One year ago today: January 31, 2024, except fast-forward . . .
Five years ago today: January 31, 2020, drastically overdue.
Nine years ago today: January 31, 2016, Wal*Mart stats.
Random years ago today: January 31, 1980, 45 years ago.
Such a perfect night and day, I fell asleep with the window open and snoozed until 7:00AM. Pancakes for breakfast and let’s check what got past my filters. Trump’s going after the corrupt prosecutors as the hunters become the hunted. While he could force his appointments, he’s letting the Left attack which is showing America how bad they truly are. Screaming Trump will bankrupt the drug companies and then nobody will get a vaccine. I can’t believe she said that.
Here’s the coffee I’ve finally tried, Black Rifle. It is every bit as good as they say, but it costs twice as much. It is a Kuerig product and I chose medium roast. Very smooth, great aroma, no bite, not aftertaste. And $8.50 for 12 cups. To offset this, we made $6.58 on eBay. That seems a trickle, but remember 100% of it is reinvested so I don’t have to. Few realize how important that is. Protect your investments. I’m fully aware of how difficult this is when you don’t make enough to live on. But consider the consequences.
I was not ready for that thousand dollar hit y’day, but this is one of the major reasons I don’t have women as business partners. They presume there is only one way to think about money and that everyone else also thinks that way. None of what happened is her fault, but with women in general, too many of these things seem to slip past them. She knew about the pending postal strike in August. If I had known that, I would have transferred the funds on October 5 instead of November 5. This way, the money arrived one day after the strike began. Now, nobody could have predicted the outcome, so it is not anyone’s fault. But let me give you some tough advice.
If you want to be reasonably in control instead of a victim of every circumstance, you must learn to think differently about money. This is a two-step process, because you first have to admit there is a difference. The second step is to, without becoming one of them, learn to think like a Jew. With money, all delays are costly. If you don’t give it priority for yourself, you won’t with anyone else. Turns out the money was there 13 days before she exchanged it.
This means I may not have the new stove and fridge until April or May. Those things are considered extraordinary and not budgeted. It’s a cabin, so I can get by with a hotplate and so on, but I had planned on something nicer, being a bit of a cook myself and all. The good news is senior FBI honchos have been chucked out, 12 Inspector Generals got canned, 50 foreign aid big shots got axed, and the Justice Department is being gutted. Trump is dismantling the network who disobeyed his 2016 orders or supported those who did. America loves it, but they are clamoring for more.
There is a meme about Woolworth’s lunch counters. That was the first place I ever bought a coffee on my own, I think I was eight years old. Just eight years later I was alone and often their 15ȼ sandwich was my main meal of the day. By 1990 they were being crushed by Wal*mart and the franchises, but once they forced integration on us, the lunch counter was doomed.
I’ve guessed for some years now that there was 300x more silver on paper than real silver. Today I read it was 280x. Not bad for guesswork. Silver price is $32.24 at noon today. So if they tried to convert to real silver, 32.24 x 280 = $9,027 per ounce. That would, other than ruining the present crazy social order, change my life completely. There are unusual rumblings in the gold market, apparently a lot of gold that is supposed to be in the banks isn’t. And the curious real estate situation of rising prices but no new buyers. Boomers want all prices to fall except for the house they spent a lifetime paying for. To many, it is the only investment they know.
Anchor factory.
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Not getting back onto Hwy 60 until past 1:00PM, I thought why not take in that museum in Lake Wales. I had checked the hours y’day morning and it said they were open until 3:00PM. So, I drove the 15 miles out there. And got millennialized. Despite having a web site, there was no indication the place was closed until you drove up the driveway, parked, and walked up the stairs. Total inconsideration, but that’s normal. The millennial part is if you say anything, they’ll have fifty excuses why it is not their fault, so it must be your fault.
Trump declares the Mexican cartels as terrorists. This means the military can be used against them. That should be fun, watching the gangs faces when something shoots back. The 51 laptop signers are banned from all Federal buildings. He has also ordered all Fed employees to remove pronouns from their email signatures, and some smart aleck quickly posted that Trump didn’t realize so many of them were called, “Who, me?” BWAAAAAAA-ha-ha-ha.
My latest audiobook, “The Giver of Stars” is a surprise. It’s totally entertaining for a theme I’ve never encountered before. It does not sound like anything I’d look for, it is the tale of an English bride married into a wealthy coal family in Kentucky in the 1930s. She takes on a job as a “horseback librarian” delivering books to remote cabins and villages. The plot is mostly the people she meets and I guess in some ways I find that intriguing. I recognize the role of environment in poverty and she certainly finds a lot of that—but at the same time she finds it is often attitude that she is up against more than the rest of it.
While I was not raised in a cabin with newsprint wallpaper, I know what it is like to be the only person in a household of eight who actually wants to learn to read and then actually reads. I can recommend this book already. It’s an eye-opener, I find, on how so many people justify their own ignorance and stay that way unless they are forced by circumstances to clean up their act. Like Lizzy’s refusal to learn to ride a horse. No different than the millennial who won’t learn to drive a standard.
The connection with my upbringing is a bit more obscure to the onlooker. On the outside, I was never told I could not learn to read, or bake a cake, or fix a bicycle. In fact I was free to take on most anything—so how can that be a negative? Answer: because displaying an aptitude or interest around peasants never stops there. If you show a knack for anything, it quickly becomes your added (and unpaid) chore to do it for free for the rest. Why should they learn to do anything for themselves once they learn constant whining will get you forced into doing it for them?
“The Giver of Stars” is not going to look into the poverty problem that deeply. So far she describes the people without much cause and effect. Still, I identify most with the kids who only pretended to be reading the Bible while they were really learning how to get the hell out of Kentucky.
Late news is that Trump, in response to border behavior, has placed a 25% tariff on all goods entering this country from Canada and Mexico. You want the tariffs down, you stop letting garbage through your turf.
ADDENDUM
Bennu, the bits of asteroid matter brought back to Earth in 2023, has an interesting makeup. Despite being 65 million years old, scrapings of the surface show 14 of the amino acids needed for life are present, along with plenty of nitrogen and evidence of exposure to water. And of course, we have yet another asteroid scare, this one due in 2032.
