• At this time of year, with the blisteringly cold nights, a pot of hearty potato soup is just the thing to warm you. I love this plain, where I get to enjoy the simple flavors of the potato itself. I also love it “blinged out” with cheese and onions and other delicious additives. It’s super easy to make, too!

    Ingredients:

    • two tbsp margarine, butter or olive oil
    • one potato per person, plus one extra, diced, skins on or off to taste
    • one to two onions, chopped roughly
    • one tbsp minced garlic per person
    • enough chicken or vegetable stock to cover the potatoes completely
    • milk or cream, to taste
    • finely chopped fresh parsley (optional)
    • crumbled fresh bacon (optional)
    • shredded cheese of your choice (optional)

    In a soup pot, heat your butter or oil and add the onions. Cook for a few minutes, until the onions are clear and limp. Add the garlic and stir well, cooking for another minute. If you are using fresh parsley, add half of it now and give the onions a good stir, then add the potatoes and the broth, just to cover them. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer until potatoes are tender and starting to fall apart.

    Remove the pot from the heat. Using a potato masher, mash the potatoes until they are the consistency you like. Some people prefer a lumpy soup, with large chunks of potatoes (that would be me). Others like a smooth, pureed soup (my children), and this can be achieved by pouring the soup into a food processor or blender and giving it a bit of a whir. Alternatively, you can use an immersion blender easily enough for something in between.

    Once the soup is the right consistency, return it to a medium high heat and bring it to a low boil. Add your cream or milk if you want, and salt and pepper to taste. Simmer until it’s as thick as you like it. As a quick fix, if you find your soup isn’t thick enough, you can always add dehydrated potato flakes until it’s the right thickness. Add the remaining fresh parsley right before removing it from the heat, and stir to distribute evenly. Serve the soup in large bowls garnished with a sprig of parsley, and a sprinkle each of bacon and cheese.

    Notes:

    If you’re in a real hurry, or you’re exhausted and just want potato soup, use instant potato flakes in your favorite flavor. Add enough liquid to make it soupy, then add your onions, parsley, and toppings. This isn’t as good as making it yourself, but it’s nice in a pinch or when you’re camping and don’t want to be bothered with whole potatoes.

    You can add all sorts of things to potato soup. A loaded baked potato soup would have bacon, onions, sauteed mushrooms, and cheese. You could do broccoli and cheese as a topper for something that pretends to be healthier. Add a dollop of sour cream and paprika to the top for a creamier finish. Use your imagination!

            

  • So the Mexican cartels have decided that they want to play games and win big prizes.

    They might actually find out. They have already started taking pot shots at federal agents on the north side of the river.

    I believe that we might just have that moment when Mexico remembers that they lost all the wars with the United States.

    A bit further south, Rubio visited with the president of Panama. They contract with the Chinese company has been canceled, and it looks like the canal will go back to treating US ships with due respect.

    The Governor of Canada is having a hissy fit. Seems that he doesn’t want to close the border to drug trafficking and unvetted terrorists crossing in to the rest of the US.

    Instead, he has decided to call what he thinks is a bluff. A 25% tariff goes into effect this week.

    Doubling down on stupid, Mexico and the great state of Canada have decided to impose tariffs on us.

    As the Texas Governor put it, “Texas has a larger economy than Canada, and we are not afraid to use it.”

    Have a fantastic week.

            
  • What he is saying is that the only people who are competent to run anything in this country are white men … why did he come out so quickly to attack women and Black people for ruining the FAA? He did that bc he is very vulnerable. He has some big questions to answer bc the FAA has been in chaos since he took over. Elon Musk, his co-president, forced out the FAA administrator … this could be a coverup.
    — Chris Murphy

    Trump’s statement was questioning DEI.

    He, and many of us on the right, believe that DEI means hiring unqualified people. If the criteria for hiring includes anything that is something about the person which is immalleable, then it is unacceptable.

    Years ago, we hired a woman to do technical writing. Having read some of her non-technical work, I expected this would work out. When she started submitting her work to me, I red penned it.

    This hurt her feelings.

    It hurt her feelings so much that she went to HR to complain about how mean I was to her.

    The answer, use a green pen.

    She wasn’t getting any better. My partner and I had a lunch meeting to discuss what to do with her.

    She had graduated from law school but had failed the bar.

    He was terrified, rightly so, that she would sue us if we fired her. We were afraid that she would use her status as a “woman” to claim that she was fired because she was a woman, not because she couldn’t do the job.

    We agreed to move her to a different part of the company, where she would not do as much harm. It didn’t really help.

    There was a lot more having to do with her, up to and including hiring a new HR person to fire her without fear.

    She wasn’t hired because she was female, she was kept on because she was female.

    At that time, we would have loved to have hired a black, female, physically disabled, capable person. Why? Because all the highly skilled positions in our company were white males. Those were the people who applied, those were the people that had the merit. Those were the people we hired.

    Affirmative Action and DEI have caused significant harm to our country. Removing it from our culture is a good thing.

    Chris Murphy says the quiet part out loud, and doesn’t even realize it.

    He immediately went to “stopping DEI” is an attack on women and blacks. He is admitting that he believes that women and black cannot qualify when there is a merit-based hiring policy in place.

    This is why only leftists believe that minorities, PoC are to stupid or lazy or broke to be able to get a voter ID.

            

  • I’ve written and deleted this post a dozen times… but here it goes.

    This week, a large group of people who have never met me, never seen what I have done for Western North Carolina, attempted to get me fired from my job.

    Let me be very clear.

    If you think you can intimidate me into silence… go fuck yourself.

    Anyone who knows me on this platform knows I have a heart for hurting people and I will fight to the ENDS OF THE EARTH to make sure their voice is heard.

    What happened here in Western North Carolina is nothing short of one of the worst disasters of federal emergency help in government history.

    I don’t talk about this much, but I was ABSOLUTELY NOT a MAGA republican before the storm.

    I’m a tech bro that works remotely in WNC for a Seattle smart home company. I’m the EPITOME of someone who is liberal. I watched CNN exclusively for YEARS.

    I was the person that thought I was better than YOU for holding a political opinion I hadn’t fully thought through.

    I was that guy, and to those who knew me that way, I’m so sorry. I wish I could take back that arrogance.

    But now I know what I wish I knew long ago…

    For so many people, including me for years, it was the APPEARANCE of acting good that mattered, not the TRUE ACT of doing good in the word.

    If you’re reading this, and that’s you, and you want to change… please, I invite you to scroll through my posts for the past 4 months and see what has happened in Western North Carolina.

    Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

    Maybe your heart will change, mine did, and if it happened to mine… the hardest heart in the entire universe… I know it can happen to you too.

    When people run into the evil that is the left, they find that the center has left them right of center. Welcome

            
  • lectern, politician, politics, speakers, company, speech, man, commemorate, together, stage, presentation, occurs, microphone, lecture, politician, politician, politician, politician, politician, politics, politics, politics, speech, speech, speech, speech
    Photo by 7706992 on Pixabay

    Chris asked me to write this. He wanted me to write it because we got into a long, drawn out and rather loud discussion last night over it. It was emotional, on my part at least. I got very frustrated because I couldn’t seem to voice what I wanted to, and Chris was offering me solutions and excuses for Trump. That wasn’t what I wanted. Also, this hits me differently, I think, as someone new to “right of the left.”

    So let’s start at the beginning.

    I listened to Trump’s press conference about the DC crash. I started watching with a certain amount of nervousness, because I know Trump often says things during stuff like this. I was expecting a few gaffes, but I kind of got thrown sideways (emotionally) over some of what he said. For those who want the full transcript, it’s here. I’ll be quoting from it below.

    I was trying to not cringe over the commentary about how much better his (Trump’s) policies were than Biden or Obama’s. Frankly, when I’m tuning in to find out what’s going on with a crash, I do not want to hear finger pointing. Do that after, when we have facts in hand. But it’s Trump, and I put it off to grandstanding, which is normal for him no matter how much it irritates me. Then he said this:

    “But we’ll restore faith in American air travel. I’ll have more to say about that. I do want to point out that various articles that appeared prior to my entering office, and here’s one. The FAA’s diversity push includes focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities. That is amazing. And then it says, FAA says, people with severe disabilities are most underrepresented segment of the workforce and they want them in and they want them. They can be air traffic controllers. I don’t think so.”

    I know people who do piloting and ATC. While I know that there’s been a push to get women and people with different skin color into ATC, I didn’t think they’d lowered their standards. I did 15 minutes of investigation, and according to what I read, their method of finding people had changed, but their requirements for hiring had not. As a side note, apparently I didn’t look back far enough, as there’s a Fox article about changes done in 2015. I didn’t look that far back last night. Regardless, I translate the above statement from Trump to say, “People in wheelchairs and who are mentally defective can be air traffic controllers.” That statement is not true. Looking back on it now, it’s one of Trump’s “aggrandizement” statements, making his claim sound bigger than it is. I believe Chris would consider it to be a gaffe or misspeak, as opposed to a lie. I called it a lie last night. I was wrong about it being a lie, but I don’t think I’m wrong that it’s a bad statement.

    (more…)

            

  • When people ask me how much food I have prepped, I always say just about 18 months. It’s an odd number to many, and I often get asked why. The answer is, if the apocalypse begins right in the middle of summer and it’s too late to start planting, that’s the “worst case scenario.” From there to a finished crop is just about 18 months, give or take a few weeks. So 18 months is the longest I can expect to be with no food.

    That assumes, of course, that I know how to make a garden grow. Now, I do know, and I’ve practiced. At one point, we had a small farm with an acre of kitchen garden that friends and I tended. I raised chickens and we hunted, and we traded with locals for things we didn’t grow or hunt. It was a lovely way to live and I miss it terribly. Sadness aside, I spent four years or so learning how to grow a garden of sustainable size. I’ve done the practice, though I need to continue to practice.

    If you’ve never grown anything other than a few flowers, you need to begin learning how to grow crops now. This is not something you can “learn as you go” during an emergency. You need to know how to do all this stuff before an emergency. Do you know what to grow? Do you know how to grow it? Do you know how to harvest it? Do you know how to preserve its seeds, or otherwise get a crop the following year without getting seeds from a store? You must have the answers to all these questions and more before the SHTF.

    The first and most important question to ask yourself is what kind of food you can grow, and what kind you want to grow. You should focus on learning how to grow the things that are in the middle of that Venn diagram. I usually suggest people start with garlic, green beans, herbs, and some sort of squash. All four are easy to grow, and require only a bit of attention to keep the weeds and predators out. I can tell you that my family can eat 100 feet of green beans each year. That’s a LOT. Most people plant about half that, if they’re planning on growing all their beans rather than purchasing. What that does NOT include is seed for next year, and that’s an important thing to remember.

    I find that the best information for beginner gardeners comes from the Victory Garden networks out there (like these: Plant a Victory Garden and Vintage Victory Garden booklet). Victory Gardens were grown during WWII as a patriotic method of keeping commercially grown food for “the boys across the water.” Today, they’re an act of rebellion, because growing food makes you less dependent upon The Man. The idea of a Victory Garden is to provide enough supplemental food for your family that you don’t rely as heavily upon the government and commercial farmers to feed you. I suspect that this is a very good practice for all conservatives to begin as we move into a time of frugality and less government spending.

    (more…)

            

  • Banana Pi, Stay Away

    The board I purchased was a BPI-M2U or M2 Ultra. Nice little Pi-3 or pi-4 clone. It has BT, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, 2 USB ports, onboard eMMC flash, microSD, SATA, audio, two power modes, serial header, HDMI (full size). Just a nice little board.

    After a week, I finally managed to get ONE of a dozen images to boot. Raspbian doesn’t work. The best general version is Armbian. Regardless, only one would boot.

    That one is running Ubuntu 16.04. I’m still trying to upgrade it to 18.04.

    The board is unstable. It will run fine for a while, then power itself off. Or it will randomly reboot.

    Unless you are willing to face significant headaches, buy the real thing.

    Serial GPS NTP

    I have one of my serial GPS’s hooked to the BPI-M2U. The PPS is getting to the GPIO. The serial data is arriving on UART 2. All wonderful.

    Nice and stable. The jitter is way down.

    But because it is a banana and not a raspberry, I can’t get the PPS driver installed. I’m still hoping.

    Plane Crash and Trump 1.0

    It appears that Trump stuck his foot in his mouth during a press conference about the crash over the Potomac.

    It appears that he claimed that some air traffic controllers are DEI hires that are mentally challenged.

    For a president who is attacked every day for being a liar and for being stupid, it is not a good look when he says things like this.

    I listened to the ATC audio. My opinion is that the ATC messed up. He did not abort the landing clearance for the passenger jet. This is a no big issue event, if he had told the plane to go around.

    SCOTUS

    I am frustrated with SCOTUS. I’m afraid that we are going to get a denial of cert. We just have to keep waiting.

    Question of the Week

    What has been your favorite confirmation hearing moment?

            

  • Wednesday night, a regional jet, meaning not a jumbo, collided with a Black Hawk Helicopter over the Potomac River.

    There does not appear to be any survivors.

    There are two major airfields in Washington, DC proper.  There is Andrews Air force Base (I think it was renamed) and the Ronald Reagan Internation airfield.  Along with those two airfields, there are several military installations that have helicopter operations.

    For perspective, the Aberdeen Proving Grounds had an airfield, 4 helicopter pads “outside the fence” and an unknown number inside the fence.

    In other words, there is a bunch of air traffic in the area.

    What I would normally see is helicopters flying relatively low over the river.  Runway 33 is pointed at the river.  Many years ago, a pilot dropped a plane into the Potomac because he didn’t de-ice his aircraft.

    Even with the lights of the fixed wing aircraft on, the helicopter(s) likely didn’t notice it as it was above, descending to land.

    Depending on exactly where the helicopters were, relative to the plane, the pilots of the plane were unlikely to see the helicopters.

    Moreover, I doubt that civilian aircraft radar has good detection capabilities for low-flying helicopters.

    If anything, it is likely the fault of the air traffic controller.

    The plane was a CRJ at 1200 feet just south of the Woodrow Bridge. It was getting ready to land on runway 33.

    PAT25 was the helo.  JIA5342 was the CRJ.  The DCQ tower asks, “PAT25, do you have the CRJ in sight?”

    The military aircraft does not respond, just a few seconds later tower says, “PAT25, pass behind the CRJ”.

    The crash happens a few moments later.

    Tower should have ordered CRJ to turn left to heading 270 and to climb to 3000.

    Here is the track of the aircraft in the air when the crash took place along with the audio.

            

  • For the past week, my feed has been filled with democrat hacks spewing their hate and lies.  This isn’t a good representation.  Why not?  Because yesterday I read the same words on a dozen tweets from high-profile democrat hacks.

     

            

  •  

    I think this is my favorite JD moment so far. Margaret Brennan apparently wanted to play journalist and attempted to take down VP Vance in a sit-down conversation. She brought up immigration, which should be a hard-hitting topic right now. Unfortunately for her, she’s not nearly as good at this game as Vance is, and the bottom line is she’s arguing for keeping violent criminals in the country. Not a good look for her.

    From the interview:

    Vance: ‘We absolutely cannot unleash thousands of unvetted people into our country…’

    Brennen: ‘These people are vetted. These people are vetted. Uh…’

    Vance: ‘Just like the guy who planned a terrorist attack in Oklahoma a few months ago? He was allegedly properly vetted, and many people in media and the Democratic Party said that he was properly vetted. Clearly he wasn’t. I don’t wan’t my children to share a neighborhood with people who are not properly vetted, and because I don’t want it for my kids, I’m not going to force any other American citizens’ kids to do that either.’

    Brennen: ‘No, and that was a very particular case, it wasn’t clear whether he was radicalized when he got here, um, or, when he was living h-“

    Vance: ‘I don’t really care, Margaret, I don’t want that person in my country, and I think most Americans agree with me.’

    And that’s a wrap. Brennen tried and failed to make Vance look foolish. Her point was to make him stutter, to call on his faith as a Catholic and shame him, and he had absolutely NONE of it. Instead, he brazenly told her that he was ashamed by the American Council of Bishops, which was an impressive thing to say, in my opinion.

    Another question being asked on social media is, what do you tell your kids if one of their friends is swept up by ICE while they’re in school? I’ve heard several good answers, mostly snarky, but my favorite was honest and polite, and went something like this:

    “Honey, I’m sorry your friend was taken away. If they are here legally, it will take a day or two for the paperwork to sort out, and your friend will be right back to school. ICE agents can be scary, but they’re very gentle with children, and they won’t hurt your friend. But if your friend’s parents are here illegally, then I’m afraid you might not see that friend again. I know that’s hard, and it isn’t your friend’s fault, but there are consequences to actions. Just like you have consequences to your actions when you do something bad, your friend’s parents might have done something bad. They aren’t being punished like you, but they do have to go back to their home country. That’s the consequence of their actions.” (from Not the Bee)

    (more…)