off of the pillow is not that uncommon during sleep; there’s nothing really odd about having the pillow beside or (partially) on top of your head during sleep.
So what is the reason for this comment – is someone trying to imply foul play?
The same for the detail that his sheets “were not wrinkled”. Huh? Freshly pressed, were they? I assume this was meant to indicate that he died peacefully in his sleep. But again, it’s a weird thing to say.
Most likely, the guy had a quiet stroke in his sleep, and died without waking up. That’s a common way to go when you’re his age.
Yeah, and seriously, if there was foul play, what murderer would LEAVE the pillow on his face?
Now his Dr says he was too sick to operate on, which is pretty sick, and it isn’t a surprise.
Well, we’re only a heartbeat away from a new president, and now were clearly a heartbeat away from a radically changed legal environment.
NO ONE gets out alive.
nick
I just wish he’d hung on for a while longer.
Now if another one dies in the next month or two, we can start talking about sinister assassinations…