Honey is one of those items that many people have laying around the house, but not too many of them know its amazing properties. Used for sweetening, bug traps, wound repair, topical antibacterial, fighter of disease, and dozens of other things, honey is worth its weight in gold. From a prepping standpoint, honey is something I will always have in my “get home bag” because of its many uses.

I’d like to start with honey’s sweetening properties. Many people love the flavor of a bit of honey in some tea. It tastes great with peanut butter, or even alone on bread or crackers. You can use honey in the place of sugar in any recipe (though there are some rules to follow, and it isn’t a 1:1 trade off – Blue Flame Kitchen). Honey is popular when mixed with other herbs and spices, such as honey garlic spareribs, and honey and cinnamon french toast, or even honey mustard dressing. Use honey wherever you’d normally use sugar or other sweeteners. If you’re diabetic, there’s a few studies out that suggest using honey may allow you to use smaller amounts because it’s sweeter than sugar, and therefore you’d be reducing your glycemic index, but there’s nothing definitive at this point.

This weekend I was at the Fort at No. 4 again, and I ended up using honey to catch flies. For whatever reason, 18th century kitchens always seem to gather flies at this time of the year, and they’re a real nuisance. Unlike at home, when we’re playing in the 18th century, we can’t use electronic bug zappers or even fly tape, because neither existed in 1750. We have glass jars that you put honey or sugar water into, and the flies can get into them but not out. That works very well. One of the ladies suggested we coat a strip of linen with some honey and hang it out of the way near the flies, and hopefully they’d get stuck on it. It’s an interesting idea! I also had out a shallow bowl filled with honey water, with drops of modern dish washing liquid in it. The soap forms a coating on top of the water, and if flies go into it, they’re not able to get out. It all worked passably well, though the old fashioned method of attacking them with a wrung out wet dishcloth seemed to work best.

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Welcome to the weekend!

We’ve made it through another week.

I think the biggest thing I’ve heard to-date is simply this: We need to focus on the candidates for president, not their VPs.

JD Vance is a better candidate than Walz, by far. No matter how much of a scumbag Walz might be, we need to focus on policy.

Kamala has not given an interview in 27 days? She has failed as VP, we need the people to know that she will fail as president.

There have been a couple of wins for the 2nd over the last week. Things are starting to break free. I think that one of the most significant changes in the circuit courts has been the dissenting judges being willing to stand up and call out the rogue judges for stomping on The People.

I’m working on decommissioning my Kubernetes cluster. I’ve already torn down the local “test” version. The cost is too high for the benefits.

The number of “supporting” containers is ridiculous. Each container takes a bit of memory. These containers suck the memory from the host nodes, causing instability.

As an example, there are three containers that run constantly to handle SSL certificates. They are needed once every 90 days per certificate and once when a new certificate is needed. That’s a bit of resources for something that isn’t really needed constantly. There are 23 running as k8s command and control.

I’m moving back to old school stuff.

The comments are open, let us know your thoughts.

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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I was looking at voting trends over the past few years, and I find it interesting that so many people are choosing not to vote. Pew Research has a lot of information about voter turnout and flip flop on their site, and while they aren’t perfect, they do tend to do a pretty good job of reporting.

This got me to wondering… How do we fix the voting system? How do we fix the campaigning system? How do we encourage GOOD third party candidates to bring their best and enter the interview process (being President is a job, and We the People interview for that job)? There are so many questions, and way too many answers that only make sense in a single-use scenario. We desperately need results that help the country as a whole.

Right now, I’m fairly sure that Trump is going to win the election. Harris is a twit, honestly, and while she’s currently riding on a blue wave thanks to Biden, I suspect that it will bottom out pretty soon. She simply isn’t that popular, and she just hasn’t done anything with her four years. Trump has a proven track record, and even if there’s nose holding going on, I think a majority of people are going to vote for him. Of course, winning the popular vote isn’t enough. We’ll see what happens.

The problem that I have is that, if Trump wins, the country is going to burn. I fully expect there to be gnashing of teeth, false reports of racist/sexist/homophobic attacks happening, etc. Basically I expect what happened during his first election to be tripled or more, with false accusations across the country. And then the Dems and their violent machine are going to literally begin burning down the cities.

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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:

Wait, don’t leave! They are REALLY good! And not as odd as they sound.

I really love burgers, but I also am trying to lose weight. Those buns are not great for me, but a plain hamburger patty on a plate is boring. I went looking for something new, and found this recipe, and we tried it out recently. It was delicious! The fat from the ground beef infuses the cabbage with a lot of flavor, but doesn’t leave it feeling overly greasy. I walked away from the table quite pleased with myself!

Ingredients:

• 1 lb ground beef
• 1 egg, whisked
• 2 to 3 tbsp panko or breadcrumbs
• green onions and parsley, minced
• 1 head cabbage, cut into thick “steak” slices
• olive oil, drizzles
• spices – oregano, thyme, salt, pepper to taste
• cheese slices (optional)
• 1/4 cup tomato or pizza sauce (optional)

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A First Principle is that two things can be true at the same time.

I can be fat and I can be old. Both are true, at the same time.

Next, who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

50 years ago, a picture was worth a thousand words, and it could communicate truth where words could lie.

This was never “true”, it was just believed. Photographers have been doing “touch up” of photos since the earliest days. Some of that involved painting directly on the plates, other times it was more extensive.

It got to the point where people were building composite photographs, showing things that did not exist.

This painting caught my eye when I saw it in the National Gallery. I took a picture of it, then had a correspondence with the Gallery because I could not find it in their gallery.

The reason is that the painting doesn’t belong to the Gallery, so it is not in their gallery. This was explained to me, and then the very nice lady explained that this painting was a “fake”.

It was fake in that this particular scene never took place. This is not the artist adjusting the setting or anything like that. The artist was known to make quick sketches of interesting people doing interesting things. Or just interesting things. He would then create a composite image from those sketches and, from that image, paint something that wasn’t “real” but it wasn’t truly fake, either.

I expressed it as “The Photoshop of 1846”, to which she agreed.

We have become much more sophisticated. We even have a word for those manipulated and faked images, they are “Photoshopped”.

We see, and most of us recognize, the manipulations that are used on the cover of magazines. We notice it when things “just don’t look right”.

One famous example was the Vogue cover featuring Cindy Crawford. The magazine had “erased” her mole. She got upset and said that her mole was part of who she was.

I spent years working on Computer Graphics, making very high-quality renderings with no real images involved. At one point, one of my teammates was giving a presentation to some brass. He was talking about how we had managed to make our trees look more realistic.

As he was speaking, he was clicking through different images of a real place. Well, the digital elevation map, as we rendered it, with our fake trees planted where the trees were in the real location.

Not a single pixel of the images shown was real. It was all computer-generated images.

After about 15 minutes of the talk, somebody with brass on his shoulders stood up and said something like: Enough, I’ve been to there, I know what it looks like, I want to see your images.

Our fake images looked enough like the real thing that an intelligent guy, with stars on his shoulders, that he was looking at real images.

Those images took days to model, weeks of programming, hours per image to render.

Today, you can ask an “AI” to create an image for you, refine it, then push it out as real. The image will often be a composite of many real images or sub-images.

Photoshop actually has “smart fill” and “smart erase” that are designed to use AI to “seamlessly” fill areas of an image or erase areas of an image.

What 20 years ago took a team months to accomplish, a troll on a media team can accomplish in minutes.

It has gotten to the point where people can create an AI movie by creating the proper prompts.

Some AI-generated images are easy to detect. A Tuesday Tune I posted had visuals created by AI. Not my doing. Some guns were absolutely mind-blowing. The cylinders with 8 chambers, each chamber looking like a keyhole. It was fun, in its obvious errors.

We had the period of time when people were getting multiple rows of teeth, or hands with six fingers, or a dozen other “standard” errors. It was fun to pick out, or down right terrifying, depending on your view point.

Can we trust our eyes when we watch a video? We know some ways that things are faked. But this new technology is going to get better, harder to detect. We are already long past, “Pictures, or it didn’t happen”. We are rapidly moving past, “Video, or it didn’t happen.”

Dad is in long-term care. He will never return to the home he shared with his wife, my mother, for the last 20+ years.

Last week was a hard trip to say goodbye. He was in good spirits and doing “ok”. He is not nearly as sharp as he was a couple of years ago. He has had one major cardio event, and they think he is having mini-strokes.

He remembers that his wife is dead, then 5 minutes later starts asking if we have talked to her recently and know how she is doing.

He remembers her going into the basement at our family goodbye to mom. That was about 6 months ago. He does not remember her ever coming back upstairs.

He has conflated an event with my eldest daughter and his wife to think mom borrowed some money from him to buy a car and left him.

It is easier for him to believe that she left him, than that she is dead. I wish I could believe she was still alive.

But that is boring stuff.

The more interesting part was that we were tasked with helping to clear the house. My youngest coordinated with “The Cousins” to make sure all the grandchildren got a fair share and what they wanted. When we arrived on Wed., they were there.

They went into a search and divide mission, which was cool to see. What was even better was the lack of anxiety or conflict between any of them.

After the work was done, I had the pleasure of working with one of my nephews. He is interested in picking up his first EDC pistol. He is very down on “small” pistols. That was until I showed him the P398 to show him that it works very well as a pocket pistol.

That started to change his mind, but then he got to try the 1911 for size. That he liked, even though he felt it was a bit heavier.

He got to look over and handle the AR15 platform.

The conversation then turned to Mom and Dad’s views on guns.

Dad was never “anti-gun”. After he was exposed to CNN and the constant Republican’s are bad rhetoric, he changed his opinion from “2A” to “you don’t need a …”. At the end, he was no longer pro-2A and felt that universal background checks, LCM, and “assault weapon” bans were ok.

He never pushed back on me about my very PRO 2A opinions. It was something we didn’t discuss when he was able to discuss.

One of my tasks is to evaluate and rescue every piece of data he has on his computer. This meant collecting all the external drives, the main desktop computer, the two husks, the external drives, the USB cards. I think I have all of that.

In the process, I was down under his desk taking things apart, and I turned and looked at the mid-shelf of his desk.

I’m looking at the back strap of a Glock like pistol.

To say I was a bit surprised would be a serious understatement.

I take the pistol and bring it out to inspect, automaticity going through the clearing operation.

The slide doesn’t run. There is no safety keeping the slide from moving. The weight is wrong.

I drop the mag and only then realize it is a BB gun.

0.177 steel balls.

Mom hated the squirrels in the bird feeders. She must have gotten tired of the lack of results from airsoft and upgraded to this thing.

The next time somebody says, “It was only a BB gun.”, I will remember this instant. There is no way in hell I would have let a bad guy point that thing at me. There was no way to know it was “just a BB gun” from the muzzle end at 5 feet.

An interesting thing is happening within the circuit courts, those judges who are tired of seeing the majority rubber stamp any infringement a state wants, are speaking out.

They are taking their lead from Thomas, Van Dyke and others who have spoken up to shed light on just how badly these rogue judges are behaving.

This explains the game. The majority of the Bianchi merits panel found for The People. The minority refused to write his dissent. Because of “traditions”, the merits panel did not issue their opinion, instead waiting for the dissent.

Meanwhile, the Fourth was waiting for another 2A case to show up. That would be Price.

The Price panel decided the “plain text” question was worthy of considerable attention. Since Mr. Price was charged with a criminal act, the panel decided he wasn’t a part of The People. To use their words:

Boy is it cleaned up.

1) It is undisputed that petitioners Koch and Nash—two ordinary, law-abiding, adult citizens—are part of “the people” whom the Second Amendment protects. —New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. V. Bruen, 142 S.Ct. 2111 (U.S. 2022) So the fourth is going down the path that the definition of “The People” in the Second Amendment is a subset of The People as used in the rest of the Constitution.

2) In common use, was not part of “plain text”. It was a reference to Heller‘s work, which states that the state cannot ban weapons in common use.

This is essential to note and understand. A weapon that is in common use cannot be banned. This does not mean that weapons that are NOT in common use may be banned. If a weapon is not in common use, then the government bears the burden of proving that there are firearms regulation in this Nation’s history which match the modern-day infringement.

3) “Shall not be infringed?” That appears to be pretty clear-cut.

There are 84 pages of this twisting of language in Price all to get to the point where they say “The plain text of the Second Amendment does not encompass the proposed conduct.”

The gist of this argument is the self-centered arrogance of the Fourth Circuit and the Seventh Circuit. When Justice Thomas wrote: Despite the popularity of this two-step approach, it is one step too many. Step one of the predominant framework is broadly consistent with Heller, which demands a test rooted in the Second Amendment’s text, as informed by history. …—id. at 10 he did not claim that any of the Circuit Courts got it right, just nearly so.

Nevertheless, the Fourth circuit believes that Justice Thomas was speaking about them as having been “broadly consistent” with Heller in the past. Since they are the exception, they must have gotten it right the last time. Thus, they are correct in thinking that “plain text” has anything to do with common use.

In common use is only of use to The People. If an arm is in common use, it cannot be banned.

In Bianchi, the Fourth issued Price first, used that to justify their “We were broadly consistent before, we still are.”

So, in the minds of the Fourth circuit court, “plain text” is a sophisticated problem requiring detail examination of the etymological meaning of each word and phrase, ignoring the Heller Court doing exactly that, for them.