Windows 10 and Other Stuff

We are now officially a Windows 10 household. My PC was force-upgraded several weeks ago after I told Microsoft emphatically that my system was NOT to be upgraded. But Microsoft upgraded it anyway. I could have rolled back, but as I had planned on upgrading while it was still free to do so, I let this violation of my personal property stand. I mean, life in these united States is nothing but an endless grab-your-ankles-and-stick-your-ass-in-the-air operation anyway, so what's one more insult?

The change was mostly painless. Windows 10 is ugly as sin as everything was made big and square to accommodate the twelve remaining Windows Phone users. The start menu now has some insipid Life at a Glance thing that currently tells me that it's Tuesday the 19th, and that some Twitter twit going by the handle "Lesdoggg" feels like he is in a personal hell. There are several blank blue squares implying that I'm missing out on Something Very Important.  Oh, and SHOPPING!!! I'm sure there is some way to make all that go away, but frankly I don't often use the start menu much now that I can pin important programs to the task bar. (And if they are not important, then why are they on my system in the first place?) So over all, no worse than some Microsoft "upgrades" and much less painful than many in the past.

That left us with one Win10 PC (mine) and one Win7 PC (Debbie's work PC). We had already told her work they needed to get their crap together and upgrade the office prior to July 29 unless they planned on paying the $100 to upgrade after that. Debbie has been periodically bugging them for months while the owners of the company have been pointedly ignoring her. Then a couple weeks ago, one of them finally admitted that a PC in the office had been force upgraded around the same time my PC was, and the world didn't end. Last weekend, we made the plunge and finally gave Microsoft permission to do its worst. At first, I thought that there was a roll-back in our future. Debbie has two screens on her PC, with the second one running off an external display adapter that plugs into a USB port. Windows 10 didn't know what to do with it. It was in the Device Manager. The driver was installed, up-to-date and running properly, but Windows insisted there was only one monitor on the system. Disabled and enabled the driver. No joy. Uninstalled and reinstalled the driver. Nada. Started poking around in Google and came across a discussion board thread that mentioned a cleaner tool from the display adapter manufacturer. Downloaded and ran that, then rebooted. Windows found and installed the driver automatically during boot-up and all was well. The driver was identical, across all four dots of the version number, to the one that Windows was running after the upgrade, which was identical, across all four dots of the version number, to the one that I had downloaded and installed.

Three decades later, the first rule of Windows still applies: When in doubt, reboot. Sheesh.

Everything seemed to work other than the VPN connection to the company office, but we already knew that would need to be tweaked to get it working 100%. It's now near the end of Day 2 and all seems well other than a few UI issues like audible notifications for Office 365. We'll get those ironed out over the next couple days while I'm off work.

Next up is upgrading the PC's in the lodge office. I'll probably tackle those over the weekend while I'm the only one in the office. My PC is non-critical, so that one will go first. The two PC's are identical hardware (or as identical as any purchased PC is these days), so if all goes well with the one on my desk, I'll take a crack at the Administrator PC. That one has several mission-critical apps running on it, so it'll be squeaky-tight-sphincter time while I'm running the upgrade. But I've been assured by the best tech minds in Moose International that there won't be a problem. Heh.

Speaking of sticking your ass in the air, I wonder if the blacks currently agitating for (or actively participating in) a race war understand just how out-numbered and out-gunned blacks are in the US? I see a couple possible outcomes if this continues. One, black urban areas are simply abandoned leaving the black populous to fend for themselves without cops, firefighters, utilities, etc. This has largely happened already in Detroit. If cops and whites shooting blacks is a problem, not having cops or whites in majority black areas will solve that problem quite nicely. Sure, there may be other problems as a result, but if there ain't no cops or whites, then blacks will no longer be shot by cops or whites, assuming blacks stay where they belong. This is the optimistic outcome.

The second, more pessimistic, outcome is some line is crossed and whites begin the systematic extermination of young, urban black males. Anyone who thinks I'm nuts for considering such a thing as a possibility really needs to read some history. No need to go digging too far in the past. In just the last 150 years, we have Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur... well, you get the idea. Those responsible for killing people in any of those places, and the dozens I didn't list, are just like you and me. They are not some sub-human species. They are not necessarily brain damaged or mentally ill. They are just like the hundreds of people you walk by every day and don't give a second thought about. John Shanahan was right: civilization is a thin veneer over barbarianism. And the veneer is looking a bit worn lately.

I'm sure this will come as a shock to those who make a habit of reading this site, but I generally assume the worst. I'm told that makes me "sick" and I really need to think differently, but the rare occasions when I have gone into a situation assuming the best of all possible worlds have, without exception, ended in bitter disappointment. I'd much rather go through life being pleasantly surprised that everything doesn't suck as hard as I assumed it would. The only downside to my worldview is when the universe manages to suck even harder than my most pessimistic expectations:

So oil prices have surged from their low earlier this year, though they bounced off the apparent ceiling of just over $50 a barrel. Natural gas prices too have surged. Yet, four more E&P companies with $1.5 billion in combined debt filed for bankruptcy in June, according to Haynes and Boone’s Oil Patch Bankruptcy Monitor:

• Warren Resources ($486 million in total debt, including $180 million unsecured)
• Tauren Exploration ($23 million in debt)
• Maxus Energy ($295 million in debt, all unsecured)
• Triangle USA Petroleum ($692 million in total debt, including $382 million unsecured)

This brought E&P bankruptcies tracked by Haynes and Boone in the US and Canada to 43 filings in the first half of 2016, involving $40 billion in debt – of which $30 billion is unsecured.

I expected the fracking bubble to keep leaking air in 2016. I didn't expect this. In one month, $30 billion just poofed out of existence. I wonder how much of that was in retirees pension funds and 401K's? On a personal level, we received yet-another letter from some energy company we've never heard of who now owns the gas wells we get a small chunk of income from. This makes the fourth company since we left Michigan. And if there has been a "surge" in natural gas prices, we certainly haven't seen any of it. Our payments have gotten so small, we don't even bother entering them into the checkbook until it's time to do a bank reconciliation.

Almost time for us to head up to the lodge for some Special Doin's, so I'll stop.

Just Us Strikes Again

The top story today is that Hillary is not guilty of anything. Never mind that FBI director James Comey detailed how the Lizard Queen violated at least six different laws. Comey simply invented a rule that says if you don't intend to do injury, you are not guilty of anything. Then our illustrious Department of Just Us stroked its collective chin, thought for moment, then vigorously nodded its head in agreement. "Yeah! OK. That's it! What he said!"

So if I decide that I will no longer stop for red lights and cause all sorts of mayhem and death while doing so, it's OK as long as the government cannot prove that I intended to kill and injure people. Oh. Wait. I'm being silly. Of course some unimportant peon like myself couldn't get away with that. Only The Anointed Ones like Hill and Bill can get away with using an unsecured computer system to store and communicate classified information, as long as no one can prove that there was the intention of harm.

In any case, it is now official government policy that Important People need not be bothered with obeying the law, while the rest of us can be prosecuted at any time for simply getting on with our lives. I'm not sure these shit-dicks understand the consequences of their actions:

The idea of the rule of law today is a lie. There is no law. There is no justice. There are only lies.

Hillary Clinton is manifestly guilty of multiple felonies. Her fans deny it half-heartedly, but mostly out of habit – in the end, it’s fine with them if she’s a felon. They don’t care. It’s just some law. What’s the big deal? It doesn’t matter that anyone else would be in jail right now for doing a fraction of what she did. But the law is not important. Justice is not important.

...

They don’t realize that by rejecting the rule of law, they have set us free. We are independent. We owe them nothing - not respect, not loyalty, not obedience.

And it isn't just crazed tin-foil-hat right-wing gun nuts who are drawing the obvious conclusion. Those just about as far out as you can get on the left agree:

All of these decisions point to a flawed and corrupt system that permits transgressions at the highest level of government, while the government pursues those at a lower level.  President Barack Obama’s legacy will include the fact that he irresponsibly used the Espionage Act of 1917 more often than all previous presidents over the past 100 years, and contributed to the demise of the Office of the Inspector General throughout the government, particularly at the CIA.  One of the key causes of the current hostility and cynicism toward politicians and the process of politics is the double standard at the highest levels of government.

This is serious. Ordinary people are getting pissed. Right now, the results have been mostly peaceful; harsh words, street protests, the Leave vote, Donald Trump. But how much longer will that last? It's not like crowd violence is unknown in the US.

Or maybe the answer is to encourage politicians to take dangerous selfies:

This is a list of serious injuries and deaths in which the victim or a member of their group (for group selfies) took a selfie or prepared for doing so, and their death or major injury was at least in part attributed to this activity.^[1] The Telegraph wrote that, in 2015, more people were killed taking selfies than by shark attacks.^[2] Other publications have debated that analysis.^[3][4][5]

Thanks to technology, narcissism is now a fatal mental illness rather than simply an annoying one. Maybe someone should start a gofundme page for Bill and Hill to take a trip to someplace with tall cliffs. Or trains.

I bumped into the this little gem over at Dmitry Orlov's blog:

The artist is Gregori Maiofis. There are several images he has created I wouldn't mind having on my wall. Definitely Russian.

I should be outside taking advantage of the burning hot sun and 90 degree temps to get some work done in the yard. Or I can just stay in the air conditioning and take a nap. Probably that second thing....

[Update: About two seconds after I hit publish, it started pouring down rain. Aw shucks; I really wanted to work outside.]

Hot and Dry...ish

Although I would never classify anything Florida dishes up weather-wise as "dry" after spending several years in Arizona, it has been drier than normal for the last week or so. We had a bunch of rain a while back, everything sprouted, blossomed, etc.; now it's all dying off. The temps have been consistently in the 90's and lots of bright sun to really bake everything nicely. I'm managing to keep most of our plants alive, but that's about it. The 10-day forecast shows all sorts of rain coming our way, but it always seems to... er... evaporate before it actually gets here. It looks like I'll be getting another unexpected day off tomorrow, so giving everything a good soak is high on the list of things to get done.

OK, so much for the central Florida weather report. There have been a few things that have happened lately that I should probably comment on.

Orlando Shooting

One of the things that you learn very quickly if you spend any time studying human "intelligence" is that we suck at rational thinking, but we are top-notch rationalizers. Omar Mateen wanted to off some queers (probably due to self-loathing), and found an excuse to do so. The excuse was Mohammedanism, naturally enough given the legalized murder of gays practiced in many Muslim nations, including those considered allies of the United States. This is exactly what he himself stated when he called 9-11 to claim credit for the murders he committed inside a gay nightclub. So naturally, everyone from our president on down is busy turning themselves inside out to deny that Mateen's Mohammedanism had anything to do with his decision to murder 49 people.

Brexit

No surprise here unless you are one of the elites who have benefited from selling out the bottom 80% of your own nation to the international bankers for the last several decades. Average people are fed up with being told that high unemployment, low wages and crushing debt are good for them by the very people who are making more money than God by increasing unemployment, lowering wages and piling on the debt. Now these same elites are saying that the Leave vote doesn't matter because they ain't gonna do it and never intended to. These people are why God created lampposts; a convenient place for them to be hanged from.

The Donald

I'm not sure what can be said about this fraternity-prank-gone-too-far. Obviously, the bottom 80% in these united States are as pissed off as those in the UK, Poland, Greece, Italy, France, Spain, etc. The problem with Trump is that he is probably too compromised to do much, assuming he ends up being the Republican nomination (and I'm sticking with my previous statements on that being a big assumption) and manages to win the election. My concern is who will finally tap into all that anger in 2020. Read history; those most capable of harnessing mass hate are not the kind of people anyone in their right mind would want running the country.

Muslim Rape

The latest outrage involves three pre-adolescent boys dragging a mentally handicapped 5-year-old girl into a corner, stripping her naked, raping her, then pissing in her mouth. All on video, of course. (No one born since around 1990 or so is capable of experiencing anything first-hand. For an event to be real, even something as visceral as raping someone, it must be recorded and viewed later on a screen to have any meaning.) The news media completely ignored the crime. That of course didn't stop the locals from talking about it. Unfortunately, stories passed verbally tend to collect incorrect "facts", such as the exact ages of the boys involved, which Middle East shithole they originated from, whether or not one of the boys had a knife, etc. None of which really changes what was done, but it did give the news media the opportunity to claim that because a few minor details were wrong, then the whole thing must be made up. Because we all know that Muslims never rape. What is amusing to me is that in certain cases, the very people who jump all over obviously made-up rape stories that involve white males, like the UofV case a few years back, are the exact same ones screaming the loudest that this is all made up.

We indeed live in interesting times.

And speaking of time, it's time to go make dinner.

And the Beat Goes On

First we had the (successful) voter turnout suppression in the Arizona primary. Then we had officials from the Clinton campaign placing the Hillary-Already-Won article with the Associated Press prior to the last of the state primaries; another (successful) attempt at voter suppression. Now this:

...the Democratic Party cut the number of polling places by two-thirds, from more than 1500 to less than 500. In addition, because there were two simultaneous elections — one for local officials and one for the presidential race — voters had to go to two separate locations if they wanted to cast both ballots. Then the Party cut the voting hours, the window of time during which any voting could be done.

And the result was another wildly successful attempt at voter suppression:

The number of votes actually cast in the Democratic presidential primary totaled just over 60,000. If my math is correct, that about 8% of the expected total, or a voter suppression rate of 92%. Again, the Puerto Rico Democratic Party, all good loyal Democrats I’m sure, suppressed 92% of their own vote, by reducing voting locations and hours.

Why? You decide. My answer? Too much democracy for the “Democratic” Party.

Please tell me there isn't anyone left who still believes voting matters.

Summer Chorus

And thanks to all that rain we got, the frogs are back (turn down the volume before you hit play):

Rain, Rain and More Rain

Tropical Storm Colin blew through a hundred or so miles north of here so we've had nothing but rain for the last 24 hours. There were a couple good gusts of wind as well, but no big deal and no damage other than a couple tipped-over chairs on the patio and a ton of leaves and small branches on the ground. I haven't checked, but I'm sure the local news is full of all sorts of Armageddon stories featuring massive flooding, missing roofs, downed trees, etc. Even if they have to dig up years-old video footage like they were showing last night, hours before the rain even started, during the spots advertising the evening news. Add in the inevitable man-on-the-street interview from someone who swears that they've "never seen anything like it" and you have what passes for news these days.

A long-winded way of saying the whole thing was no big deal. It rained. The wind blew. It's Florida. In June. Get over it.

Another celebrity death this week. Muhammad Ali died Friday evening. Matt Taibbi is a few years younger than I am, but he sums up my neighborhood gang's view on Ali pretty well:

When I was growing up, it was impossible to imagine anyone cooler than Muhammad Ali. He had the perfect looks of a rock star, was hilariously funny, and was beautiful to watch in the ring. My friends and I used to pop in tapes of his fights and double over laughing watching his opponents flail about in search of that infuriatingly pretty face of his.

Our parents hated the guy; "draft dodger" and "coward" were probably the nicest things they had to say about him. But we didn't care. I saw the news from Vietnam every night. I'd use words like "smart" to describe anyone who did whatever was necessary to avoid that.

The absurdity called the presidential election continues and grows more weird by the day. James Kunstler's site has been knocked out. I'm assuming it was some form of SJW pissed about something they think he said that he probably didn't. In any case, it's the web and nothing goes away for long:

Considering that the 2016 election looks like a Dark Age puppet show — Pantalone and La Signora smacking each other with dildos — we forget this spectacle is serious. Rather large matters are at stake, such as the continuity of governance, the legitimacy of the two major political parties, the credibility of our financial arrangements, perhaps even the durability of the nation as a united polity.

It's hard to make fun of this stuff anymore. The image of Hill and The Donald in a televised presidential debate screaming incoherently and beating the crap out of each other with six-foot latex dongs should be hilarious, but in 2016, it's too close to the realm of reality to be anything but terrifying. And the latest weirdness doesn't stop there. Scott Adams is endorsing Hillary in self-defense:

So I’ve decided to endorse Hillary Clinton for President, for my personal safety. Trump supporters don’t have any bad feelings about patriotic Americans such as myself, so I’ll be safe from that crowd. But Clinton supporters have convinced me – and here I am being 100% serious – that my safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump. So I’m taking the safe way out and endorsing Hillary Clinton for president.

Now I've been reading Adams since he first popped up on the internet, and I know he loves to play mind games. I wouldn't be completely surprised to see a "Ha Ha!! Gottcha!" post, but this has been up for over 48 hours now. That's a little long for a joke. We'll see. But, again, the take-away is that there is doubt that this is anything but satire.

Speaking of real life as satire, another SJW has struck a blow for the emancipation of... wait for it... lobsters:

So hey, did you hear about the Canadian lady who “rescued” the lobster?

Apparently, the sight of a lobster for sale in a grocery-store tank “weighed on [her] psyche.” So she bought it, “drove six hours to Winnipeg, [and] shipped it via UPS to a vegan contact out in Halifax for $225, where the lobster was released into the ocean by a fellow vegan out east.”

This story might remind some readers of the first act of a 1998 episode of The Simpsons, but no, it happened in real life just a while ago, and if you dare, you can listen to this chick compare what she did to the Underground Railroad.

I wonder if this brain trust thought to remove the bands from the lobster's claws. Assuming it survived being shipped via UPS....

On a slightly different note, we have John Oliver ripping apart the debt collection industry:


Stumbling onto this clip is actually perfect timing. We've been being harassed since we moved here by some sleezebag outfit that calls itself Medical Services (813-675-0408). They keep calling our number asking for someone we've never heard of. The first time, we were actually helpful; told them the person they are looking for does not live here and we have no idea who they are. We've become progressively more hostile as the calls continue, looking for random people (and insulting and threatening us in the process) who all supposedly gave our home phone as their contact number.

Bullshit. Complete, unadulterated, 100%, Grade-A BULLSHIT.

Today was the final straw. Medical Services called our number four times between 9:25am and 9:30am. I ignored the first three calls and let them hit the answering machine. (They left no message, of course.) While these calls were happening, Debbie was trying to talk to a client and I was trying to get some stuff done while I had an unexpected day off. The last time they called, I answered and said very clearly and loudly, "If you call this number again, I will hunt you down and I will kill you!" Then I hung up. They haven't called back yet. I seriously hope they try to press charges.

That's a lot of typing; time for a nap.

Wait... Did Hell Freeze Over?

In the four years we've lived here, the park maintenance people have cut our grass exactly once, and that was only because I demanded that they do so. But something has changed. They've been back here twice in two weeks!! It's like a miracle or something.

Understand that I generally cut our own grass (and the seven other lots on our block). The maintenance guys start at the front of the park every week and work their way to the back. If something comes up, they don't make it to the back of the park. I don't mind giving them a hand, but sometimes things come up for me as well, and it would be nice if the park didn't assume that they never need to come back here. It's not like we get a break on the rent for doing their work for them.

But for now, it looks like the maintenance crew has finally discovered the back corner of the park where we live. It will be interesting to see what happens when the new owners take over in a few weeks. Lots of rumors, but not much in the way of facts. Other than they are yet-another multinational corporation whose primary goal is to make as much money as possible with as little effort as possible. In other words, I don't expect anything to improve unless it comes with a big price tag attached.

The theater-of-the-absurd presidential "race" continues, getting more surreal by the day. Rumors abound of violence at the Democratic convention, along with actual threats of violence at the Republican convention from the Black Lives Matter shitheads. There are other rumors of the Democratic establishment freaking out over what a piss-poor campaign Hillary is running, and I still expect the Republican establishment to do away with The Donald at some point over the summer, by whatever means necessary.

The latest absurdity is that Victoria Nuland is being considered for Hillary Clinton's Secretary of State. Perfect. I wonder how many days after the inauguration it will take for Vicky and Hill to do something really stupid with regards to... oh, I don't know... Russia? Just to pick a country completely at random. Not that we can't whip Russia in no time. I mean, look at how well we're doing trying to kill off a bunch of Kalashnikov-toting goat herders. With a success like that under our belt, who in their right mind would doubt that Russia's military wouldn't crumble on first contact with ours? As it turns out, several people who are fully in their right minds:

We, the undersigned, are Russians living and working in the USA. We have been watching with increasing anxiety as the current US and NATO policies have set us on an extremely dangerous collision course with the Russian Federation, as well as with China. Many respected, patriotic Americans, such as Paul Craig Roberts, Stephen Cohen, Philip Giraldi, Ray McGovern and many others have been issuing warnings of a looming Third World War. But their voices have been all but lost among the din of a mass media that is full of deceptive and inaccurate stories that characterize the Russian economy as being in shambles and the Russian military as weak—all based on no evidence. But we—knowing both Russian history and the current state of Russian society and the Russian military, cannot swallow these lies. We now feel that it is our duty, as Russians living in the US, to warn the American people that they are being lied to, and to tell them the truth. And the truth is simply this:

If there is going to be a war with Russia, then the United States will most certainly be destroyed, and most of us will end up dead.

But that's OK, because the really important news is that some fringe group of social justice warriors got a frog on a unicycle banned from their own, insignificant corner of the internet:

“Dat Boi” is an Internet meme that sprung up randomly, as so many memes do, about two months ago. It’s a low-resolution frog riding a unicycle, with the caption “Here come dat boi!” Don’t try to overthink it. It’s (supposedly) funny because it’s silly and random. A frog, retro low-res graphics, a unicycle, and slang for “that boy.” If you insist on knowing more, there’s no shortage of Dat Boi explanatory articles. But really, all you need to know is that it’s arbitrary on purpose, a non sequitur, a head-scratcher for “noobs”...everything that makes a good meme.

Except that according to black social justice warriors, it’s a bad meme. A very bad meme. Because it’s racist (you expected a different reason?). Yes, the frog on the unicycle is racist....

For a people who like to boast about being descended from kings, this is most surely an ignominious reduction in influence. “My ancestors ruled over a vast, fertile kingdom and commanded an army of warriors. I got a frog on a unicycle banned from a Facebook group.” From Zulu emperor to hobo emperor. It would be funny if not for the fact that the black community in the U.S. can ill afford such stupidity from its leaders and activists. Stoners wearing dreadlocks and frogs on unicycles... these are the worst problems black Americans face?

No, there are real problems faced by black Americans. But, in keeping with the rules of the Rescue Game, such "problems" as a frog on a unicycle make it possible for social justice warriors to put something in the win column (no matter how insignificant), and feel good about themselves, without doing anything that might be mistaken for actually helping black Americans. Like teaching them the importance of speaking standard English, rather than making up bullshit like African-American Vernacular English.

Well, I really should go outside and do a little work on my day off.

Back in Florida

The 'rents are safely back to Michigan for the summer. It was certainly easier to pay someone to get the house opened up and everything turned on before we arrived. There were also some major repairs to the plumbing that were done while they were in Florida, which should help a great deal in opening and closing the place for the winter. The one thing we noticed when we got there was the large number of burned-out light bulbs. Not sure if there was some sort of power surge or what. Fortunately, anything expensive that could have been fried was unplugged, so it was just bulbs that got whacked.

Other than that, it was the best kind of road trip; uneventful to the point of being boring. We left here Sunday night instead of Monday morning, so we rolled through K-Town a day earlier than planned. That gave all the grand's and great's a chance to run out and say a quick "Hi!" before I had to fly back to Florida.

And that pretty much killed my entire week. Why that stopped me from posting here for nearly a month is unclear....

The farce generally referred to as the 2016 Presidential Race continues. Hillary is still measuring the Oval Office for drapes as if her coronation is inevitable. I guess she read The Secret. The small matter of a federal indictment doesn't seem to occur to her. Neither does convincing everyday people to vote for her. Of course, with "paperless" ballots, I'm not certain how much that whole voting thing actually matters. Meanwhile, the Bern keeps racking up wins, bringing in new donations from actual people, and generally acting as one would expect someone running for elected office to act. There is even some back-channel chatter that those super-delegates that the Hill thinks she's already bought and paid for, are starting to take a hard look at Sanders.

Meanwhile, establishment Republicans continue their efforts to not just torpedo Trump's candidacy and guarantee a Democratic president, but to destroy the entire Republican party as well. I'm of the opinion that they've already succeeded in demolishing the party. If there is no Republican candidate for the 2020 election, I would only be mildly surprised. I'd be very surprised if there was one in 2024.

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Obama, that all the world should reinforce the delusions of gender dysphorics. And all went to pee, every one into whichever the hell restroom they felt like going into regardless of the shape of their naughty bits.

This would all be just another bit of stupidity by a president that has set an all-time record for stupid things both said and done, except this particular bit of stupidity has teeth. A female security guard named Francine Jones is currently being charged with simple assault (translation: she touched the person; no real violence involved) for physically removing a dude in a dress from the women's bathroom, with the police considering adding on hate crime charges.

I'm sorry, but this is demented. I'm not concerned in the least with true gender dysphorics; my concern is just how long do you think it will take for pedophiles to figure out they can put on a dress and some eye shadow, hang out in a women's bathroom and wait for an eight-year-old girl to wander in unaccompanied? Male pedophiles (meaning, nearly all pedophiles) that kink towards little boys figured out that trick about five minutes after the first public toilet opened. Now we are forced under threat of legal action (not to mention the internet-fueled shit storm of death threats and social stigmatization aimed at the entire family) to simply look the other way; to tell our daughters to not be afraid of the creepy man hanging out in the ladies room. There is no way this can end well. And I can confidently say that because we've been here before:

Step by step they were led to things which dispose to vice; the lounge, the bath, the elegant banquet. All this in their ignorance they called civilization, when it was but a part of their servitude.

Tacitus

Gotta go; dinner is ready.

Prince, RIP

Another icon from my high school days is gone. Not that I'm all torn up and taking a week off work to deal or anything. I (sorta) liked a few of his songs, never saw him perform, never saw the movie Purple Rain, and pretty much never knowingly listened to any music he recorded after 1984. Jeff Kay had a nice bit on the new fake-grieving-for-celebrities-we've-never-met phenomenon:

I blame Facebook. In fact, I blame Facebook for a lot of things. I believe it’s ruined the world in certain ways. Everybody’s a show-off now, doing some kind of weird and pathetic performance art. The same thing happened when David Bowie died. Everybody was in a race to out-grieve each other:

“When I heard Bowie died, I couldn’t stop crying for a solid hour…”

“That’s nothing. When I heard Bowie died I cried for three days.”

“Well, you must not be as big a fan as I am. ‘Cause when I heard Bowie died I had to take a leave of absence from my job, and check into a mental institution in upstate New York.”

Heh. Even without having been on FB for over six months, I could probably come up with a list of people who are, even as I type this, boohoo-ing all over the place about losing a genius like Prince and who are unable to name a single song he recorded other than Purple Rain.

Anyway.

The political farce of our presidential "election season" continues on its merry way. It now looks like Bernie is up in smoke. Anyone with a greater-than-room-temperature IQ knew that was the preordained outcome. Really, it's quite remarkable that he hung on as long as he did. There's probably a message in there for the Democratic Party establishment, but I doubt very much that they are listening. Meanwhile, the Queen of Toads is busy putting the finishing touches on her inauguration speech, confident she can sweep past whoever ends up as the Republican Party candidate.

Meanwhile, the country club Republicans are openly stating they would rather destroy what's left of the Republican Party than have The Donald as their candidate. Not that Trump really needs the Republican Party to run a presidential campaign, but he can't run a winning presidential campaign without it. Personally, I figured he would have died in some sort of "accident" by now. The country clubbers likely already tried that and botched it like they've screw up everything else they touch.

Whatever happens, nothing substantive is going to change. The oligarchs will continue to strip the place to the bare walls. If we're real lucky, we'll get someone like Putin to really shake things up in 2020 or 2024, but I ain't holding my breath.

I don't know who is in charge over at Hulu, but they need to be fired. ASAP. They took a relatively simple, straight-forward website and turned it into a complete piece of crap. As usual. Ya know what would be nice, Hulu? Instead of spending wads of money on geeks who do nothing but wreck your site and frustrate customers who have stuck by you since day one, why don't you use some of that money to free 20-year-old shows from behind your iron curtain? If I'm going to pay to watch old TV shows, I certainly won't be paying someone who is going to force me to watch commercials as well. Screw that.

Better yet, I'll just read a book.

Another Implementation

The go-live I talked about a few weeks ago was only for the lodge bar staff. The wait staff were still using the old "system" (which wasn't really much more than slips of paper and a spreadsheet that I fill out every morning). That changes on May 1st. So the next couple weeks will be filled with training people whose attitudes range from positive thru indifferent to openly hostile. That's OK; business is slowing dramatically now that the snow birds are heading back north and we have more people than we have shifts. If someone feels strongly enough to quit, both I and the kitchen managers are in agreement: let 'em.

Of course that means all sorts of crazy hours for yours truly, with the first of May being another hell week of long days and little sleep. What will save us this time around is that we only serve food until 7pm, so at least the administrator and myself won't have to take turns being up all night.

We still don't know what is going on with my mom and if my parents will be going back to Michigan anytime soon. It's just endless tests and doctor appointments with no meaningful information coming back to us. In other words, business as usual for the medical/industrial complex. As I'm the one tasked with driving them back, that leaves me and my job hanging in limbo while all these clowns are maximizing their Medicare billing.

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate these guys? Anyway.

One of the things I like about the web pages I routinely read (that list over there on the right) is how people coming from radically different starting points can all end up more or less at the same place. (That place would be "We're completely screwed" by the way.) First up, we have John Michael Greer, fresh back from vacation and already busting American taboos:

...the word “racist” in the mouths of the pundits and politicians who have been applying it so liberally to the Trump campaign is a dog whistle for something they don’t want to talk about in so many words. What they mean by it, of course, is “wage class American.”

That’s extremely common. Consider the recent standoff in Oregon between militia members and federal officials. While that was ongoing, wags in the blogosphere and the hip end of the media started referring to the militia members as “Y’all-Qaeda.” Attentive readers may have noted that none of the militia members came from the South—the only part of the United States where “y’all” is the usual second person plural pronoun. To the best of my knowledge, all of them came from the dryland West, where “y’all” is no more common than it is on the streets of Manhattan or Vancouver. Why, then, did the label catch on so quickly and get the predictable sneering laughter of the salary class?

It spread so quickly and got that laugh because most members of the salary class in the United States love to apply a specific stereotype to the entire American wage class. You know that stereotype as well as I do, dear reader. It’s a fat, pink-faced, gap-toothed Southern good ol’ boy in jeans and a greasy T-shirt, watching a NASCAR race on television from a broken-down sofa, with one hand stuffed elbow deep into a bag of Cheez Doodles, the other fondling a shotgun, a Confederate flag patch on his baseball cap and a Klan outfit in the bedroom closet. As a description of wage-earning Americans in general, that stereotype is as crass, as bigoted, and as politically motivated as any of the racial and sexual stereotypes that so many people these days are ready to denounce—but if you mention this, the kind of affluent white liberals who would sooner impale themselves on their own designer corkscrews than mention African-Americans and watermelons in the same paragraph will insist at the top of their lungs that it’s not a stereotype, it’s the way “those people” really are.

I see this a lot here in Florida. While "nigger" is as verboten here as it is most other places, "cracker" is fine because, ya know, all poor whites from Florida are a bunch of crackers. Therefore, is isn't racist/classist to point that out. Thems just facts.

Speaking of dog whistles, Counterpunch (which, as a relative pointed out to me, is an extreme liberal, probably socialist, maybe even communist web site) steps up to the plate with a beautiful example of exactly what John Michael was talking about with an article entitled Why Bill Clinton is Full of Shit. As much as I agree with the sentiment expressed in the title, I have to take exception to the article's insistence that drug laws are exclusively aimed at blacks. Plenty of poor whites have had their lives destroyed by our War on (some) Drugs. This article doesn't mention my favorite example (but plenty others on the site do); the difference in sentencing guidelines for powder vs. crack cocaine. This is always presented in terms of racist suburban whites beating down poor urban blacks. Again, I'm quite certain that substantial numbers of poor urban (and rural) whites did a nickel in the state pen for being busted with a couple rocks of crack while Wall Street types were getting slaps on their wrists for equivalent amounts of powder cocaine.

Then today over at Taki's Magazine (which, as a friend pointed out to me, is an extreme right-wing, probably fascist, maybe even neo-Nazi web site (it's so nice having all these people looking out for my mental/emotional well-being; like being a well-cared-for child)), there is this bit on what the author calls The Bubbafly Effect:

This need to surveil and control isn’t applied just to white people in power, but to any white person, male or female (though more commonly male). Why? Why does it matter so damn much to the members of racial, ethnic, and gender victim groups what average white folks are saying and doing?

Well, that’s where the Bubbafly Effect comes in. This is the belief that the words and actions of any white person, no matter how seemingly insignificant, can have ripple effects that will eventually harm a member of an officially sanctioned victim group. The words of the lowliest random white person—an average “bubba” from a hick county—can, like the seemingly inconsequential wind generated by a butterfly’s wings, grow in strength until some poor innocent nonwhite non-cis non-male is swept off “thems” feet (to use the proper PC pronoun) by a hurricane of hatred.

If Bootless Clem in Owsley County says “nigger,” it could create a ripple effect that leads to a proud young African-American genius being barred from admission to a prestigious Ivy League university. If Fartmaster Chad at Kegger House wears a tiny sombrero on his head during his frat’s “tequila sunrise” party, the ripple effects might lead to a brilliant Latino tech wizard being passed up for a job at a major Silicon Valley firm.

“Progressives” really believe this; they’ve just never given their operating theory a name. You’re welcome, lefties.

Again, all things must be seen through the lens of racism. Unless you happen to be John Michael Greer, who posted a follow-up to his post previously quoted from called American Naratives: The Rescue Game:

Here’s how it works. Each group of players is assigned one of three roles: Victim, Persecutor, or Rescuer. The first two roles are allowed one move each: the Victim’s move is to suffer, and the Persecutor’s move is to make the Victim suffer. The Rescuer is allowed two moves: to sympathize with the Victim and to punish the Persecutor. No other moves are allowed, and no player is allowed to make a move that belongs to a different role.
....
There’s one other rule: the game must go on forever. The Victim must continue to suffer, the Persecutor must continue to persecute, and the Rescuer must continue to sympathize and punish. Anything that might end the game—for example, any actual change in the condition of the Victim, or any actual change in the behavior of the Persecutor—is therefore out of bounds. The Rescuer also functions as a referee, and so it’s primarily his or her job to see that nothing gets in the way of the continuation of the game, but all players are expected to help out if that should be necessary.
....
A variant of that game still goes on in the pseudoconservative end of American politics. When Hillary Clinton went out of her way to characterize African-American youth as “superpredators” not that many years ago, she was playing a version of that same game, in which law-abiding white citizens were the Victims, black youth were the Persecutors, and white politicians were the Rescuers. On the other end of the political spectrum, of course, the roles are reversed; in games played on that field, people of color are the Victims, working class white people are the Persecutors, and affluent white liberals are the Rescuers. The players have changed places but the game’s otherwise identical.
....
It’s only fair to note that each of the three roles gets certain benefits, though these are distributed in a very unequal fashion. The only thing the people who are assigned the role of Persecutor get out of it is plenty of negative attention. Sometimes that’s enough—it’s a curious fact that hating and being hated can function as an intoxicant for some people—but this is rarely enough of an incentive to keep those assigned the Persecutor’s role willing to play the game for long.

The benefits that go to people who are assigned the role of Victim are somewhat more substantial. Victims get to air their grievances in public, which is a rare event for the underprivileged, and they also get to engage in socially sanctioned bullying of people they don’t like, which is an equally rare treat. That’s all they get, though. In particular, despite reams of the usual rhetoric about redressing injustices and the like, the Victims are not supposed to do anything, or to expect the Rescuers to do anything, to change the conditions under which they live. The opportunities to air grievances and bully others are substitutes for substantive change, not—as they’re usually billed—steps toward substantive change.

The vast majority of the benefits of the game, rather, go to the Rescuers. They’re the ones who decide which team of Victims will get enough attention from Rescuers to be able to start a game.  They’re the ones who enforce the rules, and thus see to it that Victims keep on being victimized and Persecutors keep on persecuting.  Nor is it accidental that in every Rescue Game, the people who get the role of Rescuers are considerably higher on the ladder of social privilege than the people who get given the roles of Victims and Persecutors.

All of which goes a long way in explaining the Bubbafly Effect.

OK; I'm going to quit before this gets as long as War and Peace. As always, follow the links and read the quoted articles in their entirety.

Summer Arrives

Typical of Florida, we went to bed during the middle of winter and woke up in the middle of summer. I don't think we've ever lived anyplace where you can have a frost/freeze warning one night, then 48 hours later it's getting up into the high 80's during the day and only down into the low 70's at night.

Which means the grass has grown about a foot since Sunday, so I should really be outside doing that instead of doing this. But this involves less sweat.

A nice little bit about Millennials in the workplace:




Anyone who happens to have the "pleasure" of working with 20-somethings probably won't find it all that humorous. We don't have many as members at the lodge, but we do have a fairly steady stream of them coming to us to do their community service for various legal infractions, like shoplifting (the preferred shopping method of Millennials). "You want me to clean? I have a bad back/asthma/fibro/sensitive skin! Is there something else you have for me to do?" Oh, sure snooky. Tell ya what; set your thieving ass down at my desk and count all the cash that came in yesterday, and I'll go clean up spilled beer.

Not that Boomers (who used to refer to themselves as the Me Generation) are much better. Of all the personality types that don't age well, it's hard to top narcissism. Trust me on that; I'm surrounded by it all day every day. "Ugly" is the most polite term I can come up with.

I had to laugh this morning at a headline on Yahoo Finance: Trader: Listen to Yellen, ignore fundamentals. It ends with this bit of day-trader wisdom:

I suppose that fundamentals and the cash flow of a company will once again reign supreme in valuations, but until the market sheds all the outside influence that has been baked in over the last 7 years, I will continue to look at the market influences that have little to do with the operations of a company.

The author of this drivel is none other than Keith Bliss (no, seriously; you can't make this stuff up), Director of Sales and Marketing for cuttone & company. (The mis-capitalization of the company name is from their website. Um, guys? The all-lower-case-cuz-we're-so-cool thing stopped being cool about two decades ago.) What Keith (keith?) is saying is that price discovery has been completely shattered by the Fed attempting to prop up the stock markets. But that's OK; all retail investors have to do is keep chasing yield while racking up lots of brokerage fees for Keith and his buddies at c&c.

We're so screwed.

And this post is now a week old. I forgot to hit publish.

Survival

So I survived my first go-live in about a decade. Everything is more-or-less up and running and the bartenders are getting comfortable with the system. We still have some back-end issues to work out, but we are already getting some good information that we've never had before. Like just how much free alcohol we give away. And how much just goes missing. I predict the next bartender meeting will be rather... um... lively.

In other news, Debbie is back to work after another bout of whatever it is that is wrong with her neck/arm/wrist/whatever. This is the third time she's been through this. The first two times, she just took a few days off and it got better. This time was far worse and is still hanging on over a month later. We spent a few bajillion dollars on bone guys and nerve guys and x-rays and the consensus is that there isn't anything wrong. Nothing, that is, other than the debilitating numbness, tingling and pain that goes from the side of her face, down her neck, across her back and down her arm to her fingers. But other than that, everything looks good. We could spend another bajillion or so dollars on still more tests that may or may not reveal anything more useful than the universal shrug she's gotten so far. Or we could spend a few tens of dollars on the only person in Pasco county that is actually doing something to alleviate her symptoms: The Frank Clinic of Chiropractic & Natural Health Care. So much for the medical/industrial complex accomplishing anything useful with the 20% of GDP they consume every year.

Speaking of which, my doctor down at the ghetto clinic was concerned about a spot on my foot and referred me to a local podiatrist. I went a couple weeks ago and of course the only solution was to drive down to Tampa so I could hand over $3K for them to chop on my feet. Oh, and I wouldn't be able to work for a couple weeks. No big deal, right? I flat out told them, "No." From their expressions, you would have thought I had farted in their faces. Debbie's been off completely or on a reduced schedule since the first part of February, and money has been flowing out of our bank account like water from a fire hose trying to get some answers. We don't have an extra $3K just lying around, nor can I take two weeks off work during the absolutely crazy-busiest month at the lodge. Not. Gonna. Happen.

After a lot of arm waving and dire warnings that they might have to chop off my entire foot if I delayed surgery, they agreed to monitor my foot for now and do the surgery later. After two weeks, my foot is essentially healed up and the podiatrist was forced to admit that surgery was not, in fact, immediately necessary, and told me to call when I was ready for the surgery or if my foot started oozing anything.

And the secret ingredient in the secret ingredient noodle soup? Honey. Did it actually help? Who knows? All I do know is that instead of $3K+2 weeks lost wages for a foot surgery, we spent five bucks on big Band-Aids and used a few drops of honey we already had in the pantry. So don't expect the medical/industrial complex to jump all over that.

So I hear there's this whole Trump thing still going on. Last time I saw his bad toupee, he was making excuses for the implosion of yet-another of his "brilliant" ideas that made him millions while wiping out the fools who invested in whatever boondoggle he had cooked up. On the one hand, I just don't see how anyone can take this ass clown seriously. He obviously doesn't take himself seriously, with all the insanity and lies he spews every time a TV camera gets within a half-mile. On the other hand, given the endless failures of... well... pretty much everything the US has attempted in the last couple decades, Trump's string of failures, loose grip on reality and inability to tell the truth may make him the most qualified candidate we've seen in a long time. Especially when the alternatives are complete nut-jobs like Cruz. Not that the Democrats have anything better to offer; there it's either Ms It's-My-Turn staring down an indictment for numerous breaches of national security, or some fossilized socialist who hasn't said anything relevant since I was in elementary school. One reason why I'm just staying home. Again.

And my home town is back in the news:


If no one ends up in prison for this, we owe Charles Manson an apology.

Well, I was able to escape from work a little early today, so I should do something productive, like get our tax return filed. Or maybe just take a nap. One of those things.

Twas the Night Before Go Live

'Twas the night before go live and all through the house,
   Not a program was working, not a keyboard or mouse.
The programmers stared at their tubes in despair,
   With hopes that a miracle soon would be there.
The users were nestled all snug in their beds,
   While visions of QIOs danced in their heads.
When out of the basement there arose such a clatter,
   I sprang from my desk to see what was the matter.
And what to my wondering eyes should appear,
   But a super programmer (with a six-pack of beer).
His resume glowed with experience so rare,
   He turned out great code with a bit-pusher's flair.
More rapid than eagles, his programs they came,
   And he cursed and muttered and called them by name,
On Update/ On Transfer/ On Build/ On Delete/
   On Batch Jobs/ On Closings/ On Functions Complete/
His eyes were glazed over, fingers nimble and lean,
   From weekends and nights in front of a screen.
A wink of his eye and a twitch of his head,
   Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
   Turning specs into code; then turned with a jerk.
And laying his finger upon the "ENTER" key,
   The system came up and worked perfectly.
The updates updated; the deletes, they deleted;
   The transfers transferred, and the closings completed.
He tested each whistle, and tested each bell,
   With nary a bomb, and all had gone well.
The system was finished, the tests were concluded,
   The users' last changes were even included.
And the user exclaimed with a snarl and a taunt,
   "It's just what I asked for, but not what I want!"

So yea. Today is likely the last day I will see the sun for a couple weeks. The lodge is going live on their new Point of Sale system tomorrow morning, which means I will likely be living at work for the next several days, at least.

I think we are ready, but something like this you never really know. I do know there is going to be push back from some employees as well as some of the patrons. The pricing of certain items has been, shall we say, flexible to the point that many of the members shop around to find who will sell them what they want the cheapest. Or give it to them for free. There is a lot of that as well. The system won't fix that completely, but it will make it much easier to spot and to put an end to it one way or another.

So that will consume my life for the next week or so. It's going to be worth it in the long run, but getting there is going to be interesting.

In other news, Debbie is back at work half-time after a three-week hiatus due to pain, numbness and tingling all down her right arm. The current theory is that there is some sort of nerve issue going on in her neck, but of course just confirming that means endless visits to multiple doctors and money pouring out in every direction like water. The worst part is we already know there won't be any real solution; once again the pain will subside on its own with no help from the Medical-Industrial Complex until the next time it flares up for no apparent reason. (This the third time this has happened since we moved to Florida. Each time it's a little worse and lasts a little longer.)

Assholes. Have I mentioned lately how much I loath healthcare?

In any case, she will be back to full-time work on Monday. The only place she has been that has any idea what to do or seems to help is The Frank Clinic of Chiropractic & Natural Health Care. Each visit costs us a fraction of what any of the "mainstream" "health providers" charge, and they actually do something rather than just talk about endless tests and visits to talk about the tests. Or if we are talking about the local ghetto clinic, charge for the tests then never give the results until we've nagged them for a couple weeks.

Shifting gears over to solar electricity for a bit: Back in January, John Michael Greer predicted that grid-tied utility-scale photovoltaics would be the new fracking now that the air is whooshing out of that particular bubble. He posted a follow-up last week. It seems things are moving even faster than he expected:

Climate activist Naomi Oreskes helped launch that new tone with a diatribe in the mass media insisting that questioning whether renewable energy sources can power industrial society amounts to “a new form of climate denialism.” The same sort of rhetoric has begun to percolate all through the greenward end of things: an increasingly angry insistence that renewable energy sources are by definition the planet’s only hope, that of course the necessary buildout can be accomplished fast enough and on a large enough scale to matter, and that no one ought to be allowed to question these articles of faith.

You really need to hit the link and read the entire article. Once again, here is my take on solar in general and photovoltaics in particular from the perspective of someone who has actually lived off-grid. It can be done. It is impossible. Depends on what "It" is. If "It" means living in less than 500 square feet and making modest amounts of electricity to run a laptop, a couple lights, a small high-efficiency 'fridge and a small TV used only on sunny days, then yea. It can be done. If instead you define "It" in the same way that the typical environmentalist does, meaning a 3,000 square foot McMansion lit up like an airport runway, with central air, a half-dozen 100" TV's, at least one computer, gaming system, tablet and smart phone per resident all running flat out 24/7, with enough juice left over to charge up a couple electric minivans, then no. It is impossible. Not even if you covered every square inch of the state of New Mexico with PV panels bought with money waved into existence with the Fed's magic QE wand.

Not that solar is useless. Some people use renewables for their entire energy budget. But they don't live anything like a typical middle-class American lifestyle. The idea that utility companies can just take their coal-fired plants offline and slap up a few solar panels and no one will ever know the difference is completely absurd. There is a Duke Energy ad that runs every once in a while down here in Florida. The basic message is that there are all these smart, hard-working people with all the latest high-tech gear that keep the power on so I don't have to even think when I reach for a light switch. First, anyone who has ever lived off-grid will never again take for granted flipping a light switch and having a light come on. Trust me on that. There is no colder cold or darker dark than the cold and dark when the batteries run out of juice at 3am when it is -20F, and you are outside trying desperately to get a cranky generator to start so the water pipes don't freeze. Been there, done that, ain't goin' back.

But more importantly, that unthinking switch flipping attitude does not work when your power is being supplied by intermittent renewables like wind and solar. Electricity from fossil fuels is essentially unlimited. (OK; not really, as a hundred or so households find out every Christmas when they plug in too many lights and burn their house down. But so abundant that it takes real effort to hit the limits.) It doesn't matter what time of day, or what the weather is like, or the time of year. If you want to plug something in and turn it on, you just do it. Renewables don't work that way.

And that's leaving aside the insane notion that the massive amounts of money needed to build out significant solar and wind electrical generation will just fall from the sky. For many years, there has been a large (taxpayer-subsidized, of course) build-out of windmills with the average year-over-year increase in capacity running more than 25% for a decade, and yet wind accounts for a measly 4.5% of electricity generated in the United States. Photovoltaics, at less than on-half of one percent, are a rounding error. Boosting those number up to a significant fraction of current electrical generation would involve an unimaginable increase in manufacturing and installation capacity over anything that exists today.

None of which will make any difference. After all, if there is anything left of your pension after the fracking bubble gets done with it, it will need to be invested in something, so why not put the last of your life savings in some nice, safe debt used to build out a bunch of solar farms so Jamie Diamond and the boys over at Goldman Sachs can make a few more billions while you take yet-another hit to your net worth when it all goes spiraling down the drain in a few years?

Happy New Year!!

It's only two weeks into the new year, so I'm not too late to wish everyone a happy 2016, right?

I'm not sure what happened to 2015. It just sort of disappeared after I finished up tax season. We really didn't get much of anything done on the house. In fact, we barely kept up with the day-to-day stuff. And now the first two weeks of 2016 are already gone.

As far as books, Debbie held up her end, but I was seriously slacking for some reason. For one thing, I've been doing more reading on the Kindle, and I have to say, I'm not really a fan. It seems to take me forever to finish up a book. At first I thought it was just getting used to not holding a physical book, but after a couple dozen books things haven't improved. It doesn't seem to be an eye-strain thing, and I'm not any more distracted than when reading a regular book. I just read painfully slow. Anyway, I only managed to read 49 books; less than my annual goal of one book a week on average. According to my Goodreads page, the least popular book that I read in 2015 was Shavertron: The Pre-Gafiation Years. Only two people other than myself read all about Teros living underground and being rayed by evil Deros, etc. Frankly, I'm surprised that there were that many. The most popular was Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice. Than surprises me as well. I figured with all the Lee Child, Clive Cussler and other pop fiction writers in my 2015 reads, one of those would take the top spot, not something published in 1813 that (like most books of the time) takes a great many pages to tell a fairly simple story. (Dear Dick from the Internet: This isn't a criticism; I enjoyed the book and think a great many modern pop fiction authors could learn a thing or two about story-telling from Jane Austin. I'm just saying that her style of writing as well as subject matter doesn't seem to appeal to kids these days as evidenced by the first link the googles came up with when I typed in "pride and prejudice publication date".)

(And get off my lawn!!)

(And yes, we are going to see that when it comes out. I'm not that old....)

Last year, I stated that our only goals for 2015 were to not end up homeless and not murder our wacko neighbor. I'm happy to say that we managed both of those things!! Woohoo! Go us! In fact, the neighbor situation actually improved slightly in recent months after she figured out that no one in the park or at her church would do a damn thing for her, so she is better off not actively harassing us. She still ignores us, but I can live with that.

The big news for 2016 is that for the first time in a long time, I won't be working for a tax prep outfit. I'll still be doing the dozen or so returns that I do under my own EFIN, but no more Walmart Cubicle from Hell. Instead, I'm working an actual full-time, year-'round job for the first time in a long time. In fact, I started as the Administrative Assistant at the Zephyrhills Moose Lodge almost exactly nine years after leaving Munson. So far, it's going well and I'm back doing what I've always been comfortable with; spreadsheets, databases, making CAT5 cables, messing with routers and switches, etc. We have a new point-of-sale system that I've been setting up over the last six weeks that is going live at the end of January. I'm assuming I'll be living at the lodge for the first week or so after we go live. This is going to be a big change for the bartenders and a huge change for the waitstaff. But I think that ultimately, it will be good for the lodge and will give the board a much better handle on what is going on from week to week.

Debbie is still cranking out cruises and expects to keep on cranking out cruises until the entire cruise industry belly-flops or she becomes eligible for Social Security.

Or we hit the $1.5 billion Powerball tonight. Which is really a $930 million jackpot. It would be tight, but we could probably get by on that.

It's the beginning of a new year (or at least close to the beginning...), so that means one thing: predictions.

My personal predictions are fairly straight-forward. The air will continue to leak out of the fracking bubble, resulting in more bankruptcies, layoffs, etc. The former boom towns in the various frack fields are already starting to turn back into the near-ghost-towns they were a decade ago. As I said last year, this will impact more than just the oil companies; the junk bonds are lurking everywhere. Due to over-supply and increasingly, under-demand (is that a term?), I'd expect oil prices to stay low, continuing to damage the oil industry's productive capacity. At some point down the road, the production and consumption lines will cross and oil prices will jump back up to where they will benefit the oil companies at the expense of the rest of the economy. But I seriously doubt that will happen in 2016.

The twenty percent of the country doing well will continue to do well. The eighty percent who have been getting beat down will continue to get beat down. How much longer all the various debt-fueled plates can be kept spinning is anyone's guess. Some will inevitably fall while others will be kept going a little bit longer. One thing about doing taxes at Walmart; I saw a lot of what those crashing plates do to families in the 80%. It ain't pretty. I won't have a front-row seat this year, but I expect those folks are in for yet-another rough year.

Stocks are sure looking sad so far in 2016. As we know from the last several years, stock prices are fairly easy for companies and the Fed to manipulate, so it's probably significant that a) the annual Santa Clause rally was a no-show, and b) nothing seems to be able to halt the decline in the markets. My personal opinion is that the indexes are simply returning to rational levels, but I also know that a lot of people bought in well above those rational levels and will be wiped out in the process. The talking heads can say all they want about "paper losses", but that doesn't mean it has any less of a psychological effect on the person watching his 401K falling. The bottom could really fall out of the markets this year, but I expect instead we're in for another exciting roller coaster ride with the stock indexes flying all over the place with no relation to the underlying economy.

And that's probably enough from me. Some predictions from others:

John Michael Greer: Down the Ratholes of the Future

The ongoing depletion of fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources will keep squeezing the global economy, as the real (i.e., nonfinancial) costs of resource extraction eat up more and more of the world’s total economic output, and this will drive drastic swings in the price of energy and commodities—currently those are still headed down, but they’ll soar again in a few years as demand destruction completes its work. The empty words in Paris a few weeks ago will do nothing to slow the rate at which greenhouse gases are dumped into the atmosphere, raising the economic and human cost of climate-related disasters above 2015’s ghastly totals—and once again, the hard fact that leaving carbon in the ground means giving up the lifestyles that depend on digging it up and burning it is not something that more than a few people will be willing to face.

James Howard Kunstler: Pretend to the Bitter End

Those terms might be somewhat negotiable if we could accept the reality of this re-set and prepare for it. But, alas, most of the people capable of thought these days prefer wishful techno-narcissistic woolgathering to a reality-based assessment of where things stand — passively awaiting technological rescue remedies (“they” will “come up with something”) that will enable all the current rackets to continue. Thus, electric cars will allow suburban sprawl to function as the preferred everyday environment; molecular medicine will eliminate the role of death in human affairs; as-yet-undiscovered energy modalities will keep all the familiar comforts and conveniences running; and financial legerdemain will marshal the capital to make it all happen.

Oh, by the way, here’s a second element of the story to stay alert to: that most of the activities on-going in the USA today have taken on the qualities of rackets, that is, dishonest schemes for money-grubbing. This is most vividly and nauseatingly on display lately in the fields of medicine and education — two realms of action that formerly embodied in their basic operating systems the most sacred virtues developed in the fairly short history of civilized human endeavor: duty, diligence, etc.

Dmitry Orlov: My Prescription for 2016: Collapse Early and Often

Not too many people, I expect, will want to follow my prescription; not too many of my family members, or friends, or acquaintances, or you who are reading this. And that's fine because, as I have learned over and over again, there is no strength in numbers. Quite the opposite: the probability of any given trick working is in inverse proportion to the number of times it is tried, or the number of people who try it. And so, if you are reading along and think “I can't possibly do this because of [insert lame excuse]!” then—good! Fine with me. Fewer people equals more oxygen.

And that applies to the few people who will actually bother to read this. Lots more people will not want to read this, because—what collapse? Gasoline prices are low, Obama has shut down most of the wars, the economy is strong enough for the Fed to have started hiking rates, and once Bernie Trump gets into the White House, everything else will be set right too. To the people who think that, someone like me, who predicted collapse a while back, was clearly wrong, and needs to be psychoanalyzed, not followed. Again, fine with me, so long and thanks for all the bullshit.

Gail Tverberg: 2016: Oil Limits and the End of the Debt Supercycle

What is ahead for 2016? Most people don’t realize how tightly the following are linked:

1. Growth in debt
2. Growth in the economy
3. Growth in cheap-to-extract energy supplies
4. Inflation in the cost of producing commodities
5. Growth in asset prices, such as the price of shares of stock and of farmland
6. Growth in wages of non-elite workers
7. Population growth

It looks to me as though this linkage is about to cause a very substantial disruption to the economy, as oil limits, as well as other energy limits, cause a rapid shift from the benevolent version of the economic supercycle to the portion of the economic supercycle reflecting contraction. Many people have talked about Peak Oil, the Limits to Growth, and the Debt Supercycle without realizing that the underlying problem is really the same–the fact the we are reaching the limits of a finite world.

And that should keep everyone busy for a little while.

(Yes, Debbie. I know. tl;dr)

Christmas Moon

The first full moon on Christmas since 1977; the next one won't be until 2038. We thought we weren't going to be able to see it. It was supposed to be cloudy and raining. But that never happened and instead we had sunny skies and highs in the upper 80's for Christmas.

Tomorrow, vacation is over and it's back to the grind.

Merry Christmas!!

Because nothing says Christmas like boring repitit... er... Tradition:








A new one for this year we heard Wednesday while we were at Busch Gardens. This recording doesn't capture the seriously amped-up bass. I'd be surprised if there isn't some sort of structural damage being done to the building.



I've had no luck trying to find out who performed this. My first thought was Trans Siberian Orchestra. They have a version of Carol of the Bells, but this isn't it. Not often the googles comes up completely empty.

Well, today is a full day, so I need to get at it.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Yo Saturnalia or whatever holiday greeting floats your boat.

Fundraising Update

Our lodge's final Toys for Tots fundraising event was on Saturday, December 12. I don't think that many (or more likely, any) of our members read my mini-sermon I posted. We certainly didn't come anywhere near my $40K-plus-toys challenge. We did, however, raise more than we have ever raised in the past: over $17,000 in cash plus another $6,000 (very conservative estimate) in toys. Given how badly the Marines were freaking out, it's probably a good thing we didn't raise any more than that. In any case, a bunch of East Pasco kids who would have nothing Christmas morning now will. And yes, it was all we could do to not tear into the boxes and play with some of the toys ourselves. Not to sound like a bitter old fart, but Holy Crap Do Kids Have Cool Stuff These Days!!!!

On the home front, Debbie is gearing up for her busy season at work with some days crazy busy, while other days she may as well have stayed in bed. I'm getting deeply into a new point-of-sale system the lodge purchased. I had hoped to have it all up and running by now, but it appears that my ten-year hiatus from the computer industry has not improved the ethics of computer software salesmen. (Salespeople? Salespersons? Anyway, "salesman" is an accurate description of our particular liar.) It's partially my fault for us getting strung along for so long. The second I saw the default inventory app, I knew there was no possible way it could do what we were told it could do. I've written enough inventory/purchase order systems that I should have immediately twigged to the fact that we had been had by Clover. Not that the system is useless; for small businesses, it is plenty capable. And there is a third-part app that adds the functionality we were promised, but it costs an additional $20/month over the cost of the system. I realize $20 a month may not sound like a big deal to, say, a software salesman pulling down six figures a year, but to a small non-profit it's not nothing. Add in the fact that either my boss or myself have to go back to the board and explain that we were suckered and to make the system do what we thought it would do for us, we have to spend more money.

The other option is that I roll something in-house, but being out of the game as long as I have will make that a challenge. Certainly not impossible, but not easy. I'm not even sure what sort of data we can get out of the system. I know there are reports that can be exported as Excel spreadsheets, but until I have some data to work with, I have no idea what those look like. There is supposedly an API built into Clover, but you have to be a developer to learn anything about it other than that it exists. I should know more by the end of the week. (Meaning the end of my work week, not the end of the calendar week.) One other thing we were promised was that all our data would be loaded into the system for us. I don't know how long that normally takes, but I sent some of the data off last Friday and hadn't heard anything by Tuesday morning. So I decided screw that, and loaded it myself in about four hours. Not sure why I need Pakistani child labor, or whatever Clover uses, to type in a couple dozen categories and less than a hundred items. Anyway, I'm rollin' now and look to have the system ready for training and installation probably this weekend.

I had to giggle earlier today while reading an article linked to by The Automatic Earth. It seems that all those pushy, self-righteous lefty vegans who claim meat-eaters are destroying the planet are full of crap. Growing vegetables takes more energy, water, etc. than "growing" the equivalent number of calories in the form of meat. The trick that has been used to hide this little fact is to compare the weight of vegetables vs. an equivalent weight of meat rather than the number of calories from each. Granted, Americans consume too many calories, regardless of what form they come in, and it is certainly easier to over-eat meat than it is vegetables. However, simply reducing caloric intake would be more beneficial to the environment (and the person) than switching to plants instead of animals. Of course, my take-away is that this is an indictment of how we produce food in the good ol' USA rather than what a person is eating. A salad or chicken dinner that I grow in my backyard has far less environmental impact that a 3,000-mile Caesar Salad or KFC made from Chinese chicken. But that conversation is not allowed.

Well, gotta go make the donuts. (Actually, pork chops, but WhatEvar...)

The Least of These

³¹When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit on the throne of his glory: ³²And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats: ³³And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

³⁴Then shall the King say to them on his right hand, Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: ³⁵For I was an hungered, and you gave me meat: I was thirsty, and you gave me drink: I was a stranger, and you took me in: ³⁶Naked, and you clothed me: I was sick, and you visited me: I was in prison, and you came to me. ³⁷Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we you an hungered, and fed you? or thirsty, and gave you drink? ³⁸When saw we you a stranger, and took you in? or naked, and clothed you? ³⁹Or when saw we you sick, or in prison, and came to you? ⁴⁰And the King shall answer and say to them, Truly I say to you, Inasmuch as you have done it to one of the least of these my brothers, you have done it to me.

⁴¹Then shall he say also to them on the left hand, Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: ⁴²For I was an hungered, and you gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink: ⁴³I was a stranger, and you took me not in: naked, and you clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and you visited me not. ⁴⁴Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we you an hungered, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister to you? ⁴⁵Then shall he answer them, saying, Truly I say to you, Inasmuch as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me. ⁴⁶And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.

Matthew 25:31-46 KJV

I generally don't start out my posts with long quotes from the Bible (or any other book, for that matter), but there is a specific reason in this case. The Moose Lodge that Debbie and I belong to just had our big kick-off event for the East Pasco Toys for Tots on Saturday. The event was successful beyond anything we could have possibly imagined. We're not entirely sure how many people came through the lodge during the 12-hour event, but we started with 350 wrist bands, then had to send someone on an emergency run for 500 more. Monday morning when the administrator and myself were sorting through the debris, we found a couple dozen wrist bands left over. We thought the original 350 bands would be more than enough. Shows what we know.

In any case, the event was a band marathon running from noon to midnight. We ended up with 18 bands participating. Half were rock bands that we ran on the social quarters side of the lodge, and the other half were country-western and/or oldies acts that we put on the hall side. Both sides were filled to capacity for most of the day. The event was open to the public with admission being either an unwrapped new toy, or a minimum $5 donation. Once you were inside, we had several 50/50 raffles every hour and an entire banquet table of stuff that people had donated that was also being raffled off. In short, the money was really flowing in, and so were the toys.

This is the first of five fundraising events that our lodge is hosting for Toys for Tots between last Saturday and our big, grand finale Christmas Ball on December 12. Our goal was to collect $20,000 in toys and cash. At Saturday's band marathon, we came close to half our goal. Everyone is really stoked about that, as am I.

But I'm also not. Allow me to explain. Yes, it's great we set an ambitious goal, a goal that is much higher than anything we've raised in the past for Toys for Tots. It's fantastic that we look to easily beat that goal. However, before we dislocate our collective shoulders patting ourselves on the back, lets do a little basic arithmetic. Our lodge and chapter have well over 3,000 members between them. I realize that number includes people who are not active and will likely allow their dues to expire next time they come due. And that some of those members are physically or mentally incapacitated and can't realistically be expected to participate in lodge activities. But I think I'm on fairly solid ground when I say that at least 2,000 of them do not fall into either of those categories. (If I'm wrong, I'm sure someone will quickly set me straight. There are people in the lodge who love nothing better than to correct everyone else, and as a natural-born people-pleaser, I try to make everyone happy.) So we'll use 2,000 as the number of active members. A mere $20 per member is not $20,000. It's $40,000.

No matter how you slice it, if you are an active member of a fraternity, $20 is chump change. It's the loose change in your car's ashtray. It's less than you spend every Saturday at Steak Nite. It's the $20 that you just stuck in the pull tab machine or used to buy another round of drinks. I'm not asking for $20 every week, or even every month. All I'm asking for is $20 once a year.

So here it is: I'm issuing a challenge to the members of the Zephyrhills Moose Lodge 2276 and Women of the Moose Chapter 1682 to raise $40,000 in cash plus toys for the East Pasco Toys for Tots for Christmas 2015.

Now lets take a minute to back up and explain the relevance of that long quote at the start of the post. At the beginning of every men's meeting in every Moose lodge, there's this little bit where a guy opens a Bible and declares, "This is the Holy Bible; our inspiration and our guide." Well, that quote is certainly part of the Bible and therefore, is to be considered an inspiration and guide to anyone who is a member. (I'm assuming that the women's meetings have something similar. Never having been to one of their meetings, I can't say for sure. Again, if my assumption is wrong, I'm certain that I shall be set aright.) The writer of the Gospel of Matthew is pretty clear about what we are to do, whom we are to do it for, and what the consequences are if we fail to do so.

[Side note: Yes, I am aware that certain factions of Christianity have a real problem with this passage. As someone who spent the first forty years of his life in one of those factions, I've heard all the overly-intellectualized meanderings I care to listen to as to why this passage isn't saying what it obviously is. So please... just... ya know, don't.]

I know that it is popular just now in these united States to blame the poor for their plight. Anyone with several hours to spare can ask me what I think about that particular bit of neo-liberal bullshit. Regardless, we are not talking about adults; we are discussing children. No child has ever asked to be hungry, naked or homeless. However much we may choose to blame their parents, I see no rational way the parents' "sins" can be imputed to the children, and I'm quite sure I don't want to be associated with anyone who would even dare make the attempt.

And because this is the internet, I need to include the following:

Dear Dick from the Internet,

Nothing in this post should be construed as a criticism of what our lodge has done for Toys for Tots (or any other charity) in prior years. If my wife and I were not impressed with how much the lodge has done and is doing in East Pasco, we wouldn't be members. All I'm saying is that it is not just possible, but falling-off-a-log simple to do so much more.

And yes I understand how poor you are and how dare I ask for money so some poors can have a better Christmas than your own kids. All I can say to that is you have a computer and internet access. If your kids have a crappy Christmas, you need to rethink your priorities.

Sincerely,
Ric

And before this turns into a book, I'll wrap up with this:

C'mon Zephyrhills Lodge! Lets Loose the Moose!!

Triskaidekaphobia

Friday the 13th was on a Friday this month. The day we had at the lodge seemed to fit pretty well with the date. It started out bad, then went to worse, then proceeded to horrible. But we survived; and I get to go back tomorrow and do it again. Wee.

Debbie and I have been traveling, though not together. I flew up to Michigan to drive my parents down here for the winter, while Debbie and her mom enjoyed a free 2-day cruise. I got back here around midnight Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, and Debbie and her mom rolled in Wednesday evening. We both were back at work on Thursday. I played catch-up at my work while Debbie won another free cruise on the Carnival Vista. We have from January 2, 2016 to December 30, 2017 to take whatever 7-day cruise we want that leaves out of the Vista's regular port. Usually, these freebees are for an inside cabin, but this one is for a balcony! Woohoo!!

I was going to write up one of my diatribes about the nonsense at the "University" of Missouri, but my usual procrastination paid off and Fred Reed beat me to it:

How many of the black athletes, or black radicals at Missouri, or anywhere, have any business being at a university? How many have IQs below ninety? How many are way below? How many are studying real subjects, such as chemistry, languages, philosophy, literature, or history—as distinct from subjects for the enfeebled, Black Studies, Sociology, Education, and Breathing for Credit?

How many of the jocks can read? In many universities the black athletes are kept in special dorms and get high grades for courses they never attend and can’t spell. Is that happening in Missouri? Can we see their SATs? No one, I promise, will want to check.

Stray thought: If universities accepted only those with intelligence and interest, the noise level would drop appreciably. I am for it.

I know I keep saying it, but I'll say it again: Anyone who insists their child go into debt for life for the "privilege" of participate in this stupidity is guilty of child abuse. Get 'em a library card instead and apprentice them to a local tradesman.

And I'm off to bed so I can be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed tomorrow.