General

I know what I want to do, I am just not able to do it justice currently.

What is Charlie’s Voice?

This is taking up Charlie’s bloody microphone, not in hate, but in love and compassion.

It is being willing to listen to people ask questions and addressing them honestly with the truth and compassion. It is being willing to stand up for what is right but without acting out.

As one person put it, WWCD, What Would Charlie Do?

Since I believe that Charlie lived by WWJD, this is not meant to be a slight to any Christian; it is expanding on those ideals.

His voice is strong and positive.

But how did he convince people?

From what I have seen and read, his strongest point was to give people a smaller concept to grasp and think on. To personalize it. Instead of talking about weaponized lawfare, he talks in terms of a single person. Do you purchase things with credit? How do you pay for those things? How do you record those payments?

It is about getting the person to have something personal to work with.

So many of the big lies are so big that people can’t wrap their heads around them.

One I’ve heard recently is “Trump is a pedophile.”  Now the logic is a bit twisted, but I think it goes something like this: Trump’s DOJ took Epstein to court and got him convicted.  But because the court didn’t release the names of the people involved with Epstein’s crimes, Trump must be one of those people. Now the Biden administration couldn’t release the Epstein files because Trump had the records sealed. Now that Trump is attempting to get the files released, but it hasn’t happened yet, he must be on the list as a pedophile. Q.E.D. Trump is a pedophile.

On the other hand, Biden isn’t a disgusting pedophile, even if his daughter Ashley wrote about her father taking showers with her at inappropriate ages, because Biden is a kind man, while we know that Trump is a criminal.

Trump having material protected and guarded by the Secret Service, which he had the legal right to have, is proof of criminality.  Biden having classified material stored in open boxes in his garage is not proof of criminality. Even though Biden never had the authority to remove those classified documents from their proper locations.

It is hard to follow the logic. But it is there, you just have to tease it out.

Lyrics

“Friends” are falling away like dead leaves. I’m trying to take my cue from the falling autumn leaves… it’s okay to let go of the past, and sometimes it can be beautiful.

One of the rough ones happened this morning. Opening up FaceBook to do some author stuff, and I run into someone I thought was a friend, posting up the entire of the “ciao bella” song that Kirk’s shooter had on one of his bullets. Just that, just the words of the song and nothing more. I realized that’s basically a threat right now. I didn’t hesitate to delete and then block him, but it hurt.

Another wasn’t Charlie specific. A very old friend (r/l tho we don’t get to see each other very often and interact more online) posted about “why can’t they learn that their stupid 2A stuff isn’t as important as the kids that were just killed?!” I admit… I hesitated. I thought long and hard. She didn’t threaten anyone directly. But then again, she IS threatening. When someone is telling me that my protected Constitutional rights are “not as important,” you’re giving someone tacit permission to use weapons to take my rights away. And that’s not directly violence, but it’s definitely the precursor to it. And so I deleted and blocked her, too.

When Charlie got shot, I ran out of fucks to give. There are no more chances. I don’t care if you’re liberal, but if you glorify the death of someone (and that includes schoolkids) then I don’t need you as my friend. If you want to have the government take away my personal rights, then you obviously don’t want to be my friend.

On the other side of that line, though, other things are happening. A friend’s wife, who I’ve known online for a while but never really met, introduced herself at a wedding I attended on Sunday. She took me aside and said she wanted to make sure I was okay, because she knew so many people who were hurting over Charlie. She calls herself a liberal, but said she’s been desperate for a conservative friend who is willing to talk and listen and debate (gently). We’re going to get together and have some chats, and go over some ideas and such. There are some parts of conservatism that I consider myself qualified to speak on (1A and 2A, for instance), and others where I will likely reach out to friends for help. I explained that I’m squeaky brand new… and that I’m also only conservative right now (imo) because the mid-line has moved so far left because of leftist stupidity, and that in any sane world, I’d be considered slightly left of center, a moderate. It was a good conversation.

It was also good to show up at a wedding, escorted by my boyfriend (who was packing), only to find myself surrounded by a handful of people who were also packing, and one who was very much open carrying a beautiful 9mm. I complimented him on both his sidearm and his holster (which was very nice), and he smiled and said in times like these, it doesn’t pay to be unarmed. It felt good.

Starting this Wednesday, there will be a new weekly feature tentatively named “Charlie’s Voice.’

The goal is to produce a persuasive article to carry Charlie Kirk’s voice forward.

The guidelines are something like this:

• Take a left-leaning stance, position, or statement at face value.
• Listen to the statement/argument as if a single person were presenting it to you, face-to-face.
• Extract from the statement/argument the actual points of the person presenting.
• Using persuasive language, present your counterargument in such a way that it brings that person closer to our ideals and goals.
• Maintain neutral language, no gotcha phrases, no barbed zingers.

I do not expect this to be easy, which is why I’m asking for help from you.

Submissions go to info@troglodite.com. We’d prefer a Google Doc, LibreOffice document, or a Word document. Submissions will be edited for grammar and may be sent back with red pen if more than grammar changes are required.

Please include the byline you wish to have your article published under.

Examples

If you want to write on these topics, feel free; I’m putting them out here now because I will be working on something for Wednesday.

President Trump is a felon.

Example response:

You are correct; Donald Trump was convicted in a New York state court of 34 counts of falsifying business records.

If there are 34 counts, does this mean that Trump was convicted of 34 different crimes? The court says yes; maybe you won’t agree with the court.

Over the course of nine months, Trump signed 9 checks to Michael Cohen. The checks were normal checks with a memo line. The prosecution claimed that the text on the memo line was fraudulent, resulting in 9 different counts. Because that memo line was repeated in a ledger, each entry in the ledger became another count.

The prosecution decided that there were 4 counts for each check that Trump wrote, leading to the 34 count number. All of which were for the payment of one bill.

This would be similar to you buying a new set of golf clubs on credit, then writing a check once a month to pay off the bill, but instead of writing “New golf clubs,” you wrote “Entertainment.”

The prosecutor’s argument was that anything apart from “hush payment” was fraudulent.

There will be more, of course; this is just the start.

I look forward to your submissions.

My office chair has been failing for about a year now. The gas tube gave up the fight. The left armrest had cracked. And the entire thing had become one uncomfortable mess.

As somebody who sits in front of his computer for many hours per week, this was unacceptable. Worse, it was painful to sit for more than about an hour. After an hour, the discomfort was making it difficult to program or get other work done.

I bought a new chair. I’ve spent the last couple of hours sitting in it. There are different issues, but mostly it is me getting used to the new chair. It is nice to have my eyes at the correct level for my screens.

Auburn Duck Race

This is an event that Ally has been attending for a few years. She dresses in period garb, does a cooking demo, and sells her cookbooks. Normally I drive her out to the event, drop her and her gear off, head home, and then go and pick her up after the event.

We were both uncomfortable with her being in a crowd after what happened to Charlie, so I went along and stayed. SIG P365, two spare magazines, truck gun briefcase.

Nothing happened; we had fun, plenty of people, some book sales. I got to see one of my clients in person and met his family.

Shit Talk from Leftist

I had mentioned to Ally that the amount of Trump and right bashing on the Reddits had gone down. I spoke too soon. It is still full of hate and evil.

She’s right! Donnie started this!

J6 was the most violent thing in living memory. That’s the problem; MAGA lives in a completely different reality from what is actually going on. They don’t have the mental capacity to apply critical thinking skills, they just ride on hatred and lies.

I think I’m going to have a “speak out” day once a week.

Ally posted about the difficulty in saying no. I read her article and found that it didn’t really hit home with me.

Not because it was written badly. It was well written. But it just didn’t connect. I know I am good at saying no.

In a resource limited situation, hard decisions need to be made. Some of those decisions will be life or death in nature. We need to think about those today. If you can convince yourself that you are capable of saying “no” in those situations, then you are a stronger person than I am.

To help prepare myself, I run different situations to decide what I am willing to do, what I must do, and what I can’t do.

Let’s take a simple one: a couple that knows you but whom you don’t know stops at the red line and places their newborn child there. They yell up to you, “Please save our child!” before turning and walking away, in tears.

They aren’t asking for help for themselves. They know you will say “no.” Instead they have left an innocent at your doorstep.

You have the following choices:

• Do nothing until the baby dies of exposure or is killed by something.
• Take the child into your care, reducing the supplies your people are depending on, adding a drain on your people’s resources.
• You kill the baby outright.

What do you do? Is it an easy choice? It isn’t easy for me to choose. I also have to deal with my family. How will they respond? How will I say “no” to them.

An even simpler example of this is personal. I have been saying “no” to pets since before I got married to my current wife. I have allergies that are not helped by animal fur. So they ask for a dog; I say no. They ask for a cat. I say no. They get a rabbit and have it in the house before I can say “no.”

How do I say “No” now that the animal is in the house? That was 5 rabbits ago. Three of them passed after expensive vet bills. My kid is at college, my wife attempts to care for one of the rabbits, and Ally cares for the other. Regardless, it didn’t matter that I said “no”; they just ignored me.

Will you be able to kill that baby when your spouse is in tears begging you to bring the innocent child into your care?

Here is a different one. You are out on a scavange hunt. You have taken one of your neighbor’s kids with you. You have been working with this family to the joint benefit of both groups.

During the hunt, the kid is badly injured. He is unlikely to survive his injuries. You have limited choices:

• Do you put yourself at risk to drag/carry the kid back to home base, knowing he might die in the process or bring the raiders down upon you?
• Do you leave him there to die?
• Do you leave him there, book it for home base, and hope you get back to him before he dies?
• Do you use your medical gear to make him comfortable, knowing that gear is never going to be replaced?
• Do you kill him to put him out of his misery?

Now compound this with having the neighbor with you. He is begging you to save his kid, to do risky things, to use your resources to save his kid. Can you still say “no”?

How about this one? Your kid is injured. They are dying. There is nothing you can do to save them; the most you can do is extend their life, and in doing so, use irreplaceable supplies, and they will be in pain the entire time.

Are you willing to kill your child? Are you willing to let them suffer? Are you willing to kill your group in six months for another day with your child?

I know that I don’t want to make that decision. I know that my wife would hate me if I didn’t do everything in my power to save my child, damn the costs.

If you think you can say “no,” then I don’t think you have thought about the hard choices. I agree with you; you are good at saying no. You are likely better prepared to say no than most people. Now stretch yourself and find scenarios where it would be difficult to say no. Scenarios where saying no is the right choice, but you will be hated by your loved ones for making that choice.

Then look me in the eye and say, “I can say “no.”” without having that niggling feeling in the back of your head that maybe there will come a time when you wont.

My father had degrees in engineering, something military, and business. He was also a carpenter, electrician, and cabinet and fine furniture maker.

I learned to look at things from watching him work.

At University, I was a teaching assistant (TA). We graded papers and programs, taught labs, and sometimes presented lectures.

This was a great way to learn, and I loved doing it. I still love teaching.

One of the computer science professors started in the psychology department. Since computers were relatively new, he became interested in them as a psychology problem. To that end, he wrote a textbook about programming. He then requested and was assigned to teaching CPS300 FORTRAN for Engineers.

This was a large lecture hall with around 300 to 400 students in it. Labs were taught by TAs.

His big thing was flow charting. Everybody loved flowcharts at that time. And he had some of the most beautiful flowcharts I’ve ever seen.

Mostly because he was using Nassi-Shneiderman Digrams. These things show program structure clearly, making it trivial to verify the correct functioning of the flowchart.

The problem with them is that they are almost impossible to modify. You didn’t so much modify them as rewrite them.

As engineering students, we were taught piecewise progression. You know where you are, you have an idea of where you want to be, so you take a step in that direction. Verify that the step got you closer; iterate until you are there.

If it becomes impossible to proceed, you backtrack and try again until you reach your goal.

Professor Hans Lee wasn’t an engineer. He was a psychology dude. About a third of the way through the first term working with him, I had a private conversation with him. The gist of the conversation was, “How do you write programs? What do you do when your program doesn’t work?”

His answer was that he visualizes the complete Nassi-Shneiderman, draws it out, and then translates that into code. And if the program doesn’t work, he “throws that design out” and creates a new version.

I had to explain to him that his students were not creating the flowcharts first; they were using the flowcharts to document the code they had already written and proven out. And that as engineers, they were all taught a piecewise problem solving method. His methods might work for the general student body, but for engineers it was a bad fit.

This was the first time I actually vocalized a part of being an engineer actually means.

One of the things I do at The Fort is “fixing” things. Here’s the problem with that: many of the things that exist at the fort don’t have Google pages telling you how to use them. They certainly don’t have IKEA instruction manuals on how to put them together. And many of them are broken, repaired badly, or missing parts.

So I look at things and figure out how they go together and how they work. For me, it just makes sense that tab A goes into slot A. I have been told that most people can’t identify “slot A” or “tab A,” much less that the two go together.

This played out last weekend when I stopped at The Fort; they had a newly donated great wheel plus some parts to go with it. I went over to give it the once-over to determine its condition and what we would need to do to get it back in production.

The answer seems to be replacing two leather axel holders, two leather adjuster holders and putting new drive string on.

The thing that happened, was that as I looked at the wheel and parts, it was obvious to me how the pieces should align. But the kicker in fitting two pieces together was a notch in one of the pieces.

The first rule is that any cut or extra work was done for a reason. The spokes are turned down for a reason: to make the wheel more responsive. The little grooves are for beauty.

Given that rule, why is there a notch cut in that part? What does it do? Some craftsman spent the time to put the notch there. Why are those risers threaded? Making a threaded hole in wood and the matching screw is extra work.

Why is the axle bearing for this part in a separate peg instead of being a part of the riser?

Each of these questions leads to only one answer.

The notch is so that the spindle drive pulley has enough room to run freely. The riser posts are threaded to be able to adjust the tension on the drive string. The separate pegs to hold the axle bearings (holes in the pegs) are so that they rest on top of the risers and the risers can be adjusted.

It all makes perfect sense, once you know what to look for.

Politics And Engineering

When something happens, politicians want to be seen addressing the problem, right now, in very public view. The issue is often that they have no idea what the problem or issue actually is. Instead, they have feelings about what the cause of the issue is.

So they propose a change. What they don’t do is look at what the possible results might be. Instead they focus on what they want the results to be, becoming blind to potential failure or, at best, a waste of taxpayer money.

The problem with most bills is that they are experiments with our freedoms, our livelihood, and our search for happiness. They never seem to have a plan for what to do if their experiment fails. Or if they do, it is mostly “throw more money at it.”

Behind the  “read more” are lots of photos, so if you’re not on a good connection, beware. This is also replacing FBEL for the week, because I don’t have the mental space to write about politics right now. I hope you enjoy.

This past weekend was the first of three at Maine Renaissance Faire. It’s a lot of fun, a TON of work, and you never know what the weather will be. This is my fourth year presenting at MERF (as we call it), and though three weeks is a LOT at a single site, I have been looking forward to it.

When I prepare for a faire, I need to worry about different types of things. First, I need to address my infrastructure. When I’m at MERF, I get to use the kitchen tent of the Brotherhood of the Arrow and Sword, which is my 15th century historical group. They’ve been around for a couple of decades now, and so they’ve acquired the kind of equipment that I can only dream of. They have many amazing looking tents, trestle tables, medieval lamps and tripods and clothing, things I’m still working at achieving and creating. I have better cookware than they do, though. 😀

Their kitchen tent is a massive wedge that opens on one side. In modern parlance we’d call it a Baker’s tent, though it’s much larger than any one I’ve ever seen before. It can be used with the front closed, making it a plain old wedge tent (albeit one large enough to hold six queen sized air beds with room to move around) or you can put the side up (as seen in the pictures below) to use it for vending out of. This is where I sell my cookbooks, and where my cooking demonstrations begin (they end at the fire, of course).

The other tents are the type used by various medieval military. There are some bell wedges (wedges with ends that bump out to give you a bit of extra room), some square and rectangular wall tents, and a round tent (the most usual used by the average knight, at least according to paintings). My own tent is a tiny wedge, just big enough for me and a small cot and my personal gear. It, too, opens on one side (just like its big brother, the kitchen tent), but it’s not tall enough for most people to stand under. I’m tiny (only 5’1″), so it works for me. I have to stoop a bit, but not much, and I can get dressed standing up by shoving my cot on its side. When I’m at an event with my sweetie, though, we need something larger. We’ve been staying in the “modern camping” area for the past few years, in a very modern pop up easy set up tent that accommodates our queen air bed. I wanted to be closer to my Brotherhood, though, and so my sweetie finagled a “long term borrow” of a 9×9 wall tent for our use from his sister. It is just large enough for our queen bed, our personal clothing bags, and one “gear box” each. Luckily that’s all we really need, as other items are either stored in the car (cash box, harp) or in the kitchen tent (cast iron, chairs, tables).

Read More

Today, I sit in a home that keeps the rain off my head, the cold away in winter, and provides me with shelter from the elements.

It is my castle. I, and my bank, own it.

I have a vehicle that will carry me and mine. It is a workhorse that does what I need.

I have a machine , a woodshop and am in the process of creating a space to do hand woodworking.

I have earned these things by marrying correctly and working hard. Note, I married badly, twice, and it cost me wealth.

I have taken part in the unalienable rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

My country was the first to recognize that these rights are unalienable. That they come from our creator, not from man, not from king, not from government. They are mine by right of being born.

I’m proud of my country. I’m proud that we recognize these rights.

When Jimmy Carter was my president, I was proud to be an American. When Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush were my presidents, I was proud to be an American.

When Obama and Biden were my presidents, I was still proud to be an American. I am still proud to be an American with Trump in office.

My country is worth being proud of. The only other country that has done as much for this world is the British Empire.

Unfortunately, the British Empire no longer exists.

When Carter bent over to the Communist “students” that had invaded our country in Iran, he said, “Please use some lube,” and not much else.

I was embarrassed by his response. I was disgusted by his actions. I was angry that he chose to let Iran do that to my countrymen. I was still proud to be an American.

When the party controlling my country are shitbags, worthy of nothing but derision and ridicule, they still represent my country. We, The People, are still good people. We still step up when there is need.

In most major disasters, American citizens give more than most countries. Then our country gives even more.

We are, by far, the most generous people in the world. It is one of the reasons that we are such suckers for emotional blackmail. We care.

If you want to say, “Not my president,” then give up your citizenship and emigrate to a different country. Accept their leadership, their politics, and their largesse. Until then, he is your president.

It is my country, right or wrong.

When it is wrong, I will step up to be heard. I will use the ballot box, I will use the jury box, and I hope and pray that I never have to use the cartridge box.

Right or wrong, Conservative or leftest, it is my country, I love her, I will defend her, I am proud of her.

How do we know that either Hell is one single temperature or there are no engineers in Hell? If there was a temperature differential and an engineer, they would have made a heat pump and be enjoying mild temperatures.

When you have a device that can both heat and cool the inside of a building, we call it a “heat pump”. An Air Conditioner is a heat pump that is optimized to pump heat out of a building.

A heat pump is a practical application of the Ideal Gas Law. The gist of the Ideal Gas Law, in this context, is that as the pressure decreases, heat also decreases.

You can feel this when using a spray can. If you allow the gas to escape, the pressure inside decreases and the can gets colder.

So a heat pump works by having a compress turn a gas into a liquid. This causes the temperature of the liquid to go up, lots. That hot liquid is then moved through a radiator. A fan blows air through that radiator, transferring heat from the liquid to the air.

This causes the air to be warmer leaving the heat pump than when it entered.

That compressed liquid is now cooler. It is then moved to an orifice where it is allowed to expand rapidly. Following the Ideal Gas Law, this causes the temperature to drop.

This cold gas is then pushed through a different radiator. This radiator takes heat from the air being blown across it and transfers that heat to the gas.

The gas then ends up back at the compressor, ready to start its trip again.

Heat pumps can be efficient if there is enough temperature differential on the waste side. In other words, they don’t work well in the north country where you are attempting to pull heat from sub freezing air. The cooling side still works in hot places because it is easier to add heat to already hot air than to pull heat from cold air.

The real problem is that compressor. That compressor does real work. Real work always has waste heat. So that compressor is turning expensive electricity into heat and then trying to get rid of the heat.

For a heat pump to work, you need an appropriate gas, a compressor, two heat exchangers, and at least two fans.

The Swamp Cooler

These things are old technology. They have been around for thousands of years. The basic method they use is to move air across water. The air moving across the water causes the water to evaporate. As the water evaporates, it sucks heat out of the air.

We will start with some numbers.

To raise one gram of water (also known as a ml) requires one calorie.

There are 252 calories in a BTU.

To raise one ml of water from 24°C to 100° requires 76 Calories.

To cause water to change state from a liquid to a gas requires 540 Calories.

That means that causing one ml of water to evaporate will take two BTUs of heat.

A swamp cooler does just this. It transfers heat into water vapor. You place the swamp cooler where there is a cross breeze. A fan blows air across a water impregnated membrane of some sort, think a porous towel or a piece of cheese cloth.

As the air moves across the water, the water evaporates, pulling heat from the air.

The cooler air now flows into the room with a little more moisture in it.

Depending on the amount of moisture in the air, a swamp cooler can drop the temperature, in the local area, by up to 30°F.

That’s not bad.

Above is a homemade version of a swamp cooler. It works by blowing air on water that then evaporates and cooler air comes out the side vents.

I purchased a Chinese made version. It is about 2.5 ft tall, about a foot square. It holds 4 liters of water, a little more than a gallon.

It has a fiber honeycomb to hold the water. There is a small fish tank type pump in the reservoir to pump water up to a holding tank. From there, water flows at a fixed rate into the honeycomb.

There is one major fan to move air across the honeycomb. There is a second, small motor to move vanes to redirect the air.

That’s it.

This thing pulls less power than one of our normal window fans. That’s because we aren’t running the fan at full speed. Instead, we are running the fan at medium while the pump and oscillator run.

And bluntly, the only reason I know the oscillator has its own motor is because there are electronic controls to turn it off and on.

One nice thing is the remote. There have been a couple of times when the room has gotten too cold for sleeping comfortably. The remote has an easy to find “off” button. Which is what I use.

Total cost for this? $99 from Amazon.

If you are running fans for cooling, it is worth while looking into a modern swamp cooler.