General

Elon Musk is making plans to send men to Mars. They will be going on a one-way journey. It will take them months to get there. Once they arrive, there is no short-term way to return. They are risking it all.

In 1620, 132 people boarded a small ship and sailed west. They were at sea for 10 weeks, nearly three months. The trip to Mars will take 115 days, or so, 16.4 weeks. Not all that much longer than the trip on the Mayflower.

The colonization of America, by Europe, was a daunting task. Most people who made the journey had no expectation of every being able to return to the land of their birth. When they arrived, they might be with earlier colonists, or they might be in a new location.

When they landed, they had to survive. They had limited resources to forge a new life in a new land. Some died, others thrived.

That sense of “we can do” is part of our heritage. It is part of my heritage. I hope it is part of your heritage.

Over the last half century, it feels like we have lost that mindset.

My Ex. used to tell me what her mother taught her, “Why try? You know you are going to fail.” There were so many things that she never tried because she “knew” she would fail.

My parents instilled in me a sense of ability. Do you want to go fishing? Go fishing. Do you want to go hunting? Go hunting. Do you want to disassemble your motorcycle to attempt to repair it? Do it.

Everything I attempted my parents were there giving me support to succeed. I hope I have given that same level of support to my children.

I came out of that childhood knowing that I can do better, do well, succeed. Failure is a possibility, but a failure is just a data point, telling me how not to do that thing. Now go try again.

We lost that.

We wait for the government to show up and help. “What are the ten scariest words in the English language? We’re from the government, we’re here to help.” — Ronald Reagan.

Katrina showed that. Sandy showed that. Those cities could not deal, they demanded help from the country. The government responded. And the people were not satisfied.

This weekend, hurricane Helene made landfall. Florida was hit, but the storm moved north and dumped water on the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee. People describe it as a once in a 1000-year storm.

Entire mountains washed away. Homes, businesses, roads, bridges are all washed away in the mud slides and water.

I had family that used to live in that area. I’ve been there. It is gorgeous. Living on the side of a mountain, where your driveway leads to a family road, and it is 1000 feet in elevation to reach a county road.

I can close my eyes and see it, and it is beautiful.

Our government cannot help us. When we talk about FEMA coming to help, what they actually bring is a checkbook. They are money people. They are management people. FEMA has no construction equipment, rescue gear, supplies on hand to help in an Emergency.

They are there to pay bills.

So instead, the American Spirit came out in force.

Because our Government has been failing us, we, The People, have been learning that we have the power. We can do. We do have a voice.

And that spirit is there in the South East. It is people dragging their Bass Boats up from the Gulf coast to do rescue missions. It is private pilots, flying their personal copters into to the area with supplies and to rescue people.

It is a company that trains pack mules showing up with mule trains to haul supplies.

It is people sending targeted donations. It is people handing some of their food and supplies for the mobile to move forward.

It is people, who, like myself, own construction equipment (John Deere 210C), showing up and putting their equipment to use.

It is we, The People, acting like a community, standing shoulder to shoulder doing the right thing.

I don’t have places for you to donate. I don’t have a list of things that are needed.

Find those for yourself. If you do locate a source that you trust, please tell us and include your source or reason for trusting.

God bless and watch over those at risk.

This is from a screenshot from Facebook or X. I have not verified the source, but it sounds like her.

The history of the race to the moon is amazing. There is so much that happened behind the scenes, out of sight of the public because it was that dangerous.

My parents kept me awake for the moon landing. I remember watching Neil Armstrong step foot on the moon.

I am currently following Elon Musk’s personal goal of putting men on Mars. In 5 or so years, I hope to be watching man set food on Mars, to stay.

The short of it, watch the movie. It does a good job of telling the story of Neil Armstrong.

Then visit https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/apollo-11-what-we-saw to listen to the story of Apollo 11 or watch it:

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/WGmyPedxhacbTcmu

Well worth the time to watch all four parts and the movie.

Enjoy!

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTFMrGM3X/

I love this woman. She is one of the people whose words and thoughts made a difference to me in coming around to the right.

Today my father passed. He was missing his wife, Prue, of 64 years. For the last 4 months, since her passing, he has been asking everybody that talks to him if they have seen Prue.

I believe he is in a better place, with his wife, young and joyful, once again.

While at the Fort, one of the visitors to come through, was from Australia.

I wanted to break out into songs from Men At Work, but restrained myself.

During our conversation, we were talking about the nasties that live in Australia.

Of course, there were the spiders. We agreed that spiders were worse down under.

We agreed that koala bears are cute to look at but nasty, vicious animals if they aren’t drugged.

She explained that the big red kangaroos are nasty critters. They will lean back on their tails, then kick out with their legs in a way that will knock a strong man down.

The little gray ones are not as nasty.

Another thing I didn’t know, was that kangaroos are extremely destructive to crop land. They will eat a field bare.

This led to a discussion about the definition of varmint. I am not a lawyer, so check the regulations where you are before you depend on some random guy on the net.

It is my understanding that farmers are justified in removing destructive varmints. So when that cute deer is eating your crops, they are not deer, they are a varmint that can be removed. Same with several other animals.

Which led her to talking about American’s having guns. I described the lever actions over the sofa. Bear, Deer, Raccoon and Squirrel rifles. Or in gun culture language, 45-70, 30-30, .357 Magnum, and .22LR.

While we agreed that there were some nasty faunae in Australia, she felt that bears were worse. She wanted that 45-70, “Bear Rifle” if she was going walking in the woods of New England.

For me, the most interesting part was getting to ask her about the gun confiscation.

It was obvious that she had been asked this before. She started by trying to answer for the group. Not herself. I had asked her explicitly about her opinion, not the opinion of others.

She explained that she had turned in their rifles. Not because the state knew that she had the rifle, but because she and her family were afraid that somebody would snitch on them.

Once the guns were collected, crime started to go up. She wishes they still had guns, envoys the gun culture of America. And of course, strongly suggests that we not give up our guns.

These are people you should know about. They are often the people to put together the NPC videos of all the MSM saying the same thing of the same scripts.

They are also the people who provide the positive vs. negative percentages for MSM.

Biden Lashes Out After Judge Pauses His Executive Order Rewarding Long-Term Illegal Aliens with Path to Citizenship https://t.co/8Tha4Bzny3

— Media Research Center (@theMRC) August 29, 2024

Today is different. It is challenging to put into words what is different. I know what has changed, but finding the words is difficult.

More than 36 years ago, I was sitting in an operating room as a doctor was cutting my wife’s belly open. I was in scrubs, looking and feeling out of place.

I had informed the doctor ahead of time that if there was a choice to be made between saving my wife or my child that my wife would take priority.

My child was six months early. She is now a successful mid to upper manager in a large corporation.

My second set of children came before my oldest graduated from middle school.

Today, my youngest children, twins, start classes at University.

The house seems quiet. Their spoor is being quietly removed from the public areas, reviling my mess/spoor.

I have been informed that there will be cleaning done. That I will be moving my “stuff” out of common areas and into my areas.

I’m both sad for the silence in the house. I’m also at a loss. This is the first day in over 36 years when my children were not a major part of any decision I made.

My wife is a teacher. She is a darn good teacher. She has a couple of masters, is working on another, besides having a bachelors. She is constantly doing continuing education classes.

For years, I would talk about The Teachers Union in a negative light. She took that as a personal attack because she is a teacher.

When I was just entering 1st grade, they had just started a new language curriculum. It was a five-year plan. The gist was to move students through the k-12 process cleanly and with a good foundation.

At the end of first grade, we moved to Wisconsin. In Wisconsin, most kindergarteners arrive knowing how to read. I didn’t know how to read as a 2nd grader.

Later we went through “new math”. It did not bring much to the table. It did make it extremely difficult for parents to assist their children.

The Education Industry had managed to drive a wedge between children and their parents. Parents were made to look stupid because they didn’t know the new math methods.
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We live in a strange world. There is so much information at our fingertips that it is almost impossible to comprehend just how much of an information age we live in.

I’ve talked about this in the past, my mother was a telephone operator, as was her sister. They worked in a large town in Wisconsin.

There were two T1 trunks heading towards Chicago and two T1 trunks headed west towards Minneapolis. This means they could have a grand total of 96 long-distance calls going at any one time.

The grand total of the bandwidth for the town was 6.176 Mbit/second. That was it.

In the early 90s, we were mostly using 10base2 and 10baseT connections. That is, 10 Mb/s. The actual throughput was closer to 5 Mbps. So, about the same bandwidth as the entire town.

We were pleased when we upgraded to 100baseT. We were also using 125Mbps fiber connections. We actually had more network bandwidth than disk bandwidth.

Today, most of my boxes, at the office/house, are 1000baseT. I’m in the process of upgrading the infrastructure to 10Gbit/second. This isn’t for the servers, most of them will continue to be 1Gbps connections, but the inter-switch connections will upgrade to 10Gbps.

Why is this of any interest? Why am I doing this? Simple, I currently have 70 TB of storage at the home. This is about to get to nearly 100 TB. There will be 5 servers with 24 TB of disk each, 2 servers with 12 TB of disk. Those servers need to be able to move data very rapidly. The bottleneck has become the network, again.

This storage is for every movie I ever purchased plus daily backups, plus more software than I can shake a stick at.

Each of the primary servers cost $300 to stand up. $100 for the computer, $200 for disk drives. The other servers are multipurpose, so they have more CPU and more memory.

For you, old folks, you might remember the encyclopedias of your youth. This was the single largest collection of knowledge we knew. The Encyclopedia Britannica was 32 volumes in size. It was released on a two CD version. Each CD held 750 Mbytes of data.

1.5 GB total.

That encyclopedia would consume 0.00101725% of my storage. And I’m small compared to the bigger boys out there.

All of this is to say, there is nothing that has ever been digitized that doesn’t now exist somewhere on the Internet. Storage is cheap.

If you have ever sent a “dick pic”, it is on the Internet, somewhere. If you have ever sent a “bra pic”, it exists. It doesn’t go away.

If you have ever written a comment or posted an article, it exists, somewhere.

There are entities whose entire business model is to scarf every last byte from the internet.

To quote a great philosopher, quoting some stranger: