One year ago today: September 21, 2019, Bush blows $121M.
Five years ago today: September 21, 2015, 200 bodies, yuck.
Nine years ago today: September 21, 2011, on the circle of fifths.
Random years ago today: September 21, 2017, $952 is the minimum..
Half my kitchen is back. I worked past dark last night thinking I’d go out for a Sunday cocktail. A constant sprinkle slowed me down, at which time I decided to stay home. I cooked up every vegetable in the house, found a can of refried beans, and made myself a Mexican casserole. Except radishes, I didn’t put any radishes in the mix. That’s one of those veggies that except for salads, is best eaten alone. I often wonder which cave man first pulled up a radish and thought, “I like how this tastes and I’m putting on the human menu for the next 100,000 years, plus possibly on to Mars.”
The Supreme Court hubbub is confusing a lot of people. TMOR this could be an eye-opener. The Supreme Court was created to resolve deadlocks in the Senate—if the deadlock occurred while the Senate and President belonged to different political parties. That’s important because at this time, both are the same party which means the Supreme Court is not supposed to even get involved. There are nine judges so there cannot be a tie vote, they are appointed for life, not elected. The radical left quickly spotted the potential for takeover and began planting their agents to the position some 40 years ago, but never got more than four.
I repeat that no liberal-Marxist-leftist party in America can ever win an election by legitimate means, rather, they take over methodically. Like Seattle and Portland, you wake up one day to find your city council has been taken over by outsiders. The liberals bank on public complacency. This is not illegal in America. In America, the radical left euphemistically call themselves “liberals”.
Like all socialist agendas, they claim to alleviate the poor, but are after supreme power for themselves, same as any communist agenda. The liberal left knows when everybody is on welfare, nobody votes for lower taxes, just ask Canada. But in a country like America, liberalism is regarded as a mental condition. The beauty of America is that mental defectives are just as free as anyone else to form political parties, in this case they took over an existing party, the Democrats.
Problem, knowing they can never win without cheating, we’ve seen is decades of dirty tricks and back-door deals. What happened here is Obama knew Ginsburg was old and ill. He needed to replace her while he was still in office. The plan was once their bag-lady Hillary was elected (the liberals were convinced she was in by their own pollsters), if any of the other Judges, all getting on in years, died in office, do the math. Hillary was to appoint another leftist and they would have a five-Judge majority in their pockets, a majority. At least, that was the plan.
But the then leader of the Majority Senate spotted this scam and said he would not allow the necessary voting to take place until after the next election. Then two things went wrong. Ginsburg did not retire and along came Donald Trump. Now, rumor has it, the Democrat liberals spent millions keeping the ailing Ginsburg alive on a million-dollar a week drug cocktail, praying she’d live past November 2020 and died after they got rid of Trump. Now they scream that the vote should be withheld, but they are purposely avoiding the issue of the two different political parties. Watch for violence, this is how liberals operate when they lose.
They are presently talking impeachment, showing they never learn. They’re screaming the appointee must be a woman, who they feel is the more malleable. They don’t have much time. It’s a corner they painted for themselves. I say Trump appoints a Constitution supporter, giving the Republicans (in name only) a majority, he will win the election by a landslide despite Democrat vote-rigging, and shortly after the election, out go the arrest warrants. Don, you should cancel their passports now, they really nasty ones are going to bolt. Cut off foreign aid to any country that accepts them, including Israel. (I’m convinced somebody in Trump’s circle is reading this blog, at least on occasion.)
[Author’s note: I am not any authority on politics so do not quote me as such. Other than a lifelong hatred of liberalism, which has nothing to do with politics at core, I never followed any issues until I saw what happened when Trump announced his candidacy. And other than that, my fascination with the events is directly proportional to how much liberals hate it.]
Kingdom Death: Monster Showdown Board.
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The sheds, actually two of them, have proven annoyingly expensive. Lumber and hardware have doubled since I began. The shed are such a welcome addition that I don’t mind, the best effect is the ability to take almost every repair out of the house. I have another situation looming. That water pump on the car. I’ve amassed the tools needed but cannot start until the scooter battery is replaced or at least eliminated as a problem. It is risky in America to be caught without ground transportation. There are no effective public transport systems in most places.
Here is the battery in place under the scooter seat receiving an initial trickle charge to full voltage, which will be tested under load with the device shown atop the charger. This price is after the Florida trade-in credit for the old unit.
The other neighbor, who is from near Carthage in TN, got stranded with his kids due to a motor breakdown. Knowing this was fresh in his mind, I hired him to help me with the water pump. He was late getting here, by which time I had removed around thirty bolts holding brackets and moving things out of the way. He got at the final few bolts that were a bitch to get at, thanks, Ford. Last two bolts taking 90% of the time.
There is the water pump, where I’m pointing with the wrench. The rust color is from overheating problems caused by the worn unit. The alternator and some of the pulleys have to be removed to get at the pump, which took me the better part of two hours, but it’s done and the water pump is off and lying on the ground by late afternoon. Such repairs are always a chore for zero-trained dudes like me, but I have an excellent system for keeping track of everything, part of which is I take every bolt and piece removed and set them on a table 15 feet away. The transit time saves over losing and dropping parts. If there is time before dark, we’ll begin the reassembly.
The car will start without the water pump, or the fan belt for that matter, so we could keep shifting the car to work in the shade. If there’s a picture, you’ll even in daylight, we require the use of a trouble light.
ADDENDUM
While moving storage material out to the shed, I found a box of disks labeled “Journal 1987” I was still hand-writing the dailies by then, but make no mistake, millennials, I am 50 years ahead of you on computers. By 1987 I’d had a home computer for eight years. It could be a journal of anything but I no longer have a 5-1/2” floppy reader. And all the disks will be past the expiry date, there are around sixty of them. I suppose a few no-minds will think I’m old-fashioned for having such disks, but they aren’t thinking. At the time, these were state of the art, a lead I maintained until past middle age. I did not stop so much as lament that in my own lifetime, I had seen the computer fall from a fantastic new invention to what it is today. In news of the obsequious, GitHub will change it’s file name from “master” to “main”. That such terminology would even bother computer-literate people is another sign of the decline.
What really brought computers down to the proletariat was pornography. You may not know this, but in the early 90s there were zero restrictions on-line. Anything can be and was published, and I mean anything. When I saw 18 year old college nerds and 45 year old married men buying $8,000 worth of computers and modems in 1995, it was a given they were not running spreadsheets. The news spread like wildfire that what was illegal everywhere else could be experienced on-line. By 1997, it was practically impossible to keep porno sites off your equipment with no real thought of anyone tracking who was viewing what. It was not uncommon to get a computer in the shop that had 4,500 porno that the owner had never heard of. Child pornography, or as they called it, “kiddy porn” was rampant.
Then along came Windows 2000 with tons of suspicious code. At that time, I decided to never have a paid IPS account in my own name, a system that was already used on my cell phones. Yes, I was ten years ahead of the first hipster on that count. The code was not malicious or Internet based, but it was there. We decided it was for tracking pirated copies and quickly learned how to delete the feature as a customer service. Then, oddly, Windows XP came out and contained very little mystery code. It remains the most stable version and is (as you know by now) still used by all my internal systems and the British Navy. MicroSoft had put all their malware in one or two folders and once deleted, Service Pack three became the standard around here.
My in-house system is, let me count, six computers, of which only one has ever been on-line. It is amazing to regularly check the Windows folder for security and find every log, temp folder, and other such nonsense to be completely blank. Now that, Tyler, is security. I can even pull diagnostic files, famous for abuse, that still show August 21, 2008 as the latest modification date. That’s the date this system was first set up. Another folder to watch is your Windows DMP files. If any of them are ever larger than 88KB, your system has been compromised. Note that if you disable updates, which I have always done without problems, that MicroSoft keeps a log of that, too.
If you are wondering what the update log looks like, here is y’days. I did not ask for or want this type of “service”. The point is, even when you disable the so-called updates, Windows is constantly tyring to install them behind your back. The operative word is “install”. I don’t install anything new on a working computer unless I make a conscious decision to do so. They are rare.
2020-09-20 00:15:49:546 1196 4dc Misc =========== Logging initialized (build: 7.6.7600.256, tz: -0400) ===========
2020-09-20 00:15:49:546 1196 4dc Misc = Process: C:\WINDOWS\Explorer.EXE
2020-09-20 00:15:49:546 1196 4dc Misc = Module: C:\WINDOWS\system32\wuaueng.dll
2020-09-20 00:15:49:546 1196 4dc Shutdwn Install at shutdown: no updates to install
2020-09-20 00:15:49:546 1196 4dc Shutdwn FATAL: WUCheckForUpdatesAtShutdown failed, hr=8024A000
2020-09-20 00:15:53:890 468 764 Misc =========== Logging initialized (build: 7.6.7600.256, tz: -0400) ===========
2020-09-20 00:15:53:890 468 764 Misc = Process: \??\C:\WINDOWS\system32\winlogon.exe
2020-09-20 00:15:53:890 468 764 Misc = Module: C:\WINDOWS\system32\wuaueng.dll
2020-09-20 00:15:53:890 468 764 Shutdwn FATAL: WUAutoUpdateAtShutdown failed, hr=8024A000
2020-09-20 00:15:54:500 852 718 AU ########### AU: Uninitializing Automatic Updates ###########
2020-09-20 00:15:54:906 852 718 Service *********
2020-09-20 00:15:54:906 852 718 Service ** END ** Service: Service exit [Exit code = 0x240001]
2020-09-20 00:15:54:906 852 718 Service *************
2020-09-20 05:28:06:265 856 724 Misc =========== Logging initialized (build: 7.6.7600.256, tz: -0400) ===========
2020-09-20 05:28:06:296 856 724 Misc = Process: C:\WINDOWS\System32\svchost.exe
2020-09-20 05:28:06:296 856 724 Misc = Module: C:\WINDOWS\system32\wuaueng.dll
2020-09-20 05:28:06:265 856 724 Service *************
2020-09-20 05:28:06:296 856 724 Service ** START ** Service: Service startup
2020-09-20 05:28:06:296 856 724 Service *********
2020-09-20 05:28:06:296 856 724 Agent * WU client version 7.6.7600.256
2020-09-20 05:28:06:296 856 724 Agent * Base directory: C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution
2020-09-20 05:28:06:296 856 724 Agent * Access type: No proxy
2020-09-20 05:28:06:312 856 724 Agent * Network state: Disconnected
2020-09-20 05:28:52:171 856 724 Agent *********** Agent: Initializing Windows Update Agent ***********
2020-09-20 05:28:52:171 856 724 Agent *********** Agent: Initializing global settings cache ***********
2020-09-20 05:28:52:171 856 724 Agent * WSUS server:
2020-09-20 05:28:52:171 856 724 Agent * WSUS status server:
2020-09-20 05:28:52:171 856 724 Agent * Target group: (Unassigned Computers)
2020-09-20 05:28:52:171 856 724 Agent * Windows Update access disabled: No
2020-09-20 05:28:52:203 856 724 DnldMgr Download manager restoring 0 downloads
2020-09-20 05:28:52:250 856 724 AU ########### AU: Initializing Automatic Updates ###########
2020-09-20 05:28:52:250 856 724 AU AU setting next sqm report timeout to 2020-09-20 09:28:52
2020-09-20 05:28:52:250 856 724 AU # AU disabled through User preference
2020-09-20 05:28:52:265 856 724 AU Initializing featured updates
2020-09-20 05:28:52:265 856 724 AU Found 0 cached featured updates
2020-09-20 05:28:52:265 856 724 AU AU finished delayed initialization
2020-09-20 05:28:52:265 856 724 Report *********** Report: Initializing static reporting data ***********
2020-09-20 05:28:52:265 856 724 Report * OS Version = 5.1.2600.3.0.65792
2020-09-20 05:28:52:296 856 724 Report * Computer Brand = Dell Inc.
2020-09-20 05:28:52:296 856 724 Report * Computer Model = OptiPlex 740
2020-09-20 05:28:52:328 856 724 Report * Bios Revision = 2.2.7
2020-09-20 05:28:52:328 856 724 Report * Bios Name = )Phoenix - Award WorkstationBIOS v6.00PG
2020-09-20 05:28:52:328 856 724 Report * Bios Release Date = 2011-08-03T00:00:00 2020-09-20 05:28:52:328 856 724 Report * Locale ID = 1033
2020-09-20 15:42:27:656 1220 4e0 Misc =========== Logging initialized (build: 7.6.7600.256, tz: -0400) ===========
2020-09-20 15:42:27:671 1220 4e0 Misc = Process: C:\WINDOWS\Explorer.EXE
2020-09-20 15:42:27:671 1220 4e0 Misc = Module: C:\WINDOWS\system32\wuaueng.dll
2020-09-20 15:42:27:656 1220 4e0 Shutdwn Install at shutdown: no updates to install
2020-09-20 15:42:27:671 1220 4e0 Shutdwn FATAL: WUCheckForUpdatesAtShutdown failed, hr=8024A000
