68F and slightly less than saturated. Forecast is for sunny and clear.
Woke up dreaming about joining some sort of Rothschild bank, as some sort of volunteer guard/depositor/social club. Like I said, weird.
Today we honor our mothers for doing their job. Which is both silly and profound. Without mothers, fathers, FAMILY the culture and people don’t survive. Naturally, those who hate the culture attack the family, and for a large part they are succeeding in destroying a culture that brought the largest increase in wealth for the largest number of people in history. It’s time for the pendulum to swing back. Do your part, wherever you can.
For those out there who have had very negative mother/family experiences, and I know there are some extraordinary examples in the readership here, you are exceptionally resilient and tough to have made it through that. It’s a testament to the tenacity of humans that even though we seem to be designed to require a long period of supervised and supported development, some of us can do just fine without it.
I hope that the younger couples who used to lurk here and send email to Robert are still stopping by occasionally, and read my sincere best wishes for all the Moms who are working hard to bring the next generation along, and for all the Moms who raised our generation, and the ones that came before.
Have a Happy Mother’s Day.
nick
From yesterday:
Of course it’s Donald Trump’s fault their farmers can’t grow enough chickens or pigs…
“Cuban government announces it will ration food and everyday goods amid ‘grave economic crisis’after Venezuela was forced to cut its aid to the communist-run island…”
I grew up in Florida and understand the arguments of both sides on the embargo, but, recently, I came to the conclusion that it doesn’t have a point anymore. The Cubans produce world-class zombie comedy — we should declare victory and move on. Restoring to power a bunch of jugheads who want to rule their homeland from their Miami Beach penthouses is stupid foreign policy, in Cuba or Venezuela.
Trump is the one President who I believe could sell lifting the embargo to the majority of the expat community who are seriously interested in turning their homeland around. The inbred (oh, yes, I’m not using that term lightly) exiled Cuban aristocracy still running around South Florida clutching the old deeds to their lands and businesses are starting to die off, and the time could be right in a second term.
I’m sure Trump knows it could be a “Nixon to China” moment.
http://thesilicongraybeard.blogspot.com/2019/05/a-different-view-on-splitting-facebook.html
Interesting.
I can’t see any reason to have a hostile foreign power on our doorstep. Although the embargo didn’t have much effect on keeping the Castros from getting rich, it didn’t cause the common folks to rise up either. Fail on both goals.
But I don’t see any compelling benefit to normal trade either.
They have the population of Ohio, but no money. Half of them would show up in Florida in a heartbeat if they could, vis. Puerto Rico… not a useful result.
Nothing has been keeping Euro tourists out, and yet that hasn’t lifted the country out of poverty either, so US tourism is unlikely to do that.
Cuban cigars have a mystique far out of proportion to the reality. Cuban tobacco in the DR and cuban rollers in the DR produce a more consistent and higher quality product.
In other words, not my circus, not my monkeys. End the embargo, keep the border closed, sell them stuff if they can pay for it.
n
Interesting.
Just don’t feed the gorilla. Avoid the website as much as possible, and flush cookies from your browser periodically.
But I don’t see any compelling benefit to normal trade either.
Long term, we want to encourage civilization wherever it clings to existence. That’s the cheapest insurance policy against “grid down” in the US and Western Europe.
No Mother’s Day here – thankfully, my wife agrees that holidays like MD and Valentine’s are dumb. My wife and I did go to a concert today, but the particular date was just coincidence. I literally did not know today was Mother’s Day until a couple of days ago.
I got totally turned off of Mother’s Day by my mother. When I was in my 20’s, I would always send her flowers, and call later in the day. Eventually, she complained that I always sent her flowers, every year pretty much the same, and maybe I should just stop. So I did. Big mistake – now I was in trouble for *not* doing anything for Mother’s Day. Seriously put me off the whole damned, contrived holiday.
RIP Peggy Lipton. I loved The Mod Squad.
almost 34 years since I scraped half my face off on an interstate highway, and crap is still working its way out of my skin. Just got a chunk out of my face this morning.
n
(and by ‘chunk’ I mean a tiny grain of sand or glass, encapsulated by whatever your body surrounds it with.)
Of course….
“Stepfather of missing four-year-old Maleah Davis is ARRESTED and charged with tampering with a corpse after they found her blood in his apartment, eight days after he said she was ‘abducted'”
Smarter folks than me have observed that the NRA supported every major gun control legislation since its founding…
Not a joiner, not my circus. I do have a strong interest in having someone fight for gun rights, someone well funded. I DON”T have an interest in feeding the beast that is the existing political world.
Gonna be a LOT of butthurt NRA members who believed that the NRA weas acting in members’ best interests. The blowback should be ‘yuge’ especially considering the never ending stream of fundraising appeals that NRA members get.
n
added– ” ‘The entire board is fully aware of these issues. We have full confidence in Wayne LaPierre. ”
–then the entire board has to go too.
Yes, the NRA needs to clean house and elect a board and President from the ranks. Surely there are some savvy amongst them. As Mr. OFD would say, “they smelled the vapors…”
When my NRA membership expires I’ll not renew.
Bob
maybe we should let some more of these hard working assassins into the country. They certainly are more vigorous-
I’m sure they’re just doing the jobs americans won’t do.
n
Re: advertising and blocking…
If I was going to design an advertising system for a web site, I’d have potential advertisers send me the full code (including images) for their advertising ‘insert’. And I would provide them tracking (views and clicking etc) analytics when their ads are ‘placed’.
And all ads would be ‘placed’ from the web site’s server, using server-side code, so that there would be no requests for third-party content from the client side. So any client-side blocking wouldn’t block my ads. There wouldn’t be any client-side JS to block either.
Not a hard thing to code, I’d think. And maybe the ad-distributing companies already do this (but I doubt it). I think that that process would be able to deliver advertising ‘content’ without being blocked by ad-blockers.
I’d even take it a step further by using server-side ‘cookies’ to identify the visitor, and serving up even more targeted ads. Of course, with full GDPR-type disclosure.
Anyone for a startup?
(This could be another one of my never-implemented ‘million dollar ideas’. Like the one I had about bicycle carriers that would attach to a trailer-type hitch. I had that one back in about 1990. Or the shareware software packages distributed on floppy disks. That one is from the later 1970’s. )
Gonna be a LOT of butthurt NRA members who believed that the NRA weas acting in members’ best interests. The blowback should be ‘yuge’ especially considering the never ending stream of fundraising appeals that NRA members get.
The list of lobbying groups no longer acting in their members’ best interests is endless. DC messes with everyone’s head.
maybe we should let some more of these hard working assassins into the country. They certainly are more vigorous-
The Vatican’s assassins are in dire need of some new blood. Pope Francis is a fan so why not send a few to Rome to finish the long overdue job?
maybe we should let some more of these hard working assassins into the country. They certainly are more vigorous-
Bill Allowing Illegal Aliens To Work In Congress Approved By House Committee
From the comments:
“More likely it’s a desperate effort to retroactively legalize existing illegal conduct, or failing that, create the PR basis for claiming enforcement actions are somehow illegitimate.
“IOW, they’re ALREADY employing illegal aliens on the Democratic side of the aisle, and are concerned now that the DOJ might actually care.”
Bill Allowing Illegal Aliens To Work In Congress Approved By House Committee
I’ve seen snippets of a scandal brewing regarding a group of people from overseas who did IT work for various Democrat House members. There was some question of their eligibility to work, but Americans doing the same job ask too many questions and want to get paid appropriately to live in the DC area.
Quicken cut off transaction download support for the 2016 release so I bit the bullet on a subscription to the latest version.
The subscription model isn’t nearly as offensive as the hideous look and lousy performance of the new “continuously upgraded” version. Converting my finance tracking to GnuCash just rose to the top of my priority list.
Thanks for the offer on 2017, Ray, but I’d have to convert sooner or later. I’m going to start with the credit union account which gets my direct deposit and the move on to the institution my wife uses.
Yup, separate. It is a long story, but, in Vantucky, my wife’s employer always seemed to know how much money we had in the account at US Bank where her direct deposit went. We’ve kept separate accounts for paychecks and broker transfers ever since.
When my wife quit, the Vantucky clinic acted like we weren’t serious, as if we didn’t have the money to even cover her malpractice “tail” much less a moving truck. I surprised them writing checks out of my separate accounts. The clinic manager who rolled the dice was shown the door not long after we left — a poor gamble at 60-something on his part.
spent most of the afternoon digging a hole in the front yard for a new pond/water feature. Wife wanted a fountain by the front porch for a few years now, and I finally got the pond liner, and most of the bits. DEEP hole, almost 2 feet, for a 55 gallon pond. The digging wasn’t so bad, but the roots were a back breaker. After the shovel, ax, and finally the sawzall, I prevailed.
Still have to get everything else in place, get some rocks, build the water fall bit, and plant some aquatic stuff, but I’m leaving most of that to her.
Hooray for me on Mother’s Day.
n
I spent time today doing something similar. We have a cherry tree that was dying. It was only 15 ft high, so last week I cut all the branches off, leaving 6 ft of main stump. Today, I cut the mail roots out and took down the trunk. The trunk was too big for the sawzall. I used a hammer drill with a big bit. Around 15 holes around th base and down it came. Drilled a bunch of holes in the top to help it rot. I got it low enough that I can bury it and sod and you will never know it was there.
I thought I was in decent shape. I run 2 or 3 times a week and walk 2 or 3 times as well. I’ve also been mixing weight lifting back in. It man, real physical labor – swinging and axe, moving lots of dirt – THAT is a real workout. I’m not nearly as young as used to be….
I’ve seen snippets of a scandal brewing regarding a group of people from overseas who did IT work for various Democrat House members.
From 2017:
7 Fast Facts About Imran Awan, Wasserman Schultz’s Jailed IT Vendor
From 2018 (?):
Ex-Dem IT aide Imran Awan avoids jail time after attorneys complain about Trump
I was wiped out and had to stop and slow my heart rate down several times. Shoveling, hoeing, and chopping use different muscles than other activities and they are very taxing on trunk muscles. I was worried that I’d have a heart attack and it wasn’t even that hot today.
n
From 2017:
7 Fast Facts About Imran Awan, Wasserman Schultz’s Jailed IT Vendor
Yeah, that’s the scandal.
I thought the IT thing was more about a foreign national given access to congressional IT than an illegal alien… and a garage full of hard drives, iirc
n
I thought the IT thing was more about a foreign national given access to congressional IT than an illegal alien… and a garage full of hard drives, iirc
I remember someone not being in the country legally.
It would be more convenient if Congress could use IT labor with immigration problems to hold over heads in return for silence.
Finally got my 2018 tax return filed today. The IRS accepted it in 23 minutes. I believe that to be a new record. Now if they could only get my tax refund to me in such a time.
I will wager that you will have your refund no later than Friday. With electronic filing the refunds are issued quickly. Unless someone has filed under your name and SSN which really causes some delays and requires a visit to the closest IRS office.
Up early to head to the hospital for the procedure. Urologist called me yesterday (Sunday) to see if I passed Fred and Wilma and to make certain that it was a go for the procedure.
Still scared/frightened/anxious/concerned about the procedure. Lithotripsy/laser/extraction. I know I should not be as there is no actual cutting involved. I am just not certain of the aftermath and the recovery. I have talked to others (maybe a bad idea) about the recovery and it is concerning.
@ray, good luck brother, we’re all pulling for you.
Check in when you feel able…
n
@Ray: Best of luck, I’m sure you’ll be fine 🙂
About the NRA. Not really my concern (being Canadian) but I will note it seems to be another splendid example of Pournelle’s Law as regards organizations and the people who run them.