Sun. Jan. 10, 2021 – it continues to get worse

Cold.  Supposed to be rainy.

Yesterday was cool to cold all day but was sunny and dry.

I did get my pickup done, and went by my secondary to do some  more clean up and to get ready to go back over there later today.

Then I got home and looked at the news, and HOLY FREAKING HELL.   The control freaks are moving FAST.  EVERYONE should be condemning this.  What goes around comes around, and someone once said, never ask for a power for yourself that you wouldn’t like  your worst enemy have.  I guess they think this is the end of history.   In their mad rush to power, and you can’t really describe it as anything else, they are doing even more damage to the social norms that made this country great and they are glorying in it.   Does no one see the parallels to the worst regimes in history?

We were sliding down the slope toward the cliff, but now they are running as fast as they can towards it.  NO WAY does this end well.  The boot is coming down.  If you think I’m crazy, or overly dramatic, please make your case in the comments.  NOT just assertions.   An actual reasoned case.   I’d LOVE some reassurance right now.  Every thing they’ve done in the last few days makes it even more certain that there is no way to avoid the violence and bloodshed.

Speaking of avoiding bloodshed, where is the Elder Statesman ™ hoof in mouth Joe urging calm, praising free speech, lauding tolerance, and taking control of the party?  Are you really gonna love his presidency?  All 3 months of it?  Was getting rid of Trump worth empowering Pelosi?  Waters?  Kammella?  Look up Pyrrhic Victory so you’ll understand what you’ve done, when there is nothing left worth fighting over.

Anyone actually had eyes on Trump in the last day or two?  Is the staff at his home gearing up?  Secret Service barracks getting a good brush up?  Something ain’t right.  He should be spitting nails.

And are we really going to let them gaslight the nation?  There was NO call for insurrection, let alone a call for ARMED insurrection.  There were 10s of thousands of people at that rally that did NOTHING MORE than stand around on the grass.  Where is the video of demagogue Trump calling for armed insurrection?  If they had anything at all we’d be seeing it non-stop to convict him in the press.

Anyone out there who was still on the fence about whether conservative voices were being suppressed in the public square should be pretty well convinced of the truth of it now.  Kinda too late though.  They will come for you though eventually, given enough time.  It’s what they do.  What they ALWAYS do.

Anyone who couldn’t see the hypocrisy of the left should see it clearly now.  A baker has to serve all customers, but twitter/facebook/amazon/go daddy don’t.   They can object to  words, and not even the customer’s words, but third party words their customer can’t/won’t/ and SHOULDN’T police* and deny them the same service they offer to others.   Many of those others engage in much more violent rhetoric, so we know that words about violence are not the issue.  No one is more filled with hate than the leadership of Iran, and yet they still have a voice.  Violent leftist thugs use social media to organize rioting and crime sprees, raise funds, and spread their message of hate for others without censure from the ‘platforms.’

Remember the bit about how things change very slowly until they change all at once?   People ended their work day Friday, and when they start back up tomorrow, look at the change.   Consider the last year.  And consider the last week.  Seriously take a step back and look at it, thing about what you were doing at various points, and what you were reading about.  Compare that to today, where ONE GUY has decided that he can and should control what the President of the United States gets to say and who he gets to say it to.  That’s some big balls, but he’s getting away with it for now.  And when the President DOES try to move in the ‘free market’ to another, friendlier platform that would welcome him?  Nope.  Sorry not sorry.  We don’t want your kind in our place, and we don’t want your kind in any other place either.

The media blitz has been so intense, that even through the tiny little hole that I use to view it, there were a couple of times when I thought “what if this, or what if that?” and then I thought about the people involved, and thought “almost got me, but then I remembered who you were”.  If it could happen to me, it’s happening to others too.  Help your friends, ask them questions to lead them to it, telling them won’t help at all. * *

When I looked up this quote (I do do SOME fact checking/research/confirmations while writing) I found that Trump re-tweeted it after he was exonerated in the impeachment sham.   “When you strike at the King, you must kill him.” -RWEmerson.  That was February.    How unfortunate and ironic then that Trump struck at King Deep State, but didn’t kill him.


I’ll have a bunch to say about prepping issues coming up.  There is nothing this mouse can do now that the elephants are dancing, except to stock my bolthole and pull my  head in (figuratively, and a bit literally).

Don’t forget that we are in the midst of a massive increase in sick people too.  The wuflu hasn’t gone away, and while the percentage is small, when enough people  get it, even that tiny percentage with bad issues will get to be a really big number.

And I discovered that the NSAID I take daily for back pain is a fever suppressor as well, so I probably shouldn’t be quite so sanguine about my lack of fever when I’m coughing and headache-y.

In the mean time, avoid crowds, figure out what you have and what you need, and get to work stacking up needful things.

 

nick

*Note that this website and most other websites are not services.  You are not customers here.  (especially here, where you are friends and colleagues) No one here is under any obligation to provide anything other than courtesy, and that obligation is self imposed.  Trolls be warned.

 

** “Why on earth would the capitol cops move the barricades and let the people in if there was a riot?  Why wasn’t one of the most important and secure areas of our government guarded on this day of all days?  Why would someone as experience and seasoned as Pelosi leave her computer on and logged in if she was afraid the building would be overrun?  How many fires were there?  How many businesses were burned to the ground and looted during this ‘riot’?  Why are the headlines suggesting the rioters killed 4 people when two were medical emergencies -a stroke and a heart attack- one was an unarmed woman killed by cops, and the fourth was accidentally trampled or crushed in a crowd?”  Any one of these should plant a seed.

 

69 Comments and discussion on "Sun. Jan. 10, 2021 – it continues to get worse"

  1. SteveF says:

    You’ve been on fire the last two days, Nick. I’d say “keep it up” but I suspect the passion in your posts comes at a cost to your physical health.

  2. Ray Thompson says:

    Why are the headlines suggesting the rioters killed 4 people

    Because it fits the agenda of the left and the media. I find the condemnation of the event, while real property destruction, even to seizing part of a major city, ironic. The capitol event lasted a day, Portland for weeks. One event little damage but FBI all over it. Other event city blocks destroyed and little effort is expended.

    As I stated earlier, the free USA has died. The final nail will arrive 01/20/2021.

  3. Greg Norton says:

    Why would someone as experience and seasoned as Pelosi leave her computer on and logged in if she was afraid the building would be overrun?

    Please. She’s clueless about security. They all are. Doctors are the worse, but politicians and C-suite execs are up there.

    When I worked at the Death Star supporting the VPN for that Big Blue company, my rule of thumb about malware on a user machine was that the exec was either surfing pr0n with the company ThinkPad or downloading pirated high end Adobe tools to edit their kiddie pics videos. And my time predated torrent videos with embedded nastiness loaded through bugs in Windows video players. I never saw an exception to the rule outside of our own test machines which were deliberately loaded with junk.

    There may be more problems with phishing emails now that they went with Outlook over Lotus Notes, but realize I’ve been away from that gig for over a decade now.

    Ironically, cloud services from Big Blue company and overseas players may see a resurgence of interest if AWS continues its purge of non-entities as defined by the Progs. As I stated earlier, I believe Hot Skillz! drives AWS but alternatives still exist if you aren’t simply padding a resume.

  4. Greg Norton says:

    Don’t forget that we are in the midst of a massive increase in sick people too. The wuflu hasn’t gone away, and while the percentage is small, when enough people get it, even that tiny percentage with bad issues will get to be a really big number.

    Despite the increase in cases, the seven day moving average reported fatality trend line in Texas is moving down again. Florida too. The media love to talk up that number until it becomes inconvenient, like right now.

    I got a call the other day from a realtor looking to buy us out of our house. The Locust Class across the whole country is trying to move to Texas and Florida. The trend started pre-Covid, but the virus accelerated their sucking the life blood out of the West Coast tech hubs.

  5. Bill Quick says:

    Normality bias is a tough thing to break through. A lot of people won’t see anything amiss until it’s far too late to do anything about it.

    “Just politics,” they will say. “Who cares?”

  6. ITGuy1998 says:

    Since I blackholed Facebook the other day, I’ve been getting emails informing me that someone has posted something interesting and a I should go see. Not gonna happen.

    As for sports, I haven’t watched an NFL game in 2 or 3 years – whenever the kneeling started. I didn’t watch baseball last year at all. I won’t this year either.

    Pro basketball? Please, haven’t watched since the end of Jordan’s second retirement.

    I do watch some golf, but it’s not appointment viewing. Same for Premier League Football.

  7. Harold Combs says:

    As a professional paranoid, when I chose a cloud backup provider, I picked one with excellent encryption and storage hosted off shore in generally safe countries. I host my own email system on rented servers and am looking at setting up listserv to keep in touch with friends and family. I have several domains that I haven’t done anything with for years but that may change.

  8. MrAtoz says:

    Care to share who, Mr. Harold.

  9. MrAtoz says:

    Since Big Corporate is now our shadow goobermint, is there an encrypted message board that we could use. Or is that too far down the rabbit hole of paranoia? I would be willing to chip in for hosting. But, how you screen people might be, again, too far.

    Am I being paranoid that Shot Girl ™ might become powerful enough to hunt most of us here down and put our heads on pikes.

  10. Harold Combs says:

    Am I being paranoid that Shot Girl ™ might become powerful enough to hunt most of us here down and put our heads on pikes.

    In the UK, the government can demand your passwords and encryption keys at will.
    Shortly, it may well be argued that the simple act of encryption is an admission of guilt.
    Steganography, is very effective and hard to detect but the information bandwidth is horribly low. After 9/11, I proposed that on-line images be subtly modified in transit to destroy any hidden message without visibly altering the photo.

  11. drwilliams says:

    Yeah, my bad. I tuned football off after the kneeling crap, and did a pretty good job staying away from it. But the flesh is weak, and it’s very convenient background noise when I’m working on certain things. Besides, if Tampa continues to get their poop in a group, I have a sentimental attraction to “old quarterback wins”. Never liked Tom Brady much at NE, until he got shafted by the professionally incompetent “engineering” report that they used in UnderInflationGate to put him on suspension. I was hoping that he would stand up at that point and say “My recent treatment by NE and the NFL has led me to the conclusion that I will no longer be playing football for that team. Kindly get stuffed.”

    Not much an individual can do in response to the current abuses, except wait for the lawsuits to sort out and maybe support them in some small way. Except:

    1) Apple. Don’t know how many of the “70 million” use an iPhone, but the proper response should be “no new purchases”. Ditto Macs or anything Apple makes or sells. As a Mac user since 1986 (upgraded a 128 to FatMac) with probably 50 Macs since, and who knows how many iPods, iPads, and iPhones, I’m done. Apple is dead to me. As Dad used to say, “Don’t piss in my face and call it rain.” Or alternately, “No, Tim, I don’t give a rat’s backside which of your parts you stick where, except when you try to stick me.”

    2) Google. I migrated away from Google for search a long time ago, first to Bing, and soon after to the duck. Now it’s past time to tighten up on the ads that are spewing onto my screen courtesy of Windoze 10. And it troubles me that during slow loads of a website I inevitably see google-analytics.com.

    3) Farsebook and Twitter. Never been there, never will be.

    4) VPN. Time to get serious.

    5) Amazon. Research only. Buy direct. Buy local from a storefront, lest the storefront not be there next time.

    6) Cable. I cut the cord years ago. Still have the local over-the-air channels. I’m cutting three of them from my channel list. They get a letter explaining why, and that letter is going to a dozen or so of their top advertisers.

    7) Selling. I’m going to get real serious about selling the excess stuff I don’t need, and turning it into stuff I do, or at least stuff that is more portable and fungible.

  12. Geoff Powell says:

    @MrAtoz:

    She’d better not try that outside the FUSA. Although I have my doubts that HMG would tell her, to her face, to pound sand.

    A query: how do you get the Trademark symbol in these comments? I know how to do it in vanilla HTML, but the comment editor strips standard tags.

    G.

  13. Geoff Powell says:

    @harold:

    In the UK, the government can demand your passwords and encryption keys at will.

    Yes, they can, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 2000, as amended. Any authorised person, even down to P.C.Plod, or a local government bureaucrat, can demand, under threat of several years in stir, access to any information he/she sees fit, regardless of encryption. Ignorance of the key(s) is no excuse. Which leads to the insane possible consequence: if you have a file stored on any device in your possession, you can be locked up for years if you cannot decrypt it on demand from any authorised person, even if the file contains purely random data.

    Or, the more likely scenario: P.C. Plod sees you photographing him, and takes exception to it. He can demand that he see the photo(s) – and anything else on your phone, even unto private snaps.

    Because of this, it is colloquially known as “The Snooper’s Charter”.

    Re: ads. Do you run an adblocker? if not, why not? It’s amazing how much more peaceful wandering the web is, if you do.

    Social media: No accounts. I do read a select few accounts on Twitter.

    G.

  14. MrAtoz says:

    Mr. Geoff, without spaces:

    ( t m )

    Space before where you want to tm.

  15. Geoff Powell says:

    @MrAtoZ:

    Thanks for that. Is it a general usage? Can one get, e.g., the copyright symbol in the same fashion?

    G.

  16. Greg Norton says:

    Am I being paranoid that Shot Girl ™ might become powerful enough to hunt most of us here down and put our heads on pikes.

    Shot Girl is done when men on both sides of the political aisle stop wanting to have sex with her. Until then ‘Y’ chromosomes will drive males to put your head on a pike to please her.

    Biology is a powerful force, even in politics. #MeToo changed nothing.

  17. Ray Thompson says:

    A query: how do you get the Trademark symbol in these comments?

    This ® or this ™ ?

    I just use Character Map in windows and select the character, copy it, then paste it.

    Can one get, e.g., the copyright symbol in the same fashion?

    Yes. ©

    Same method, use character map. ۩֍

  18. Nick Flandrey says:

    It’s still technically morning here in TX. It started to rain at about 1;30am, and got heavy by 2:30 so I knew my plans were blown before bed. When my alarm went off, my groggy brain wondered who the F was calling me in the middle of the night, so that was a clue to go back to sleep. It’s still drizzling.

    I slept thru my non-prepping hobby Saturday without even noticing.

    @steveF, as of yesterday I’ve lost 15 pounds since march, despite eating half a cup of smoked almonds mixed with M&Ms every night before bed, Christmas cookies, and pie. Some of that is muscle mass and when I notice that I do more to keep it. My gun store buddy and his wife have both lost so much weight they’ve seen a Dr. Theirs was diagnosed as stress related. Mine probably is.

    My little dog’s weight loss was diagnosed as aggressive cancer. He’s on pain meds, steroids, and an appetite enhancer. He is doing better than expected. As long as he’s willing to stay we’re willing to have him. He lost from 18 1/2 pounds to just over 14. First xrays a couple weeks ago didn’t show anything, this week the tumors are visible with ultrasound. Surgery and other interventions were contraindicated by lab work and age. He’s a good boy and is getting extra love, food, and attention.

    Regarding alternate comms, message boards don’t need a ton of resources, unless they get huge, and they can be widely distributed. Even ROT-13 encryption should be enough to keep the robots from indexing it. Not my area of expertise but def been on my mind. Flandrey.com is a placeholder and alternate place to check if something happened here. Since there is nothing there, I doubt anyone would nuke it in advance. NickFlandrey.com is not live but is set up. Rick has full backups of this place and can speak to the host and hosting arrangements.

    Steganography was a thing back in the early to mid 90s. It seems like it would be easy to break transmission and they have tools to detect it in images, even from back then. The idea of making a meme that has embedded info for wide distribution is interesting but you’d still need to assume everyone in the world was reading it.

    Falkenburg’s Legion used ‘codebooks’ of keywords iirc. That always seemed like good fallback plan, but like anything, key distribution becomes the chokepoint. There are some developments to help with that- there is at least one privately created and OSS one time pad generator project, I think Brushbeater has linked to it. There is a lot of good comms related stuff over there anyway, but from a particular point of view, and aimed at a subset of people. Still really valuable stuff, just focused on tactical issues. I don’t know anyone who has been working on the big picture, because everyone thought there would be more time.

    Every insurgency needs an outside sponsor. I don’t think the advances in tech have negated that.

    WRT woo ping cough… Aesop’s ground truth from his place in Cali. As he says, if your area doesn’t look like his, awesome, but get ready…

    Time to get some food and caffeine down my gullet and spend some time with the dog.

    n

    added- and the kids and the wife, of course…

  19. Nick Flandrey says:

    trademark ™
    work with the parenthesis trick
    copyright (c) –used to work at some point, but not now
    registered (r)
    does not.

    I’m pretty sure the html would work too

    n

  20. MrAtoz says:

    X ©️
    X ®️
    X ™️

    From iPad keyboard

  21. SteveF says:

    ™ ™
    ® ®
    © ©

    I coulda sworn I’d typed up this and some commentary not long ago, but web search isn’t bringing it up.

  22. Geoff Powell says:

    Thanks to all.

    G.

    added: attempting to use HTML entities (the & syntax from @stevef:)


    ©
    ®

  23. Nick Flandrey says:

    The list of questions at the end of the post is there conveniently for you to use on normies who might have a chance of waking up. I know the answers 🙂 I picked them specifically because the lefty media and other outlets SHOWED that stuff and even the FB only crowd has seen (or was ABLE to see) the cops moving barricades, and the pix of ‘itchy-ball man’ with the computer clearly shown…

    n

  24. MrAtoz says:

    Shot Girl ™

    ProgLibTurd ©

    OFD ®

    Thanks SteveF

  25. Nick Flandrey says:

    P!ssing down rain atm.

    n

  26. MrAtoz says:

    Ï

    rapidtables.com

  27. Jenny says:

    A little bit of normalcy for y’all.
    Our daughter roamed the new neighborhood yesterday, introducing herself to all and sundry. I’m sure I’m a bad parent for encouraging it – she could be snatched or something really bad. As a result a couple families came to our door to introduce themselves today. I think we are going to really like living here. Social distancing was observed.

    So very nearly done with the remodels. Need to get the wooden baseboards reinstalled throughout, and paint the downstairs. The bath tiling job languishes, I am too short to do the top two rows, and the friend is AWOL. My husband may get pressed into service, though he’s still feeling pretty lousy since his October gallbladder removal surgery (docs are working on figuring things out). Once we have a fully functional bathroom I can get us moved in.

    I’m still happy with my winter watering system for the rabbits, and the manure system. The two systems have suffered a couple failures – neglected while I’m doing house renovations – but easily recovered. Barrel got too low on water and pump was struggling with the small amount that was left. Rabbit drinking nipples need regular tweaking to keep flow correct, otherwise they over drip or dry up. Husband kept them from going dry, but no maintenance to keep them from over dripping. This led to massive ice build up, which over burdened the manure system, pulling it loose from the cages. So I’ve got some under the cages clean up to do, before we move. I put the manure system tarps back up.
    Despite the neglect the failures have been minor. The animals haven’t suffered and the extra work for me isn’t too bad. I observe that the winter litter of rabbits, not unsurprisingly, is gaining weight significantly more slowly than summer litters. Since we’ve been in the throes of home buying / renovating / moving I haven’t bred any more litters. I can’t do the extra care and maintenance that a winter litter needs at the moment.

    Our oldest Cardigan Welsh Corgi, 13 last October, has had three seizures of 1 – 4 minute duration since Christmas eve. She’s got a vet appointment Tuesday. At her age, most likely culprit is a brain tumor so we are preparing ourselves for doggy hospice and a shortened horizon for enjoying her companionship. She’s been a good and sassy partner to me. She’s also humiliated me more than a few times in the ring when she demonstrated how lousy a trainer I actually am -laughter-. We’ve earned a lot of ribbons and titles together, from Conformation (that’s doggy beauty show for you dog sport heathens), Rally, to Herding and Barn Hunt. In herding she is my fair weather fighter jet on a kite string – jets full on and almost but not quite out of control, thrilling and a little scary. She’s a sweet natured beast and I’m sad to see her reaching her end of life. We will give her mercy when it is time.

    I’m scared spitless about the things going on this week. I did a (somewhat) fear based run to Costco. We’re already pretty well prepared but it gave me something tangible to do that gave me the illusion of control. I’m anxious to get us moved so I can stop splitting my focus.

  28. Rick Hellewell says:

    In regards to the hosting of this place, and the data therein, weekly backups of content (the WordPress database) are done weekly, and emailed to my gmail account. I do not normally store backup data off-line. I haven’t had to use the backup data, as far as I can recall. I did attempt to move hosting to another service (JustHost) for my convenience, but there were issues with mail access by Barbara Thompson (who ‘owns’ and pays for this place, and has her own domain and site).

    This place is hosted by Dreamhost, on a shared server. That has worked well, but I note that their Terms of Service includes this (emphasis added):

    Illegal Activity: Customer may only use DreamHost Web Hosting’s Server for lawful purpose. Transmission of any material in violation of any Country, Federal, State or Local regulation is prohibited. To this effect, child pornography is strictly prohibited as well as housing any copyrighted information (to which the customer does not hold the copyright or an appropriate license) on DreamHost Web Hosting’s Server. Also, using DreamHost’s servers or network to conspire to commit or support the commission of illegal activities is forbidden as well.

    Their TOS included a 14-day notice of termination. Dreamhost has other extensive documents for various categories of TOS. Those that are interested can find them here: https://www.dreamhost.com/legal/ .

    Domain names are registered through GoDaddy.

    It would be difficult and time-consuming (and probably expensive) to move a site to another hosting place. And finding one that would allow you to host illegal (or ‘threatening’) content would be similarly difficult/expensive/time-consuming.

    Most of what is posted here is ‘acceptable use’, I think. There are the occasional posts of what I would term ‘threatening’. But there is no action taken against those types of posts, at least by me. I just visit here often, keep WP/plugins updated (daily), and let the weekly backups clutter up my mailbox. And fix the occasional ‘hiccup’.

    So, all of you (continue to) behave – and act responsibly in your postings.

  29. Alan says:

    Why wasn’t one of the most important and secure areas of our government guarded on this day of all days?

    What I don’t understand is if Pence was in the Capitol wouldn’t there have been an appropriate Secret Service presence outside the building? If a similar crowd had tried to breach the White House there would have been a different outcome. Or does Pence not have the same level of SS coverage as Trump?
    (PS inadvertently posted under yesterday’s thread but noticed too late to delete.)

  30. Greg Norton says:

    @Lynn — Costco had Charmin “blue” yesterday at ~ 70 cents a roll.

    North Austin. Normally, the place is swamped with Californian transplants, but I needed Kirkland Signature shampoo.

    My wife had hoped to take a quick look in Trader Joe’s across the street, but everyone was lined up Soviet style to get into the store under Austin’s limited occupancy rules.

  31. Alan says:

    Happened to me twice recently with Big River (one was for a pack of mechanical pencils for which the erasers were crap – about $3)
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-walmart-tell-consumers-to-skip-returns-of-unwanted-items-11610274600?mod=flipboard
    Also got a Fire TV box from them last month that I didn’t order. Gave them the courtesy of a call to tell them, and despite that it was in an Amazon padded envelope and a known Amazon return address they said they had no record of the shipment and that I should contact UPS. I said “sure, will get right on it” and tossed it into my ‘to be sold on ebay’ bin.

  32. Greg Norton says:

    Happened to me twice recently with Big River (one was for a pack of mechanical pencils for which the erasers were crap – about $3)
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-walmart-tell-consumers-to-skip-returns-of-unwanted-items-11610274600?mod=flipboard

    OWC, Macsales.com, refunded the cost of the swollen week-old MacBook battery but never returned my emails about where to send what is now my disposal problem.

    I usually drop dead rechargeable batteries off at the recycle bin at Best Buy, but their bins are no longer available. My fall back plan is Home Depot.

  33. paul says:

    And it troubles me that during slow loads of a website I inevitably see google-analytics.com.

    Put
    127.0.0.1 google-analytics.com
    in your Hosts file. For a start. I’ve not noticed any sites breaking….

  34. BillF says:

    This ® or this ™ ?

    I just use Character Map in windows and select the character, copy it, then paste it.

    I use the alt codes for the common ones. It seems like I could not get through a typical week without typing “alt 0176” for example. Hold down the “Alt” key while typing the numbers if you don’t know how this works…

    And I only insert this particular alt code in front of “F”, never “C” – one of many pet peeves…

  35. paul says:

    … they said they had no record of the shipment and that I should contact UPS.

    I had similar happen. Four place settings of Villeroy & Boch dishes. Cups, saucers, bread plates, salad plates, dinner plates. Very nice stuff. Stuff you put in the china cabinet. UPS dropped the box off one day while I was at work.

    I called Foley’s or Macy’s or Dillard’s or whoever, I forget. Nope, can’t find a record of that order. I tried UPS and they were even less helpful.

    This was pre-Internet, when getting a modem to work while having video and sound in a 386 at the same time was a wonder to see happen.

    I shoved the box into a closet and forgot about it. Re-discovered it a year later and what the heck, it’s mine. We used it a few times, too. Stuffed the dirties in the KitchenAid too. ‘Cause White Trash, you know? But China Cycle, so, I’m cool.

    Then on a trip to the outlet mall in San Marcos, Oh, cool, soup dishes in the same pattern. Seconds, you can tell buy the random grain of sand in the glaze. Then again, if you’re inspecting the glaze of the dishes what the hell is wrong with the food? $25 each. “Marked down from $100 Retail”. Haven’t used the stuff since, no one but me wants to touch it. OMG! I don’t want to break a $100 plate!

    I suppose the price stickers will age off eventually. So far at almost 20 years they are just yellowing. Yep, I’ve yet to wash the soup bowls.

    I need to sell the whole set off.

  36. paul says:

    Last night Penny was finally cold enough to hop on the bed about 5AM.

    Say whatever about dogs on the bed but she snuggles against my legs and we are both happy.

    It rained hard enough an hour later to wake me for a moment.

    At 7AM, 33F outside and snowing. Tiny flakes at first. Then a few dime sized flakes. I don’t know how much it has snowed. The yard is white, the trees look like a Christmas card, Penny is like WTF is going on, and several of the cats are in a pile on the rug outside the back door. The snow stopped about 4PM.

    This is the most snow I remember having here. Since ’92. It’s usually rain followed by sleet. Because you need the sleet to cover everything with ice. To break trees and drop power lines. Then a dusting of show, like powdered sugar on a cake to make it look pretty.

    The pellet stove and an extra fan has kept the house at 72F. The stove is running at 1/5. That’s heat set at one on a scale that goes to nine. Five is the blower speed. Pretty good.

  37. Nick Flandrey says:

    We’re still getting rain but the temp has dropped to 37F with the sunset. I harvested almost all the rest of the grapefruit, and one of the two oranges. The lemons will be fine.

    Daughter two has me ripping another bunch of CDs. This time it was a hundred or more, mostly modern country. These are all in their jewel cases, so in good nick and fast to rip. She went thru and picked about 50 that she’d like to have, and I added about 15 more for artists we should have that she didn’t know- Shania Twain being one of my favorites, as well as Hank Williams. I’ve got a bunch of classic country, but no real modern. There’s an awful lot of George Strait in this collection, like there was a ton of Skynard in the other one. These will probably go to the auction when I’m done.

    in other news, FEMA has a booklet of their internal use acronyms. It’s about seventy pages, two columns. https://training.fema.gov/programs/emischool/el361toolkit/assets/faatbook.pdf

    n

  38. Richard says:

    And are we really going to let them gaslight the nation? There was NO call for insurrection, let alone a call for ARMED insurrection. There were 10s of thousands of people at that rally that did NOTHING MORE than stand around on the grass. Where is the video of demagogue Trump calling for armed insurrection? If they had anything at all we’d be seeing it non-stop to convict him in the press

    You are intelligent people. Think about what you would you say if, for instance, a bunch of Black Lives Matter guys did what happened in Washington with,say, Al Sharpton telling then to that they will never take back our country with weakness and to march to the Capital ? There is no way to minimize this. It was a terrible thing in the history of our country and I think it was pretty clear Trump encouraged it.

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  39. Robert V Sprowl says:

    Why have the poll workers who committed fraud not been named? The Republicans who failed to call for local law enforcement and if the law enforcement did not act failed to call the FBI should be named. The Democrats committing the fraud should be named. Home addresses for both groups should be published as well.

    How can we publicly shame them for not doing their jobs is they are unnamed?

    Why was no action taken in Georgia to stop the fraud reported in General election from reoccurring in the runoff election?

    What will it take to get the rule of law re-established?

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  40. Greg Norton says:

    Why was no action taken in Georgia to stop the fraud reported in General election from reoccurring in the runoff election?

    Why didn’t 320,000 Republicans and Libertarians show up to repeat their votes against Ossoff from November and contribute to the vote against Warnock?

    Just the Libertarians alone would have sufficed. They have much to answer for by creating the mess in the first place.

    GA Republicans have no one to blame but themselves for last Tuesday’s loss of the Senate.

  41. Pecancorner says:

    At 7AM, 33F outside and snowing. Tiny flakes at first. Then a few dime sized flakes. I don’t know how much it has snowed. The yard is white, the trees look like a Christmas card, Penny is like WTF is going on, and several of the cats are in a pile on the rug outside the back door. The snow stopped about 4PM.

    This is the most snow I remember having here. Since ’92. It’s usually rain followed by sleet. Because you need the sleet to cover everything with ice. To break trees and drop power lines. Then a dusting of show, like powdered sugar on a cake to make it look pretty.

    The pellet stove and an extra fan has kept the house at 72F. The stove is running at 1/5. That’s heat set at one on a scale that goes to nine. Five is the blower speed. Pretty good.

    It snowed here all day too – we’re in Brown County. Just gorgeous, about 5 inches or more. This is the second snow we’ve had – another just like it on New Year’s. It used to snow here every winter, then it stopped for several years, now I guess it has started a new weather cycle again.

    Isn’t wood heat wonderful? I would not take for it! Our wood stove doesn’t have a blower, but if I keep the thermometer on top of the stove box at 200F, the living room, kitchen, dining room around the corner, and front bedroom will stay at a constant 70F.

  42. Nick Flandrey says:

    @richard, have you forgotten the “Million Man March”?

    Exactly what you ‘what if’ has already happened.

    We’ve already seen huge (although significantly less than 1M) marches on DC by large groups of black people. We’ve also seen much smaller groups of antifa and BLM “demonstrating” on the streets of DC. I recall a lot more fire and property damage being involved. Is it a riot if nothing was burned? No cars overturned? No looting? No lasers pointed at cops or hard objects thrown at them?

    Trump certainly encouraged people to attend. At no point did he call for an insurrection, or to take over the Capitol building. Unlike BLM in 2018 for example when they swarmed the floor…

    If you have video of a riot during the rally, I’m collecting links… I’ve got plenty of pix of 10s of thousands of Trump supporters standing around peacefully. Seriously. Where are the videos? I’m open to evidence but I’m not seeing any.

    They took down Trump’s speech so that they could talk about it instead of people seeing it with their own eyes as the nothing it was. They keep talking about the small group of people that entered the Capitol, but completely fail to mention the 10s of thousands that were just there to show their support for our sitting President.

    So yeah, I’ll say it again. There was no riot. There was no call for armed insurrection. Watch the video of the speech. Heck, Fortune.com has an edited version, but no where in there is any call for violence or insurrection. Even they admit it in the article–

    Trump’s statements leading up to and during the storming of the Capitol building, however, did not include explicit calls for a violent attack on America’s democratic institutions. Instead, those laying blame on Trump are pointing in part to rhetoric that agitated his followers with conspiratorial lies and instilled a sense of imminent doom—while relying on them to make the final decision to act. This is a version of the “stochastic terrorism” tactics common to authoritarian leaders around the world.

    Trump specifically calls for a walk down Penn to show support for Republican lawmakers.

    They said from the first second that the people breaking things were “Trump supporters”. I guess they’re clairvoyant because any responsible journalist would have used ‘apparent’ in front of that, as anyone can put on a Trump hat. There is plenty of evidence that antifa and others were planning to disrupt the event. And the same couple of jack@sses we see at every turn are long time attention whores, who attached themselves to a movement. They are not representative of the (again) 10s of thousands that were there, or the 70 million that voted for him.

    n

    added- no more than 4 links in any one comment, or it will be automatically moderated. You can put more in, but Rick or I will have to notice there is a comment in moderation and release it manually.

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  43. MrAtoz says:

    So yeah, I’ll say it again. There was no riot. There was no call for armed insurrection. Watch the video of the speech. Heck, Fortune.com has an edited version, but no where in there is any call for violence or insurrection. Even they admit it in the article–

    + ∞

    Stretch Pelosi is screeching an ultimatum for Pence to 25th tRump and takeover. A major challenge to Pence’s bolitas. And another impeachment. She is crazy. Also Dumbos calling for *all* tRump “riot” supporting congress critters (GOP only) to be 25th’d. It is going to be interesting to see what tRump does in his final Presidential days and after. I think he will fade away unless there are plenty of bucks to be made.

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  44. Nick Flandrey says:

    This is what a cascade failure looks like…

    Top government officials in Pakistan are urging calm after the entire country was plunged into darkness on Saturday night due to a breakdown in the national power grid.

    “A countrywide blackout has been caused by a sudden plunge in the frequency in the power transmission system,” Pakistan’s Power Minister Omar Ayub Khan announced, according to Reuters.

    “For want of a nail….”

    In a statement, the Ministry of Energy said that, according to an initial report, there had been a fault at the Guddu Thermal Power Plant in Pakistan’s southern Sindh province, which had caused power plants across the country to shut down.

  45. Greg Norton says:

    It snowed here all day too – we’re in Brown County. Just gorgeous, about 5 inches or more. This is the second snow we’ve had – another just like it on New Year’s. It used to snow here every winter, then it stopped for several years, now I guess it has started a new weather cycle again.

    Williamson County had 3-4 inches today, but it will be gone tomorrow.

  46. Mark W says:

    I read an article this morning (on my phone, sorry I don’t have the link) which said Trump called for violence directly, with an embedded video that did not support the claim.

    I have seen video of people at BLM rallies calling for much worse than the things Trump said. I’ve seen tweets by celebrities calling for violence against Trump supporters.

    I note that leftists did something similar in 2018, and that leftists spent much of last year rioting in multiple locations around the country. So much so that there was talk of updating dictionaries to change the definition of the word “riot”.

  47. Mark W says:

    sudden plunge in the frequency in the power transmission system

    there had been a fault at the Guddu Thermal Power Plant in Pakistan’s southern Sindh province, which had caused power plants across the country to shut down.

    I’m sure @lynn could say more but that sounds to me (a layperson) like there was no spare generation capacity, one plant tripped, the others overloaded causing a frequency drop, then every plant tripped offline.

    Lynn said last year that no-one knows how to restart the Texas grid. Pakistan is about to find out how to start theirs.

  48. Greg Norton says:

    RIP. Bubbalou’s is one of the places we always try to hit when we are in Orlando. Our favorite location is the store just north of the Universal Studios parking garages.

    Florida doesn’t have a distinct BBQ style, but the upside of that situation is having most of the major regional favorites somewhere within driving distance of Tampa and Orlando.

    https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/obituaries/os-et-sam-meiner-obituary-20210109-xsl226pggnazllfrhzxjkgp6fa-story.html

  49. MrAtoz says:

    It will be easy for Stretch to get most of the House to vote impeachment. The Redumblicans are mostly RINOs and think voting with Stretch is their salvation. That leaves The Turtle between killing it and more salvation. Some goof Dumbo states tRump can be impeached up to 100 days *after* plugsy McSpongeBrain is sworn in. Our Constitution has become a joke. The FUSA is a joke. Redumblicans are a joke.

  50. Nick Flandrey says:

    Speaking of BLM and antifa, they are getting ready to up their game. Uniforms. Armor. Marching…

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/01/motherfckin-streets-antifa-terrorists-march-nyc-riot-gear-media-silent-video/

    Turn your speakers down first.

    n

  51. Greg Norton says:

    It will be easy for Stretch to get most of the House to vote impeachment. The Redumblicans are mostly RINOs and think voting with Stretch is their salvation. That leaves The Turtle between killing it and more salvation. Some goof Dumbo states tRump can be impeached up to 100 days *after* plugsy McSpongeBrain is sworn in. Our Constitution has become a joke. The FUSA is a joke. Redumblicans are a joke.

    Impeachment gets complicated in a legal sense after noon on 1/20. There is even some question as to whether Roberts presides in a trial in the Senate.

    After Trump leaves office, a vote to Impeach and bar him from Federal office in the future may not even be legal, something that a civil law suit will have to decide.

  52. Rick Hellewell says:

    Regarding google analytics JS file, and resources used therein – I have always thought that a client-side analytics process (like ga.js) was not effective. Many ad blockers (I use uBlock Origin) block the ga.js from working, so if an ad blocker is running, you won’t get any analytics info.

    I use analytics on all of my sites – mostly out of curiosity for visits – and having ad blockers block the ga.js results in incomplete information.

    So for quite a while (more than a year), my sites run a server-side analytics that reports to the GA site. Since those analytics work on the server side, they are not affected by ad blockers, so my analytics are much more active.

    That server-side analytics runs on this site – and on most of the sites I manage. Even with uBlock Origin active, I can still see analytics for this site.

    Any site running client-side analytics – which most do, because it’s so easy to set up – will not be getting the full picture of visitors, because of the number of people who use ad blocking.

    All of my sites – including this one – get the full visitor picture. We don’t do anything with the data other than gather visitor page views, etc. But it is quite easy to implement server-side analytics. I even wrote about how to do it on my SecurityDawg blog. It works just fine – ad blockers or not.

  53. Nick Flandrey says:

    Hey Rick, did the comment count widget change? I am pretty sure ‘Robert V Sprowl’ has more than 9 comments here…
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  54. Rick Hellewell says:

    did the comment count widget change?

    I dunno what that is. The thumbs up/down are still there.

  55. MrAtoz says:

    After Trump leaves office, a vote to Impeach and bar him from Federal office in the future may not even be legal, something that a civil law suit will have to decide.

    There have been calls for plugs to call Stretch and stop the insanity. I imagine that call would go like this:

    plugs: Nancy, please stop the impeachment proceedings. The Nation needs to heel.

    Stretch: Shut up, moron. You work for me. We can 25th you, or call the Klintons.

    LET THE HEELING AND IMPEACHING BEGIN!

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  56. Nick Flandrey says:

    @rick, ok. I guess not.

    n

  57. Harold Combs says:

    It is going to be interesting to see what tRump does in his final Presidential days and after. I think he will fade away unless there are plenty of bucks to be made.

    Based on the over-the-top violent rhetoric of the left, they won’t be happy till Trump and his family are in prison or killed. A major goal is to paint the president as such an evil figure that any supporters will rush to repent their sins and never have a conservative thought again.

  58. Ray Thompson says:

    Trump and his family are in prison or killed

    The Hillary retirement plan.

  59. Mark W says:

    Probably more pardons, perhaps Ross Ulbrict, and maybe declassify some interesting documents. I hope.

  60. Nick Flandrey says:

    Yeah, pardons for sure. Deal with the israeli’s for asylum? Blackwater as bodyguards and escorts? Nothing’s off the table, just some of it is more likely that others.

    n

  61. Nick Flandrey says:

    Didn’t he just release an israeli spy too?

    n

  62. Nick Flandrey says:

    “A major goal is to paint the president as such an evil figure that any supporters will rush to repent their sins and never have a conservative thought again.”

    –like I said earlier, everything they do makes the coming bloodshed more likely.

    n

  63. Nick Flandrey says:

    Joy. Coughing quite a bit tonight. No fever. No difficulty breathing. Taste and smell still good…

    I have been coughing a bit at home for the last few days. I don’t cough outside the house, so I think it’s something in the air here. And unlike most days, I haven’t been out of the house at all today. Still, it’s worrying.

    n

  64. MrK says:

    Honestly Nick it might be stress? If the rest of the family are OK, it could be something to think about.
    Anyway, take it easy.. 🙂

  65. brad says:

    @Jenny: Sorry to hear about your pup. Sounds familiar – our 17yo kelpie has had a few siezures, likely the same reason – but at this age, there’s no point in putting the pup through the diagnostics. Our vet recommended a medication that seems to be working – hope that works for your pup as well…

    @Rick: Threatening and illegal content is such a laugh, and not a happy laugh. Ars Technica has an article about de-platforming conservatives: in the comment thread there is a comment about murdering conservatives, backed up with a picture of a pile of corpses. Not a peep, not a protest; in fact, the comment (and pic) were quoted and praised by others. Yet conservatives are the ones accused of promoting violence, and conservatives are the ones being de-platformed.

    In other words: It doesn’t matter what the ToS say. It’s all about virtue signalling. Look at Parler: AWS is apparently going to end their hosting in the next hour or so, despite the fact that Facebook, Twitter & Co have far, far more violent content from the Antifa/BLM crazies.

    @MarkW: There’s a lot Trump could do in his last days in office. Pardons, certainly. Unfortunately, I don’t think he will pardon the people he should, first and foremost of those being Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.

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  66. brad says:

    Just a quick follow-up: Yep, Parler really is down, as of midnight PST (09:00 here).

    Now we’ll see how good the Parler site admins are. If they’re on the ball, they’ll soon have the DNS redirected to at least a placeholder site. Finding new hosting on such short notice – that’s going to be a bitch. I trust they will have the sense to go outside the US.

  67. JimB says:

    Jenny, sorry to hear about your four legged family member. We lost one to a suspected brain tumor that caused canine vestibular syndrome, a fancy way of saying it affected motor control and vision. At the time, no effective treatment was available. The seizures got longer and more frequent over a few months, and we finally knew it was time. Animals make us more human. They are true family members, whose memory never leaves us.

  68. MrK says:

    Following from Brad, Parler is down on this side of the pond as well.
    @Jenny… Fingers crossed that the vet may be able to help with your dear woofer..
    We miss ours every day..

  69. Richard says:

    If you have video of a riot during the rally, I’m collecting links… I’ve got plenty of pix of 10s of thousands of Trump supporters standing around peacefully. Seriously. Where are the videos? I’m open to evidence but I’m not seeing any.

    https://www.indiatoday.in/world/video/us-capitol-siege-watch-10-viral-images-of-the-rampage-1756866-2021-01-07

    https://www.tmz.com/2021/01/10/new-capitol-video-trump-mob-riot-beating-fallen-police-officer/

    https://nypost.com/2021/01/07/wild-video-shows-moment-rioters-easily-overtake-capitol/

    If these aren’t enough there are plenty more.

Comments are closed.