• The trade wars going on are making me chuckle. First, we have Mexico. Trump imposed a tariff on them, slated to begin at 12:01am Tue. Feb. 4rd. By 10am Monday, Trump had fielded a call from Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, and the tariffs were put on hold for a month. Why a month, you ask? Because Sheinbaum promised to “…reinforce the northern border with 10,000 members of the National Guard immediately, to stop drug trafficking from Mexico to the United States, in particular fentanyl.” (AP)

    Canada… now they’re doubling down. Or rather, I should say that outgoing Prime Minister Trudeau is doubling down. He’s put a 25% tariff on certain items coming from the US to Canada (the list is here: Canada.ca). Having zipped through the list, it looks like chicken and other poultry, cheese and other dairy products, wine and other alcohol, cigarettes, and then a list of various smaller products like suits and jackets, carpets, etc. The biggest one for me is the chicken. We in America have been experiencing a rising in chicken prices because we have less chickens due to many of them being slaughtered due to avian flu (I’m on the fence over it, but having talked to egg and meat producers myself, it’s not that big a deal and isn’t the main reason costs went up). If we’re not exporting chickens and eggs, that means we get to eat them. That should lead to our prices going DOWN. Seems like a win to me.

    Canada placing tariffs on our goods going north means that our folks will find people willing to pay better prices down here, in America. That means we keep American produce in America. That seems like a huge win to me. Bring it on.

    Funny (to me) quote: “And don’t forget bar cabinet staples, like tequila and Canadian whisky. According to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, a trade group, the U.S. imported $4.6 billion worth of tequila and $108 million worth of mescal from Mexico, as well as $537 million worth of Canadian spirits – including $202.5 million worth of whisky.” (AP) Goodness gracious, what ever will we do if we can’t buy Mexican tequila and Canadian whiskey? Oh, right, we make those here. Never mind then. LOL!

    And then we have Panama. I don’t understand all the minutia with the trade agreements between Panama and China, but I know that we used to own the canal. We built the damn thing. I can’t find news on it, but I heard through the grapevine that Panama has already caved on their Chinese partners, and modified things to allow better and more preferential treatment to American ships using the canal, thereby halting (at least temporarily) Trump’s tariffs.

    The bottom line is, everyone’s now watching Canada. They’re the only ones who didn’t immediately give in. I’m pretty sure that Canada is going to hurt more from this than America is. While Canada is a little bit larger, it has less population by far (336 million in America versus Canada’s 41 million). They simply don’t have what it takes to win this trade war. Eventually, they’ll give in.

    And while I’m pretty sure that Trump’s comments about making Canada the 51st state were jokes, there would be benefits to both countries in merging. It also might allow for some spacing out of people, maybe “redistricting” in a way? Regardless, it’s a fascinating idea.

            

  • Consider for a moment that you are a company that contracts with the government. You have a 5-page contract about what you are supposed to deliver, how much you will charge, and when it will be delivered.

    The other 200+ pages of the contract are where you promise to do all the “equality” stuff the government mandates.

    You don’t even need to be a government contractor, there are many industries where there is a government agency watching over them to make sure they are “equitable” in their hiring.

    So we have two positions open, one is for a Widget Designer, and one is for a Machine Operator.

    The requirements for the Widget Designer are that they have a 4-year degree, 3 years in the Widget Industry, and have two successful widget designs.

    The requirements for the Machine Operator are the ability to lift 50 pounds, to be able to stand for 8 hours, to be able to read English, and to be able to learn to operate the machine. Training will be provided by the company. The first 6 months are probationary.

    20 people apply for the Machine Operator position. The top 5 are asked to return for a second interview. After the second interview, two are offered employment.

    These 2 are the top 10% of the applicants. They both look good for the position, both have the potential to move up.

    And they are both people of color and met the diversity requirements put in place by the government. Everybody is happy. These are both merit-based hires.

    The Widget Designer position is a different animal. There are four applicants, not 20. Of the four, one does not meet the requirements and does not move forward.

    The other three are interviewed and two are asked to return for a second interview with the lead Widget Designer.

    After the second interview, there is a management meeting. The lead Widget Designer comes in to give his opinion.

    Candidate A is outstanding! They know this stuff inside and out. It turns out that they were part of the design team for the XYZ Widget Company.

    Candidate B is ok. They are competent, they will work out. We might have to do a bit of hand holding in the beginning, but not a horrible choice.

    The lead leaves and management gets down to work.

    Both candidates meet the requirements.

    But, one of them is a black woman in a wheelchair that is non-binary. The other is a normal, every day, guy.

    Who gets picked?

    If there is any DEI involved, the woman gets picked. If not, then candidate A gets picked.

    Did the company lower their standards if they picked the woman? No. They did not. Both candidates passed the requirements stage.

    Did they pick the best candidate for the job, based on merits? Only if the woman is candidate A.

    And this is how you end up with a lower quality of people without ever lowering your standards.

    If candidate A is not picked, he will go find something else to do. He might even change careers. The world is his oyster because he is a capable person.

    In a couple of years, when the company is looking for another Widget Designer because they hired based on “equity” standards and not merit standards, he, and many like him, aren’t available. They have moved on.

    Because there is an education requirement as well as an experience requirement, there is a tail from the time the “equity” hires start until there are new, qualified people.

    If a person in school learns that they will not be hired, because of the color of their skin, they will switch majors. That means from the time that they say “We want to hire” it is four plus years before we have new candidates, with no experence.

            

  • I’ve been in the Psycho wars for the last couple of weeks. One poster tells me how this action is illegal, this other poster tells me it is constitutional.

    This person tells me that Mexico backed down. This other guy informs me that Trump backed down.

    I’m told that we are about to get into a shooting war with Panama, and then the Panamanian president tells me he’s caved.

    Over here, I’ve got the Governor of Canada notifying me that he’s going to ruin my week by putting tariffs on the goods coming into his state. Then I have this person explaining how his state has lots of “salty” crude oil. Which can only be processed at one US refinery. So according to this person, he has to send his crude to the US, at a 25% tariff, then we will refine it, and then his people will import it and face another 25+% tariff.

    Really, somebody needs to take this to SCOTUS. The constitution clearly states that this sort of interstate squabbling isn’t supposed to happen.

            

  • 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?