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Category: news

Friday, 24 June 2016

09:35 – Good news overnight. The UK has voted to leave the EU, and that prog POS Cameron has announced his resignation. Apparently, Boris Johnson is likely to become leader of the Tories and probably the next PM. It would be more fitting if Nigel Farage became PM. He is, after all, the leader of the UK Independence Party.

I have a modest proposal. I think we should rename the North American Free Trade Agreement to the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, eject Mexico (which is in Central America anyway), and invite the UK to join the new NAFTA. Eventually, we could invite Denmark and Holland, most of whose citizens speak English anyway, and of course Australia and New Zealand. But the UK is most important. As Europe continues being muslimized, the day may come when we again need the UK as an unsinkable aircraft carrier.

I didn’t do much prepping this week, other than ordering half a dozen boxes of Krusteaz cinnamon crumb cake and a pail of Augason Farms brown rice from Walmart. I note that the Krusteaz product has gone up from $2.14/box to $2.25. Eleven cents may not seem like much, but it’s more than 5%. At least that’s not as bad as the Augason powdered eggs. The last time I bought them, they were $17/can. They got up over $50 last year, but are now down to $34.50, only twice what I paid.

More science kit stuff today, of course.

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Saturday, 18 June 2016

09:59 – Barbara is cleaning house this morning, while I do laundry. We just started seasoning the new wok she bought down in Winston. I’ve seasoned cast iron cookware, but this is the first time I’ve done steel. It’s ugly, which is more obvious on the gray surface of the steel than it is on the black cast iron. Barbara has never cooked in seasoned pans before. I think once she tries it she’ll like it. Ten second cleanup and the food just seems to taste better. And I like the idea of using 3000 year old nonstick technology.

UPS showed up about 7 p.m. yesterday, just after we’d finished dinner and cleaning up, and left five large boxes on the porch. Colin never even woofed. Those boxes contained about 3,000 30mL bottles and caps, a case of funnels, and two cases of test tube racks, which we were completely out of. Later today, we’ll finish building a dozen chemistry kits, which were awaiting test tube racks, and then return to labeling and filling chemical bottles and building subassemblies.

And in more bizarre news, it seems that four years or so ago a Pennsylvania Amish couple more-or-less sold their 14-year-old daughter to a 51-year-old pervert, by whom she has borne two children. What really surprised me was that the father of the girl said he thought it was legal based on research he’d done on-line. Since when do the Amish use the Internet?

Email from Jen, whose husband has a new hobby. Two or three weeks ago, they attempted to start their generator and it wouldn’t fire up. So David hauled the generator over to a guy he knows who works on small engines. He sat and watched as the guy tore down and cleaned the carb, making notes of tools and supplies he’d need to do it himself. Jen says David has now downloaded service manuals for all their tools that use small gasoline engines, both four- and two-cycle. Last weekend, he tore down, cleaned, and rebuilt their leaf blower and chainsaw. This weekend, he’s going after their lawn tractor, which Jen fears will never be the same. But she does admit that both the leaf blower and chainsaw are running fine.

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Tuesday, 14 June 2016

10:02 – Federal and state estimated taxes are in the mail. Grrrrrr.

I’m afraid that the Florida outrage is just the latest in what’s likely to be a string of similar outrages between now and the general election. The goal of terrorists, after all, is to spread terror among ordinary people. In that sense, the choice of a gay bar was less effective than it might have been had the murderer chosen a target that average people could identify with. Only a tiny percentage of the population has ever been in a gay bar. Nearly everyone has attended sporting events, theme parks, and similar soft targets that attract mass numbers of people. There are hundreds of thousands of such soft targets, most of them made even softer by declaring themselves gun-free zones. Which is actually a pretty good metric: if it’s a gun-free zone, you really don’t want to be there under any circumstances. And in that category I include not just sports stadia and theme parks, but entire cities and states. All they’re really doing is advertising, “Lots of helpless victims available here.” Someone called that a wolf amongst the sheep, but I think a weasel among the chickens sums it up better. If you value your life and your family’s lives, don’t go anywhere you can’t go armed. And if you ever find yourself in such a situation, don’t count on someone else to save you. Whether or not you’re armed, your best response is ALWAYS flat-out attack.

More work on science kit stuff today.


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Monday, 6 June, 2016

10:12 – Happy birthday to me. I turn 3F today. Only one more year until I hit the Big Four-Oh. A year after that, I’ll be eligible for Medicare, assuming it’s still around two years from now.

Barbara got me the perfect gift for anyone with an interest in science: Derek Lowe’s The Chemistry Book: From Gunpowder to Graphene, 250 Milestones in the History of Chemistry. Recommended.

Big article in the paper this morning about the increasing violence in cities. After peaking in 1990, violence in cities had declined significantly over the next 20 years, but now it’s started to increase dramatically in many (but not all) cities. Apparently, no one in authority can figure out why this is happening, or maybe it’s just that they’re not allowed to say. Hint: it has to with the large increase in the population of underclass scum. That, and forbidding the police to deal with them.

Back in the Good Olde Days, cops divided people into three categories: cops, civilians, and scumbags. They treated civilians politely, and never, ever beat or shot them. They treated scumbags as they deserved to be treated, and beat or shot them as necessary. In olden days, mistreating civilians was the fastest way for a cop to commit career suicide, while treating scumbags harshly was just another day at the office. Nowadays, the situation is, if not quite the opposite, uncomfortably close to being so. Cops now shoot more middle-class civilians than they do underclass scumbags. Killing a middle-class person has become almost a protected activity for cops, while killing an underclass scumbag invariably results in severe blowback, often career-ending. This has to change.


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Thursday, 2 June 2016

09:36 – I’m old enough to remember the time when newspapers did actual journalism rather than just reprinting government press releases. I thought about that this morning while I was scanning the morning paper. There was an article that reported unemployment in the Winston-Salem area was at 5%. Yeah, right. Time was when a newspaper would have pointed out that the government 5% number was entirely bogus. Not only does it not include those who are so discouraged that they’ve given up looking for work, but it counts any job as a job. The simple truth is that the country has lost millions upon millions of good middle-class jobs over the last couple of decades, and replaced them with crap service jobs. If a machinist making $60,000/year loses that job and goes back to work in a minimum-wage retail job, the government considers that a wash. One job lost and one job gained. We should try that on them, making all government jobs start at minimum wage, with a cap no higher than the average wage earned by people with jobs in private businesses.

More science kit stuff today. Barbara assembled a batch of small parts bags for chemistry kits yesterday, and is working on another batch as I write this. We also have chemical bottles to label and fill, and I have purchase orders to cut.

Walmart has some of their Ball canning jars on sale. Their website lists a two-pack of Ball wide-mouth quart jars with lids and rims for $18.95, or $0.79 each. I added three of those to my shopping cart, which was enough to get over $50 for free shipping. But when I tried to place the order, instead of going to the page that confirms shipping address it took me to a page that said I could pick them up at the Elkin Walmart Supercenter. I wasn’t about to make a 60 mile round trip, so I canceled the order.

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Wednesday, 27 January 2016

10:47 – I see that the standoff has ended, with the Bundy family and their supporters arrested and one of them shot dead. No surprise there. But it comes at a cost to the government in the form of decreased trust by the citizenry. After Waco, most normal people thought the fault was with Koresh’s group, although many questioned the use of tanks and firebombing to root out what were, after all, general peaceful civilians. After Ruby Ridge, still more people began to question just what the government was doing. And now with the Bundy family, still more average people are wondering just what’s going on. I think we’re going to see more events like this over the coming months and years, and more and more people will start to see the federal goons for what they are. Federal government goons murdering ordinary civilians.

I’m still tied up with administrative stuff, some of which has to be complete and in the mail by Friday.



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Friday, 8 January 2016

10:26 – It seems that the pushback in Germany has begun. With hordes of moslem scum making the streets unsafe for Germans, particularly women, German men have decided to do something about it. Vigilante groups are forming. One such group already has 8,000+ members on its Facebook page. Their attitude, with which I agree, is that if the authorities aren’t going to do anything to stop the muggings and rapes, they’ll just have to do something about it themselves. Meanwhile, the German government tells its citizens that they’ll just have to get used to higher crime rates, which is to say moslems mugging, raping, and killing them. The government has no right to abdicate its responsibility to protect its citizens and then tell those citizens that they aren’t allowed to protect themselves. I hope the vigilantes nail that treasonous bitch Angela Merkel as well. If she wants to commit suicide, fine. But she’s not entitled to take the rest of the country with her.

Simply put, islam is incompatible with Western Civilization. It is attempting to destroy everything that we value, so it’s only fitting that we eradicate it. Expelling all moslems from the US would be a good start, and they should be expelled regardless of their citizenship status.

11:02 – It’s been a while since my last weekly prepping post, mainly because we’ve been so busy closing on the house, getting stuff moved up here and organized, and so on. As I said last time, we’re in reasonably good shape now, so we’ll be making only incremental improvements in the coming weeks and months. Here’s what I did to prep this week:

  • We got all our long-term storage food stacked and organized in the two downstairs bedroom closets. I’d been concerned because I thought I’d somehow lost a couple dozen #10 cans of relatively high-value Augason Farms stuff, things like powdered eggs, butter powder, and cheese blend powder. I’d looked for them up here and on the last trip down to Winston, and couldn’t find them. I finally found them yesterday in the unfinished area of the basement, stacked with cases of kit components. The powdered eggs will go in the upright freezer, along with as many cans of butter and cheese powder as I have room for.
  • We’ve started cooking more from long-term storage food, trying out different recipes. This afternoon we’re making a batch of oatmeal cookies from LTS supplies. We couldn’t find our supply of molasses yesterday, so Barbara’s buying another bottle at Lowes this morning on her way back from the gym. (One tablespoon of molasses added to a cup of granulated white sugar yields a cup of brown sugar. Both white sugar and molasses have essentially unlimited shelf lives.)

So, what precisely did you do to prepare this week? Tell me about it in the comments.

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Tuesday, 5 January 2016

09:09 – It was 14F (-10C) when I took Colin out the first time this morning, with a windchill below 0F. Even he didn’t want to stay out long. The high today is to be about freezing, with tonight again down in the low to mid-teens.

We made a lot of progress yesterday on getting the unfinished basement area set up to build kits. One large built-in shelving unit now holds bins of chemical bottles, about 120 of them, all alphabetized and ready to pick and pack from. The floor area is generally cleared and ready to set up work tables. We’ll get more preparation done down there today.

I’ve been reading a lot of news articles about Obama taking more steps toward confiscating guns. I don’t think he’ll attempt to confiscate guns. He’s a stupid man, but not so stupid that he doesn’t understand that he doesn’t have the resources to do that. Who would do the actual confiscating? State and local LE? Good luck with that. In the first place, many state and local LE personnel sympathize with the gun owners because they’re gun owners themselves and would oppose any further infringements on the 2nd Amendment, let alone outright confiscation. In the second place, if domestics are dangerous for cops to deal with, imagine how much more dangerous gun confiscations would be. We’d end up with a whole lot of dead gun owners, but also a whole lot of dead cops. Obama might order federal LE to do the confiscations, but there aren’t enough of them to make any real difference. And they have families, too. The military? Good luck with that. Many of them are Oath Keepers, either explicitly or as sympathizers. I think it’s unlikely that our military would undertake a wholesale gross violation of our Constitutional rights. And again, they have families, too. Hell, Obama’s own SS bodyguard are sworn to uphold the Constitution. They might turn on him, and he must know that. So I don’t see any widespread gun confiscations happening any time soon.

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Monday, 21 December 2015

12:34 – We’re still moving furniture around downstairs, but the downstairs den is now pretty much the way Barbara wants it in terms of furniture placement. We now have five large bookcases sitting empty that we need to get books transferred onto. Those bookcases, incidentally, could be moved upstairs, where they’d make excellent gabions if push ever comes to shove.

Other than the stuff I’ve mentioned about getting science kit production ramped up, the major item on my to-do list is to get at least a basic off-grid solar setup installed. Before I do that, I need to find out whether our well pump is 120VAC or 240VAC, and find out what the start-up and run currents are. At this point, I’m assuming that a 5KW true sine-wave inverter will do the job. An 800W array, something like this one, should reliably produce maybe 2.4KWh on an average day and more on a good day, which’d require about 180AH of deep-cycle batteries to store a day’s worth of output. This would obviously be a major project in terms of time, effort, and cost, so for the time being we’ll depend on our 7KW generator.

Still no word on what happened in Las Vegas, although I find it suspicious that the authorities have not released the name of the would-be mass murderess. I’m guessing it’ll be a moslem-sounding name. The authorities have been at pains to emphasize that this wasn’t terrorism, which of course makes me think it probably was.

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Sunday, 20 December 2015

14:00 – We decided to make a quick run down to Winston yesterday to haul more stuff up here. It was 1:15 down, about 1:30 down there loading, and 1:15 back, for a total of about 4 hours portal-to-portal. Frances and Al met us at the house with their pickup, and we hauled back a full pickup load plus a full Trooper load, including just about all of the remaining science kit chemicals and nearly all of the remaining food. Al and Frances left for home after lunch, and we spent the afternoon moving stuff that needed to be in the heated area there from the garage and vice versa.

We spent most of the morning working downstairs, rearranging furniture in the den. The guest bedroom is now essentially complete. We moved my new desk (a This End Up dining table) to my new office, which is the second downstairs bedroom. I now have my computer, printers, and other gear set up and working in there. There’s still a lot to be done in my office, including installing shelves and moving all my office stuff in. Oh, and I got the propane tank connected to Barbara’s new grill, which she’s going to use to make dinner tonight.

I see the Baltimore cops shot another black guy. The dumb SOB tried to rob an off-duty cop at gunpoint using a realistic-looking toy gun, and got exactly what he deserved, not that that’s likely to stop the UC from rioting. And there was another death by cop incident, this one in WS. The cops sprayed a criminal with pepper spray and he became unresponsive and ended up DOA. The dead guy’s father flew in from Denver, and is trying to stir things up. The only reason that I care is that Frances and Al are still in WS, and we still own a house there. And just yesterday at lunch, I was telling Al that although I didn’t expect mob violence in WS in the near future, he and Frances were welcome at our house here any time.

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