Month: January 2019

36F, clear and sunny. Cold last night, Cold today. Maybe thinking about the garden was a BIT premature.

MLK Jr was, like the other ‘great’ politicians of his time, certainly a flawed man. What we think we know about anyone subject to biased reporting and as polarizing as he was is bound to be a caricature of their real self. Nonetheless, his legacy lives on. The world is certainly a different place than it would have been without him.

I wonder if he would be happy with the result?

n

Today is the one year anniversary of the death of Robert Bruce Thompson.

No matter your beliefs or lifestyle, no matter your preps, death comes for all of us in the end. Hold your loved ones. Do the thing you’ve always wanted to do. Learn a new skill. Meet new people. LIVE your life. One day you will leave this life, leave it a better place for your having been there.

I continue to be amazed and humbled by the great people and community Bob built here. Thank you for your support.

Take a moment to remember our absent friends- say a prayer, light a candle, raise a glass, or choose your own way. They live on in our memories, and the way they’ve shaped our lives.

Thanks Bob.

50F and windy as Kansas….

Lots of stuff to do this am, wife taking one child, me the other. Gah. Not even fun stuff.

Better get moving.

n

58F and wet, again. You’d think it was winter or something. Yesterday afternoon opened up and was just gorgeous. The forecast was revised warmer too, not even a frost. We’ll see if that changes again.

The game of chicken continues in Washington, but the rest of the world isn’t sitting still. I feel like we’re the little pebbles at the top of the mountain that have just started moving, on the way to becoming an avalanche.

In related news, my order of freeze dried and canned meat mostly arrived. Cans were rattling around in a big box with no filler, not even paper. One can of Keystone came separately in a padded envelope. Not even an invoice or packing slip. The dryer sheets I ordered for pickup at the local walmart have STILL not arrived. They sent me an email saying ‘parts of my order have been delayed.’ Again I’m thinking some sort of shenanigans. I’ve gotten epackets from China in less time.

Daily duty calls,

n

52F and damp, after misty drizzle upgraded to drizzle in the evening yesterday.

Weather like this HURTS for us older folks, with some accumulated injuries. Youth is wasted on the young.

I see headlines like these, and I’m beginning to apply the ‘never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by ignorance’ dictum….

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-16/merkel-offering-pay-one-years-living-expenses-if-refugees-leave-europe

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-16/denmark-one-generation-our-country-has-changed

Because, “DUH! WTF did you THINK was going to happen?”

Perhaps they weren’t worried because they thought “they are just like us, only with different food”? A couple of generations of multi-culti brainwashing would do it, I guess. But MERKEL wasn’t that soft-headed surely?

It looked to me like they were wrecking the place intentionally, although to what end still isn’t clear.

So are they smart manipulative psychopaths or did they really not understand what people were telling them would happen?

n

53F and 88%RH, which sounds about right… yesterday was overcast and grey for most of the day, with the occasional light spatter of drops. Nothing you could call rain, but it threatened all day.

I was finally able to attend another type of local neighborhood meeting, this on put on by our Houston police department. It’s called the Positive Interaction Program, and is meant to get homeowners and citizens out and talking to the cops that patrol their area. Our city council rep was there too.

Many crimes were down in our area but burglary, assault, and murder were up. (This is for the area around my neighborhood.) The officer blamed gangs for the increases. Their plan is to try to keep kids from joining, and to lock up anyone caught. Good luck with the intervention, better to spend the time locking up the others. Then the lifestyle doesn’t look so attractive.

There is also an increase in tent camping under freeway bridges and panhandling. The HPD blames TXDoT for not letting them enforce trespassing statutes. The ACLU has sued to stop enforcement too. Since many of the homeless now also have pets, it complicates rousting them. Basically the bums have figured out that state land is safe, and having a pet (that the cops don’t want to house) protects them too. So we get ‘urban campers’ under overpasses, each with a mangy pet.

It was a good chance to hear ‘straight from the horses mouth’ about some of the activity and responses in the surrounding area. And the HPD has their own version of the Citizen’s Police Academy program that I did with our Constables, with a new class forming. I’ve signed up for that as it affords additional training opportunities for graduates too. I met the coordinator, and another guy who lives in my area who helps manage the program. Meatspace!

I encourage all of you to attend any civic meetings in your area, and look for any programs put on by you local cops or fire departments. You WILL learn things, useful things, and have the opportunity to meet people, and talk with people about what’s really going on.

Keep stacking, big changes in the world are afoot…

n

46F and 83%RH. My hands are stiff as paddles which usually means a big change in barometric pressure. I can’t see that part of my weather station from my desk though.

Amazon is having issues. Maybe it’s distractedness, or maybe there is another issue going on. I’ve maintained for a while that they are poisoning the well by letting all these third parties sell as if they were amazon. This has let all the counterfeiters and scammers in. There are categories and products you just can’t buy on amazon anymore.

There seems to be another type of scammer, one who lists all kinds of popular items, but doesn’t actually have them. They are hoping to source the item cheaply and ship once it’s ordered. I had this happen at Christmas with a piece of jewelry. Factory discontinued the item, all the stores showed no inventory, but 3 days later it was “still available” on amazon. Nope. When I ordered, everything looked fine, but in a couple of days the order got canceled. I think, when the reseller couldn’t get the item.

Yesterday the same thing happened with some meat bars. All is good when ordered (inventory showing “last two, hurry”. Then a couple of days later, order canceled due to “technical reasons.”

To have this happen twice in a month, and NEVER before, with modern inventory management, shows a problem.

Perhaps not coincidentally, walmart just emailed that my order with them (and a third party) has been delayed. Hmmm.

Something stinks in Denmark, and it isn’t the tasty cheese.

n

38F, and slightly less than saturated. Yesterday was clear, sunny, and cool. I certainly hope it warms up today. I’ve got a ton of work to do before the end of the world.

About that. I haven’t repeated it because it was even more doom-er than usual, but now I’m seeing it again, and in a different place and it might be a real thing…even though it’s reported in Nature.

“Earth’s magnetic field, otherwise known as the geomagnetic field, is the magnetic field that extends from the Earth’s inner core out into space, where it deflects harmful radiation from the Sun.

But now something bizarre is taking place. Earth’s north magnetic pole has been rapidly shifting away from Canada and towards the Siberian Federal District, driven mostly by liquid iron churning deep within the planet’s core.

“The magnetic pole is moving so quickly that it has forced the world’s geomagnetism experts into a rare move,” Nature reported.”

-snip–

“”The location of the north magnetic pole appears to be governed by two large-scale patches of magnetic field, one beneath Canada and one beneath Siberia,” Phil Livermore of the University of Leeds told an American Geophysical Union meeting. “The Siberian patch is winning the competition.”

In the meantime, geophysicists are trying to figure out why the magnetic field is shifting.”

–snip==

“Geophysicists do note that Earth can undergo a “geomagnetic reversal,” where these magnetic poles switch sides. The last time this happened was 781,000 years ago, but it is believed to have occurred every 20,000 to 30,000 years over the last 20 million years.

Could the erratic motion of the north magnetic pole be a hint that a “geomagnetic reversal” is already underway? If so, what are the consequences for planet Earth? “

In other words, the pole is moving, a lot, and weirdly, so CLEARLY we’re all about to go extinct in a pole reversal event. I’m sure that’s it.

And hey, maybe that is what’s causing all the shifting and unrest in the world. Geopolitical unrest and change linked to changes in the magnetic field of the earth? We’d better Do Something ™, For The Children ™.

n

added- seriously though, it’s enough they have to fix the map. That is big, if not exactly unprecedented. I blame the US, HAARP, and Climate Change. Oh, and Trump too.

44F and 80%RH with sunny skies.

More work for me to do outside today.

Got some work done yesterday, but not enough. Really nice day until evening when the temps went down. Still, the campfire was nice and the food tasted good.

My fire pit turned to oxides of iron, and crumbled, so my wife put it out on heavy trash day. I thought I could apply a couple more patches or layers of mesh to various areas, but she was done. Unfortunately, Santa didn’t bring a new one, yet anyway. I do have a wide and shallow ceramic ‘basket’ that works great for a table top fire ring. A couple inches of sand from the strategic sand reserve (kids’ play area) and some tinder (last year’s Christmas tree needles) and some pecan twigs and branches from the yard, and we soon had a nice bed of coals. For light I hung a colman lantern on the shepards crook that is meant to hang baskets of flowers, which worked great. Freezer hotdogs, freezer hot dog buns, and s’more fixin’s from the cupboard, and we were living large 🙂

In world news, the yellow vests are still at it in France. If you aren’t seeing at least some coverage, with links to twitter feeds from people on scene, you need to adjust your media mix. In the videos I watched, rioters were pulling cops to the ground and putting the boot in. (Kicking them while on the ground) They are also forming skirmish lines and storming each other’s positions. It’s the 9th week and doesn’t seem to be fading out. Even if the government isn’t telling the whole story, you don’t call out 80K cops for no reason. The protest are spreading throughout Europe, with varying degrees of attention and success, but don’t count on it dying. Also, don’t count on the cops putting up with being beaten much longer. Things are getting sporty over there.

I could say more about our more local politics, but I can’t be bothered to get the links right, so all I’ll say is, you’ve got to be tone deaf, more powerful than an evil warlord, or so arrogant that you can’t conceive that you don’t automatically do the right thing and people worship you for it, to vacation in the Caribbean while complaining that people are being hurt by the shutdown.

Stack it high people….

n

59F and wet this am. Got a bit of misty drizzle last night, just enough to wet the deck. The NOAA forecast called for rain. I got a few drops while driving around, but mainly nothing. It’s incredible to me that their forecast was super dependable for better than a year, but now it has been mostly wrong for months. There was a notable change in the graphics they were producing, I wonder what else changed at that time.

Non-prepping hobby club this am, then kid’s sportsball game, so i’ll check back later.

In the mean time, What did you do to prep this week?

n