Raining Finally

So the rain started last evening, late. Rained hard early this morning, 3 AM, and gave us 1.5 inches. In a wet year we'd have around 4 inches from a storm like this, there would be branches down and possibly blackouts from those shorting out the power lines. It is snowing up the mountain, around 5000 feet, just above Blue Canyon where 20 and 80 meet. There's snow plows operating through Yuba Gap and over the summit down through Truckee and towards Reno. This is a good thing. The ski resorts will be able to open.

Locals prep for rain by stocking up their pantries, filling their gas tanks, fueling and oiling their generators, getting a few movies rented and books to read, and cleaning out their gutters, drains, and ditches. Also, bring in firewood if you have a wood stove, which is the preferred method of heating during a blackout because a good wood stove really works. This is a huge downside of an RV. Their heaters suck or use lots of propane or electricity. A house doesn't care about the weight, and there's usually plenty of space so you can plant a stove in a good location.

There will probably be more rain today, though the bulk of the storm is south of here now. This is not a choice day for bicycling or motorcycling or scootering. This is a day for windshield wipers, heat, and defrosters on the ON position. I am glad I still have a car. Riding a scooter to my volunteer job in this iffy weather would seem a bit too risky. Yes, there are most of the months of the year that the scooter would be fun and just fine, but during rainy weather that's a NOPE.

I find myself baffled by the brave middle aged men who ride their bicycles when there is snow on the ground. True, most of those men live on the flatland, and clearly have chips on their shoulders daring cars to hit them when they ought to be more sensible rather than commit suicide-by-car. We all make choices, but try not to traumatize someone by killing yourself on some teenybopper's fender while you insist you have the right to take the lane. In the real world, that is a suicide, and the police will rule it as such. And then your family won't get the life insurance. Stop being such a rude pillock. Use your car when the weather is bad. Seriously.

I am off to the library today. It will probably be busy, which is great because I like it busy. Keeps me moving and happily distracted. I have decided to do the Cuesta College Library Assistant Certificate program after all, because even though there are no paying jobs now, by the time I finish I should be able to get one in Placer County or elsewhere which pays better. It will mean a commute, but for $10/hr more pay that is worth it. I recall a very nice branch in old Rocklin that would likely hire me once I have a certificate. I can't wait forever here, no matter how nice the people are. If I had a trailer, I could be cooped up in icy cold Truckee working part time at the library there and swap my wheels for spiked tires and steel wheels all winter. It is serious multi inch black ice up there. Reno has good libraries too, another option worth considering. I kinda like Reno. Its the last western outpost of the Great Basin, a huge and empty place where you are damned polite because there are too many places to bury you if you aren't. Also, it is run by mafia. Be very polite to the mafia. Unlike in movies, they DO own the police and politicians and courts. And its legal. They call bribes "campaign contributions". They themselves are "industry leaders" and "concerned leading citizens". You do not insult them, even by accident. It could be the last mistake you make. So, that's the downside of Reno. It IS pretty, and its a major hub to other places with good photography opportunities and I love being in quiet places. Its a thing. You do have to talk to folks in the library these days, but you use your inside voice, quietly, and ask the needed questions. With all my customer service experience, and no sales pressures, recommending books or assisting library patrons is a cake job. Super easy. I have trouble understanding why so many librarians get in a huff about this. The Masters Degree arrogance is really not impressing me, but I have personally chewed out PhD's for academic incompetence back when I was a physics major, using choice questions about their math while asserting magical girl levels of results without offering a real test to see if this outcome is valid. Physicists like coeds and scotch too, so they fake results with the best of them. This is a reality of academic life everywhere. Even Princeton and MIT have bozos. Its this truth which is why I caught onto the academic fraud behind most climate "research" which is really just fundraising and trolling for morons with cash, booze, and hookers to keep the game going, like all confidence artist games. Climate change? Its winter. It rains and snows in winter. This isn't change. Its normal weather.

Cycling Safety From Top Gear

Even as a cyclist, I do see their point. Cycling in traffic is a great way to get horribly injured or dead. Bicycle accidents are every bit as terrible as motorcycle accidents, since anything over 15 mph can be fatal, and motorcyclists wear far better safety gear. A flimsy helmet and gloves aren't nearly as safe as full leathers. I'm all in favor if people cycling safely, in safe places, but London traffic? Nope.

Of course, in a few short years you won't be able to afford a car. And your choices will be bicycle, walk, or stay home. Cheers!

Cycling Weather

The last three days here in California it was lovely and warm. Apologies to those with snow on the ground or freezing daytime temps, but it was 70'F here. Yes, that's right: 70'F. I dried laundry on the line. I wore short sleeves. I opened up the windows and let the gentle breeze drift through.

This is why people retire to California. There's a LOT of California which relatively far from San Francisco and Los Angeles crime and home prices completely suitable for retirement living, enjoying the good weather like this week has been, and smirking at the snow storms "back East". Neighbors were out riding bicycles. If I'd had a scooter, I would have ridden it around laughing to "Girl From Ipanema" on the stereo. We're expecting rain this weekend, but for now, and on Thanksgiving, we will again have clear and warm days. Are you jealous?

We do have our troubles, and the drought isn't over yet, but we'll have rain on Saturday and Sunday, and probably snow Sunday and Monday, at least in the high country. The Skiiers will like that. As will the people running the resorts. Ski resort staff make their living doing that all winter, and then go back to waitressing or growing pot when the season is over. A reality of modern California, I think.

Still we have better weather than the rest of America and they are jealous. And when serious winter blizzards blow into the Midwest, retiring folk think: Why do we keep living here where the winters are so long, so bitter, so miserable when we could be driving around in a convertible 10 months of the year in California? And its true. And they DO move here. And they settle in little towns rather than the big loud angry cities, and life is good. We have cheap good wine. We have many more kinds of lettuce that get out of state. Our sports teams often win. You can go on vacation to all sorts of different places without leaving the state or our weather behind, usually within a day's drive.

Thanksgiving is going to be sunny and warm again. I'll be doing lots of cooking for the feast, including the bird itself. I joined 2500 other people for the Turkey Trot this morning and probably again after eating so my body is all set to deal with the high quality food. And there's a 49er's football game afterward, against Seattle. All very traditional.

I am a fan of this holiday, celebrating family, immigration, and our history as Americans. It is one of our high points as a people. I hope the other Americans reading this enjoy their feasting and remember what makes us a good people.

Soul Food

I was fortunate, during an emergency trip to Riverside several years back, to stay at a hotel near a Soul Food restaurant. We ate there two or three times, and impressed the owners, who were NOT used to white people coming in. The cook even asked us what we thought of it, and I expressed happiness at the flavors, and particularly at how difficult it must be to cook fried breaded okra just right, and that they'd pulled it off. You still want a bit of crunch in that. Okra goes slimy like spinach does. I was also impressed with their sweet potato pie, which is a Southern Soul Food specialty and does not taste like pumpkin pie when done right. And this was done right. Even though the trip was very sad, and cemented in us our need to marry rather than delay any longer, a decision we came to regret, while we were together we embraced tasty food.

My wife and I were exposed to lots of cultures, and eating their foods was something we enjoyed. I have eaten the common ones (Mexican, Italian, French, Chinese, Japanese, Cajun), but also Peruvian, English, Irish, Spanish, New Mexican (different from Mexico), Moroccan, Egyptian, Lebanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Turkish, Greek, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Taiwanese, Bulgarian, Canadian, Alaskan, Quebecquois, Afghan, Kurdish, Indian (3 different kinds), Midwestern, Texican, Memphis, St. Louis, Atlanta, Hawaiian, Philippine, Australian, Kiwi, Chilean, Brazilian, Basque (inventors of Hors d'oeuvres AND cocktails), Malaysian, Burmese, Korean, Mongolian, Kentuckian (not fried chicken either), West Virginian, Cape Cod, and Norcal Beach BBQ. And yes, there's a restaurant for each of those. Despite being white and middle class, I am not, after all, ignorant or afraid. I've also had Nigerian and Venezuelan and Colombian food. Oh, and Ethiopian which is very spicy but vegetarian since the population of that country is a particular branch of Jewish which doesn't eat meat. Eth E O Pya, as it is properly pronounced, still reveres Hailie Sailassi and I impressed those nationals by knowing his name. Africans, I will point out right now, have little respect for African Americans who are lazy and violent and have everything so easy. To escape Africa is a lot of work, a lot of sacrifice, and they're glad to have arrived here and thrive once they do. This is a big difference, and proves the divide between Black people and African immigrants is social. Terry Pratchett describes the ghettos of his fictional London as a Crab Pot, which needs no lid because the other craps pull down any that try to climb out. Out of jealousy and petty hatred, mostly. Africa is a crab pot and in time the Chinese will own all of it. Especially if America continues to stand aside, ignoring it.

I really appreciate proper food. I am a foodie, but I can't afford to pay for other's cooking so I generally cook it myself these days. Despite it being a warm and sunny day, only a couple days from Thanksgiving, I made pea soup again. This time with hickory smoked sausage slices and more carrot than last time. After nearly two hours of simmering it was ready, and again, it was delicious. Dad and I had a bowl each on our warm back deck, under a comfortable sun and a bright blue sky. The Midwest and East are mostly dug out of their last blizzard, but here in California there are still people riding motorcycles and laughing. I spend days like this hiking the hillsides and staring at the views, raking up leaves, and making soups like the above split pea. And yes, the hickory smoked sausage really did add nice flavors to the soup. Didn't even need to add salt.

So many leaves to pick up, and the fig tree is nearly bare, but this is California, and our normal is really different from everyone else's. We aren't afraid to have restaurants for so many kinds of food from around the world. We can eat food that doesn't look exactly the same as we're used to. We like spices and interesting flavors. We discover the joy of experience. Rather than throw firebombs at our neighbors, like in say Ferguson. California is still in drought, but we'll have rain on Black Friday and all weekend, and that's fine. We might even see a few flakes of snow.

Never Argue Science With A Creationist

It makes you frustrated and them more insane. Its doubly frustrating when you're a conservative atheist because you run into religious Xtian people a bit more often. Liberals get everything BUT xtians because they hate xtians and welcome everything else, including cannibals. Must make for awkward dinner parties: "so whose baby are we eating tonight?" It just doesn't sound like something the Vegans are going to be comfortable with.

When I was in college, I worked several jobs to pay my books and car insurance. My folks covered the tuition, which back then was only a few hundred a semester, and I went to the local university so there were no food and housing costs. When I finished college I wasn't bankrupt, just useless like everybody else in my degree program. The most important lesson you get from college is academics exist to rip you off. Most of the Millenials know that now. When Gen X, Y, and the Millenials get the majority vote, we're cancelling medicare, defunding social security, and throwing the old people out of all their freebies, so quick your head will spin. We will bankrupt them. It won't be enough, but it will be a start. After that, we're publishing the books on why the Baby Boomers were bastards their whole lives. And we're going to get specific on their acts of greed and hypocrisy and corruption.

Gen X, Y, and the Millenials are the least religious in history. Any God that built a world like this one should have been fired. Most of the religious people I've met have been very blasé about their sins, smiling with insanity that God forgives them for their many sins, again and again, so its okay to sin again, and again. And more, God will forgive us too, for not forgiving the Baby Boomers for being ruthless evil bastards all their lives. Uh huh. Can you see how demotivational that is?

I was told by an Intelligent Design cultist today that he doesn't believe in RNA. This is a complex protein which evolved into DNA and still serves important purposes in cellular communication and control so you can have things like a metabolism and organs and be self aware. That's insane to deny something which exists and is easily detected. You can see RNA strands on a microscope. A powerful one, but they exist. Your body is full of them, along with DNA and cell walls etc.

In my experience, people run to religion this hard because they've just been told they've got fatal cancer and have weeks to live. There's no rationality in religion. Its abuses hiding insanity from reality, simple wrong answers to a complex world, and the more zealous the faith, the more violent the person who believes. Religious zealots are insane, and insane people should not be allowed to own guns, but that is a protected right. Thankfully, many religions insist that God protects them so they think they don't need them. Ironic that the Muslims are most likely to whip out the firearms invented by xtians for self defense against muslims.

Gen X, Y, and the Millenials are really all waiting for the crazy nihilist bastards to die off so we can fix our broken govt, our broken economy, and our broken civilization's public utility infrastructure instead of allowing the elder religious insane bastards to drop us all into an apocalypse. Good thing that zombies are just a fad. I've met Boomers who actually said: "I want the world to end when I die. I'm all that matters." And they meant it too! How should I respect a generation which feels that's okay to think and believe and use as their guiding principles into the future? This was a generation raised xtian, with good parents who loved them, and they are the worst generation in human history.

Baby Boomers disappoint me in humanity. I do hope my own generation behaves better when we are in charge. And hopefully ban religious people from having any access to destructive technology. People who think Intelligent Design is real should be banned from owning digital watches, cellphones, microwaves, gasoline, safe food, and modern medicine. Help those Luddites meet God directly instead of troubling sane people trying to look after the ones who aren't going out of their way to offend those of us doing the work to maintain civilization for the future. Which, as it happens, still exists despite the death of zealots who hate the world for existing. Just saying.

There are religious people who are quiet about it, and I respect their willingness not to trouble me. Its the zealots who insist reality is delusion and shout it from the rooftops who are begging to see the state mental hospitals refunded and reopened. And I think that's something my generation will do. Homeless is an euphemism for insane asylum patient, released to die. That was something the baby boomers did which was wrong and killed a lot of them with exposure or drug overdose. Really wrong. Good religious baby boomers abandoned crazy people to die. And that was really wrong. We should stop pretending these people can be cured, stop pretending their abandonment to die in the cold was "freedom", reopen the hospitals and put them back away. Maybe some of the religious zealots belong there too.

Totalitarianism: President Wants To Censor Internet In New Power Grab

After the incredible scandal of Gruber's bragging statement: "American voters are too dumb to know what they want, so we tricked them into the ACA" and got paid $2.5 million in combined fees from the Federal govt and 4 states, the President has turned his sights onto new targets of expanding his own power. After this scandal, which most of the big media are ignoring, the White House needs to distract people from their corruption and failure with a new attack on freedom. You'll love this.

 

The White House wants to censor the Internet. Only things they like will be allowed. Yeah. Say goodbye to social media, Wikipedia, youtube, online news, freedom of thought, freedom of expression online. Its all going away. The FCC chairman was interviewed about this and says its a terrible idea and would crush much of the new economy, as well as being a vast and unconstitutional expansion of power of the Presidency, an office which changes hands from political party to political party.

 

Do you want to live in an America which attacks your right to think out loud?

 

Do you want to be arrested as a communist 2 years from now because the Democrats lose the presidency after screwing around and hurting people for 8 straight years and the inevitable retaliation against the weak and loud means you are on the chopping block?

 

Or have your home broken into by storm troopers because you own a firearm, still legal at present, but not if the President gets his way as he becomes Der Fuhrer.

 

If you were completely evil, censoring the internet opens up huge vistas of campaign contributions from companies that want to buy back the right to operate while their competitors languish behind a censorship curtain and resulting bankruptcy. What's so bad about censorship? Depends who is in charge, doesn't it?

 

Censorship works for China. Anybody who objects gets arrested, tortured, and thrown into slave labor camps making iPhone components. What if we started punishing our conscientious objectors under internet censorship laws. Every blog, every bit of email correspondence, every network broadcast censored by a completely political, biased, and proved anti-American agency that's put 92 million people out of work. If you arrest them and put them into slavery camps for saying the President is a bad guy after all, that "reduces unemployment" and "gets America back to work." And if those workers are beaten or shot for refusing to be slaves, well, at least they aren't unemployed anymore, right?

Most of these guys at the WPA are working because they get beaten to death by the foreman if they don't. Victims of the Great Depression and stuck in Hoovervilles, they were rounded up and forced into the WPA work camps. Many of the things they built are still around. And the "wages" are "sent home" despite vanishing on the way often enough. Funny how that is. But its totally not slavery! And we totally totally wouldn't do it again, either. Nope. Trust us! Govt totally doesn't enslave people anymore. Ask anyone in the military, currently the highest suicide rate occupation in the world. This is the sort of world we live in, and the govt we deserve. There's long been talk about bringing back the WPA. Would you like to slave away for the WPA?

 

How do you feel about this?

Say no to Internet Censorship. Even the head of the FCC says this is a terrible idea. That much of our economy only exists because the internet is free and open. And closing down freedom will just destroy viable industries. Living where I do, I suspect probably half of those 92 million are doing underground jobs, probably in the drug industry, probably making meth and growing dope, and selling it to all the overworked, overstressed, underpaid suckers trying to survive on Minimum Wage. Its a Liberal Paradise, bringing back slavery because once you control the news, you can tell people what to think. Orwell warned us about that. So what if we've had 80 years advance notice. Its not like schools teach people how to think.

Try To Understand

I have been trying to understand the mentality of the local pot growers, because they are the only growth industry around here. I won't be joining them, ever, because I have too much to lose to bother with illegal stuff, but security and safety come from understanding the dangers, and for that I need to understand their motivations. What I've worked out through twice weekly observation, plus observation on my many hikes is this:

1. Pot gardens are all over the place. Any tall fence or thick brush with a tarp over it? There's a pot field on the other side. There are LOT of those.
2. Pot smokers have figured out how to be high without bloodshot eyes and sunglasses as telltales, but they ignore the stink on their clothes which is pretty strong even from 10 feet away, or 100 feet if they are smoking it at the time.
3. Both towns here seem to be accepting that they are a party center for potheads, however only a few places have worked out how to cater to this crowd and extract money. Previously, Broad Street worked out how to cater to Cruiser biker clubs that come up for the weekend and party, not harassing or ticketing their rows of bikes because they spend money and the city gets tax revenue from that. Surprisingly few accidents, too.
4. Both towns prefer to hire locals, despite locals often being high on the job because wages are so low and benefits rare. Slogging through a crappy job, and dealing with the mistakes being high causes seems to justify the low wages for their companies, and the mistakes eventually bankrupt them. This is why legitimate businesses keep closing their doors. Why they choose to hire locally is their prerogative.
5. North San Juan Ridge, on the North side of the Yuba River is a popular growing region for pot when working on larger fields than the local town gardens or using someone else's land. These fields are the reason that BLM has assault rifles and the sheriff has an APC. The ridge runs from the Sacramento Valley all the way to the Pacific Crest of the Sierras, just south of the Yuba Pass near the Sierra Buttes. Its 50 miles by 10 miles, and a genuinely rural and somewhat dangerous place, with lots of logging roads and survivalist/preppers growing dope and squatting in very primitive conditions. There are the people with tiny RVs or building cabins with camouflage netting over the outside. They live up there, growing dope every summer, harvesting every fall and selling to their dealer network. There are several risks. When the sales are done, that's the money they live on for the next year. This pays better than any job up here.
6. When they've got their money, they get to decide what to do next. Many prep for another crop, spending towards living standards comforts or personal security. Better RVs, generators or solar panels. Laptops and movies to help pass the time. Firearms, 4WD or enduro motorcycles for getting in and out of the boonies. There seem to be a fair number of couples doing this job, too. Lots of women with really serious dark tans and babies. I am not sure they're happy settling for this lifestyle, but with a degree in liberal arts or whatever useless thing they studied and no job opportunities in legitimate work, is growing pot better or worse than "appointment setting" which is code for telemarketing people during dinner specifically conning old people into convincing them they forgot about buying something they really didn't? How about indoor sales, which is also code for telemarketing. This is better than 1/3 of all the jobs listed in Sacramento, btw. Con men, absolutely and completely. Are drug growers worse, morally? These days they don't have to push pot. It is popular enough that lots of kids smoke it in the high school. Meth is a big problem at the local junior high, but the school seems unwilling or unable to arrest kids using it even though possession is a felony. Or was. Prop 47 took effect immediately, so the job market is flooding with released felons from the state prison system. This fixes overcrowding, but also releases experienced and motivated felons into the wild once more. There will likely be a crime spree. And those who don't want to be so obvious will drift into drug growing, including raiding their neighbors near harvest time, which could increase the violence there. How do the drug growers feeling about their job downgrading to a misdemeanor while gaining seriously dangerous felon neighbors newly released from prison? Ambitious prisoners who understand the myth of morality?
7. Some of the drug growers will likely want out of the whole thing, or perhaps be educating themselves into safer jobs they're more suited for, using the money they made growing crops, and their contacts in that industry and the associated black market, to find a niche they can fill which is less dangerous and still provides acceptable income to live on. Many of those are at the local library reading about associated skills, like welding, machining, engine repair, soils, agriculture techniques. Some are just looking to improve yields and get more out of their crops, but others are probably thinking about getting out of the business to reduce personal risk in the coming war with the Mexican drug cartels, an inevitable consequence of getting into their market share and reducing their profits. The Mexican Cartels murder people in really showy ways to try and scare off others from competing. Same as any mafia. The president says they're just folks and works hard to insure that border patrol is helpless to stop them. I wonder if the Mexican Mafia donates to Democratic party campaigns to insure that borders stay largely unguarded? If I were evil that is what I would do.
8. From what I've seen, pot growers are preppers, and around half the preppers posting questions or articles on the bulletin boards are pot growers. They have rural bunkers, supplies, and often start from a tent in the woods under camouflage netting and gradually build up to owning the land, digging a well, upgrading to an RV, then building a cabin with bulletproof adobe walls and pretending its really eco friendly when what it does is stop rifle bullets from rivals while sleeping. Rivals snipe each other, you see. Those stories rarely get into the local hobby newspaper.
9. The paper is pro-pot and thus biased against negative stories. They don't tell about the trimmers that get murdered, raped, or ripped off by the grower they're working for. Some raped trimmers end up having babies and being common-law wives with nowhere to go. Its easy when they've been drugged up with superstrong pot. After enough raw date rapes to insure a baby, they're pretty well stuck. I see these women with very grim and hopeless expressions at the library pretty often. The ones with two or three kids, each a different color from a different father are rather the most pitiful. Eventually they turn into the devil may care hags with all the tattoos and a belt to hold down their flat and floppy breasts, in 20 more years. Its really sad, but they chose this industry and all it meant. Being naïve can kill you. I think a lot of them talk themselves into pretending they love their rapist, but women have a special kind of masochism all their own. Ending up a trimmer is a direct result of the current poor quality college education today. Colleges do not teach how to start businesses, because professors do not know how. Corporations outsource jobs and pay the lowest wages they can get away with to maximize profit. College grads can't pay rent AND student loans, so they end up off the books and desperate, and desperate people do desperate things. Like break the law.
10. The pot growers happily use any technology that is cheap and durable enough to give them an advantage, including agricultural humidity sensors to help with water conservation. As many of the growers near the various forks of the Yuba River have to tend to pumps with jerry cans and rifles to keep rivals from touching them or stealing them, not wasting the fuel, and getting the most pot for their buck in an industry where sharing crucial details is disadvantageous to your own operations, there's serious motivation to get this right. During the summer months it is COMMON to find pumps running and water streaming up the canyon wall a couple of hundred feet in what looks like firehose then vanishing into the woods at the top. These are going to pot fields. That water is full of cholera, btw, from leaky sewer pipes in Washington, a small gold mining town 20 miles east of Nevada City. It is so deep in the Yuba River Canyon it is at the same elevation as Nevada City. Washington is pretty dull, but one of the places where gold panning and rockers are still in use today. It also has lots of pot growers, having access to the San Juan Ridge to its north via fire roads.
11. It is common to find growers squatting or renting access to water via a garden hose and long orange power cords off a nearby house. Some actually park a tiny trailer in BLM areas in the boonies and then commute down to Sacramento for one of those minimum wage jobs, while tending a pot field in their evenings. I have seen these setups personally, 12 years ago when mapping fire roads. Locals did not shoot us because we were NOT the building enforcement department, and not trimmers looking to home invade and kill everyone, which ALSO happens around here. 90% of home invasions are drug related. The other 10% were the wrong address. Very important to remember that.
12. Semi legality of marijuana means there is increasing competition, which lowers the price. Growers see their profits falling, and understand they have to either ramp up production endlessly or lose the money they've come to depend on for their lifestyle. I expect it will eventually become fully legal and regulated one day, in order to cut down on violence with the Mexican drug gangs. The Mexicans will try to fund efforts to stop legalization because they make a lot of money from pot sales through their black market network of contacts. They don't want to give up the profits either. This dispute is going to escalate as more US troops come home from the wars with battle experience, since the Mexicans hire them as mercenaries and they're very good at killing, at security, at booby traps and demolitions and even at recruiting. As war veterans coming back to an economy that only offers minimum wage jobs, some of them will take the mercenary work. Most of the more vicious killings along the US border go back to US military veterans. Its not the guns, its the veterans.
13. I don't know whether to feel glad or sad at the pot growers making money from their chosen crops. They are spending money locally, which extends the life of lots of local jobs. They are employed, so they aren't burglarizing houses in my neighborhood, at least. They aren't growing inside rentals anymore because they're growing in gardens and fields the Sheriff can't touch thanks to the flimsy license requirements for growing "medical". They aren't competing with me for work. And the local police arrest the worst offenders going into public high and violent, and there's some of those every couple days. Legalization has definitely increased crime. And the cities are dealing with it. Any that leave that life behind for a new job ARE competing with me for work, but they're also likely saving their own lives in the process. I should be happy they are choosing life. I just wish there were more legitimate jobs around here.

A Little Advice On Wine

There are two kinds of wines, and many varieties of grapes to make them. There is red wine and there is white wine. I grew up in the wine country. Napa County was literally two ridges over, about 15 miles away. I was half a mile from Matanzas Creek Winery, which is famous for its Chardonnay, a well known white wine. I do not like white wine because the cheap stuff is awful. You need to pay over $9-12/btl to get a white wine that is drinkable, and it must be served very cold. White wine is made by removing the grape skins from the juice during a certain stage of the fermentation. You also have to have white wine grapes. You can make various white wines from red grapes using this technique, including Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Grigio. Sauvignon is what you make Cabernet Sauvignon from, the sign of basic competence. Cabernet grapes do not mutate so their wines all taste largely the same, provided they are made correctly. Compare this with Pinot Noir, which mutates like crazy and picks up a lot of variation from local terroir, soil and microclimate, including atmosphere and salt spray, such as is found in the fog off the San Francisco Bay which creeps into the Carneros District just west of Napa and over towards Sonoma north of the salt flats between Hwy 37 and Highway 12. This is important because those tiny crystals of salt make the grapes fruit slightly more concentrated and result in world class award winning Pinot Noir wines. The best looking winery in the district, btw is relatively new, and there to attract tourists. I watched them build it over several years back in the 1990s. Old Wineries, like Chateau Montelena have been around for over a century.

If you like wine, white wine is an expensive taste. If you like wine, drink reds. They have a lot more flavor for your dollar, can be purchased and travel better and offer a far broader temperature range for serving, go with more foods and appetizers, and are often grown in more places, further increasing supply and reducing price. Ergo, if you LIKE wine, red wines give you better flavor for your dollar, and that dollar buys more of it. Cabernets are a sign of competence. Sometimes you find wineries that screw that up, so $3 cabs are to be avoided. A $5 cab is probably just as good as a $12, though feel free to buy both and after a 30 minute rest or aeration, taste test them. I generally recommend this to determine what price you should buy to, ergo if you can taste the difference between a $10 and $12 but not a $12 and $15, buy the $12 and limit yourself appropriately. If you find that $6 and $8 are both fine and can't taste the difference, buy the $6 and be happy. And stock up because not all wines stick around forever in shops, and having bottles in a rack or cellar is a fine investment in stress relief, cheaper than a sports car or a divorce.

Lately, a Lodi Zinfandel (Lodi is to Zinfandel what Carneros is to Pinot) called Victor Vineyards has become available through a local discount grocery chain. It is very good, a $12 wine for $6. Dad and I bought a case. I am enjoying it slowly because it really is very good. To buy an equivalent Chardonnay, I'd need to spend around $16 a bottle. And chill it really well. Chardonnay is a good choice for Thanksgiving, or a roast chicken, even chicken bbq, or pork roast, but Zinfandel is great for streak with pepper, beef stew, bbq ribs, or one of those $15 burgers that a $15 minimum wage will produce.

When I worked in the wine industry in Healdsburg, walking during my lunch break up to the overlook for the Russian River, the Alexander Valley lay to the north and offered some very good Zinfandels, Cabernets, and Chardonnays, the trifecta of critical wines. It turns out the screamy girl from the Jurassic Park movie was from there. The vines are mature, and the old prune plum orchards and walnut orchards were being ripped down and sold off or ground up at the local lumber mill and then replanted with vines of the coming thing. Lots of famous very rich people have homes in that area because it is scenic and peaceful, other than when the fans are turned on because of frost anyway. Those wines earned the area $4 Billion a year. Think about that. Alexander Valley, Napa Valley, and Sonoma Valley WINES made California $4 billion a year. For about 20 years. More areas sell wines so the prices have dropped and the money coming from those 3 valleys has dropped as well, but overall the state is still making big money from wine. When it rains properly, and the aquifers and reservoirs refill, they can ramp up production once more and more Americans can learn the difference between white and red wines and why they are good and how much to spend to satisfy their tastes. Good wine is civilized. California, especially where I grew up, is a lot like Provence, without the muslim terrorists. Speaking Spanish rather than French is also somewhat useful. We have great restaurants, as well as bad ones, but the profitable ones stay open. I miss my home sometimes, particularly the fog, and meandering along in a car between vineyards, probably driving too fast for the speed limit signs but that's what a BMW was for. If you were dumb enough to go fast with a straight axle then you deserved what you got.

It would be nice if the better aspects of my home asserted themselves. Good wines, good food, good weather, enough rain, patience, and the long warm afternoons that ripened grapes before the sudden onset of heavy fog that shut it down before too much sugar developed and ruined them. Its the hot afternoons and fog which are believed to be so critical to really perfect grapes, though science has found a way to water precisely to accomplish this trick without fog. But that's a story for another day. If you desire to visit Provence for food and wine, consider Napa and Sonoma and Healdsburg instead. The people speak English. If you want the architecture of 2000 years in stone, go to Provence.

Split Pea Soup

Traditionally, split pea soup is made with a ham hock or ham bone, cooked until the marrow leaks out and provides flavor to the broth. I used three spicy sausages, sauteed to get the fat rendered out, poured off the fat and set them aside to drain in a bowl. I then diced 3 onions, 3 celery stalks, a carrot, and sautéed them 15 minutes in the same pan with a tablespoon of olive oil. Leave the lid on so it sweats and deglazes the spices off the pan. This helps later.

Then I added 2 cups beef broth, a bag of split peas (8 oz) dried, and returned the drained sausage slices back into the pot with two cups water and simmered for 90 minutes until the peas swelled and broke down to thicken the soup. You should stir with a ladle every 30 minutes and mind it simmers without boiling over.

I did not have to add additional seasonings or salt since both were in the sausage and broth already, and the onions are fantastic, almost disappearing into the soup they are so clear by this point. The soup is very healthy, low fat thanks to pouring off what came out of the sausage, and sticks to your ribs. It has less than half the salt of store bought. I had mine plain but many people like sourdough bread or fresh biscuits with butter and honey, and dark beer or hot tea works well with this dish. Makes about 10 servings.

BOOK: Unseen Academicals

It is slightly puzzling how someone might review this book poorly, unless they're so detached from life they don't know any war veterans. In modern times, war veterans are everywhere in English speaking countries. Wounds in modern war are even worse than during Korea or Vietnam, and modern technology and medicine means that war wounded don't have to lie in bed after they close up. They are out and about, and I suspect we'll see proper working exoskeletons in under 10 years time, so the paraplegics can walk again.

Unseen Academicals is about a war veteran, though this isn't immediately apparent as the story begins, instead confusing him with a particularly reviled race on the Discworld. It is about how war veterans are treated and distrusted and overall not regarded well enough, not respected for both their sacrifice to keep us safe as for their restraint upon returning home to a world that may need more chlorine in its gene pool.

It is also about how Academics are disconnected from the world outside their ivory tower of publically funded communism, examples of which I found in a university owned set of perfect, maintained, visitor bungalows in Livermore which existed to serve visiting Doctors of science coming to Livermore Labs, home of the Hydrogen Bomb, which is an upgraded Atom Bomb which can flash fry a big city rather than a small one. Livermore Labs and Sandia (Los Alamos) Labs are both cited, like Oxford, as examples of letting blowhards talk themselves into an easy job of pretension and laziness by being so obscure nobody can fire them. Geologists used to do the same thing as USGS but eventually the complaints from pregnant coed field lab assistants convinced then Democratic President Clinton to fire them all. And he did, too. This impacted me by making my career worthless a year before I graduated. I have never forgiven him, but it was their own faults for being such randy, useless bastards. I don't forgive them either. They had it coming. Those same bastards are running global warming research scams and seducing braless hippy chicks at dinner party fundraisers today, while their exes continue to collect alimony or child support and the professors keep a low profile and work off the books as much as possible. Absolute Bastards, but at least they're not the worst sort of bastards. They don't generally kill their girlfriends. Ahem.

They story also contains bits on the start of fashion models and the fashion institution out of a medieval culture that is evolving out of the functional armor stage and into the showy pretty stuff, and why footballers seem to attract fashion models because they're both so very dumb.

Still, the war veteran plot is the key one and how many authors today write about that? Respect to Terry Pratchett, once more. I kinda wish that he'd franchise the Unseen University to diploma mills with actual classrooms, with the stated intention of doing exactly what modern colleges do, namely waste state and Federal money and poorly educate and impoverish the youth who attend them. It would be honest and hilarious.

Polar Vortexing Second Time

I'm a conservative, former Boy Scout, hiker, writer, and amateur snapshot photographer. I'm also, I suspect, a narcissist because nobody else around here is worth obsessing over or talking about. I know this is a flaw, but people here aren't especially nice. Egotism is a natural disease for authors, btw. Every single one of them is an egotist. Even if you're really good at observing people, you can't write about anything unless you believe in yourself most of all, and vanity presses are so cheap these days it no longer costs money to publish through them so you don't have to be rich to be an egotistical author.

 

I think this is part of why I find Jeremy Clarkson so very entertaining. He's one of the hosts of the car review show Top Gear. They do many silly stunts involving cars to show of their designs and sometimes their flaws in ways you don't normally do in a car test drive with a dealer. They also do some hilarious things which piss off the Liberals, like buy used cars and drive them to show off their cheaper to keep running than the taxes and fuel from electric cars and hybrids, which still aren't there yet. All you have to know about hybrids is watch a current Season F1 race and see which cars just... stop. That isn't a normal thing for F1, before hybrid engine setups this year. Some champions have had their cars just die on them. Its been hilarious chaos having F1 insist on being green. When Bernie Ecclestone, current chairman of F1, steps down or dies underneath his latest conquest with a heart attack and a smile on his face, the new chairman should fix the formula back to cars with engines, no batteries, and probably a clutch pedal would be a good idea too. The cars back in the 1980's were faster. Keep the cameras, but lose the team radios. Let the drivers drive. Top Gear makes suggestions on car racing, and why rallysport is cheaper and more fun than golf. They even made a film about it.

See? Better than golf. And you'll end up learning a lot from your car, what makes it go, how to repair it, what equipment is essential and what is just weight that hurts performance. Around here, in the mountains, lots of people have specialized offroading trucks and jeeps, with roll bars and big knobby tires, some of them for the sport of riding dirt roads, but most I think because they have pot fields and that's the only way to get there.

 

Top Gear has also reviewed ATVs, which I appreciate, since they're the modern equivalent of the Willys Jeep that hasn't been made for years and was the sort of quality steel you'd find in a Lancia, most of which currently fits in a small bucket due to the rust.

ATVs do what little jeeps did but don't anymore due to modern car safety standards. Yes, modern cars are very safe, but they're also very heavy and unsuitable to offroading. Subarus are mostly AWD to help with slushy snow conditions, not actual offroad. They can deal with gravel, which is slightly slippery, and graded dirt roads, but nothing more severe than that. As graded dirt is one rainstorm away from rutted dirt or stream or mud bog, Subarus just don't cut it in real woods. They're good for snowy places like here and Tahoe, which is about an hour away over the crest, as we call it. Nobody has a lancia, and while there's plenty of Priuses around here, I don't see many moving when it snows. Mountains are special conditions. We don't get many 49cc Vespas either. It is mostly bigger bikes, and I see more Dual Sport bikes than scooters on the road here. More useful. Like a jeep, only you can hurt yourself a lot further away from help on one. Still, better than walking 20 miles.

 

The Polar Vortex is coming again, because we're having a double-dip El Nino. El Nino is not human caused. They've been happening for at least 100K years, predating coal burning, people as we are today, and even the most recent ice age. And they keep happening and I think most of the global warming hysteria is a mix of religious nihilism by masochists like Al Gore (or con men cashing in on the panic to make a lot of money and attend parties with breathy hippie chicks who don't wear bras or panties) is just more El Nino weather. There's tons of data on El Nino, how it works, what makes them and what ends them, and nobody confuses El Nino weather events with people because its ocean currents responsible. Way bigger than us. And going on longer than we've been us. You can't sell the idea because its ridiculous.

 

Polar Vortexes, before they got the silly name and eviscerated public support of Warming, costing the Greens this election and their control of public funding to their environmental causes, which is still about hippie chicks not fixing any part of the environment. Its a fund raising scam, and the funds are going into Freds Bank, which is his left front pocket, not the thing they're "saving". They never "save" anything. Its ALWAYS a scam. That's one of those truths. This is one of those fundamental differences between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives do the work. Liberals raise money they don't care to see where it goes because it always goes to a scammer they fool themselves into trusting. Idiots. The Polar Vortexes are going to slam global warming again this winter, and its going to make the Liberals look even stupider, and cost them more support and I'm going to laugh, even though this means more drought for California. We need the water. This years El Nino should be weaker than last, so we should probably get more rain and snow than last year, but still not normal levels of it. California hasn't had many Top Gear visits, and Clarkson has avoided the wine country and the Pacific Coast Highway north or south of San Francisco. I am not sure why, I'm sure there's a reason. Maybe he'd get bogged down racing on the curvy roads that he thought American's didn't know existed.

He likes to say American cars flip over at the least sign of a corner, and he's not completely wrong. I saw lots of 1970's musclecars in ditches when I was a kid. Live rear axel meets bumpy pavement requiring all independent suspension? Duh. When my Dad bought an AWD SUV for mountain roads in the snow because he had friends on gravel roads and holiday dinners are socially mandatory here, he couldn't find an American one without a live rear axle so went to the Japanese who understood them newfangled Wishbone thangs. This gives you all independent suspension and prevents many kinds of crashes, provided you do your part. When people who are fans of SUVs and Trucks insist the live rear axle is "good enough" this just tells me they live on very straight roads or lack imagination or perhaps haven't heard that other options exist.

 

Someday events like the Polar Vortex are going to be called "winter" again like they were back in the 1980s and those kinds of blizzards happened weekly during the long Eastern Winters, and the Midwest didn't fuss about Chicago being closed down by snow because this happened every year. The brief period of slightly warmer and drier winters we've had in the 1990's and 00's has returned to more normal patterns. This is new to the 20 somethings, but old hat to me. And justifies the taxes and crap economy here in California, though that will change as normal winters will prompt more old boomers in the Midwest to sell out at market price and move here to warm up their joints and reduce that winter arthritis pain. There are lots more areas in California where we can build houses, provided we build water pumps to supply their lawns, sewers and swimming pools. I could easily see Cloverdale, Willits, Ukiah and such getting huge retirement communities, hospitals and jobs, with RV maintenance, storage and sales for those hot summer months when the locals get out to the coast and enjoy seeing America and not being in the 115'F heat. Lots of California has much better weather than the Midwest in the winter. You don't have to spend a fortune buying in Palm Springs to take advantage of it. Polar Vortexes should kickstart the next housing boom here, and that will mean jobs and development.

 

As for the Midwest? Getting normal cold winters again supports splitting cords of firewood, having a wood stove and a blower run by a couple of deep cycle marine batteries. That will heat your house. It means putting up the storm windows, and probably winter curtains too, and those silica absorbers at the base so moisture doesn't ruin your floors and walls when its really cold out. Serious winters justify serious preparations and a deep pantry and probably a generator. We used to get those, back in the 80's. The weather is returning to normal. Calling it a Polar Vortex is just more media politics, more bias. More propaganda. More reason to get your news elsewhere. And the public voted and slammed the entire agenda. Bring on the snow. Snowmobiles are fun. Skis are great exercise. Cuddling up to your spouse makes more babies, perhaps ones that won't be conned into warming nonsense when they play in the snow every winter. This is normal weather, not "extreme". Extreme was the mild warm winters of 20 years past. That's over. Back to normal.

Show Your Resolve

A few years ago I was denounced as a traitor by Liberals when I suggested that Republicans should drop out of the economy so they couldn't be taxed on income they weren't making, add to the burden on social services to bankrupt them and prevent layabouts from getting any kind of benefits by refusing to work, and appear in protests holding signboards that mock liberal hypocrisy with signs like "Gun Control Makes Rape Safer For Rapists" or "Natural Lifespans are 29 Years" and "Good Liberals Don't Need Dentists". The Liberals really thought I was being a bastard, but my parents were married to each other well before my conception. Maybe they meant that as some kind of welcome? Non-bastards are so rare these days. Anyway, this is my suggestion to the Liberals whining and pining and trying to spin this official denouncement of Obama by America. I found this hilarious because I am not a Liberal. I am a Libertarian which is like a Republican with social aversion. I'm perfectly willing to applaud people killing themselves, and morally opposed to volunteerism. Time passed and I realized my hermitage wasn't finding my jobs and my bitterness was making me bad company, so I took up a volunteer job shelving books and having minimal interactions with people who weren't actively trying to hurt me (as my last 4 paid jobs have been). I have a suggestion to the Upset Liberals who saw their politicians fired on Tuesday.

Stop working. Get fired so you can get unemployment, go on the dole, be a burden to society and get back to college and become that carpet weaver or painter or potter or poet you always knew you were meant to be. Stop contributing to the tax base that allows Republicans to fix everything broken in America. Act locally. You can do it.

Become a social volunteer, sit with old people and listen attentively while they tell you about that one time they were really high back in 1969 and pulled a train. This is totally for you. This is you time. Drop out of the economy and just take part in the best of your community, and show it your appreciation and love. Cancel your cell phone and talk to your fellow human beings in person. Volunteer at the soup kitchen. Shelve books at the library and teach literacy. Read stories to children. And do it all for free because you're so generous. You don't need other people's money to be generous. Do it with your own savings. Sleep in your car. Liberals don't believe crime can happen to them because all people are just misunderstood and need love. That's what you tell rape victims who want a gun to protect themselves the next time some huge hulking guy tries it. You're totally right. You should prove it by sleeping down by the railroad tracks or get drunk at frat parties. I'm sure it will go swimmingly.

Once you follow your karma and leave the economy, people like me will work very hard in your now-vacant jobs rebuilding the America your laziness destroyed for the last 6 years. Just saying. You made things worse by voting in that Hawaiian fraud who made Jimmy Carter look effective and accomplished. Make up for all your failures as a human being. Your karma requires it or spend the next twenty generations as a bug. Expand your social conscience and actually do something for others instead of profiting by other's misfortune.

Even someone as curmudgeonly as ME has done more than you have. Out of my own pocket, unpaid. Can't you do more than little old grouchy me? Don't you want to keep feeling superior?

University Of California to Raise Tuition Costs 5% Per Year

In a concession to inflation, University of California announced today, after the election, that they will be raising tuition costs 5% a year for the next 5 years. Which is not to say they won't raise it even more after, or anytime during. I attended the California state college system, which required passing a course called "Critical Thinking" before you were allowed to graduate. UC has no such requirement, and only requires a minimum of general education courses, allowing the student to focus entirely on a specialty, something which helps explain why so many UC grads are so very DUMB at everything else, since all other knowledge is high school level. CSU grads are better educated and thus smarter. And CSU costs a small fraction of UC. I also note that in 1998, CSU dropped Critical Thinking and CSU graduates are getting dumber every year. I think things started slipping when they made the SAT too easy to score high and getting into harder colleges, ruining the colleges that accepted these inflated morons. Social promotion taken to its extreme has lead to a generation of simpletons. UC is raising its fees and if you want their name on your diploma, you will pay. And in the end, UC is about MONEY.

 

What this means is that UC is going to lose out to both private schools and CSU schools, as well as self education, online certificate diploma mills that pass through hiring boards without objection, and actual on the job apprenticeship programs, which tends to teach the skills best of all. We are shifting into a small business and craftsman focused economy because big business isn't hiring and there's no reason not to stomp them with taxes and trade tariffs since they employ nobody we like, and those they do are either overpaid bastards lording it over us Peasants, or insuring only poor people are paid as little as possible and then churning through employees to keep the wages low. That builds retaliation, and with law now in the hands of the people rather than the bribery party (Democrats), we can finally hurt them back. Hahah!

 

I do hope anyone reading this is not attending a UC and does not plan to. They're not really very good, after all. Cal Poly is hype as well. I've met graduates, and 3 our of 4 were dangerous morons with engineering degrees they shouldn't have. Yes, that's a small sample size, but some nearly killed people because they did not think. I am often astonished at just how stupid people are. Most of the marijuana growers are either self taught druggies with determination or college graduates working for them as "trimmers" and often getting ripped off in the process. A college degree today is nearly worthless because the people who get them are at the lowest standard for education in a century. America would be better served by no further state funding of colleges and let them go private and shut down when their bloated egos translate to no jobs so no students go there. Colleges need Glass Door reports. Prospective students need to know that colleges are a scam out to get student loans and leave the student 4-5 years later with a huge debt they can't escape and can't pay off on minimum wage, part time, on call jobs of today. You don't go to college expecting to push a broom as a janitor when you get out, and that's one of the better jobs these days. UC has failed, as an institution and I'd like to see their doors closed.

The Lamest Duck

I voted yesterday. Real Americans over 18 mostly did this, one time each. The communists voted many times, and helped the illegals vote many times because voter ID cards are mandatory in Mexico and India yet are somehow considered unfair in the USA and just impossible to produce here. No ID or registration allows the Democrat party to retain power in the USA through the evil phrase: "Vote early and often". Chicago votes the dead, which is part of the reason why Dresden Files takes place there. After all, if the dead are consistently voting in Chicago it MUST be a supernatural hub, right? Its a tongue in cheek reference.

 

So anyway, after 6 years of the Anti-American president and his communist cronies stomping all over human rights, crushing the Middle Class into poverty, taking bribes from Outsourcing international corporations, and blaming the people who aren't in charge for his mistakes, and actively using racism any time they don't get their way, because his party are evil narcissists and don't mind a little genocide to insure their bad ideas become law. This is because they hate you and want you to give them all your money, and your house, and die so you can be replaced by someone more loyal to the party. Hurry up, sucker.

 

Well, the real Americans don't like that and they voted yesterday. Today, the Senate and House are ruled by the Republican party and the Anti-American president is now what is called a "lame duck". As he has personally, professionally and internationally offended even more people and powers than Jimmy Carter, he is now the Lamest Duck so I think I'll call him that from here on. He doesn't have the power to be anti-American anymore. I expect he'll spend more time golfing and asked by his party not to participate in fund raising since just being associated with him cost Udall his governorship of Colorado. I personally despise everybody who voted for him. I blame Democrats for destroying the Middle Class and wrecking our economy. It is small business that makes jobs. Govt takes them away. This is not complicated. Attacking small businesses through taxes and regulations is a great way to bankrupt small businesses which can't afford to hire fancy regulatory compliance experts at $300/hr, much less build all the unfunded mandate nonsense when they really need to be worrying about getting and completing contracts for a profit so they can pay their employees and keep their doors open.

 

Maybe I should write to my congressman and ask him to support trade tariffs on Chinese imports so we can bring jobs back to America. Maybe it hasn't occurred to him, with a Republican House and Senate, finally, that this critical and easy step is time to happen. Who TF is WTO to me? Is that one of those UN cronies? Are we being taxed so they can attack us? Can we stop that now?

 

The Millenials are fans of Maker Culture. They'd support jobs making electronic gizmos here, independently from the big slave-contractors like that fruit computing one, or the others like it. That could employ a huge number of people who show up for work on time and sober. Those jobs could offer wages to people that might buy into a housing market and keep it from crashing. That could fix the economy that the Democrats have done their best to crush forever. And they've succeeded in forcing Baby Boomers to sell out or shut down their businesses, try and sell their houses in the cities, and retire, perhaps on less than they wanted. If the boomers end up in trailer parks smoking dope and sleeping around, why should that bother me? These are the results of their decades of poor life choices. This is what they deserve, after all. Not a big house on a golf course with a wine cellar. They voted to create debt, then shove off paying it back onto me and the younger generations. This is their fault.

 

The upshot is the Millenials don't have to hire Baby Boomers as they start their own businesses through hard work, ignoring loans and debt thanks to Kickstarter, which is very much not like a bank and removes a lot of fears about economic reprisal from failure. Working out of your garage avoids the lease rental ripoffs, provided you can ramp up production in a small space not designed for it. Retrofitting is a key trick to productivity on the cheap, and dovetails nicely into my post-apocalypse economy, which is all about walking to work rather than commuting 30 miles to the job you like and spending all your profits on fuel and lost time. Neighborhood jobs are the future. Folks need to think hard about what they can make in their home, for profit that sells. In their kitchen or garage or basement.

 

I have thought about some businesses which might work in a local neighborhood. Around here, there's a website that largely replaces the local newspaper which is currently operated as someone's hobby. The competition is a website bulletin board, often with pictures, which gets locals to contribute and offers more news, because it is free, but also some noise from the North San Juan junkies and loonies. Drink mercury a few years and see how sane you are. Since the big papgers are owned by big corporations that export jobs for profit, everything they publish is biased. "Ebola? Harmless! Don't worry!" is something you see on the headlines of the big media these days. And Democrats believe it because loyalty is more important than thinking about all the dead people. So local competition for the propaganda rags is really important, and leads to local jobs.

 

Encrypted packet radio networks, covering the difference between Wifi and WiMax in a neighborhood and below the power limits placed by the FCC would allow a local server to provide a neighborhood library, streaming radio, alarms, jobs bulletin board for the small stuff that gives teenagers spending money for lawn mowing or gutter cleaning or basic IT drudgery or queries for help with babysitting or "does anyone know someone who can do this task" kinds of things. Neighborhood networks save lives. Considering how many police departments in cities show up late or not at all, they could save a lot of lives.

 

Programming websites and applications for specific paying tasks rather than advertising scams or malware (most Android apps take huge amounts of data bandwidth for the banner ads which can themselves contain malware in the flash or Java programming and can be argued as malware), and software to block these is an ongoing war worth fighting. Eventually everything useful gets a competent free app without banners, mostly as an advertisement for the quality of the programmer and acts as a resume for their eventual paying job. If you can program apps without banners, apps that can work offline and are useful, you are improving things for a lot of people. 

 

Engine or vehicle repair there's a huge future for, however they are low paying jobs. Low paying because with the population mostly poor now, thanks to Democrats, people can't pay shop rates anymore. The mechanic up the street who works in his garage for $12/hr and takes a week instead of a day to fix your car but doesn't charge for the time he's waiting for the part to arrive, is way cheaper and you can afford that. He's going to stay in business while big shops will have to lay off their mechanics and close their doors. When you price yourself out of the market, you are screwed. Any business that only hires people to turn around and tell them they're "on call, part time, no benefits" inspires no loyalty and will find themselves with a no-show and probably competitive bids for the contracts they were counting on. Never pull that crap on a craftsman. They get even. Inspiring Disloyalty is a modern business practice every bit as insulting as not replying to a submitted resume and guarantees retaliation. And you just can't afford that if you want to keep your doors open.

 

Another useful garage job is building teardrop trailers, so people can have cheap vacations on something light enough you can haul it behind your compact car. The Sierras, where I live, is full of campgrounds, both along twisty highways as well as rivers and lakes with trout and boating. Teardrop trailers let you use them in the rainy season because they are more waterproof than a tent, and you can throw a standup tent with a canvas chimney over the kitchen hatch that folds up for stowing when its dry. Building these costs from between $2000-10K, depending on the size and amenities, but most are made from wood over a cheap garden trailer with the heavier duty frame so it can take the weight. If the total weight is under 1000 pounds, all passenger cars can tow this, even the little ones. As the profit margin for such a specialized trailer is too low, and the gizmo too bulky to make profit shipping from China, they don't make them there. This is still something Americans can do. Great for fishermen, photographers, bird watchers, campers, herdsmen, and pot growers. Some people turn them into portable bars for hiring out to parties or street events. Because they are light, any vehicle can tow them. This is the crucial bit of their value. Don't make them too heavy for your market.

 

There are also jobs you can do in your kitchen. Home canning and home brewing makes for great trade items in a neighborhood barter economy. Eventually, I expect to hear about home distillery, since the govt is so insistent that we should ignore pot laws. Perhaps not with the new govt, but the last six years certainly favored getting high. Explains so much, too. Anyway, canned preserves from local fruit trees is a great way to pay for favors like someone watching your kids for an evening date with your spouse. I expect, if eggs get difficult, eggs will be a great one for barter, provided they have date stamps from soy dye. For now, just buy your eggs. It is less of a nuisance. In the future, someone will raise chickens in the neighborhood like its their job, and make deliveries door to door. Maybe by golf cart.

 

But that's all in the future, as our energy winds down. Several counties were voting to ban fracking because of contamination threats from the benzene and radioisotopes. This will make the oil companies upset, and eventually everyone upset, but for now it is preventing leukemia in cute little children. The new power shift in the govt is going to cause a lot of changes.

 

I won't say this is "morning in America" yet. We have to get rid of the Lamest Duck and not replace him with the Hag. "What difference does it make?" is really not something a presidential candidate should say about their own mistake. Mrs. Stevens thinks it makes the world of difference. That was her son killed in Libya, and Hillary who snarked that it didn't matter to her. Is that the sort of political party you support? The kind that murders sons through incompetence and then laughs about it like a psychopath? Mrs. Stevens is a friend of a friend, btw. She lives here. That Ambassador went to the high school half a mile from where I'm sitting. All politics is local. I consider it astonishing there are any Democrats left in this region, but they do have unlimited capacity for self-delusion, don't they? I suspect that once the Baby Boomers die in their trailer parks and rest homes in the coming decades there will need to be a new party to replace the Democrats that die with them. One without the stigma of treason and hypocrisy and exploitation. The one that got slapped down in the polls yesterday.

 

Anyone else wonder what will change when the new congress and senate are sworn in this January?  

Elio, Tesla, and Vespa

Little known fact: It takes about 17 minutes to assemble a Vespa scooter. Most of the components are made in China, most of the bikes are assembled in China but certain models are built in Italy. The components cost $150, approximately. The labor is around $20. So a Vespa actually costs around $170 to build, plus shipping to the dealer in a small crate. If they were built here, a lot of people could afford to buy them because we wouldn't be charging $2-4000 markup like Vespa does. That markup is so insulting it really puts me off. Particularly since I live in a place with steep and twisty mountain roads, so the 49cc engine is pointless. Also, we don't have the 49cc exclusion from motor vehicle licensing like all other states in the USA. You have to pay registration and put a plate on it and carry motorcycle insurance just like any motorcycle that goes 100 mph. Yes, the local motorcycle laws of California also allows lane splitting, and we have fewer motorcycle deaths because of the mandatory training program, and the best weather for riding because we're dry 300 days a year. Still, a scooter is slow and very easy to ride it would be nice if they backed off the expensive requirements so more poor people and students could ride them. They're really fuel efficient, take little space, and allow people to ride to paying jobs so they can gradually climb the ladder of prosperity rather than stay trapped at the bottom of the electric car wall.

 

A proper Tesla S goes for around $65K, fully equipped. This is what a good Porsche sports car goes for, or the fancy racing Jag and the next up class of Mercedes Benz. These real cars can be refueled at gas stations dotting the landscape. The Tesla needs a charger. Battery swapping stations are supposed to be built in a few places, but the costs are higher than a gas station fill up, though I think I've read they plan to make the swaps free, eventually, and the stations for them everywhere. And they might, but the economic value of green technology is always tightly tied to Federal grants that run out because only a few rich loonies end up able to afford them.

 

Tesla is building a battery factory, eventually, in Reno, processing lithium salt brine into lithium batteries and selling them to car factories around the world. This will become their biggest product and source of profits outside of collecting Federal matching grants in compliance with various "green" laws passed a few years ago. It is possible they won't end up making many cars after all, since selling the batteries will be bigger profit. And the batteries won't require building all those charging stations at a loss. The Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans are all very interested in Tesla's batteries. And that's a fine thing. But it also means that Tesla cars aren't going to be a huge player in the general car marketplace after all. You and I won't own them because we can build a decent house for $65K, and the house can't be carjacked by all those people who can't afford a $65K vehicle in the Post-Jobs economy the Democrats have created for us. Remember that at the polls. It was Democrats who had control and Democrats who got rid of everyone's jobs.

 

The Elio Motors reverse trike car is interesting because it was engineered to use as many off the shelf components as possible, a respected and reliable engine from the 1960's (Triumph 3 Cylinder, water cooled and fuel injected), offers a crash safe tandem car body with antilock brakes, works in the snow, has a roof, windshield wiper, A/C and heat and doesn't require a helmet to operate, yet gets 80 mpg. And it costs about twice what a Vespa does. And is probably much harder to steal. The Elio has a lot of potential for basic transportation, since its freeway capable, unlike the Vespa, and cheap enough to buy outright, or with a loan even if you're only making minimum wage as a janitor or waitress. Provided Elio actually makes the cars rather than folds, it will probably become a major player in transportation. Right now, the shift from showing off and taking orders to building the cars at the plant in Shreveport Louisiana is the thing they need to do next. Build the cars. When they're on the road they are advertising. The key thing about the Elio is they are built with as many off the shelf car parts as possible. No exotics, nothing to go to war over. Its efficient because it is light, and it is cheap because all the components are common. It will work, if they build it.

The Elio car will be a tough sell for the Soccer mom doing the school run with a car full of kids. She's going to have to drive a regular hatchback or pay through the nose for gasoline in her SUV until the kids are grown and we see more ultralight cars that carry more people, at lower fuel economy and probably speed, but the school run can become the school waddle if need be. Convincing Soccer Moms to drive a stick shift with a clutch will be the tough part, but birth control options are cheap and relatively effective. Having lots of kids is a choice, after all, and the cost of raising them is the cost of raising them. She can drive a hybrid till the batteries stop working and then convert it with either new expensive batteries or rip them out and find its faster, more economical, and handles better without them. The Toyota Yaris is similar to the Prius without batteries, though its a more conventional engine, and gets around the same fuel economy. If it has the Atkinson Cycle engine it would do better, but Toyota doesn't allow that engine to be tweaked or sold in junkyards, as I understand it. It might prove to Embarrass their Prius if fuel-economy-racers could tweak it to better performance. Sadly, my driving game doesn't allow the option of real fuel economy races. I expect there will continue to be hybrids for the next few decades anyway. Its just when the batteries don't do much but increase the vehicle weight and a existing tweaks to large engines like shutting down cylinders on demand has been around for 60 years, and works well, we should be using these options instead of building a car fleet out of lithium, which is rare and expensive. Scalable technologies matter. The Elio car is great for solo commuters going to work or school, and is double the fuel economy of the Prius, realistically speaking. While some people get 55 mpg with a Prius, most are down in the low 40's. The Elio will reach 60 faster, as well.

 

Things are going this way because the writing is on the wall about fuel economy, fuel costs, wages, and jobs. There is no recovery. Quantitative Easing is just delaying the crash, and using up international good will, and the internationals own a lot of US bonds, which are a big part of the value of the dollar. Dumping those bonds is changing the exchange rate. Eventually we won't need trade tariffs to end dumping of Chinese goods below cost. We won't be able to afford them anymore so we'll HAVE TO restart domestic manufacturing because it will be cheaper here. How's that for Irony? By that point I expect that Baby Boomers will have wasted their last dime buying Mass Quantities and no longer have enough majority to vote themselves more debt for the future they won't have to pay off because they're planning to die first. That is their typical playbook approach. Leave us to clean up. Every soccer mom straining to haul her babies out of the back seat of a subcompact car will curse them forever.