One year ago today: March 31, 2013, Easter in Miami.
Five years ago today: March 31, 2009, Wilmington, NC.
Meet Ruby, the part shepherd that is addicted to cheese. You may have met here before. This is up at the club just before sunset. In a way it is sad how domesticated these beasts become, this animal is so tame it would starve in the wild. No instincts of any protective nature left in Ruby. But she knows cheese from pretty impressive distances. If you search on whether cheese is healthy for dogs, you get a massive array of contradictory evidence. Like that nonsense of not feeding dogs any chicken bones. Chicken bones are the reason dogs are extinct.
The dog reminded me of Wallace, I kind of miss the old guy. Just think, if he was here today, he’d be living in Boca Raton, with all his money back, and a property bringing in $450 per month pure profit. He’d have a free place to live for life, a gas allowance, and be living miles away from Patsie, his mentally imbalanced daughter. But like Ruby, his days of learning new tricks are all over.
I stopped at Fred’s and he maintains the Win 7 computer performed flawlessly on his workbench, and that Win 7 has been a favorite of all his other clientele. We have agreed to set my system up and put it to the test. Why? Because this is around the seventh time we’ve been through this rigmarole. If he’s right, I’ll admit it. If I’m right, he is to sell this computer to somebody else. The computer environment here is ideal, yet I have to reboot Win 7 two or three times per day. No, there are no viruses.
Win 7 has more hidden and gimp features than ever. But they still put the file delete and rename commands right next to each other. And if you do an F7 synonym search on the last word in a sentence, it still selects the period instead of the word. And folks, it is already 2014. I’ve come to realize that such blatant shortcomings are no inconvenience to either MicroSoft or the majority of their users. That’s why they are so widely reknown for their intelligence.
I’m in month’s end conservation mode, something you yourself will experience upon retirement. This is where the certainty of next month’s income lulls you into the “spend your last dollar” syndrome. It isn’t only the fixed income thing of so many newscasts, because I adapted to that instantly. I’m not the least phased that money gets tight, no, it is the realistic hunch that it is still not wise to live down to the last penny. As for me? I’ve got plenty to do. Here’s a mini-account of me doing it.
Reading polls. Does the government express the will of the people? According to NewsMax (Dec 2009), 70% of Americans want all illegals deported outright. Only 1% would extend any type of amnesty. (The other 29% think there are more urgent problems, but you can predict of those, another 69% would opt for deportation.) There is a huge majority of Americans who want illegals out and immigration stopped. So, what was the question? Does the government represent the people? Not on this issue they don’t.
[Author’s note: the date of the above survey is not outdated. I admire NewsMax because they are one of the few outfits whose questions don’t suggest an answer. They don’t apply Time Magazine style pressure to elicit proper or politically correct responses. And NewsMax surveys are taken in private, as people will lie about their true feelings if they think they will be broadcast or labeled a racist. Clearly with a 70% decided vote, the immigration issue is by far the most urgent problem in America today.]
And what is with all the backlash about my GMO-restricted diet? I did not make the change because of the pseudo-science out there. Those fake surveys and lying doctors, all of them bad actors, all using fear tactics to sell magazines and herbal supplements. If any readers here drew the conclusion I was swayed by such nonsense, well, they don’t belong in this blog. We have, in the past, suggested what sort of blog they should be reading. Celebrity pregnancies or something more their speed.
My reasons for abstaining (GMO) are from a study of the genetic part, how the modification takes place, and an elimination of causes for bad health. A full year earlier, I read up on genetics and DNA studies with no connection to foodstuffs. I noted there must be some reason why Americans get sick twice as often as the rest of the world. I’m not saying there is a correlation with modified food, I’m saying that here, in my case, is the single outstanding suspect. I’ve ceased eating only a few of the most-modified, namely corn and soy. I’d rather have sugar than high-fructose corn syrup. As for rejecting certain foods, listen when I tell you I don’t get any other major exposure to suspected bad agents on a daily basis. I don’t smoke, eat snacks, breathe smog, or take Prozac.
But I do agree twenty years is too short a span to claim there are no side-effects and the companies that do such studies have been caught lying just too often before. Monsanto, Dupont, who brought us DDT and Agent Orange. Mind you, I disagree with the premise of the DDT ban in many cases. Would you rather have thin chicken eggs or your kids dying from malaria? This brings up a topic in this month’s Popular Mechanics. The vaccine scare. Some twenty years ago, an English doctor named Wakefield published, for a bribe, some fake data to support a court case. He had his medical license revoked over it, but the vaccine phobia exists to this day most strongly amongst the poorly educated.
I said a few days back my hobby involved (going back and) reviewing electronic circuits (and many other subjects but choose this one) after I had built a working model. I also read a chapter on early computer design. It now seems so easy. Why didn’t somebody tell me all this when I was 15, living a hundred miles from Redmond, and convinced the entire world was doing it all wrong?
I also reviewed several articles about Enigma, the German code machine of WWII fame. Something is ringing a little too cute about the British version. There is also something else that mystifies me about “radio silence”. Why was the opposite tactic of flooding the airwaves never used? It seems compared to the cost of a single U-boat loss, the Germans could have had their long-range aircraft regularly drop small floats that emitted fake radio signals. I’ve long asked the question why a torpedo that homed on ASDIC (sonar) emitters was never developed. If the enemy (on both sides) has so much listening equipment, why not give him something to listen to?
ADDENDUM
Once more, I express my disappointment at the way the police system works. I believe that police should be busy chasing criminals and not be allowed, except in extraordinary circumstances, to get involved with traffic tickets. As it stands, the police use motor vehicle law as a springboard into areas of conduct that are questionable at best. Enter the era of the celebrity bust. I was in court to plead not guilty, the second of at least three half-days I would normally have to take off work to not remain innocent, but to be judged not guilty. Public complacency has allowed it to come to this.
The third day will be in court. That means sixty to eighty days from the time the ticket was issued, I must remain at the court’s beck and call. Cancel any vacations or business trips. Any delay or misstep on my part defaults to making me guilty of something, somewhere. If we go to court, my background will be brought up in an attempt to discredit anything I say, but I can’t use the same tactic on my accuser. I know that’s how the system works, but it is sad because America was founded on resistance to such rule.
Each person that showed up in court today, there was a guy with a computer who looked up their driver’s records whether or not they pleaded guilty. He then determined their fine or punishment based on what he saw there, a violation of their rights. How so? The law is clear. All searches must obtain a warrant, in advance. And it is illegal to punish a person more than once for something in their past. A law-abiding clerk would need to get a warrant for each record he pulled up—the founding fathers intentionally put this inconvenience into the Constitution for good reason.
I’m not saying I’ll do anything about this old English system, which was largely responsible for crumbling their empire, but I am saying I’m disappointed. I would stand idly by if those who support this system got into some real trouble.
I took plenty of reading material with me. By the time my turn came up, I had learned an odd fact about dinosaurs. How do they know if it was a herbivore? It has to do with the front knee joints. If they bend forward, like a horse, that’s a grazer. If it bends backward, like a human, it uses the limbs to bring food upward toward the mouth. A carnivore. The clerk doing the illegal record snoops in the court today was a carnivore. And in the American court system, it is the worms that are at the top of the food chain.
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