One year ago today: October 4, 2023, Punta Gorda.
Five years ago today: October 4, , the car becomes permanent.
Nine years ago today: October 4, 2015, brief box history.
Random years ago today: October 4, 2016, a Fusion 250.
My day off and I feel like working. Something is throwing my balance off with these things. I should be sitting in a coffee shop wondering where to spend last month’s $65 travel budget. We have a new juvenile female red cardinal, another squirrel raider, and what looks like a bright windy day. Should I relax, or obey my instinct to fix or build something? My decision is both. How far will I get? Silver is struggling but again over $32. Symptoms, my latest prescription creates “morning breath” and makes any paper I touch smell faintly of caramel. Or maybe I just notice paper because I use it a lot.
Another record is the game recorder. I’m changing the reference to deer camera so as not to confuse any Zoomers with their primary social activity. So that’s deer camera, not game camera.
Since you get all the news you want about the hurricane, I’ll just mention that the latest postings say the government has moved into devastated small towns and seized the property. Rumors are that bodies are rotting in the streets as the government prepares to bulldoze the towns. As usual, no names are mentioned. If I was in power, every one of those government people would have their names and home addresses published in real time. No wonder nothing every gets done. These people are allowed to hide behind job titles.
We awake to the news that England is giving Diego Garcia back to Mauritius. I’ve never been keen on the thinking that a group of nearby islands “belong” to one nation. The island in focus is where the US built a major airbase off the African east coast. Collectively known as the Chagos, England bought the islands some 60 years ago, the place was so insignificant that it was not even placed on maps until recently. As for it belonging to Mauritius, those primitives were unaware the atolls existed until some Englishman told them.
This is a backstab to the US and Biden applauded the move, which was done by London bureaucrats without consulting the British Parliament. The President of Mauritius, named Prithvirajsing Roopun, suddenly began wailing about the island’s importance shortly after he fell for China’s Road & Belt, a form of debt-trap diplomacy the Chinese are pushing all around the Indian Ocean. Around 4,000 US & British troops are stationed there, but it will soon become another Chinese listening post.
Here’s the authentic bakery I’ve applauded. Food Universe, where nobody speaks English Being too far from home, I had to have lunch there today, for $6.39. The nice lady was not on duty but they had real King Potato, I’ve only found the real thing a few times in the past twenty years. Not that Cuban potato, which is American food, but the genuine “papa rellenas”.
In one of the most suspicious events this year, the striking port workers settled within 72 hours. Nothing funny going on here, folks. Just move along. A few days ago I quoted the published starting salaries of these workers at $18 per hour, but have since learned the top of the pay scale is closer to $60 per hour. They will be getting a 10% raise per year for six years running, so by 2030 that’s $106 per hour. Barely enough to cover inflation and increased taxes. That is where I got to with my union career. Every raise barely kept pace, which was at least something, but my contention was the union was supposed to get us ahead, not merely tread water. They never did.
In case you are curious, my long-term savings calculation for 2025 is that unless you are investing $44.77 (call it $45) per week AND you are under 24, you will die broke and destitute by 2064 at the soonest and 2078 at the latest. Again, it does not matter what else you do, this formula is not to make you rich, but to save your ass way down the line. Have you not seen what happens to people who rely on the government?
The silver market is so manipulated that whenever it hits a new high, the graph of the instant drop reminds me of those audio spectrums when you add compression. Today it poked above $33 for almost 9 minutes before the banks reacted, For those who don’t know my theory, it is that if silver begins to climb, the banks begin trading huge volumes of silver certificates at a lower price to bring real silver down. This is why I advocate that silver paper and silver metal should be reported separately.
2,000 year old Roman aquaduct.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
So much for a work day. At the dog pound, I met the young guy who they sent out to lug in the heavier donations and I got him to talk just a little. I mentioned the activists and that I don’t like them for good reasons, and we now have so more info what they were up to. The pound spays cats and they are woozy and affected from the anesthetic, then portrayed this on-line as the animals being poisoned. Do not quote this as fact, as the staff there would be understandably reluctant to talk details.
This brings the total out-of-pocket for this bleak misadventure to $7,914. But I emerge with two working vans so this type of incident is unlikely to blast me out of the water again. I thought I could get by with a cheap van and a motorcycle, but it is back to the two all-weather vehicles that RofR and I discovered were necessary almost fifty years ago. Other behind-the-scenes items are also very affected by this situation, but the hard stretchy is over and we’ve survived.
The latest from the deercam clears up the mystery of so many tracks in the shed. Here is a party four raccoons at 8:42PM last evening. Not that late at all. I’m finding the camera takes a 15 second video no matter what it is set for. None of the is the ancient grandma, these are a troop of similar age and size. When they find something to chew on, they retreat into the shed, and wrestle each other for a piece. The shed is several inches off the ground to prevent wood rot, so there is no easy way to stop them from doing as they please.
I did not arrive back home until late afternoon, hitting the rush hour in Lakeland. Going through my audio books, I found one might be a military tale about the South China Sea we’ve just talked about, so I threw it in the player. It’s another Cussler brand father-son loose cannon clone fable, but it does focus on the weapons, so it is a keeper. One facet of these tales always gets me. It’s those father-son serious talks about the young man’s future. Since it is a privtate conversation I’ve never seen it except in the movies and those are too fake to begin with.
It gets me because I have no way of knowing what is real. I do know after a kid is twelve, you don’t lecture him about what the parents want. He’s already got at least ten years of listening to that. But these military tales always devote a chapter to where the father patiently listens to what the son wants, knowing that even if the son is wrong in the details, nothing will work unless the son is interested in it at the time. So what is it that gets me?
Well, it is the way the father always hears the son out and tries to fit that into what the family can afford. Huh? What? Never once does the father slap the kid in the head, or call him a stupid bastard. Not once does he insult the kid or threaten him, or scream that money doesn’t grow on trees. Or pressure the kid to forget education and get a laboring job. Now you don’t really expect me to believe that kind of fairy tale bullshit, do you?
You know that $750 the Democrats are handing out in North Carolina as relief money? Here’s the unconfirmed rumor. It seems they are required to sign a form. Buried in the fine print is that the $750 is a loan, that if not paid back within a year, the Federal Government can seize all that person’s property no matter where it is located. These Democrats are so screwed they don’t know it. Why did it take so many people so long to realized they were being screwed? Because that is how the left works. But this time I’m not so sure, there are people openly saying they will go to prison rather than pay taxes. My guess is they will walk barefoot to vote for Trump now. There were some holdouts but most have learned their lessons.
ADDENDUM
The Chinese are dangerous mainly in one aspect, that is their regard of human life as an expendable, renewable resource. The nation consists of a ring of wealthy cities around the coastline that became so under colonial, not Chinese, rule. The rest of the nation remains backward peasantry who toil and die endlessly as they have for 3,000 years, calling it “civilization”. The grandeur of Chinese cities and ceremonies is largely based on the total exploitation of the peasants, who are shifted around by a government that traditionally has one soldier guarding every three near-slave workers.
Such progress as China has made has been little more than the copying of Western technology and financial systems, enforced at the point of a bayonet. Witness the ghost cities and smog attacks. Or the Three Gorges Dam which forcefully uprooted 1.4 million people. It is already silting up and has been hit by high magnitude earthquakes.
My field of study is military weapons, not the politics behind them. China as been buying used aircraft carriers under cover stories such as “floating amusement parks”, only to reappear a few years later bristling with antennas and bulges of copycat US systems and aircraft clones. China plans to have as many as six carrier battle groups by the mid-2030s. Should the dam burst (it is already stressed to hold back water from other dams upstream), the wall of water down the Yangtze River would cripple the Chinese economy for thirty years.
