Author: Garry

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Debate Prep (Biden Style)

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It Begins

The governor of NY has called out the national guard and directed that schools, temples, churches and other large gathering places within New Rochelle be shut down. Right now he is saying this will last for two weeks. I betcha that changes real quick.

The National Guard has been called out. The Gov hopes all involved are stupid enough to believe they will be used to clean facilities and deliver food.

A 1-mile radius ‘containment zone’ around the center of New Rochelle has been established. My bet is that this will be enforced by the afore mentioned cleaners and delivery folk.

Here is how paranoid I am; I’ll bet that there are a thousand eyes watching every aspect of this quarantine. Our benevolent big brother will be trying to ascertain the good/bad/ugly of this operation, gathering lessons learned, to improve government actions on the next go-round.

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Hiding In Plain Sight

These photo’s by Eric Houdoyer show another way to appreciate our surroundings: color and form. If you can learn to see this way, it opens up a new surreal experience to an otherwise mundane day.

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The Geriatrics

Breitbart is reporting that the DNC is making changes to the next debate (March 15th). Story reads: The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is changing its debate format to limit the rigorous standing required by candidates, at a time when there is renewed scrutiny over former Vice President Joe Biden’s fitness for the White House.

The DNC announced on Friday that the format for its next debate, to be held in Arizona on March 15, would have the candidates seated behind a desk, fielding questions from the audience. The format change, which was first reported by Politico, would be a departure from the past ten debates, where candidates stood behind lecterns and faced questions from moderators.

Bernie, on Monday evening, inadvertently alluded to their ages when he said:

” I lead the opposition against it. Joe voted for the Wall Street bailout. I voted against it. Joe’s been on the floor of the House over the years talking about the need to cute Social Security, veterans programs, and other benefits.

I have led the opposition to those cuts. Joe supported the Hyde Amendment, which would deny low income women Medicaid funds for there own reproductive needs. I strongly disagree with that approach.

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It Never Happened. None of It Happened

I missed this when it first appeared on American Greatness. Let me say that before you believe that this is water under the bridge, all of the folk that advanced this crap are busy at work dredging up more blather for your consumption. It does us all well to examine how they got away with it.

Further, it reads in part: On no less than three occasions before President Trump fired him, FBI Director James Comey testified to Congress about the DNC’s strange unwillingness to let his agency examine their servers in a case they were simultaneously hyping as akin to “an act of war.” Comey testified that the DNC rejected the FBI’s “[m]ultiple requests at different levels” to collect forensic evidence. 

Full article here.

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The Eye (Plus)

I’ve often spoke of how some photographers seem to have an eye for what subject, angle, light, or composition of objects will work together to make an interesting or emotional piece of art. I’ve called this ‘having an eye’ for photography. Now, more than ever before, having an ‘eye’ for what post processing technique will aid in evoking the desired response is as much a part of the art as any other aspect.

I guess that a purist would hold that photography shouldn’t diminish itself by resorting to such post processing techniques, but for my part I encourage it. After all, evoking the desired response is more important that the purity of the means by which it was achieved. I don’t mean this as a end justifies the means statement, but rather a means to achieve an artistic end.

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The Invisible Hobgoblins

The raw power of governments over supposedly free people is now in full view. In Italy they have made it illegal to move about at all. Here in the ‘land of the free’ (etc) entire industries are being closed off and others are quite literally being managed by the state.

I’m interested in seeing just how far our government is willing to go (and how much shit our population is willing to accept) in the name of protecting us from ourselves.

A tough pill to swallow is the ease at which we are so completely manipulated.

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It Takes An Eye

The above, by Abe Frajndlich, reminds us that there is always something that can be seen (or imagined) behind a simple image. It takes a good eye to see something deep in a seemingly shallow moment.

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Around the Farm

Really did not have much time to enjoy the fauna around my little patch of the earth. I did catch this little guy working for his meal just off of the back porch. Clever little fellow blends well with the tree.

It rained for several days last week and tornado’s slammed through middle Tennessee a ways north of here. Hate to see the damaged property and lives, some small solace in that it was not in my region of Tennessee (this time).

Once it dried a little I got out to the garden and began digging it out. Here is a view of what good dirt and moderate fertilizer will produce in an un-mulched bed.

The good news is that only 3 of the 27 beds were unmulched. I worked to get two beds into shape for an early planting of lettuce and carrots. I started by ‘harvesting’ the decomposed manure and hay that I laid out last spring. The source is from the photo below:

We have two hay rings out and each will have an area around them that is thick with manure and hay/straw mixed in together. I cleaned this up last year and laid the material out in a row that is roughly 3 ft wide, 300 ft long and 2 foot deep. Yesterday I began shoveling up the ‘stuff’ and placing it in containers on the back of the jeep.

After adding this to the beds I ended up with what you see below. The two closest beds are planted with 5 different types of lettuce, two types carrot and bunching onions. I added the screens over the lettuce to prevent rain from washing the seeds out of the planted area.

Amazingly, I had parsley that overwintered (the green splotch in the second bed).

I may have got the lettuce into the ground a little early, only one way to really find out (plant it !).

Blueberry’s are blooming and more and more buds are showing up on the trees. Looks like I’ll be gathering fruit off of the peach and plum two years early. This is one of the peach trees:

As Walter Cronkite would say: And that’s the way it is…..

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The Hostage

This looks more like a hostage video than it does an endorsement. One thing it does remind me of is Mooch Obama….that halting, pleading style of speech. God I hate it!

I’m not sure how the brothers in California will take the endorsement; after all, she was the DA that would smoke a little dope before going to work to over sentence folk for smoking a little dope. Did I get that right? Maybe it was that she would smoke a little dope before going down on her knees to climb the ladder of success. Same difference?

God we are living in a strange world!

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It’s Like Nostradamus Without the Wait

Good news folks, someone has married a little math with a lot of panic and produced a scary story. Full article (actually a pretty good read) over at Zero Hedge (link below)

It reads:

Let’s conservatively assume that there are 2,000 current cases in the US today, March 6th. This is about 8x the number of confirmed (lab-diagnosed) cases. We know there is substantial under-Dx due to lack of test kits; I’ll address implications later of under-/over-estimate. 2/n

—Liz Specht (@LizSpecht) March 7, 2020

We can expect that we’ll continue to see a doubling of cases every 6 days (this is a typical doubling time across several epidemiological studies). Here I mean *actual* cases. Confirmed cases may appear to rise faster in the short term due to new test kit rollouts. We’re looking at about 1M US cases by the end of April, 2M by ~May 5, 4M by ~May 11, and so on.

Exponentials are hard to grasp, but this is how they go. As the healthcare system begins to saturate under this case load, it will become increasingly hard to detect, track, and contain new transmission chains. In absence of extreme interventions, this likely won’t slow significantly until hitting >>1% of susceptible population.

What does a case load of this size mean for healthcare system? We’ll examine just two factors — hospital beds and masks — among many, many other things that will be impacted. The US has about 2.8 hospital beds per 1000 people. With a population of 330M, this is ~1M beds. At any given time, 65% of those beds are already occupied. That leaves about 330k beds available nationwide (perhaps a bit fewer this time of year with regular flu season, etc).

Full story is at Zerohedge

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Pullin That Thread

I saw the video below over at IOTW Report and thought about the great talent and promise this little one had.

Her words seemed a little slurred and I thought that she may not enjoy English as a first language. I Pulled on that thread and found the comment below on Youtube:

Another pulled thread got me this:

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From Stories to Canon

This is the second presentation of that Yale series I mentioned last Sunday. The subject matter talks to how the Christian faith (actually faiths–plural) are based upon a canon of texts considered to be holy scripture. It talks to how they came to be and what factors, such as competing schools of doctrine, growing consensus, and the invention of the codex, helped shape the canon of the New Testament.

This guy is a great presenter and does an excellent job of keeping the discussion lively and interesting.

Link is here