Do you remember when Progressives used to believe...

Actually you would have to understand past positions by candidates who were Progressives way back when the Progressive movement started.  So lets do a bit of a refresher course to take a look at where Progressives were on policy and where they are today.  This should be fun, no?  All that intellectual integrity and stuff, you know?

Do you remember when Progressives used to believe...

1) That large companies were the 'problem'?  You know back in the Good Old Days when there were guys like Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and JP Morgan the Progressives got all in a twist about corporate trusts, 'fat cat capitalists' and companies that used to put worker's life and safety at risk for increased private profit?  The guys that were the posterboys for anti-trust legislation, many of them had a major problem with control and money.  Yet in their waning years they also started to give the boatloads of cash away to fund libraries, universities, private foundations and even charities.  Most industrialists of the sole-owner variety do that because they had a long-term conscience even if their short-term ethics sucked.  The Sherman Anti-Trust act was put together to end such monopolies and legislation thereafter went after oligopolies and unfair collusion to rig the marketplace in their favor.

Today we have 'too big to fail' to describe such companies and through their lobbying of Congress corporate giants like GM and Chrysler got government cash and had their bond holders screwed over in favor of the Unions.  Government is not only propping up failing industries, it is propping up failing Labor Unions, as well.  And yet this flies in the face of the necessary reduction in sizes that companies must go through when fiscal priorities finally put them in bankruptcy court for re-structuring.  The necessary income and outgo all get renegotiated from the ground-up, so that failing parts of a company can be removed and the company restructured.  This means Big Labor takes a haircut, various smaller sub-organizations are determined on their fiscal viability and many get cut off, and creditors and bond holders come to legal terms with reduced expectations but still having a vital stake in the companies that go through such restructuring.  The government decided all that, and not well, so that companies had to undergo restructuring not based on fiscal reality but political crony gain.  Yet that is as unfair to the creditors and investors as crunching workers for added profit and the US taxpayer ends up footing the bill for such practices.  These are companies that would have done much better being restructured, selling off parts and trimming others to become lean and profitable against more competition.

And, BTW, that earliest era of Anti-Trust was specifically made to increase competition.  That was seen as forcing the marketplace to have to adopt more than pricing and income to become competitive and would continue the private movement by smaller industries to pay workers more under safer working conditions so that they could own their own homes that had amenities that you couldn't get by working with the Titans of Industry and Banking.  More on that in a bit.

Just so you can see the differences: original Progressivism has Big Business as bad, but their modern counterparts have such things as good and must be supported by the taxpayer!  Isn't that swell?  Sounds like collusion to me to shaft other industries in favor of cronies, which is an anti-competitive process.  They should be prosecuted, Big Business, Big Labor and Big Government.  Too bad Big Government writes the laws, huh?

 

2)  Remember when the banks were seen as the problem?  You know the Big Banks, those by JP Morgan that could lend money to the US government to cover its entire debt for a year?  That apparently wasn't going to last because it wasn't actually forcing the US federal government to offer its debt on the open market.  Yet the evil, fat cat bankers were making money off the debt of the American government and the American taxpayer was footing the bill!  Luckily those Big Banks colluded to create a new entity and proposed legislation that went to Congress with the election of Woodrow Wilson and the Federal Reserve was born!  An institution that is opaque as to who runs it, opaque on its transactions, has a license to print money, makes money off of selling the US debt and would never, ever be passed as legislation today to favor the largest banks with goodies and guarantees and shaft the smaller banks by excluding them from the federal debt market.

Oh, wait, that did happen again, and was called the Toxic Asset Relief Program, or TARP!  It was TARP that brought in the 'too big to fail' meme and what it was supposed to do was buy out real estate assets from banks so as to shore up the market.  Instead what it did was force money at banks both solvent and insolvent types to hide the one or two huge banks that were facing critical solvency issues.  Banks like BB&T were told that they would be audited with a fine-tooth comb and raked over the coals for any minor paperwork problems if they didn't take the cash.    From that we learn that the Federal Reserve and US Treasury put such pressure on small and mid-sized banks to make it look like the entire sector was failing.  It wasn't.  BB&T paid everything back early so they could get out of the hold the federal government had on them and told what little they knew about the larger banks that were being covered by this wasteful fraud.  What 'too big to fail' did was to create a class of 5 banks that could do anything, take any risk, hazard the funds held in them with any venture they wanted and the US federal government would guarantee their continued existence.  In other words they became banking cronies of Big Government and backed by you, the US taxpayer.

No matter what you say about President Jackson, he knew a corrupt, crony banking situation when he saw it and got rid of the 2nd National Bank and forced the system to scale down so that localized banking at the State level could rise to take its place.  During the recession that started overseas in Great Britain and a few of the Continental Nations, that spread to the US and gave cover to later generations to conflate an overseas problem that was going to hit the US (via foreign held investors) and the demise of the National Bank.  The head of the National Bank also threatened to break the Nation if the thing was dissolved.  Today they don't need threats, just the convenient presence of lobbyists and pointing out that the Federal Reserve now prints money to cover the National Debt, and now HOLDS 60% of it.  They, apparently, wish to own the US federal government and its assets.  Luckily the federal government has all that lovely land it controls in Western States, no?  A match colluded to in the halls of Congress.  But then Progressives never actually treated the Big Banks like they did Big Business, back in the day, and break up such entities. No if you had to have a Big Government you had to have a Big Bank sector to finance it at taxpayer expense. Too bad Big Government writes the laws that protects and creates such entities and programs under the guise of 'breaking the system in order to save it' because they are 'too big to fail'!

 

3)  The rise of Big Labor was something that Progressives wanted, and pushed for as a counter to Big Business.  You needed to have Big entities to go after each other led by a Big Government mentality that makes it possible, after all.  Apparently all the US federal government under the power of Progressives in both parties knew how to do was to establish punishing bureaucracies with regulations so that Big Labor could get a Big Government backing to rise up against Big Business.  Those were the Good Old Days of brass knuckles, armed confrontation and organized crime getting into the racket because it was, after all is said and done, a racket.  That other path of lauding corporations that actually did well by workers, like George Westinghouse and Henry Ford (at least in his early years) showed that if you had safe working conditions, good pay, allowed workers to buy their own housing, put medical facilities into the manufacturing footprint and then subsidized social groups to build a strong surrounding community with good housing, sanitation and roads, that this would be a better thing than extracting every cent from overworked workers in bad working conditions.  Westinghouse had to face down the Big Business and Big Banks of his day and found their manipulative ways were intent on breaking his business because it was actually successful, expanding, increased PUBLIC SAFETY, increased productivity and gave a half-day off on Saturday which was unheard-of amongst the Vanderbilt, Rockefeller and Carnegie types.  He beat Edison at his own game, took 'inside' risk with interior profit to expand business and the few time he had to take on external capital he got punished for it.  A decade after his death his workers erected a monument to him in Pittsburgh, PA.  George Meany, the man responsible for the American Federation of Labor, said that if more capitalists had followed Westinghouse, there would be no organized labor movement in America.

No such men are never championed by Progressives because they freely offer such benefits to compete, make a profit and be responsible to their workers and communities.  You could find George Westinghouse at a lathe helping a lathe operator years after his companies became successful, which was not stereotypical behavior.  So instead of backing these men by offering tax discounts or some such (and that is a subsidy, don't get me wrong on that) to encourage good behavior and drive out bad, the Progressives wanted to 'reform' Big Business and not have it actually have to compete against those offering better labor standards by facing a profitability problem of subsidized good standards.  The power of government was used to force 'regulations' on industries to prevent child labor, unsafe working conditions and the such like, which are all laudable goals, just that the means are those of power, not persuasion.  Really, how many years were children going to be working in coal mines once heavy equipment could do their work at a fraction of the cost?  Vanderbilt's New York Central Railroad refused to put in Westinghouse's air brakes because the life of brakemen (who had to sit at the top of cars and manually turn brake wheels to slow each car, jumping from car to car) was cheap.  Publicity from the next major accident because of this, however, caused ridership to crash and the NY Central Railroad soon sported Westinghouse air brakes.  They are actually cheaper to run when lawsuits and liability are taken into consideration, and the Vanderbilt family proved that point by having to install safety features due to public outcry.  Similarly the large excavator was going to usher in a new era of mining that actually required brawnier men to move equipment around and children going through cramped shafts was going to be relegated to a bygone age.  You can still, to this day, however, find garment sweatshops with working conditions barely better than what was seen in the 1870's through 1910's as they are far easier to conceal than twisted and broken bodies of children from coal mines, and yet are also a heavily regulated industry.  And yet the Labor Movement got US federal backing and it is simply a means for workers to organize themselves... and then kick-back money into campaign coffers of their political backers.

Progressives are all against graft... when they aren't getting it, you see.  When they are getting it, they will dress up such graft with high sounding ideals and good intentions, but take the graft just the same.  Progressives are not about clean government, but dirty government that encourages cronies, kick-backs, hands out goodies to cover those two things, and ensures that by taking graft it gets a political constituency that will always back it, no matter how awful its candidates are.  Because, you see, those candidates are part of the 'enlightened party' of elites that is on both sides of the aisle in the halls of power.  While a man like Teddy Roosevelt wasn't all that easy to convince with money, a man like Woodrow Wilson, was, and he loved that elite establishment as one necessary to mold the US population into being much more amenable to being led, instead of just represented.

 

Today this means that there is an elite establishment that sees much good in 'spreading the wealth around' mostly to cronies so as to corrupt them further and make them compliant to the whims of political struggle.  This elite segment of the body politic uses hard earned taxpayer money to pay off an ever larger voting constituency by hooking them on such dollars, and by hooking banks, industry and labor into such lifelines of corruption, they seek to make the least competent actor in all of this (the US federal government) as the controlling factor of all life in America.

Give the Big Banks control of US federal debt so that they can use such debt to then call on the federal government to make good on it, and if it can't then to seize US federally backed assets.  There are large swaths of land out there to be taken and a whole bunch of residential land with Fannie and Freddie backed and held loans that can also be grabbed.  Hope yours isn't one of them.

Give Big Labor authoritarian stakes in Big Business companies by breaking contracts to do so, the most vital of which are the best understood: those of holding debt obligations from private actors.  By exchanging the 'bail out' money with GMAC TARP funds, GM is just as beholden to the federal government as when it had both such forms of cash, they just shuffled debt from one column to another.  The bondholders got screwed, franchise operators got screwed because government determined that cronies should retain dealerships even when they weren't making any money, and money making dealerships were cut even when those would help the company make sales.  Chrysler had its stake sold to the Italian automaker Fiat.  Has anyone taken a look at the state of affairs in Italy recently?  Would any sane person or company even venture such a deal?  And then take a haircut on it to boot?  Plus still have federal backing for the deal?

The Big Banks, those ones that convinced the Labor Dept. to sell the idea to Nixon of creating Ginnie Mae to give corporate banks an entry into the residential home market, does anyone doubt that the system started by them (that of federally backed security on loan packages) is one that is utilized by political whims?  It was aimed, directly, at killing the vital if conservative S&L system, and that then opened the excuse to political actors for a 'Community Reinvestment Act' to stop the 'redlining' of communities... that were not good investments and that went far beyond race.  By no longer having a locally savvy S&L system the Big Banks opened themselves up to creating an ill-run fraudulently created system that then put the smaller operators at extreme risk due to the cost of increasing regulations and the threat of federal audits.  Only the Big survive in that world of finance and that is one backed by the US federal government via legislation and US taxpayer funds.  What you wind up with is a brittle system of a few Big Banks that are 'too big to fail' and an economy resting on them so that when they do face problems the Nation crumbles under a debt load held by those very same banks which can seize assets in the form of land and companies that the federal government has bailed out.  Plus smaller competitors.  Isn't that sweet?

Always and ever the Progressives harp on Big Business, and yet it is also their benefactor and now has so many lobbyists and revolving door personnel writing regulations to protect them and shaft small business that it isn't funny.  Van Jones' Apollo Alliance writes vast swaths of a 'stimulus' bill that benefits: failing companies, puts money into the pockets of political activists and corporate political backers and then dares to say that these are 'investments' in the future.  But that is how Progressives work when they call themselves Communists: they just change the name and verbiage to make it sound palatable, but the muck they serve is still muck.

Do you remember when Progressives and their Leftist cohorts actually felt they meant what they said about 'protecting workers' and 'holding business and banks accountable'?

I do.

I didn't believe them as I grew up hearing that blather because what they did was opposite of what they were saying.  What they wanted was pure and unmitigated power over everything, which includes you and me.

You were born free.

And then government stepped in.

Perhaps, just perhaps, this long trail of abuses done for so long should lead to some change because governments, after all, are instituted amongst men... men are not created by government for its convenience, after all.  Although they will try to sell you that line now that they have IPABs.  Just wait until enforced number of births are required for 'the good and well being of society'.  If you think they are nasty with the power over death, just wait until you find out what happens when you give them the power over life.  And they will call such enslavement liberty and say that it is good.

If you don't remember when they used to say differently now, then your children will never have it taught to them because YOU didn't teach it to them now.  They can't restore America if we allow them to be corrupted by our government.  We are the ones given the honor, duty and hard work of making government accountable to us, as individuals and society, not as a collective.  Yeah, you will probably lose the goodies promised you.  You are going to lose them anyway, at this rate.  Once you are used to that idea, then one of less government is no longer frightening and even quite inviting.

If you only dare to remember what they said and how they have lied to you then, and now.

Closing out Phase 1-3

Phase 1-3 of preparing for disaster has meant getting the basics done and then augmenting on that base to get longer term capabilities in place for larger scale problems.  The very basics I've outlined previously under my DIY posts and you have to go back to my oldest posts to find the first Phases.  The first 3 Phases are yourself, your everyday transportation and home, and of those getting the last (which is where you live) set up for survival is one of the most time consuming.

As I've outlined, at home you have two generalized choices, of either making home an intermediate place (a supply and then final bug out point) or to start laying in necessities for longer term survival.  Survival for this means something major like electrical grid collapse, economic collapse and even factoring in EMP effects from a nuclear device or the similar (though somewhat different problems) of a CME.  I cannot weigh and judge the possibilities of these things for you, but as Hurricane Sandy demonstrates: disaster preparedness is not an idle topic.

My general thoughts for my situation I've laid out before and it starts with median term survival in situ to ride out the worst of disasters: being far enough inland means that hurricane force winds are blunted by 30+ miles of worn-ridge terrain, and those ridge lines also serve as natural barriers against movement from the metro area to the post-suburbia areas.  Being in outer suburbia is not ideal, but no where is really ideal for a disaster if you are getting one handed to you.  If the power grid collapses (taking with it, say, central water and natural gas systems) then you have a full scale collapse of the infrastructure of civilization, which is to say you also don't get much time until sewage backs up and you have disease and pests to deal with.  After that having potable water is a critical factor for how long you can stay in one place, and then comes food.  To offset these things a reliable power supply that is not grid-tied nor dependent on scarce consumables (read gasoline, diesel, liquid natural gas, propane) limits energy choices to solar, water or wind.  These are not optimal power solutions as they require a static or semi-mobile gathering system (wind and water power for the first, and solar for both categories).  With even a few hundred watt hours per day, you can do a lot if you scale your capabilities to your power supply.  In a disaster you also have opportunities to clear out problems for gathering power (cutting down trees, putting in paths, erecting poles for wind turbines or scaffolding across a river for a micro-hydro generator) that you normally wouldn't have with a government bureaucracy in place.  Survival is its own license and wisdom requires forethought so that you have as little impact on the natural resources around you so that you can have better access to the vital ones.

Thus, down this logic pathway, critical needs for long term use of home as a place to survive means having power and having artificially chilled storage space for keeping medical supplies and even freezing items to be kept until needed.  To reduce overhead for power use means that you either go small (that is small devices that don't take up much power) or go with larger, but well designed and low power devices (usually with large amounts of insulation).  In my prior article of Riding out Sandy, I outlined what I got done before the storm came.  The equipment that I had gotten all has long lead-times to them, and the 6-8 weeks got dragged out for all of it and instead of having staged deliveries of having one set of devices arrive for full set-up and test over a couple of weeks and then another set a couple of weeks after that, it all arrived on the same week.  I didn't know Sandy was coming, I just felt that all of this stuff had to be basically up and operational before winter arrived, which has meant stalling out every other project and getting this stuff done.

I worked to just get the two Sunfrost units on their bases (which I needed to shim up and the company that makes them didn't put adjustable feet on the cabinets).  Due to the circumstances of trying to get shims put in, the SUNRNR units arrived before I could get the refrigerator and freezer tested out.  Plus I had to put some additional bracing into the bulk shelving unit I got for the SUNRNR units, which meant that for a few weeks it was hard to navigate through the main floor due to the amount of stuff in boxes that was strewn around.  We also got the bed replaced during all of this.  Yet more time taken from getting things done...

With that said the Sunfrost units came first and with two scissors jacks and a couple of pieces of shim stock white wood about 1/8" thick, I got the units shimmed up and they tested out just fine:

The doors open from the center (just a real tight fit for the fingers) and the bottom cabinets have sturdy drawers, and the cabinets are made from 3/4" ply, meaning they can take the weight of the things.  I do want to put some wood in back of them to help put a bit of rearward stability to the arrangement, either some 1/2" plywood sheets or at least a 2x10.  There are no tops to the units and the compressors are on top, and airflow is vital to cooling so you can't really put anything up there beyond perforated sheeting and nothing that would block airflow (i.e. no boxes or sheets of stuff).  If these were going to be built-in units... no, scratch that, if I had though ahead I would get the kitchen remodeled to put in the Sunfrost units as built-in units so that they could have some upper shelving (and yet open air flow behind) along with cabinets on the bottom, all built into the studs of the kitchen.  And if I did that then I would also make proper cabinetry next to them for the SUNRNR units so that they don't look like this:

I just love rivet shelving!  It is unsightly, makes you feel like you are in a warehouse and otherwise just looks purely functional with no frills attached.  If this was all built-in then all of what sits there would be behind doors and look all spiffy and professional.

The SUNRNRs are currently not attached to the solar panels, because I don't have a pass-through for the cabling yet.  During Sandy I ran them through the sliding door and used plastic sheeting to keep out water and the worst of the wind, but that did nothing for humidity and the heat escaping through the sheeting.  SUNRNR uses Anderson style plugs (like are seen with many winches) for the panels and the next grade up of those for the cross-link cable.  These units do not use the standard MC-4 style plugs used in most of the solar industry, thus when you think ahead on how you are going to use these, put that into the planning bin.  For the input side there are 2 sets of receptacles per unit for solar and wind/aux of regulated 12v DC input, and 2 of the larger receptacles so that SUNRNR units can be diasychained together to share battery power.  This is important as when you have different outlets for AC use (above are 110v and 240v units) they can draw from the batteries of the entire array for power.  SUNRNR also makes a dedicated well-pump power unit and a battery unit just to help back the output units.  If you need a mixed mode power gathering capability and have the resources available for wind and/or micro-hydro units, then a SUNRNR can help to serve as the main systems for storage of power.

Now going from the kitchen to the deck door, you get this:

That is the back of the solar array, which are 4 Kyocera 140 units that went through SUNRNR which helpfully hinges them together 2 at a time and changes them from MC-4 to Anderson cable.  The wooden lumber is exterior rated 6x6, previously used at another place in the complex for deck support and replaced during renovations back when all the equipment was arriving and just left out for anyone to take.  Providence was, obviously, doing something there and I took the hint and here they are.  I had cinderblocks I intended to use for another project that now serve as ballast and a few bricks to help lift the forward and lowest panels up a few inches.  The rail mounts, tilt legs and feet are from DPW via a reseller.

This is in no way 'permanent' construction, just bolted on to ballast.  Those thick black cables are the Anderson plug cables and they are rugged.

These upper panels are the workhorses in the array since they are up high enough to get direct sunlight for half the day.

The lower panels are in the shade of the railing and nearby trees, and gather very little power.  Only some of that can be remedied by work on the tree on our property, the rest is from trees on common land.

Next year the reseller for the SUNRNR units plans on having mobile platforms for the dual panels that will be a ballast/tray system.  As two sub-arrays set far back from the fence and trees, both sets of panels will gather more energy... but that is for next year.

During the most direct parts of sunlight I'm getting about 10 amps between the two panels at 12v DC, which is a bit less than 25% of the power the entire array should be able to put out.  I knew that going in, however, and waited for a 2 for 1 deal on the panels.  With 4-5 hours a day (on good days) of direct sunlight, there is enough to cover the Sunfrost units.  To minimize power use, turn off the AC output during the day and only run the refrigerator and freezer at night, then minimize opening the units.

As the Sunfrost freezer is not 'frost free' (that is it doesn't cycle warmer air in to remove frost and then exhaust it out) so you do have to keep an eye on frost build up.  The unit is made so you can shut down just one compartment, however, so you can muck out one while keeping the other frosty.  Or if you only need half the space, you have storage space by shutting the other unit off.  I did a continuous 2-day draw with the Sunfrosts from the SUNRNR units which started out in the 3/4 capacity stage and were at 1/2 capacity storage for power at the end of it.  That was with intense overcast (barely 5 amps peak, total) which meant that there wasn't much coming in to replace what was going out.  With the AC output turned off, the two units spent one day with very little sun (about 2 hours where the sun peaked out on and off) and was getting 7-8 amps for 3 hours which recharged both units to 3/4 capacity.  Actually, that is pretty impressive, when you get right down to it.

After this comes system hardening: getting EMP shields in place for vital equipment (SUNRNR units, the Sunfrosts I already have a mesh base which they sit on, and the other refrigerators and freezers), seeing if there are better solutions for protecting/hardening the sliding doors and windows (against hail and such), and then looking at rainwater collection/purification along with better waste disposal plans (all of which are at the 'rough and ready' stage but not at all pleasant).  With a constant source of power available, however, much can be done.  Once a pass-through for the cables are put in, then the Sunfrost units go off-grid.

Phase 4 also begins next year: getting mobile and survivable.

Remember, one step at a time and over a year you can go from very little to a much more solid feel for what you need to survive.  Better to have and not need, than need and not have.

First you get chronic illnesses...

...and then you get sick.

I am lucky in that the number of upper respiratory tract infections that I get have dropped from their extreme high in my teen years (anywhere from 3 to 5 per year with some of them lasting nearly a month) to merely 1 or 2 a year.  No matter how well I take care of myself, I still get the bugs... but taking good care of my diabetes allows me to track when something is trying to get a jumping off point and deal with it.  I may get a 3 day stint of relatively high readings and then my body will have gotten rid of the germ and I'm right as rain.

Still, once or twice a year I get something that isn't so easy to shake and I have one of those now.  I would well and truly not have survived my teen years without modern medicine circa post-1940.  One or two sulfa drugs I can stand but they never dealt with the infections I've gotten in the upper respiratory tract.  That is the ears, sinus, throat and, when things get really bad, the upper parts of the lungs although that hasn't happened since I was 16.

I can't really do much of anything safely with tools of any sort, although that doesn't mean I can't find things to do or things find their way to me.

My lady's laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1721 bought a few months after mine, decided that its problems with the battery system (that is it hasn't been recharging them properly) now needed to have a hard disc problem.  As I had been looking a bit deeper at the recharge problem and realized that it wasn't the batteries or the software, that meant that it was the hardware which is on the main board of the system.  Here is what I do when I see a major problem on the motherboard of a system that is over 5 years old: I get a replacement and build a new system.  I can't do that with a laptop and had to buy a replacement and decided on one of the HP Pavilion line of computers... refurbished, natch.

The Inspiron finally coughed up a major problem on the hard drive and it took half an hour just to boot enough of a system to see the drive errors that filled the error log.  Since I had already gotten the major apps installed on the HP, plus removed a bit of the built-in cruft (although I never got to removing all the games and other junk that came with it, but it sits quiescent, unused and, therefore, relatively safe) put in my favored AV (Avast!) and the Comodo free firewall, it was ready for use.  The first order of business was to take a look at the drive from the Inspiron on another computer, which would require that I get the actual hardware to do that, a USB to SATA/IDE drive connector.  Since I was doing that at NewEgg I also got a new drive for the system and scared up some freeware to copy a drive image if I could find it.  Those both arrived just as I was starting to get sick...fun, fun, fun!

A day after it arrived I put the old drive onto a system and did a basic scan, which didn't show much.  Then I took an image of the drive, and put an image of that on the new drive.  That drive wouldn't boot.  Thus I had to scare up a Live CD to see what was going on and that finally revealed that the drive wasn't being properly recognized by the system.  I put on an MBR and still, no dice.  Pull the new drive with image and then put a really nasty chkdsk /f on it.  An hour later... it was bad news for the old drive image.  The second chkdsk /f only took about 10 minutes revealing no other problems.  For S&G's I put it in the system and no boot, of course.  Two directories held massive amounts of recovered files, all unusable.  Thus it was time to pull out the old install DVD and get to work...

The new drive is functional and happy, the old image is mostly awful and unrecoverable, and yesterday I spent most of the day hunting down drivers, apps, and generally getting enough on the Inspiron to get it past the bootable stage and close to useful.  I slapped an AV on it and still have to put on another firewall, and then have to do a final clean-up, defrag and general getting it back into functional order and examine any NEW errors coming up.  Both of the Dell laptops are the same vintage and I'm guessing some minor thing like, oh, a cosmic ray toasted out part of the old hard drive on the machine I was working on.  A thorough low-level disc scan and sector map should figure that out and would make the difference between having a drive that had some minor but critical event and one that is wholly unreliable.  Since there are no cables I can easily get at involved, if its the cables then I'm to stripping the system apart and if I have to do that I will see if I can scare up a new motherboard from that old line of Inspirons.  Basically, by the time you put in the cost and effort to get an old machine up and running, you are at the cost of a low-end refurbished machine that will do more.

Until the economy truly tanks when we are seen as an unreliable spendthrift.

All bets are off, then.

I can do a lot more than just woodworking... a bit of firearms work... geology...

Actually it seems as if my interest in a lot of subjects has some dividend to it.

Another project I'm taking up... where do I get these ideas, anyways?... is an adsorption cooling system/refrigerator.

Basically most refrigerators around your house run on electricity and have a compressor involved.  Those running on propane or other fuels have a burner to heat up a liquid to its vapor point and then evaporating coils to get the vapor to phase change back to a liquid (thus cooling what it is in contact with) and then a final condensation set of coils to make sure the liquid gets back safe and sound to the heater.  You can make that into a solar system, and efficiencies vary.  These ones with minimal to no compressors are absorption systems.

What an adsorption system does, in contrast, is uses a medium to temporarily bind the vaporizing medium to the surface of it as a liquid.  That surface, when heated, breaks the weak surface attraction bonds and creates a vapor that then goes away from the region being heated.  Cooler areas will draw off heat to start and then, since the liquid is barely in a vapor state, the vapor condenses and removes heat from the area.  Since it is a phase change it takes more heat away than it puts in, thus chilling the area down.  This is a chiller, not a real refrigerator, but gets to much of the same ends.  The physics is pretty old, going back to Van der Walls force and the equations that govern this attraction between gases and liquids when they are in relation to surfaces.  It was not applied to chillers until... I think it was 2003 or 04 by Toshiba.  Amazing how 19th century physics can still be used today, isn't it?

Doing a bit of reading up on the subject the main elements for a solar chiller consist of a liquid that easily turns into vapor at a relatively low temp, an adsorption media that can attract a lot of molecules to its surface, a heating chamber with the materials in it, and a cooling area.  That is it, no pump.  Nature does the work both at the chiller area and, when the sun goes down, the liquid and vapor go back to the cooling region with the adsorption material due to the attractive force it has on its surface.

That's the theory, at least.

So what are the actual materials?

Methanol and activated carbon.

Methanol you can get from various sources, but you want it anhydrous.  Anyone doing biodiesel can point you to suppliers.

And activated carbon?  Used for filtering fish tanks.  Get it in the spherical, low dust version as you don't want carbon dust clogging the thing up over the years.  Some fine screening might be a good plus for the system.

I've ordered the basics for a rig to test it out:

- A length of 2" black pipe, 24" long with couplers and bushings to get the ends down to 1/2".

- Copper pipe in 1/4" for the chilling/condensing region

- Copper pipe in 3/8" for the heating to chilling region, thus giving the vapor a slightly easier path up to the 3/8" to 1/4" reducer

- Brass pipe fittings to mate all this up, I have teflon pipe tape

- Plastic boxes used for scrapbook making, which I will fill with brine and use bulkhead 1/4" connectors for, and this will be the chilling region... I may need to put a minor coating of something on the copper pipe, like shellac, say... dunno

Still to be made are a simple stand to hold the rig in place, and a couple of cardboard boxes so I can test the thing out.

For a simple test the black pipe gets mounted on black painted wood, perhaps in an open box configuration to help concentrate the heat, the copper runs up the sides to a platform with a brine filled box, and the 1/4" pipe has some gentle bends coming out of them (and some tighter ones inside the brine containers) to serve as condensers and a simple bend pipe trap to allow liquid to serve as a barrier to any back pressure coming from the heating area so the flow goes in one direction.

I am not expecting more than a few degrees difference between the box with brine and pipe and the box that will just have a brine container without pipe.  A couple of sunny and dry days will help this out no end once it is built.  If I can get any results then I will have the known factors for materials, sizing, volume and so on to allow for scaling up of things.  I'm figuring more heating chambers in a flat box with glazed glass over it, and a top and bottom vent to allow hot air to move slowly out of the system will be a final design goal.

That and an old refrigerator I can strip out and put in some better insulation to help things along.

In theory this all works, although size and scaling is unknown.

Getting to the practice part is the hard part... but even a small chilling box that keeps a constant temp for medications and other such items would be great to have.  Plus it is no maintenance once it is put together with a sturdy frame and always works so long as there is any sunshine at all.  Weatherizing it may take a bit, but that is another bridge to blow up when I come to it.

Just because I'm sick doesn't mean I'm out of it.

Operations just shift venues for awhile.

Are you a Trustafarian?

I am ran across the term Trustafarian while perusing an article by Zombie at PJM.  She was using it to describe the class of people at The Ongoing Occupation of America post on 29 SEP 2011.  I had never run across the term and decided it needed just a bit of personal definition which required a few days to mull it over.  By the time I finally started to get the term I then came up with a definition after Herman Cain criticized those at the OWS (Occupy Wall Street/ Out With Sanity/ Ongoing With Stupidity/ Outing Witless Students... take your pick) at Hot Air.  I will correct a few spelling errors and such just to make it clear who he was talking about and what a Trustafarian is by what they do.

= = =

You might be a Trustafarian if you are part of the OWS crowd and…

- Have any electronic device starting with an “i-”

- Have a pair of sneakers costing over $100

- Have a shirt, pair of pants or jacket with a logo emblazoned on it

- Have an ‘art’ shirt that cost more than $50

- Have a netbook/notebook/laptop/tablet computer

- Have more rings festooning your body than a packed bar has glasses on the bar

- Have a bandana/headband/keffiyah with a designer tag on it

- Have a pair of shoes that has individual toes as a feature

- Have any piece of clothing other than a belt made out of leather

- Have more pieces of artwork tattoo’d to your body than a SOHO art gallery has

- Have a pre-printed sign because you can’t figure out how to use a magic marker

- Have an item with the mass murderer Che on it

- Spout off about how a system you can’t even understand needing to go because your parents have paid your way through school

- Have a law degree

- Have any degree in any set of studies involving a hyphen or ethnic or gender in its title

- Have more gold jewelry on your body than a pawn shop has in its inventory

- Can say Media Matters with a straight face and think it means something

Yes these are leading indicators of being a Trustafarian.

Any Trustafarian needs to run, not walk, saunter, or just, you know, go more or less in the direction of, the nearest mental health clinic and report yourself with permanent detachment from reality syndrome… they will spend a decade ‘treating’ you and making you poor so you will then have something to complain about.

And if you think you paid too much for your college education then ASK FOR YOUR MONEY BACK as it has done you NO GOOD AT ALL TO GO THERE.

= = =

You see?  A handy visual guide to the Trustafarians!  If you see someone with MORE than one of these attributes who is at the OWS gatherings (or 'supporting them') you have a Trustafarian: those living off of their parent's trust funds.

Easy to do, no?

Then I realized that they also fit under another term, which is a bit broader, in this headliner at Hot Air about how these OWS folks just might be, you know, POPULISTS!  Be still my beating stomach... I commented thusly...

= = =

Just a buncha Trustafarians.

Old hipsters and young dipsters.

The doucheoise.

= = =

Doucheoise was proposed as a new name for hipsters (I'm not going to bother looking up who proposed it) but as the class of people who are douche's, it also overlaps highly with the Trustafarians.  In fact all Trustafarians are part of the Doucheoise, but not all Doucheoise are Trustafarians and come by their status via other means.  The Trustafarians, in other words, are a sub-species.

Ahh... science!

I did a bit more after that on the Studentia branch of the Trustafarinensi.

= = =

And for the dipsticks complaining about their college loans and blaming the BANKS, just who is it that is ASKING for the money?

Oh, yeah, the COLLEGES.

How about BLAMING THEM for asking so much? And asking for your money back as you didn’t learn a damn thing there other than how to whine, moan and complain about how ‘hard you have it’. The banks are pushing you asshats to take out a loan the SCHOOLS ARE.

= = =

Yup!  It isn't the banks, folks, but the bubble of higher education that Insty has been talking about for a couple of years.  It is a much, much larger bubble than SSA, home loans, and medical cost inflation from 1970 to present.  It is the biggest bubble right next to all of them taken together next to our federal debt.  All these little bubbles gotta pop to get things set straight and the big one has to go down by removing the inflator we call 'government'.

Now since I'm the helpful sort with the guidebooks and such, though in no way the Shell Answer Man because I don't take questions, I decided to sum up not only what the problem is for the various sub-species of the Doucheoise, but what you need to do about it.  I really don't have time for real posts these days, what with finishing up my SKS stock and getting the thing re-assembled, plus having another 2-4 projects on my agenda, so these will have to do.

This is from another Hot Air thread at a Quotes of the Day posting. A spelling error and one typo corrected, mangled syntax and logic left as-is.

= = =

Remember in a deal in which the schools ask for more money and the banks lend it to students, who is to blame for the high cost of education?

A) The schools for CHARGING IT?

B) The students wanting the money to PAY FOR IT?

C) The banks for LENDING IT?

These OWS people blame C, put no responsibility on B and can’t think that those actually doing A who are the originators of the cost are to blame.

Now put in homes and who is to blame?

A) Those asking for more money than a home is worth?

B) Those wanting to pay those high amounts?

C) The banks for lending the money?

Again if you are an OWS’r you blame C, put no responsibility on B, and never, ever blame those asking for unrealistically high prices A.

In each case the root cause of the ‘problem’?

Government regulation that sets the playing field for giving loans. In the first part are federally backed loans that MUST be paid back to the federal government and that you can’t get around paying back.

In the second it is the government determining the risk, setting regulations as to who MUST be able to get loans for FAIRNESS which allows such things as NINJA loans to meet pre-set quotas by the regulators.

Now when you put the government as the D option in both, who is to blame?

A) Those asking for extraordinarily high amounts that they know YOU CAN GET via regulation?

B) Those seeking such high amounts and not questioning the ACTUAL VALUE of what they are getting and not blinking at the COST being asked?

C) Those providing the money as intermediaries for the government regulatory system because, to do business, they have NO OTHER OPTION in those realms?

D) The government for rigging the system to allow A to put B into debt via C the regulated intermediary?

The banks are not the villains, here, although they do share some blame in setting up D, it is the regulatory system, itself, that is swayed by such input. When A and C collude with D, it is B that is shafted.

The answer to what to do is to get D out of the equation so that they do NOT write exacting ‘fair’ regulations and only put out statutes against misrepresenting value and cost from both A and C so that B can make a decision based on actual facts, not promises of ‘fairness’ in a system being rigged against them.

These Trustafarians, the members of the Doucheoise, are HELPING those in the A category to vilify the C category so that they can get MORE REGULATIONS THAT DON’T WORK AND MAKE THINGS WORSE from the D category. They are not playing class warfare but committing economic suicide on a personal basis. If they meant what they said they would join the Tea Parties and work to get the government out of the system so that there is less to no government save for cases of fraud that need be ruled upon. As it is they are supporting the existing fraud-backed structure and want nothing to do with removing it.

Yes Rome wasn’t built in a day.

It was, however, sacked in 3.

You are seeing the sackers, not the builders, wanting their bite and not expecting the collapse to effect them one little, tiny, bit. If they get what they want they have a greatly limited life span because of what they get, that will shorten down decades to years, months, weeks or even days.

If you aren’t prepared for that disaster NOW then you will be joining them.

Your job is to survive, help and educate. And all three MUST be done AT THE SAME TIME. And to those who don’t listen, who scream and rage, you must turn away FROM to help those that WILL listen to reason. That is your duty as a citizen to your fellow citizens. Those that aren’t listening, who are screaming, who are marching… they are the walking dead if they get their way. You can save them but only if you do the right things as a citizen, now. It all depends on YOU being civilized each and every single day of your life no matter HOW BAD things get, all the way to your last breath on this earth. Only your fear will stop you…

= = =

All that stuff I've written about for survivalism, DIYism, plus looking at terrorism, organized crime, money laundering, politics... all that stuff... still comes down to you.

These people blockading their common sense for freebies don't understand how the world works and just want everything to be free.  Just like the USSR!  They can't live there any more since it collapsed under the weight of what happens when no one CAN achieve and everything is FREE and damned scarce, but that doesn't matter to the Trustafarians.

It does matter to the person wanting to be civilized and a citizen.

What you must do in such conditions is clear and I've spelled it out via hundreds of posts.

Your duty to your fellow citizens is to survive and be the one at the other end offering a hand up to a better life of personal liberty and freedom.

The verbiage that goes with being a free man, an individual, is well known and alien to the ears of those in the Trustafarian crowd, but should strike home to any who wish to lead a free life of equal justice, not 'fairness' as what is 'fair' is in the eye of the beholder:

I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, de-briefed or numbered.

My life is my own.

The OWSr's?  They DO want to be pushed (look at how they got there by having helpful 'organizers' push them), stamped (see the guidebook?), indexed (just HOW MANY loans do they have they can't pay up on?), briefed (again the organizers), de-briefed (they are going to lose everything including their briefs), numbered ('we are the 0.00001% who are the 99%'!).  Listen to any of the 'call outs' done by 'organizers' or 'radicals' or Frances Fox Piven or Cornel West and you begin to imagine Monty Python's Life of Brian in which the call out is 'You are all individuals' and the response 'YES WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS' save for that radical saying 'I'm not...'

There you go!

Now back to my normal business around here.

Gotta get that SKS up and running and then put the drum magazine through its paces now.

I will not be pushed.

And neither should you.

The self-evident and you

The following is a pure opinion piece.

You have been warned.

Yesterday was the last day for complaints.

===

Of all things that our Founders have given us, the greatest of their gifts is a recognition of the place of mankind in the order of things.  In the Declaration of Independence the basis for the reasoning is given the terms 'self-evident' because they are, upon any spare moment of reflection, just that.  A self-evident truth is one that is available to anyone who is dealing with a full mental deck, and even many of those who don't have that can recognize the very most basic of all self-evident truths.  This truth is available no matter what your belief status is in regards to religion and requires only that you have some humility in its recognition.  That state of having a lack of such humility is a derangement and hubris as it is very simple to recognize.

What is this truth?

We live in a natural world.

The howls of protest begin, no doubt, with the protestations of what mankind does with nature, how we pollute, destroy and all sorts of other bad things.  Yet the bulk of mass of life on this planet is not human life, nor even insect life, but bacterial life.  Earth is a planet of, by and for bacteria.  If any life form rules this planet it is bacterial life, and they don't give a good hot damn about you.  Consider that there are but a few thousand, at best and I know it is a much, much, much smaller number, of bacteria species that can infest your human body.  You actually require a large number of them to get things done inside your body and most of them are benign to you.  A good fraction of your biomass as an individual is bacterial in nature.  Thusly you are part and parcel of the natural world, you are part of nature, suffused with nature and must abide by the activity of nature and how nature runs everything.

If you are a believer of some sort, and I don't care which religion, then nature is recognized as the process that runs everything on a daily basis.  It is the mechanism for higher powers to not have to be involved in everything, all the time, everywhere and gets to run on its own.  If that higher power does, indeed, spend equal time about each sparrow that falls from the sky, then it most assuredly will also do so with each and every single bacteria as they are the bulk of what makes things run.  You do, indeed, get equal time in this view of things.  Recognize that the Planck second or two you get is about all that can be afforded to you and that the entire amount of bacteria in you will get more consideration than you as it lives and dies at a far faster rate than you do.  And there are 10^42, that is a 1 with 42 zeros after it, Planck seconds in every single second we experience.  Because of the mass of life on this world and, assuredly, elsewhere in this universe, any being giving you more than a couple of those is spending way too much time on you and not on taking care of business.  Thus nature and the laws of nature are set in place so that any higher power can spend some time doing more important things.

If you don't believe in the great power mover of deific process and take just the more prosaic view that we are, indeed, creatures of nature, then the self-evident is true, also: we don't matter all that much in the process.  Even better is that by stepping outside, taking up a couple of tablespoons of dirt and getting all the bacteria in that amount will yield more diversity of bacterial organisms than are housed within you, and possibly come up with one or two 'undiscovered' ones that you can then name.  The scary part isn't that you can do that.  The scary part is that this can be done by every single human on this planet, name billions of new species of bacteria and we would not even have begun to scratch the diversity of bacterial life on this planet.  They outnumber us in mass, diversity, and habitat with bacteria being found in places that we cannot live in: hot springs, oil wells, and all the way out to motes of dust at the edge of our atmosphere.  The single, inescapable conclusion is self-evident that we aren't all that powerful compared to bacteria.

Both of these general paths lead to one conclusion and it is exactly the same no matter which general way you go: the unimportance of man, no matter what 'plan' it is we are supposed to be on, is self-evident and we must gain humility in order to survive as when we lack same and attempt to command the world around us we will find it unresponsive to our desires.  Even worse is that like all good laws, the Laws of Nature are applied equally in all circumstances.  Even if you are a believer and the deific can intercede, those intercessions have been more in the 'hey, wise up!' category than the grand gestures that every civilization can feel business.  Even after such intercessions then nature takes over to run things, so no matter how great and grand the gesture, nature takes care of the daily business.  If you aren't dealing with nature, you aren't dealing with the actual, physical reality around you.

Believe me, we have quite a few of those running around the planet, those folks elevating man all out of proportion to our actual position in things.  Millions of them.

I abbreviate the entire prior coding of the Laws of Nature as they are properly stated as: The Laws of Nature and Nature's God.  I will leave the arguing about the nature of Nature's God, or lack of same, to others better suited to think such deep thoughts and not look both ways before crossing the street.  No matter the origin of all this stuff, he said waving his hands around generally in the direction of the natural universe which is everywhere around him and within him, I , as an individual, have to deal with the self-evident fact it is here and can impact me.  Forget this 'I think, therefore, I am' business... I got a lot of other problems beyond that to deal with, like the state of my sinuses waking up in the morning.  That is my part of dealing with bacterial world and it begins each and every time I get up and it takes up some of my non-thinking moments if I'm not damned careful about it.  You, too, probably have similar things going on with you as, unfortunately, bacteria do get to vote.  They set the agenda.  You must deal with that so as to carve out a niche so that you can actually do other things than deal with, or die from, bacteria.

How do I know that mankind will not destroy nature via nuclear war/pollution/'global warming'/politically backed slogan of the day?  My sinuses make it abundantly and perfectly clear to me that we do not rule this place.  But if I can keep my mucus clear, then I'm doing a good job dealing with the bacteria.

The bacteria can do this wonderful stuff to us because the Laws of Nature are impartial in their application.  We cannot repeal them nor require that the circumference and radius of a circle be moderated by a number that is exactly 3.  Thus we must take the Laws of Nature which is all of physics, astrophysics, chemistry, biology and then the fall-out sciences dealing with relativity, quantum mechanics, universal structure, biochemistry, differential survival, and geology as they are.  We still  have a lot to figure out and unlike one or two or more famous scientists, I don't see an end to what we can find out any time soon.  Folks back in the 19th century thought they did and in a decade got disabused of that quaint, Marxist, notion.  I'm pretty sure that on the Natural side we've overlooked something and much of what we consider 'great ideas' will demonstrate themselves to be transitional in nature.  That is the nature of inquiry in the natural sciences which deal with the Laws of Nature as they manifest themselves.  And so far we haven't found one, single, instantiated exception to those laws dealing with us as individuals, a species, a planet, a solar system or a galaxy.  Thus we can bask in the radiance of equality under the law, and deal with all the bacteria that have the same equality under the law as we have.  They get the great and good benefit of numbers.  I'm stuck with the minor things we can do to help me get a say in the issue, but I do not doubt, for one second, that my say is in any way absolute against such numbers.

Neither is yours.

You either come to terms with this conception, or you find yourself in a padded room at some point in your life.  Or get elected to some high political office, which seems to be the other repository for this way of non-thinking.

Thus the first part of dealing with the Laws of Nature and the fact that we are creatures of Nature and that we are neither the rulers nor controllers of this planet is: Humility.

If you aren't humble in the minor and quite frivolous aspect mankind plays in the Natural Universe then you get the bifurcated path of padded cell or politician ahead of you.  Of the two I hold those in padded cells in higher regard as they are having to deal with their skewed outlooks, not subject others to them.

But that is just me, feel free to ignore me, but do realize the bacteria cannot and generally will not ignore you.  That latter is important.

A point on viruses: they are not living things, but hijackers of bacteria.  They are very particular and nearly every single bacteria has a virus that utilizes it for reproduction.  Viruses of a very specialized sort can also invade your cells.  To such viruses you are a specialized colony of bacteria, not a human being.  That is how your cells function, how they live and die, and viruses get specialized to specialized bacteria and environments.  Thusly our bodies are specialized bacteria colonies that have their own environments to which viruses can adapt to or otherwise become amenable to finding.  After bacteria, I would guess that the next largest chunk of semi-living matter that can impact life on this planet is viruses.  You are outnumbered.  Deal with it.  It isn't changing any time soon.

Lets step up from this most humiliating of venues, shall we?  That is to say it is a venue that induces humility, and if you are humiliated by it then you are, actually, dealing with it properly.  You are learning your place in the Natural world and it isn't a pretty place.

I'm going to skip over all the other fun stuff like fungi, colonies of single organisms like coral reefs and algal mats, and get into the multi-cellular and differentiated cell world.  At all other levels we are outnumbered by their masses on this planet and their diversity, and you have some large amount of fungus living on you and inside of you, so don't get cocky.  They get a say in things, too.  I'm going to skip over the rulers of the multi-cellular world, which are plants.  Sucks but we are outnumbered there, too.  In the actual self-motile multi-cellular agenda things like jellyfish get a say, but insects and their crustacean cousins outnumber us by billions and billions... Carl Saganesque amounts... to one, against.  We can chop down forests, yes.  We do not rule the plant world.  Everything we make can be broken down by plants, if they had time to get to it which they do.  We will never win the war against dandelions.  And trees rip up sidewalks and roads at a phenomenal rate, given that they don't move around much.  You can miss the forest, once its gone, but the trees stand ready to reinvent a new one if you let them get away with it.  Old parts of the Amazon rainforest clear-cut for farming and cattle work in the 1950's to 1970's, that then lost its topsoil is now being re-covered, that is actually covered over again, by tropical rain forest after we have left it for barren land.  Nature is on the move and the Laws of Nature trump our laws at every turn.

That is a bitter pill for many to swallow who think that mere man created laws can impose our will on Nature.  Knowing that this is otherwise removes the solidity of our works and requires us to address what Nature does to our works.  This is the concept we call: maintenance.  We've been ignoring a lot of that for decades, and we shall pay for it.

Stepping past all of that to get to us (you, me, mankind in general), requires that we acknowledge that the things we get from Nature are bound upon us from Nature and that Nature imbues all things with such gifts as are bestowed upon us as being within Nature.  The equality of availability is absolute as all things within Nature are ruled by Natural Law.  The foundation of all our conceptions of everything we can do rests upon this self-evident truth: we are creatures of Nature.

Every creature of Nature has the exact, same set of Laws upon them.  Within Nature those Laws are absolute and give all things within Nature the power to act in accordance with Natural Law.  That power to act we call Liberty and the ability to exercise that Liberty manifests itself in Rights.  We cannot create one, single Liberty or Right that is not already within us as individual creatures of Nature.  We can, however, discover that we have such Liberty and Rights, which is one of the few things we have that most of the rest of Nature's creatures do not have.  They can, and do, exercise such Liberty and their Rights to use them, but that is not the same thing as self-recognizing that one has them.  Thus every bacteria has the exact, same, set of Liberties and Rights that I have.  It can't utilize more than a few of them and can't truly be said to be cognizant of them as a matter of course.  The concept is, however, humbling and fraught with humiliation.  That nice lady Grace helps me out so that I can remember to recognize that these are self-evident Liberties and Rights and that I have the ability to plan so as to use them.  Bacteria aren't so hot at that.

Notice where 'collective rights' come in?

That is correct: they don't.

They do not exist.

Let us take that most primal of all Rights, the one that manifests it so we refer to Nature as being 'in red of tooth and claw', and that is the Liberty of Warfare.  If you are on the Left you try to espouse this as a 'collective right' that it does not exist outside of the State or Nation.  Yet it is part of nature and we are imbued with it, thusly it cannot come from the State or Nation.  Further, any attempt to posit the thesis that the State or Nation is the sole arbiter of force is refusing to recognize the Law of Nature and that we are creatures of the Natural world in which we are the arbiters of force.  Now, to backtrack, we can examine the Law of Nature in regards to the Rights and Liberty of War.

War is a multi-part Liberty in that it has negative and positive aspects.  Thus there are Negative Liberties of War and Positive Liberties of War.  These Liberties are generally differentiated between that of Offensive War, that is externally directed war against others, and Defensive War, that is war in one's own defense.  The Negative Liberty of War is harmful to others and harmful when inflicted upon us.  The Positive Liberty of War is protective in nature and extent and gives the subsequent Right and Liberty of counter-attack so as to enjoin those intent on doing harm to oneself and dissuade them that this is a good idea in any way, shape or form.  From that the Negative Liberty of War can be characterized as the Thrust, the Positive Liberty of War is the Parry which carries with it the absolute Right of the Ripost.  In modern terminology this is the Offensive, the Blocking or Blunting, and the Counter-Attack or Counter-Offensive.

War, as an activity, is 'scale-free' in its dimensions for Liberties and Rights.  That is to say it is the exact, same set of Liberties and Rights at all scales from the individual to the cosmic and it scales freely without adjustment.

The Laws of War are a fallout not of the Positive and Negative Liberties and Rights of War, however.  The source of the Laws of War are not from War, at all, and are only a synthetic part of warfare added in on top of our supreme Liberty and Rights of War that we have as individuals.  The exercise of War by larger groups, at all scales, is moderated by the affinity of those groups to recognize the Primary bond between individuals which we characterize as: marriage.

Marriage is the joining of two lives to sustain life and create an environment in which we moderate our Natural Rights and Liberties so as to bring forth and nurture young, and to provide safe haven for others that we know and abide by our rules within our marriage.  The Law of Nations is built not at the highest level of interaction, but at the lowest level and this is, also, self-evident with even a moment of reflection.  Our first place of succor, that place which is open to us because of who we are and because we are cherished is the family.  That then places the basis for all society within the family and then how families and individuals within families interact between families.

This is a Universal Application of the Law of Nature and adapting to that Law and is seen in all humans from the most primitive of tribes to the greatest of Nation States, and is done without respect to geography or time.  When we create the family we create the basis for Nations.  Other animals likewise create families and, if they had the ability to apply reason to their state within Nature then they, too, could form Nations and would do so as this is a universal application of that knowledge so that we can be in accord with each other in the State of Nature.  Every single custom, taboo, right of passage, socialization with others, morals, ethics, and law to govern these things comes not from government but from the family.

When the Liberty and Rights of War are taken into a family they are moderated by the family so that all members of that family agree to restrict their Negative Liberty of War, that is offensive and external war, so as to provide for common exercise of their Positive Liberty of War for defense of those they love.  That is why stepping into the line of fire to save one's children is so primal an activity: it is the absolute manifestation of the Positive Liberty of War applied by the Law of Nations to protect those you care for in the most intimate of ways.  If your throat chokes up upon consideration of this, then you know it to be true and that it is not only an emotional feeling but one backed fully, and completely, by reason.  There is no stronger nor greater manifestation of what it means to be a member of a family than in sacrificing yourself by it so as to save them when they are threatened by ANYTHING.  In doing that you have taken up the Natural Law to the defense of others and have become one of the most powerful persons on the planet, bar none.

You may not be successful, but that is War.

War is not fair.

There is nothing that man can do to make it so as it is an artifact of the Laws of Nature, not the Law of Nations or the petty laws of man.  This is how the universe works and you, as an individual, must deal with it.  When you ask others to do so, you seek tyranny for yourself and your loved ones, and have abdicated your responsibility to them in the rightful and lawful exercise of your Positive Liberty of War.  If you fear this right, then you are a slave to your own misplaced fear and seek to enslave all around you with that fear.  Thusly any espousal of a 'collective right' is one to enslave your fellow citizens to a tyrannical concept and subject them to tyranny based on fear OF the free exercise of the Positive Liberty of War and the outcome to that is always, without exception at any time for any human culture, negative and despotic in nature.  When your fear over-rules your good sense, you are enslaved to your fears.

Patrick McGoohan summarized this in one acronym.

POP - Protect Other People.

You must do that, no one else can do that for you, and is the greatest and paramount responsibility you have to those you love and you cannot hand it to anyone else to do.  We form up hunting bands, militia, vast armies so as to get strength in numbers, but the absolute strength comes from your will and determination to Protect Other People.

And when you stick your head outside the door, see the world going to hell with imminent threat and come back inside to warn those you love there is but one phrase to describe that: POP goes the weasel.

Better to be a cunning weasel than a voracious rat, at any rate.

Thus we can acknowledge these self-evident truths:

- We are within the bounds of Nature.

- We are imbued with the Laws of Nature.

- All things within Nature are imbued with these Laws.

- Those Laws create Liberty and Rights for all parts of Nature.

- All creatures have access to all Liberty and Rights of Nature, without exception.

- We recognize that we have such Liberty and Rights as Nature provides to us.

- Natural Liberty and Rights can be seen to have Positive and Negative attributes.

- Marriage, that is the joining of one person to another, is the basis of the family.

- By creating family we create the Law of Nations.

- In the creation of the Law of Nations we agree to not individually exercise our Negative Liberty of War.

- By being part of a family under the Law of Nations we agree to exercise our Positive Liberty of War to defend those we love.

 

One follows from the other, as day follows night.

You do not need to be a believer in any religion to understand these self-evident truths about where you are in Nature.

You are outnumbered.  You are miniscule.  You are feeble.  So am I and all individual humans upon this planet even taken as a whole we don't amount to very much.

And it is self-evident that a number of people are not dealing with this very well.

No good shall come of that.

Some less random thoughts on the paranormal

...which is not to say that they aren't pretty random.

Way back when I first started blogging, I had a quick set of suggestions on some things that could be done to help deal with tracking down paranormal activity. There have been a few television series dealing with this topic since that time and I will deal with the latest incarnation of these programs, which is Ghost Lab from the Discovery Channel. The series deals with Everyday Paranormal, a group started up by the Klinge brothers, Brad and Barry, and is based in Texas. The show's basic format is to set up two situations with reported paranormal activity, have some background on the site and activity given by the current owners or other people who have experienced it, and then the Everyday Paranormal team sets up voice recorders, cameras and other equipment throughout the place they will be looking at and then do two night's worth of investigative work.

While the Klinge brothers do haul a lot of equipment around with them, some of it pretty sophisticated, the concept of their organization is to use science to investigate the afterlife, or at least the paranormal. Technical investigative tools does not a scientific investigation make, however. There are three main tools we see in the Ghost Lab series and each of them has strengths and weaknesses depending on how they are employed.

First is the EMF detector which measures variance in the Electro-Magnetic Field in milligauss. Carl Friedrich Gauss developed the equations that from Gauss's law on the electric flux through any closed surface as proportional to the enclosed electric charge. As electricity and magnetism are different manifestations of the same thing, that is electromagnetism, there is also a Gauss's law for magnetism. The gauss is then the measurement of the magnetic field which is 1 maxwell per square centimeter. As a reference the Earth's magnetic field is approximately 0.6 gauss and the variations being measured in the program are in the milligauss range or 0.001 gauss, so when we hear 0.1 milligauss we are getting 0.0001 gauss, as a difference from the surrounding field which is understood to be the Earth's at 600 milligauss. In other words a variation of 1 part in 6,000. While going from, say, 0.5 milligauss to 17 milligauss is a strong variation, that is still a less than 1% change in the Earth's magnetic field locally. Also as these are point recorders, not field or linear recorders, they have a fall-off rate due to the inverse-square phenomena and are most accurate at the point of measurement. As the Earth, itself, can experience variations in the magnetic field there needs to be data review taking this into consideration not only for local, terrestrial effects, but other effects due to the solar output. To get an idea of the strength of a gauss field, a strong permanent magnet made of iron that would be the size of your fist would be 100 gauss according to wisegeek. So a slightly magnetized iron or steel belt buckle could hit in the range that is looked at with EMF fields.

In addition the EMF detector has problems with electronics in the vicinity, beyond just local field variations due to the supernatural, the presence or absence of other equipment such as cell-phones, walkie-talkies, and even such things as electrical photographic equipment and sound measuring equipment all put out EMF from their circuitry. The Klinge brothers do try to get around this by placing isolated EMF detectors with equipment in static use mode so as to get a baseline set of readings, but any other equipment in the region can create EMF and walking around with one while sporadically using a cellphone, Wi-Fi equipment, walkie-talkies, other recorders, etc. means that EMF readings for those recorders are not of the highest value. Ones set up in static environments, with known operating equipment and time to register those equipment outputs, and then introducing a person with NO additional equipment can yield data with better value. With that said the variations are so minor as to be influenced by such things as cosmic rays, local intermittent underground sources (such as cable tv lines, power lines, even electrical sensors with gas lines), and other sporadic effects, that only a full 24-48 hour use of such detectors across normal highs and lows of equipment usage for that locale can give any assurance that an investigation can identify such sources and timing in their investigations. In particular a hard radiation meter with the EMF meter would help to get rid of high speed particles and some radioactivity noise by identifying such noise and when they happen. While the EMF detector can help individuals find equipment with noisy EMF output, its use beyond that is questionable without a better backing for the meters, themselves, and augmenting them with field meters, not just point source meters.

 

 

Second are normal visual to light enhanced cameras, fast flash cameras and other oddments in the visual range, which would include the cameras recording the episodes. Here the technology has gone up by leaps and bounds for everything from single frame to super-slow motion photography coming within the realm of the middle class. What we see of the normal cameras are single overview cameras in a room, usually put up on a tripod or otherwise stationed to get a broad view of a room (on a bookcase, say) but only in the smallest of spaces do we see overlapping use of these devices - the video cameras set up per room. Many of these are light intensifying cameras, which is all to the good in low lighting conditions, but that comes with the recognition that you are into grayscale imagery. Along with those are normal visual range (color) video cameras that only see limited daytime use or use in well lit areas. Finally there is the variety of hand-held cameras from fast flash color cameras to light intensifying cameras (still and video), and even such things as cell phone cameras. Of these pieces of equipment in the normal to light intensified range, the stationary video cameras are the ones suffering from lack of blanket coverage and overlap, which should be their highest utility. Cost considerations for all this equipment is paramount, of course, but there are some questions about why much lower cost USB or other cameras are not deployed to gain a more thorough coverage. I had this problem in my original post for IR (which falls in its own venue) where $70 Logitech Web Cams from circa 2004 were demonstrated to be good near-IR cameras once you removed their lens. Each camera would not give good focus, of course, but an array covering a room volume would allow for placement of volumes within a room even without good focus. While the aim of high resolution is to be admired for normal/LI cameras, the lack of good depth cues and volumetric analysis means that anything seen on an individual camera that does NOT have good spatial visualization is then open to question as to placement, size and duration.

The handheld units, while offering the ability to capture before/after pictures for events, are limited in time duration. The use of saturation panoramic coverage is wonderful... the lack of putting those into a panoramic image via software means that you don't get the full volumetric effect of such images. Here the problem is lack of software, which is cheap, and should be used for a 3-D spatial capture of a room that would include all of its contents so that a full before/after review could be performed.

A step up from that is the panoramic camera with parabolic mirror and unwrapping software that gets you that in one shot. That sort of camera arrangement backed by individual overlays from handheld units plus regular fixed cameras to cover areas blocked by furniture and such, would allow for a greater review of what is going on inside of rooms at any given time. Indeed if you hooked up an EMF recorder with a panoramic still recorder and stationary video you could set EMF flux densities over a certain point to trigger panoramic still shots as the EMF spike is recorded. For the cost of a good still camera with panoramic viewing, a tripping system between an EMF recorder and the camera, and a 3-D array of low cost video cameras, an entire room and its contents can be captured in not only LI but full color flash photography (an upwards pointing parabolic source above the camera would do this, but even set piece single flashes would also serve this purpose.

IR cameras, as mentioned above, are used in the hand held FLIR systems which are great on definition (in full video) but useless for volumetric information. High resolution has its uses, of that there is no question. Its utility for a hand mounted platform without image stabilization is questionable. Lesser devices giving ambient room temperature readings are, again, point source devices which are wonderful for those point readings but not so good for linear or volumetric readings. Between them are the other hand held IR devices which we have seen often give reddish/warm to sudden blue/cold phenomena that cannot, unfortunately, be tracked due to the transient nature of the effect, the slowness of the human response system and lack of broad overview IR cameras. In at least one episode there have been events happening down hallways or within rooms that a stationary IR camera would have caught, but the human carried FLIR has only gotten by near accident. At that point the human platform recorders are a PROBLEM not a SOLUTION.

Volumetric IR would be telling for any spot that varies in temperature as it would then delimit the energy available from that volume: find heat change over a volume and you yield net energy change (positive or negative).  That amount of energy then places limits on other phenomena due to that amount of energy having a limit.

 

 

Third is sound recording, which has finally progressed from reel-to-reel tape recorders and into the venue of digital, handheld voice recorders with long battery life and continuous operation. In theory, at least. What we get are standard handheld units of limited capture range and sensitivity plus the ubiquitous actual handheld use of same. Of simple parabolic microphones none are to be seen. Nor are directional microphones, ever so handy for pointing down long hallways or down stairwells with open airspace in them between the stair flights. Just like their visual counter-parts, these devices could be used for room saturation coverage with parabolic and/or directional microphones at permanent placements so that any sound above background noise (and there is a lot of that) can then be found and placed by strength of that sound to get distance at a given time for a given place. In this case sensitivity is extremely important, but not for a high end unit, per se, but for its microphone: while a wide area microphone gives better coverage it also collects much more noise across that coverage while parabolic and directional microphones get better depth of coverage and the noise is delimited by spatial sizing and can be REMOVED by noise comparison between multiple devices.

For handheld units, either with or without parabolic/directional capability, a single microphone to feed into a noise cancellation system that is worn close to the person's mouth allows for that noise to be removed on the fly. That might be beyond the state of the art: to remove specific wave forms and leave the noise. I doubt that, however, as it is a technically far more simple task to accomplish.

Motion sensors also fall into this realm, although they are either air or visual space sensors. Their recording phenomena is motion, not sound per se, but an ex post facto of 'something moved here'. That really could be attached to a camera system to cover the area in question, too.

If the team is going to be running cables all over the place, why not multiplex multiple sensors per cable position and then overlay them to get a full LI, IR and audio room overview? I do know that equipment cost is a major factor in this, but for the cost of some single pieces, like the handheld FLIR, a complete full-room array of IR could be purchased and attached to currently owned tripods and other fixtures. Similarly linear EMF, audio and video systems for hallways and other long spaces would yield better total coverage than a lot of point units. What has been striking is that for large areas, like the theater and dance hall/bar the team has been to, which allows for a high amount of overlapping coverage, that the equipment was not deployed in that mode.

There is a large value to be had in multi-spectral/multi-modal recording of volumetric information. I am still waiting for a team to do that.

 

 

Some items not seen?

Force meters for doors moving. A very simple device to measure the amount of force being applied to an object via the use of a detachable tension system (such as a spring with magnet).

Air pressure gauges. Very rudimentary and yet if there are changes in atmospherics on the local level then getting an idea of that would be a great help.

Humidity gauges. Temperature, pressure and humidity can tell of passing phenomena in the atmosphere that may have other effects (such as low pressure system increasing the amount of static electricity in an area). More than just what is on the K-2 hand sensors, but something to go with any other piece of equipment and integrated into the readings suite.  Does humidity go up with sudden 'cold spots' or down with 'warm spots'?  Standard work with atmospherics indicate they should, yet if these events have no change in humidity, then something else is going on.

Even the old Kung-Fu bit of a roll of wide rice paper spread down a hallway and having just enough tension on it to show footprints or other imprints would be handy for those stairs and hallways with paranormal phenomena going on... so long as team members walked along the edges, of course. One quick photo and you see if ANYTHING on it has been disturbed. Plastic sheeting and litter pearls could have the same effect, or just about any loose packed yet easy to clean up material on plastic sheeting.

 

 

That is equipment, next is methodology.

As has been examined for equipment, the concept of baseline readings over a given period is essential to non-periodic phenomena recording. Anything that has a variation that is irregular, at best, needs large time windows for data capture that must include standard use of facility space so that the activity within a facility can be examined to see how it impinges on recorder use. Anything that is recorded during baseline periods can then be compared per position and for the entire suite of equipment for any given period of time to see if any of the phenomena happen during regular facility use hours and compared to just what is being used at a facility at that period of time. Such baseline recordings must be both before and after any investigation to ensure that deviations to the baseline are recorded, also. This would require more than a standard two-day investigation window, however, which might limit the number of sites covered per month. The payback, however, is a much thorough volumetric examination of any paranormal activity cross-compared with normal activity over a given timeframe. It also allows for a repeatable system of equipment use so that any non-standard use of equipment is thoroughly documented and recorded and that all attempts to handle any situation for recording in the exact, same way are then adhered to for consistency of data capture.

Thus there are no 'special circumstances' and 'trying things out' performed for equipment deployment and usage: standardized, documented and regularized procedures are set down and all deviations, no matter how minor, are recorded. Good scientific data requires that standardization on methodology be performed and adhered to so you do NOT get variation of results AND equipment simultaneously. If the team wishes to postulate about 'energy sources' then capture of those must also be recorded continuously, not on a one time basis but thoroughly from equipment set up to tear down. And as those would ALSO be part of the standardized procedure, there would be deployment of equivalent equipment for those areas, as well. Coincidence of sudden EMF readings with other events is not, of necessity, causation unless the volume between proposed source and destination can show that such a reading is continuous between the two for that given period of time.

Data review by another person or group unfamiliar or unaffiliated with Everyday Paranormal. Pro bono review time is damned hard to get in this world, and only a limited number of subject experts or personal friends and family can do some work and they are biased. Getting wider subject matter experts or even just field experts is something that is lacking in the program and we only see them a few times, like in the Booth episode or with the FLIR anomaly episode. In particular getting sound expertise to enhance background sounds out of noise seems to be at a premium, and as Electronic Voice Phenomena make up the bulk of the program's interesting evidence, it is here that a group of sound experts is needed. Unfortunately the amount being recorded is vast. Between experts and what is with Everyday Paranormal is the realm of software enhancement and identification of sounds.

Because of limited pro bono professional time being available, and there being plenty of those with amateur skills with interest in such phenomena, perhaps an Army of Davids approach can be used, instead. This is also the open source/'many eyes makes good code' way of doing things in which those with interest, skills and time to do the work pick it up on their own. What this would require would be open sourcing the data gathered and then posting resultant data with the exact methods used to get it: document software, hardware and what was done at each step of the way not only for audio, but video and still photography. To do this requires the cost of a server, maintaining it, ensuring that all participants file documents on what they did along with results from any given data source. Here individual expertise is outweighed by multiple skilled amateurs examining the same data sources and deriving their own conclusions. At some point this becomes necessary for all paranormal research to be taken seriously and allow for not only the fans but critics to have their hands on the exact, same information. Being able to reproduce results and understand variations in results is as important, if not more important, than the results, themselves and should lead to better methodology over time.

 

 

There has been great criticism of the Klinge brothers, especially Brad, in his rather loud and confrontational attitude towards things.

Well, he is from Texas, after all.

If you are going after phenomena trying to make their presence known, however, and we are not considering them to be omniscient, then making it known that if you do anything within the limits of our recording technology that your actual presence will be understood to be there, then louder just may be better. The 'spooky' way of people looking at each other nervously is great for atmospherics, but has it really gotten the point across? Besides if you TELL whatever is out there you are from Texas, this should be expected...

Still, a point can be taken on that and over a two night period different forms of methodology can be used: the quiet and 'go lightly' form to see if just minor changes in personnel and interrogation get results away from the baseline, and then a louder, more confrontational stance the second night, to cross-compare techniques. That also means detaching emotions from the work, itself, which Barry seems to do quite well. You do not want to bring a biased viewpoint with you when being loud as that will skew what you expect from the results. If there is value in one way or another for doing this sort of work, then part of the evidence will BE the evidence itself. Perhaps all that timid tip-toeing around has led to a lack of results due to that methodology.

This finally points to what is being looked at: the paranormal.

While the show is about 'the dead' and what happens after life, there appears to be different categories that the Klinge brothers, themselves, use for categorization. This makes for an interesting time as they don't treat the categories in a way that would explore them more deeply.

In the realm of the dead we have a few basic phenomena that are reviewed:

1 - The dead as 'spirits' or conscious beings. This comes out in a few places where what is seen and purported has reactivity not only to the presence of people but to their actions. By going through a person's name, what they did in their life and so one, the attempt to see if this is a fully conscious being is performed, yet the times when such responses are garnered have been limited. Rarely have there been actual responses in a novel fashion to interrogation, which would be a keystone requirement for this sort of phenomena.

2 - Partial beings or phenomena. These are those things that do not show a conscious response, of necessity, but do things in a pre-set pattern. Finding tasks left unfinished in a completed state aboard the USS Lexington is a prime example of this and while not pointing to a fully conscious being it can point to a non-conscious routinized system of doing things captured in some form or another. In this are non-topical EVP recordings during interrogations, which points to an environmental response, non-conscious response or conscious response without ability to vary beyond actual past vocalizations. The voice response following the female team member at Alcatraz fits this pretty well, and following of that vocalization may not be a fully conscious response or only a limited capability of thought patterns that continues onwards.

3 - Environmental response or the feeling of recorded events. From all the programs this seems to be the largest amount of responses to the paranormal and is referred to as 'impressions' left in the environment. This category blurs into the previous, but is one that has sentences with their own intonations unrelated to anything current going on: thus the feeling they are recorded by the environment by some mechanism. How this might happen requires further examination, but seems to be a basis for a pretty large swath of the paranormal. In this category would also be 'haunted objects' which may have a higher phenomena involved, but be limited to a certain object and its surroundings.

4 - Other. The grab bag of everything not in 1- 3.

 

 

Why are these categories important?

The concept of people leaving 'impressions' behind them has been a long held part of mysticism, the occult and paranormal, and yet it has some decidedly interesting proofs that can be placed against them. The major one is the concept that when dying an individual, particularly in a traumatic state, leaves such an impression behind them. Although lesser states may also be recorded, it is this that opens up the venue to near death experiences from which an individual recovers. If the concept is that an impression is left due to trauma, then there is an opportunity to find the impression of the living individual left elsewhere and recording that phenomena. This is not the average venue for the paranormal, that of someone living having left such an impression behind them, but the conclusion by the line of reasoning is inescapable and would serve as a touchstone for understanding other phenomena. With a near death happening and then that individual recovering and being no where nearby when investigations happen, such things as voice, intonation or even visual phenomena can be compared against the living subject. This is not something I have ever heard about happening, but the logic of it is inescapable.

For such to happen on a large scale is seen at battlefields and there should be far, far more reports or hauntings of at battlefields, ancient and modern, than we currently have. Be it at Alesia, Malta, Normandy, Iwo Jima, Pearl Harbor, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Dresden, Tobruk, or the fields of Kursk, these battles of agony and death should be packed with haunting reports of all three major types. And yet that isn't the case, even with some recordings showing this the intensity and amount of trauma should leave far more than has been recorded to date.

What do we hear at the site of the Twin Towers in NYC? Any directional microphones aimed in that region of the air where they once stood? It is hard to get a haunting report from 86 stories up in empty air...

 

 

One does not need to 'believe' to keep an open mind and yet cast a skeptical eye: doing that yielded skepticism from me when I first heard about Anthropogenic Global Warming. Keep an open mind, but don't let your brain fall out.

The paranormal spans a wide variety of phenomena, including such things as UFO chasing, save that the Army of Davids is collecting evidence of them far faster than of ghosts and other phenomena. Individual reports can be faked, individual reports can be made up, but when so many of the same phenomena captured by unrelated people, believers, skeptics and non-believers, starts to pile up due to the ubiquity of recording hardware, then the volume of the unexplained tells you something about it. While ghosts and other paranormal of the less UFO sort have always had a deeply committed following, that ubiquity of recording capacity isn't yielding the same amount of results although there are more of them due to it. Even if all of this is explainable by human interpretation, even that tells us something about ourselves. But that is not the case: when you remove the fakes, hoaxes, and those things explained by normal phenomena, the residue left is no longer scanty due to the amount being recorded.

Thus, like AGW, it comes down to the basics: show me the data.

What did you get, how did you get it, and what other processing was involved?

No conjectures or hypotheses, although they may serve as a basis for recording data, the data, itself, will speak for itself.

Capture it in large amounts that do not have easy explanations and you just might have something there.

I don't need to 'believe' if I have enough data to demonstrate the phenomena and how it works.

The UFO folks could use a bit more of the high tech data capture and perseverance of the paranormal folks, and the paranormal folks could use a bit more of the ubiquitous data like the UFO folks are getting. They might even be the same phenomena.

The data will tell the tale.

Brought to you by A Citizen of the Republic