Month: July 2024

Aside, there are two cases pending articles. I’m working on them.

I do not have many friends. It is difficult for me to reach out to my friends to keep in touch with them. Since I work from home, I’m not forced to interact with co-workers. So, few friends.

Note, I use the word “friend” to mean “friend”, not somebody that I work with or classmates. A friend is a friend.

When I left the horrid state of Maryland for the green, green hills of NH, I wasn’t leaving friends behind. My friend and mentor had died a few years earlier. With my kids graduated, there was nothing holding me there.

For six months I lived near the Vermont border while commuting 80+ miles to just outside the inner beltway of Boston. I did that commute 4.5 days a week. On Friday, I left work in Boston and drove back to my family in PA. On Sunday, I drove back to NH.

I was staying with a family as a boarder. I had met her in an online game. We had become online friends. When she got married, Allyson did it for her.

During the months, I became friends with her. She, and her husband, were conservatives. They had the same sort of beliefs that I had. I had many enjoyable conversations with her.

Note, the husband is currently in the “special prison” for those special prisoners who wouldn’t survive in gen pop. I was more than willing to help put him there.

Regardless, we were friends. I helped her when I could. When they lost their house a few years later (husband’s fault), we opened our home to them. When he was kicked out, we continued to support her.

There was many a rainy day that I worked on her car because we were all short on money.

She ate at our table, shared in our lives. She was here for Christmas and for other holidays.

A true friend.

I do not talk to her anymore. Not at all.

There is a part of the abortion argument that flat out escapes me. It is how so many women think that because the federal government is no longer blocking anti-abortion laws, that they are at a considerable risk.

My friend is a few months older than I am. She isn’t going to get pregnant. It isn’t going to happen. Having access to an abortion is meaningless to her.

What about her daughters? One daughter is happy making babies with her husband. The other daughter is happy being an Aunt. That one can’t think of a man sexually, see not above about her step-father being in the special prison.

Nether of her daughters is at risk of an unintended pregnancy. So why is abortion so important to her?

My youngest is also very upset that the federal government is blocked from blocking anti-abortion legislation. She considers it to be part of “woman’s health”.

It is essential to understand, abortions are not banned in this state.

Roe v. Wade found that women had a right to abortions under because they had a right to privacy. Because they had a right to privacy, what happened between the woman and her doctor was none of your business. Thus, abortions are a right under a woman’s right to medical privacy.

Dobbs said, “No. There is no right to abortion hidden in the Constitution. The plain text of the Fourth Amendment does not implicate the conduct in question. There is nothing in this Nation’s historical tradition of regulations that is similar to ‘right to abortion'”.

Having made the statement, the Court overturned Roe v. Wade and returned the question to the states.

Some states had laws that instantly went into effect, banning abortions. Other states enshrined abortion “rights” into their laws. Still, other states didn’t do a damn thing.

But the Dobbs case broke my friend.

She blamed Trump, personally, for strangers in other states having restricted access to abortions. Having decided that Trump was “evil,” she then dove into the Kool-Aid and drank all that she could and more.

She went from “there is no evidence that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted anyone” to “Kavanaugh was credibly accused of sexual assault and is not qualified to be on the Court.”

It happened in the course of a few days.

She went from “Thomas is a great justice.” to “Justice is a political hack, he is slimy, in the pocket of the wealthy.”

Her mind broke. It broke because it was so obvious to her, that Dobbs was decided incorrectly, that the only possible reason was corruption or malfeasance.

If the justices on the Supreme Court, whom she trusted, whom she respected, could betray her, then what else are they betraying.

Currently, she is of the “vote not Trump.” There is not a single thing that Trump did as president that she respects. All of it was destroyed, for her, with that one opinion.

I believe that I am willing to question just about anything. There are some things which are locked in stone. Not because “they” told me to believe that way, but because I did my research and in that research grounded my opinions.

I like to believe that I am moral. I have a moral code which I follow. Part of that code is to be willing to question my moral code and my opinions, to be able to separate facts from opinions, truth from wishful thinking.

My friend is lost. I do not expect her to ever recover. I will pray for her and hope she finds happyness in her new status as a subject of the state.

AWA talked about cognitive dissonance (“…when two opposing thoughts reside in the same mind, generating inner conflicts and psychological distress…” — PC), but I want to talk about cognitive distortions (“Error in the thinking process, automatic thought, erroneous thought pattern. Different from logical fallacies.” — ibid) in relation to the Left.

So I was at a ren faire (Maine Ren Faire, in case anyone wants to visit me next weekend, as that’s where I’ll be then, too – look for me at the fire) when Biden decided to step down. I got the news from several sources, but mostly through word of mouth. Now Ren Faires are a bastion of the Left… everything is rainbows and glitter, men in dresses is a regular thing, and anyone can be anything they want. But Ren Faires also have a surprising number of conservative folk at them, albeit ones who are chill about gay and trans people. I have always been a wee bit more Right than the average faire person, and so I rarely talk politics. I was surprised to be hearing about Biden, as we actively avoid reading the news while at faire. Be that as it may, it was relayed to me as fact, not news, and people didn’t put a spin on it, for which I was grateful.

After hearing about it, I went and looked stuff up. I read some stuff on AP, pawed through a Washington Times article, and then went to FaceBook to see what other people were saying. Yes, I know, never go to FB for information, but part of the reason I DO, is because I write about things here. The people that I interact with on FB are friends and/or acquaintances, and so they aren’t random caricatures on social media, and I think I get much better information because of that.

Right now, the main things that are being bandied about are:

• positive memes about Harris
• a rounding chorus of “Vote blue no matter who!”
• “reminders” that if you say “ignorant things” about women, your daughters and wives hear you
• comments that it is “time for women to lead” (with disparaging remarks if someone suggests we pick the BEST candidate)
• a call for Obama to run (with a lot of very patient explanations about why he can’t… good grief that one hurts)
• a call for Obama to run as VP for Harris (which is a legally squishy area)
• a lovely note that if Biden had died instead of stepping down, Harris would already be president, so just vote for her already

That’s just a taste from a couple of friends’ timelines. There were more, but I deleted the people who called for violence or did fat shaming or name calling (that’s a thing for me every political season, and I do it for *everyone* who does it, not just one side). There’s this complete inability for the Left to see anything positive that Trump’s done, or to admit that Harris has done very little. Then there’s the whole part about how Harris will be good at the job because she’s been Joe’s VP for the last four years, and so she has “lots of experience.” At the same time, in the same paragraph, the person said Trump didn’t have enough experience to be President.

There is definitely a lot of “two opposing thoughts” in the Left’s rhetoric. Unfortunately, there’s also a ton of cognitive distortions. I think there may be MORE of the distortions than the dissonance, because the dissonance requires you to be uncomfortable with your two opposing thoughts. They (the people I know, at least) don’t seem to be in any discomfort whatsoever. They embrace it. It is the very definition of an “…error in the thinking process…”

It’s been very interesting watching some of my friends imploding because other friends suggested that the Dems as a whole were being dicks by not really allowing a choice to be made. Half of my Left friends are upset because Harris has now been forced on them, and they don’t get to actually pick a presidential candidate (though of course they don’t realize that they never had that choice anyhow because of how the Dems work their side of things, but that’s another article entirely). The other half of my Left friends are having melt downs because the other half are somehow causing the Left to lose because we all just have to vote for Harris or Trump will take away all women’s rights and force us to be sex slaves and incubators.

I can’t make this stuff up. It’s distressing to me.

It’s kind of terrifying, watching everyone Left of center picking up the same words, the same cadence, the same memes, the same phrasing. This is happening even among people that I consider *friends*, good friends who are otherwise thinking and rational human beings. It reminds me of what happened with kids a couple of years ago when you put on the song Ney Ney. It didn’t matter what they were doing, if the song came on they dropped it and just started doing the shuffle dance moves. Zombies, man… they’re training them early.

This time last election, I was upset over a lot of things. Yes, I disliked Trump enough that I wasn’t seeing any of his positive things. Yes, I was hopeful that Biden would do better. In that particular “hold my nose” scenario, I prayed that Biden would be the better choice. I am not afraid to admit that I was wrong. I’m not afraid to notice that Trump has changed, too, in the past four years.

All that aside, I am trying not to engage in cognitive distortions OR dissonance. I really think Nikki Haley was the better choice, not because she is female, but because she has a lot of the same thoughts as Trump but is a lot nicer to look at and has a much more professional stance… and she’s younger. Having presidential candidates who could conceivably die of old-age related diseases before the end of their tenure is HUGELY problematic to me. Yes, Trump is much healthier than Biden (mentally at least),  but he’s still 78 years old. He’s overweight, and that comes with a host of issues that I’m intimately familiar with, and it scares me that he could get into office and then have an aneurysm or heart attack and we’d be in another mess. I like Vance (so far, at least, but I need to do more investigation), but I don’t know that he’s truly ready to step up as President right now.

For people who I judge are thinking folks, I am pushing the narrative that “even if” Trump wins, he can’t just make up laws. That’s not how it works. We The People have choices, and when election time comes around for conservative folks doing unpopular things, they WILL get voted out. It’s my hope that they’ll be replaced with conservative folks who are doing “the right thing” while also listening to the People that they are beholden to. I suspect, however, that they’d be replaced by Leftists. That’s a message I want to send out to the conservative people currently in office, by the by. Don’t be so stupid that you’re going against  your populace, because you WILL get yourself tossed out, and that definitely isn’t going to help your party.

When we polarize, as we currently are, the checks and balances built into our government don’t work as well. I agree with the calls for unity, even if I disagree with a lot of the people who are doing the calls. I don’t want a divided states… I want the United States. We’re a grand experiment and I don’t want it to end on my watch.

There are two basic types of devices, an embedded system, and a general system.

There are embedded systems everywhere. Your smart TV. The Chromecast you have attached to your “dumb” TV. Your coffee maker, your washing machine or drier.

These are a few of the embedded systems you use every day. There are some that are “critical” systems. Your car, likely, has an embedded system. If that system were to be modified, it could cause “bad things” to happen.

Medical devices are also considered to be critical systems. The computers that control your IV medical drip, even the automatic blood pressure machines or any of the machines that are used for monitoring are critical.

While the blood O2 monitor, attached to your finger, might not seem critical, if the values it is reporting are in error, your health care professional (doctor) could miss diagnose something.

Other examples of critical systems include: many military computer systems, voting systems, systems processing classified information, alarm systems, spacecraft control systems.

Your computer and laptop are not normally considered to be embedded systems, yet they have a part that is embedded. That is the BIOS on your computer and laptops.

Your phone and tablets are a sort of hybrid, where a large part is embedded, but there is an easy way to add other software.

Update A System

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https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTNu7YoQ5/

This made me laugh out loud and scare our bunny!

Bread is often called the “staff of life,” and that’s because a man can survive on bread and water. We think of this, in today’s world of Wonderbread and fake food, as a cruel punishment. In medieval times, bread and water was fairly standard fare for a person. In the 1750s, bread was 60% of the average colonist’s daily food intake. Today, that would be considered outrageous and possibly dangerous. Then, the wheat was whole, and even when finely ground (very doable along the many rivers in water-powered mills), it contained all of the natural protein and fat of the kernel.

This recipe is one that I’ve developed on my own. It’s a blend of several recipes that I’ve worked on over the years. It combines a pain de mie recipe, a no-knead recipe that I love, and the “beginner’s loaf”  from a book of Chris’s, Bread Alone. It’s the culmination of about 20 years of practice, learning, failures, successes, and surprises as I learned enough about bread baking to casually consider teaching myself to use a wood fired beehive oven at the Fort.

This is not an easy recipe. It is a simple recipe, however. The beginner bread recipe I mention above is the best place to go for instructions on how to bake bread. If you do what the authors tell you, you will eventually make amazing loaves of bread, every time. It will take a few years of practice, though, and you will probably make up new swear words as you go along. This recipe here, is not as difficult as the beginner loaf, but will not teach you as much about baking as you make it. I heartily encourage you to make it entirely by hand at least a half dozen to a dozen times before indulging in the use of a MixMaster or other bread making machine. Getting your hands onto fresh dough is good for you mentally, and the resulting bread will feed you physically and spiritually. There’s definitely something “more than human” about creating a loaf of bread.

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Ok, but what does that mean? More importantly, what does it mean to us?

To get an example of cognitive dissonance in “practice”, dig up “I Mudd” from Star Trek. At the end, the crew destroys the androids by setting up cognitive dissonance in their “logical” brains.

One such method was Spock saying to one android “I love you”, and to another, identical android “But I hate you.” When the androids point out that they are identical, Spock replies, “Exactly.”

The left has been trained to exist in a state of cognitive dissonance.

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Brandon debunks some idiot’s claims of “fake”. 1 MOA red dot on a 2 MOA rifle at 130 to 150 Yards gives you a 4 inch grouping.

One of the most interesting things I’m currently discovering, is how to move back in time. What happens when there is no electricity? What can we do, how can we do it?

One path is to learn how to live off-grid. This is part of where I am. This is why I spent the time learning how to make a steam expansion engine, learning how to run it, and then learned how to build a 2 HP boiler.

That steam engine is intended to run a generator or a lathe, depending. Yes, I have some generators, but water and wood will be easier, in some situations, to get than other fuel.

But there is another entire type of skill set, that of taking a step back in time.

Let me discuss just one part of this, I want to make some items, such as a table-top. That’s easy, just drive to the lumberyard and buy the lumber, do the glue-up, feed it through the plainer, sand it and a bit more. Easy stuff.

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I posted about prepping a bit back on GFZ. I think it’s a topic that needs to be covered on a regular basis, and even if you have been doing it for a dog’s age, the reminders help get you in the right head space. Now, I don’t do the whole “deep state bunker prep” thing. First, I don’t believe the world will go into that much chaos, that quickly. It’s going to be a slow decline (and in my very strong opinion, the pandemic proved that). Second, and more importantly, bunker prep isn’t sustainable.

I don’t know if any of you have watched Love, Death, and Robots (it’s on Netflix if you haven’t, and it’s well worth the watch), but there’s a couple of fairly amazing shorts that cover prepping topics. The one I’m personally thinking of is in season 2, when the three robot friends are touring America after the death of all the humans. They walk around an area where a bunch of people lived in bunkers. They’re all dead, too. Another show, can’t remember the name of it, shows a couple who stays two years in their bunker, and when they open the door they find out that the entire Earth has been destroyed and they’re just floating around on a chunk of ground. These both illustrate the problem with bunker prep.

If you set up a bunker for short term emergencies, that’s fine. It is not, however, a solution for surviving TEOTWAWKI. Eventually, you run out of food, water, or air. And then you die. Bunkers, pre-pack food (like MREs or emergency buckets), and hoarding ammo and firearms are basically just a way to die painfully and slowly.

Real prepping (yes, I said what I said) is learning enough skills to survive after TEOTWAWKI. Real preppers don’t waste time figuring out ways to try and survive a planet buster bomb or other doomsday scenarios, because there’s no point. If the planet is destroyed, you’re just going to die. If a plague comes through and you catch it, you’re possibly going to die. If someone bombs your city, you may die. These are not things to prep FOR.

Prepping is what you do after you survive. Yes, have a bunch of food stores set up, because that’s important. There might not be a grocery store to go visit, or it might be empty, or being run by a despot (who isn’t the current government). You may need to shelter to avoid a firestorm or waves of nuclear fallout or insurgents or invaders. That’s short term stuff.

After the firestorm or fallout or aliens move on, you’ll come out of your hidey hole, and then the real work begins. Surviving is easy. Living is a lot more complex and difficult.

I’ve talked about it before, saving seeds, learning skills, putting food up that’s shelf stable, making short, medium, and long term plans for emergencies. But how to you go about it all? There’s no one answer for how to prep for surviving and thriving. You have to come up with your own plan, that fits your family and your part of the world. The emergencies that I plan for likely aren’t the ones that should be planned for in a big city like Boston or NYC, for instance. I live in the boonies, and there are other issues I’ll have to deal with. City people will have to deal with zombies (the name for those who wander about robbing and pillaging during emergencies) and rationing and figuring out how and when to escape. People near the equator will have to plan for hot weather, and people farther north will have to plan for cold winters, possibly without electricity or dinosaur squeezings.

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