Chaos

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

One of my minor endearing (Ah!) characteristics is that I’m digit dyslexic. Well, I’m dyslexic, dyslexic, but thanks to a very boring childhood I had to read, starting at 4, and you see words so often, you start reading them straight after a while. Except to be fair, it was spellchecker that finally got me to spell right in English. As you guys know my typos are still otherworldly.

But I transpose numbers. 345 is 543 is 435 is … You try doing complex equations like that. I mean, it’s quite possible, and I’m fast, and once I had figured out it was just digit transposing and not some baffling attack of stupidity, my math was fine. In fact, both my sons who inherited this (ah!) charming characteristic took all the math they could and some. Doesn’t surprise me. My husband’s second love is Number Theory. He had a fling with Vedic Math for two or three years (and might still play with it now and then. I pretend I don’t see, you know?) And I used to dream in math. My first boyfriend was acquired because his older brother had math books I wanted to get my hands on.

But the dyslexia and the fact I didn’t know what it was made me too hesitant to fight for a career in engineering, which was my first love. (Look, how many 8 year old girls spend a summer building rubber-band powered match box (the boxes were made of balsa wood) cars (with lego wheels connected by toothpicks) and carefully recording their weights and their speeds, and trying new ways of winding the rubber band? I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. But by 13 I’d met two math teachers who, in retrospect, were just checking the results off the end, instead of looking at what I’d done and I’d failed math twice. And I was afraid.

Maybe it’s all for the best. Oh, sure, I suspect I’d have found my way to writing science fiction anyway, and it would be harder sf, because my head would be in that head space. But it is unlikely if I had an engineering degree I’d have been willing to chuck my credentials overboard. At the time it wasn’t accepted in the US. We’d probably have bit the bullet, even though I always felt like a stranger in a strange land in Portugal (Bought the book for the title) and Dan would have moved. And the Portuguese sf scene is… not really profitable, so My stories would be in the drawer or online for free, and– Different paths. And then, as Pratchett said, our house burns down with all our children in it.

The point of this, which I got semi-lost on, is that in my thirties I had reason to doubt it was JUST the digits that scrambled around me.

So, it’s a joke in the family that they know when I hang something, be it a picture of a cabinet. No matter how much I measure, or what type of level I deploy, everything is slightly angled. (I suspect brain damage actually, because my drawing does the same. It skews just a little to the left (of all things).)

When I was in my mid thirties, we bought my favorite house, the one where I expect to wake every morning before I open my eyes: the pink house on a hill in Manitou Springs, CO.

It was labyrinthine and odd because it had been converted from three apartments to a single house just months before (Poor thing is apartments again, and her graceful balconies were stripped, more’s the pity.) And it had…. Odd things, we’ll just put it this way. Like the room next to the master bathroom, with a double vanity and…. nothing else, that the seller kept telling us would make a great dressing room.

Which it would, of course. Or, you know, a palatial bathroom. Which, since at the time we knew a handyman we could rely on, is what we chose to do.

Anyway, once he was done with the bathroom, I painted it, and then knowing myself, I went to get him, where he was fixing some issues with the kitchen, to come install the towel bars for me.

And he measured and he used the level, and he put the bar up and he…. cursed softly.

After a while, he turned to me and yelled, “You. Go away, get out of the house. I swear to G-d that measurements change around you. GO OUT OF THE HOUSE now, Chaos Woman.”

(I’ll point out the old codger — rest his soul — was normally rather fatherly to me, so that outburst was more hilarious than not.)

I went out of the house and he installed the towel bars straight.

For the rest of the time I knew him/was in his orbit, he called me Chaos Woman, and told the story to everyone.

He wasn’t exactly wrong, in a macro sense, either. I had/have a 30 year career in writing, at a time when most careers were either three books or mega bestsellers. I obviously was neither, but I wound the drunkard’s path through the so called career, and it all worked, sort of, and it still continues to. Every time a door closes, I can’t even find a window. But then part of the roof falls in and I climb out, and from there I can see a new way. It’s hard on the nerves, but it all works out. I couldn’t have plotted it. Heck, I can’t see what comes next. Indy seems limited and limiting, but I keep getting a feeling as far as fiction goes my greatest days are ahead of me.

It’s all very strange, but I’m panicky, because I don’t have a fear of success. I’m spitlessly scared of failing. So I have a few irons on the fire at all times. Some of them are strangely shaped and might be made of alien metal. And sometimes the fingernails I’m holding on to this sheer, diamond-hard wall with are mostly imaginary, yet I’m still holding, and climbing, sometimes minimally.

And it’s not because I’m better, it’s not because I’m smarter, it’s not because I work harder. All of those could be disputed and are doubtful. It might be because I’m not precisely sane, and when I’m scared I’m less so. Maybe.

But mostly, I think it’s because not only does my mind move at odd angles and bend in weird ways, and I fight like a cornered cat, and not just physically, but because I encourage chaos all around me.

Younger son and clone says the least likely thing always happens around him. I named it something different, but since my twenties, I call it “Treading the path of least probability.” It just happens naturally. And if I try to play it safe or do what’s expected, it always blows up in face in a major way. While if I take the impossible bet, reach for what’s just out of reach, jump to the roof over the busy street, it always pays off. EVERY SINGLE TIME.

Again, in talking about one’s calling and how unlikely it is, this should be a characteristic assigned to some debonair pirate, some high flying trapeze artist, not to a woman who craves security and who lives mostly on her own nerves and is by nature a clinical depressive.

But perhaps because of this — Ah, now, 2k words in, she gets to the point. Shut up. At least I hope the journey was entertaining. I’m in fiction mode, and have a short hanging from the machine as we speak — I am very well suited to speak to the current times, particularly the current times and America.

Because we’re about to enter Chaos Time. And we live in Chaos Country. Even hemming us in with rules and regulations a la European fashion didn’t work. We just ran out through where they didn’t expect, and the internet that was supposed to serve the military became cats and porn and…. ultimately a major instrument of political disruption.

This is something I must talk to. I must because a number of you are as depressive as I am but have less experience of chaos. And dang it, call me Edna and paint me purple, if you guys don’t keep falling for the talk of the planners.

Oh, I don’t mean you think central planning is a good idea. If you regularly read here, you’re not in fact enamored with having experts run your life. (Or if you are, you hide it well.)

I mean that from whatever that Russian defector was, describing the USSR’s plan to destroy America, to the agenda of the WEFidiots to the newest quinquenial plan of the Junta, you guys listen to them in horror and go “It will all come true.”

Will you please give me a break? They haven’t managed to make their plans stay on track, in the realm of EVER. That defector? I can tell you that though the US took some body blows from USSR Agitprop, we took what they threw at us and folded it, spun it and mutilated, so it became something other. I could see the holes myself as he described the grand unified plan. And the others? Not a chance. Not a bloody chance.

Yeah, things can look bad, but kindly remember that since Obama, but more likely since Clinton, our own secret services have been propagandizing us and more specifically propagandizing liberty lovers and Constitutionalists into giving up.

But– Well, guys, this is the ideology that couldn’t make five year plans work in the USSR where they technically controlled everything. They can propagandize us that all their plans are working as planned. And because we don’t get the real news, but still, to an extent the filtered news — would you know the world is on fire if we didn’t have enterprising Huns informing us? Sometimes I feel I’m in the world of Puppet Masters Masquerade. Even the “right wing” news ignored much of the Texas rebellion for days, and the farmers’ revolt is a passing mention — make it look like they’re succeeding.

They’re not. Sometimes the rebellion becomes visible. The farmers’ revolt. The Canadian Convoy. The Stonk Kiddies (yes, I know BGE has opinions, and it might have been silly, but it was a revolt, and a revolt from a quarter never expected. A lot of these will be phyrric, it’s the nature of the beast.) the parents taking the schools to task.

But there are secret rebellions. There are single or small group actions going on, the only purpose of which is to make the plans go array, to make things go pear shaped for the “elites”, to stick a burr up their bottoms.

How many cashiers did you see, during mandatory mask wearing, with the mask under their nose and not attached at the bottom? Yes, one or two might have been stupid. But do you think all of them were??? How many people wore gauze veils? For every idiot driving alone and double masked there were ten of the others. How many people made it a point of getting together with friends, as big a group as possible, just smartly and were never caught? How many bars defiantly opened? Yes, some were slapped down, but all? No way. And then there’s Twitter, without which we wouldn’t even know most of this. Who had Elon buying twitter and making it a free speech platform on their bingo card? Because I didn’t. And I’m chaos woman, and can sense these things.

And how many kids are really being homeschooled, does anyone even know? How many illegals are or at least are trying to scarper back out through the border as fast as they can because the US isn’t paved with gold and the natives are testy? How many kids are lying flat? Yes, that might seem like despair, but despair turns the corner and becomes rebellion. How many of us are planting thought-bombs into strangers’ conversations, like when I pointed out to well-intentioned strangers that no, Biden was never a good man. And gave examples. (And the fact I was a nice older lady with an accent likely blew their minds.)

Their plans aren’t working. Their propaganda-entertainment arm is collapsing. And they’re not very adaptable. They believe in centralized planning because they relish order and planning. Rigid planning. Besides they think everyone is widgets and will behave as the plan calls for.

But we’re in chaos time, and we’re chaos country. And frankly the rest of the world, much to my amusement, has reached such a point it’s becoming too chaotic for them to even lie to themselves it’s working.

And there’s a great anger. Across the world, though the US is perhaps a little angrier. You see, we’re used to living better. We’re used to each generation improving. Despair is not natural to us. We’re not Russians. To us things don’t “get worse.” And besides we can tell — bless Trump for pulling down the masks — that most of the crazy is being imposed from above. America, improbably, despite all the propagandizing, the “educating”, the “opinion shaping” is still America. And we don’t like being told what to do. We don’t like smug bastards. And we don’t recognize any self-styled “elites.” We were fooled by experts for a while, but the ex-spurts used up all their credibility in that last insane push.

Angry people are unpredictable. Yes, that can work against them. But history tells that when a vast mass is furious, chaos descends.

Let’s pray — not joking. If you’re an atheist or agnostic, pray anyway. Imagine the novelty, if He exists and hears you — that it doesn’t take the path of the French revolution, and Madame Guillotine doesn’t run till the country is exhausted.

I’m naturally a sans coulotte. I realized that when I found myself cheering rebellion, even when self-destructive. Something in me is angry enough to set everything on fire and warm my hands as civilization burns.

BUT I am rational. And I hope not evil. Unbridled rebellion burns the good, the bad, and everything in between. To an extent France never recovered from the French revolution. (The fact it was run initially by the planners doesn’t help.) And in a time when we’re short on people, particularly people with specialized knowledge, we can’t kill them all and let G-d sort it out. An — ah — operation paperclip might well be needed, and people rational enough to institute it.

Now, the left thinks if they destroy everything, then people will naturally turn to communism. It’s one of those plans that cannot — CANNOT — naturally come true. Yes, yes, supposedly it happened in Russia, and Cuba and such. But it didn’t. Not really. Even after destroying everything they had to take power by force. Which in America won’t go so well. (“behind every blade of grass” comes to mind.) Even if the idiot Junta thinks it will.

Even at the height of the mass-industrial-age, when theoretically at least fully centralized society would be what people would naturally support, they had to impose communism by force.

Communism, btw, in the left’s beau-ideal of the USSR was brought down by … typewriters. Fax machines put the final period to it. It can’t survive decentralized communication. They’re holding on by their fingernails only in countries that they took to the nineteenth century and hold there. North Korea and Cuba come to mind. But America isn’t small. H*ll the world isn’t small and humans aren’t simple.

We’re chaos apes. We’ve confounded the plans of much, much, much better planner than they are.

Chaos is just beginning. It’s going to get worse. Or better, however you picture it. It’s going to feel like the world is shaking itself to pieces, but what it’s doing is shaking itself free.

For a hundred years the planners have pretended to be in control. Now we can see the sad and pathetic bond villains behind the curtain.

We will not eat the bugs. We will not live in the fifteen minute cities concentration camps. If they take away our cars, we’ll build new ones, and heaven help us because even we don’t know what they’ll be powered with. Some bright boy will make Heinlein’s Shipstone. Just you watch. If they try to take the internet down, we’ll find ways around it.

We have only just begun. And we are chaos. And with this chaos, we’ll rebuild civilization.

277 thoughts on “Chaos”

    1. Well, technically a really good ambush is exactly that, interrupting the enemy’s mistake with a crash of claymores and a couple of MGs, plus sundry riflemen. But there is an art to Ambush, and an art of timing.

      (Kzinti Grin)

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  4. “If they take the internet down, we’ll find ways around it.”

    Oh, Sarah…

    We already have. Americans were communicating about England when they were still English subjects. Committees of Correspondence were a thing in the 1760s. There was no organized mail yet. People were paying dispatch riders and ship’s captains to carry their mail. The United States was born on paper, with people sharing their thoughts about outrages and their preparations long before the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution confirmed what many already knew.

    We don’t have to invent anything. All we have to do is look backward and see what’s worked before. Has the internet made it easier? Sure. Could a handful of renegade truckers carry letters written on notebook paper if we needed them to? Easily. And they could do it without keeping official records that could be traced, simply by having people meet them in truck stops. It wouldn’t even be hard to set up.

    For reference:

    https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/committees-of-correspondence/#:~:text=Committees%20of%20correspondence%20had%20existed,to%20organize%20resistance%20between%20cities.

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      1. Its why the leftists are so anxious to gain control over the internet and want the power to deplatform any sites they dislike. They know that as long as people can do end runs around the narrative through use of the internet that it is a threat to their quest for absolute power. The whole “net neutrality” face is an effort to impose a licensing scheme that would require state approval to be able to use the internet. Publicly supporting this type of control was what put the nails in Haley’s campaign and has made her so loathed by genuine conservatives and libertarians.

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          1. “To quote RES: And people in hell want ice water.”

            My grandfather taught me that one 50 years ago…..

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      2. Software Defined Radios, spread spectrum, mesh networks… and those are just things ox think of in a few seconds. Now, imagine (not that damn Beatles thing)…..

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        1. I was thinking about Vlad, apropos of Tucker Carlson’s interview. (Which I have not watched, I don’t need to know what Vlad wants to tell me. It’ll either be a lie or will function as one.)

          And I was thinking that Vlad really typifies the Fascist Strong Man. Central planning, central control, super efficiency, society organized to produce and support a Strong Fighting Machine.

          And it occurred to me, I wish I had the chance to ask him this:

          Let’s say there is an old retired German guy in Dusseldorf with some not-bad manual and intellectual skills, some tools, a little money, and time on his hands. He could, if sufficiently motivated, produce a flyable autonomous aircraft with a decent payload. Let’s say 50lbs for the sake of argument. In his garage. Out of wood. Might take 6 months to learn how if he was -really- motivated.

          Not because he is so awesome, but because all the plans for the air frames, electronics, software and etc. are freely available on the internet. Not potentially, but in reality. Right now. Drones are an already existing hobby.

          Throw in a 3-axis CNC router and a 3d printer, retired German guy has got a little drone factory.

          Let’s say he was -profoundly- motivated and made ten of them. They’re cheap, right? Pine, tissue paper and paint, weed-whacker motor, whatever he’s got lying around.

          If that guy was that motivated, how many more old men with time on their hands would be too? Ten thousand out of a national population of 84 million? That doesn’t seem unreasonable. Ten thousand guys make ten drones each, they all get together on Farcebook and have a little drone launching party. Every couple of weeks.

          My question for Vlad is, what’s your plan for fending off a hundred thousand cheap drones every couple of weeks? Because if you scare the Germans and the Poles, you will be. And that’s without a government program. If it became popular they could send a million.

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          1. The practical problem? There is no possible way to make a 50 pound drone with the necessary range to reach Russia from Germany, let alone reach Moscow. Can’t carry enough fuel.

            However, let’s disregard the practical and assume that was a thing that could be done. If I were a psychopathic dictator, my immediate response is that I’ll send 100k drones back, but instead of 50 pounds of TNT, I’ll load 50 pounds of VX.

            MAD is still an effective doctrine.

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            1. No, the -payload- is 50lbs. Cheap airplane, bungee launched, carrying 50lbs of… whatever you’ve got handy, really. Range would be a design decision, mostly decided by how long will the stupid little engine last.

              It doesn’t have to go to Moscow either. All it really has to do is fall on something expensive in Russia and go on fire. 5 gallons of gas would do it, there’s your 50lbs.

              Pick a town and send them all there. Tomorrow, pick another town. Next day, another town. Maybe even announce which town ahead of time, for added spice.

              How long before Vlad is unpopular at home?

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              1. If it were -that- simple the Ukies would already be doing it. They have -mad- improv skillz. (Like as if, say, US SF were coaching them.)

                Not quite as easy as you say to hit anything interesting with enough to make things more interesting, not at “Germany” distance, and barely at “Ukrane” distance..

                However, “Poland gets stompy” probably scares the Russians more than Germany right now, as the Krauts were effectively gelded by WW2 and are a Tyrolean FlusterCluck right now. Poland, on the other hand, could wade through Germany in a week or two. They have been training like crazy, they spend significantly more on defense then they admit, and -way- more than NATO requires, their vehicles work, their planes work, and they are -highly- motivated to kick Russian ass.

                Note also, Germany never conquered Moscow. Poland (with Lithuania), however -did-, in the early 17th century, and Moscow was essentially sacked both coming and going. Russia celebrates that 17th century “liberation” of Moscow annually. Its memory is -important- to them.

                If you wondered why Poland got reamed almost as bad as Germany in 1945, and for so many years afterwards, ponder the above.

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                1. The Ukrainians are doing it, just not in big enough numbers. They’ve been doing V-1 style attacks on Russia almost since the start.

                  The difference is numbers. You don’t send hundreds, because Russian air defense can manage hundreds. You send tens of thousands, you swamp them. Cheap, and numerous.

                  Remember how much trouble a few arsonists caused last summer? Fires in Ontario so bad the smoke was choking NYC? That wouldn’t be hard to do, and it would drain the Russians pretty quick. They don’t have a big economy, when you get right down to it.

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      3. HAM radio, CB radio, both are low-bandwidth Internets.

        You can make an intercontinental morse-code radio that fits in a tuna can. Long wire, morse key, 9v battery, off you go. You can key it with two stripped wires if needed.

        CB and “family band” radios are more handy.

        Good radio discipline helps keep the Gestapo from finding you. (Keep it short, move around, minimal power, don’t pattern, don’t repeat predictably.)

        You can get a taste with a fairly inexpensive multi-band “shortwave” radio receiver. You can hear some of the HAM and CB stuff, plus all sorts of international transmissions. And learning to add a proper antenna and ground adds technical knowledge.

        Radio – the original Internet.

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        2. And there a license free experimental band (in the USA) 160-190 KHz.. the limits are.. quite limiting… but as long as you stay in band, the modulation doesn’t matter. If low-rate is acceptable, well, “impossible” thing keep happening.

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      4. Looking back at networking protocols I have known, I imagine you could set up a modified Aloha network using cell phones. Aloha networks are (or used to be) set up in particularly difficult terrain using radio. No reason cell phones wouldn’t do the job. Set up a bunch of independently-owned routers in a lot of places. This de-centralized system would be hard to take down, once implemented.

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    2. As a modern form of Committee of Correspondence the truckers carrying letters would work. But with the faster communication of modern life, not a great option. How to do real-time communication that won’t be regularly intercepted basically comes down to either really good encryption or utilizing a cypher in open communication.

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        1. That puts hams in the crosshairs. As memory serves, sending encrypted messages is verboten, and doing such from a known location is a very good way to FAFO.

          Alternative means of dealing with such could work, but an obviously encrypted message would be a red flag. (OTOH, such was done in WW II, with equipment designed to be very portable…)

          IMHO, it’s a two-pipe problem.

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          1. The QRM/QRN is the message… but how can one tell when the plaintext complains mightily about the QRM/QRN… and most QRM/QRN is… just QRM/QRN. Or is a message, but intentional garbage?

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            1. That’s one possibility. For lower bit rates, one could bury info in discussion of rigs (the second most popular item on JS8Call, after heartbeats) with atypical configurations/mistyped frequencies, and so on.

              SSTV also has possibilities. Lots of noise in that signal, mate.

              Moonbounce has some potential for obscuring the QTH, though I suspect a large antenna array and lots-o-power would be counterproductive. Still…

              Other opportunities come to mind. Glad I don’t smoke any more, but a pipe or two or three sounds appropriate.

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            2. Arggh, WordPress ate my reply. Version 2.

              It’s going to depend on the desired bit rate. For low rates, misstyped messages (assuming a digital mode), or discussions of rigs with improbable features, or calling out QSY to unusual frequencies. Voice offers some potential (“I buried Paul” and related nonsense). Likely would have a horrible S/N ratio.

              For higher bit rates, QRM/QRN is one, lots of possibilities with SSTV. I’m unclear as to what’s necessary and sufficient for moonbounce. That might be a good way to obscure the TX location. Maybe.

              Other possibilities exist. Almost wish I still smoked. A pipe or two would be ideal for sorting out the problem.

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          2. A good code uses phrases with alternate meaning, not encryption.

            You can hide quite a bit ion short encrypted phrases. Call signs, for example “CQ KGM365” might actually mean “Free rum” which means….

            Folks skunked the frikken Gestapo with this crap, and the K-mumblefumble-GB. Ours aint there yet, although their technical stuff is world class. They dont have the numbers, yet.

            Granted, the learning curve for the operators io kinda harsh, but not yet quite too harsh.

            Best to start as a quite lawful operator, and learn how to do minimalist stuff against the day when we are “invaded by Martians or Kzinti”. Dont be food.

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            1. Complex situations often call for one-time codes.

              I read one book where half a team broadcast in the clear that the other half was to fall back to the Tower — where the enemy heard it, and the fast members of the enemy team went to fight them. Then the other half retreated without fear of pursuit because that was why they had chosen that as the code message meaning, “We have successfully extracted ourselves from the Tower. Distraction is no longer needed.”

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          3. Bots. Flood the networks with similar sounding messages, and not only can you reply to an enquiry of “You received this message” with “yeah, frigging SPAM”, but it hits the core vulnerablilty – they can collect all of the info, but there is too much to go through

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      2. Pick a single word that means that you need to meet in person. Another word means that another communication is coming that will include cypher, and which cypher will be used.

        Have a series of words that, if mis-spelled, have specific meanings. Also missing or mis-placed puncuation. Normal stuff that can be hidden in any communication.

        The problem isn’t finding good codes that work, it’s meeting in person to establish those codes in the first place.

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    1. Many years ago I read a story in Analog about people…well, strange things happened around them. They were like walking embodiments of Murphy’s Law. Computers crashed, the simplest machines failed in the damnedest ways.

      So, in that future, such people were identified and sent to an isolated Lunar colony where they were employed as product testers. If there was any way a widget could fail, they’d find it. The world was kept safe from them, and their perceived disability was used to perform a valuable service.

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      1. Lights go off as I walk under them. If I’m emotionally disturbed, I should NOT touch electronics. I once fried a television by turning it on. Just push the button. I held my dad’s expensive electronic watch (70s) while he washed his hands. It’s never worked again. I get computers to fail in ways that should be impossible, So impossible it surprises even Dan who’s lived with me 38 years.
        Maybe the digit dyslexia and stupid math teachers were sent to save us from a future in which I crashed … Europe. Just all of it.

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        1. Early days of PCs, when my office in Dept of the Army was trying to figure out how to use them, I’d keep having some weird problem. Call the IT guy. And as often as not, after looking at the machine I’d been assigned to use he’d shake his head and say, “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

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            1. I have the opposite effect on computers. I walk into a classroom and teachers will say, “I swear it didn’t work until you walked in here. I’ve been trying all morning.”

              It’s my super power.
              🦸

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              3. A nice, and useful, thing I have learned to tell folks in that situation– “It might be heat related. Let’s open it up, dust it off, and try to make sure there’s good air flow.”

                One, it’s true. Two, it’s good for the system. Three, it empowers the person who asked for help to do something useful they can SEE.

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              4. Same here at work in retail with all the point of sale stuf.. Hey the computer froze! I walk up look it over press a key sometimes and all of a sudden everything is working right.

                Works with so many things not just computers. kind of fun.

                So right about the chaos and the anger. Fun times, for some values of fun….

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              7. It is that way for me. I am known as a computer geek. People call me over to fix a problem they are having with their computer and it goes away when I show up.

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              8. My husband has that too, and did during his time as a tech (which was helpful.)

                He claims “Computers are scared of me.” Given that he has successfully applied percussive maintenance (in a repeatable and transmissible fashion), this is not going out of line.

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          2. One of my coworkers is kinda like that. When she got married and moved here, she change her address with B&N. A couple of months later she was having issues with her NST and they sent her a new one, after confirming the shipping address. When she called because it didn’t arrive they said it was shipped to the old address, which wasn’t listed in any of their systems.

            When she upgraded her phone the next year, Verizon somehow gave away her number to someone else in the couple of seconds it took their tech to port everything to the new phone.

            Computer screens randomly shut off without her touching them.

            It’s weird as heck. She’s the first person I met that had things like that happen to her, and which I’ve witnessed.

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            1. I had a coworker, programmer/software type, at my first IT gig. I forbade him to touch my servers because he killed them dang near every time he touched them. While seated at my server bench, he argued I was being ridiculous, and to proved said “See, I can touch the disk farm and…” BEEEPBEEEEEpbeep blip, (disks shut down four shelves worth, one by one.)

              (scowl. huff. stand pushing up sleeves)

              “Ill be going back to my desk now….”

              I changed the access roster to lock him out. He never again complained.

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        2. As someone who has similar problems of this nature I read up on it, and my favorite theory is that people with some degree of psychic power wreck havoc on electronics. shrugs Not sure if I truly believe that, but it was the best explanation I’ve gotten so far of my car battery randomly dying multiple times for no reason.

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          1. Electronics, particularly microelectronics, involve quantum mechanics. If one goes with Ed Mitchell’s theory that psychic phenomena involve quantum fields (what he termed the quantum hologram), it makes sense that persons with psi would interfere with electronics.

            I worked it into the Grissom Timeline psi stuff.

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            1. One particular system killer I knew was cured by ensuring they never again wore wool or polyester at work. And definitely never again “and”.

              Could have powered the dang server room with the sparks.

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              1. My father used to tell of how the night cleaning staff at the steel company office managed to crash the IBM mainframe every time they’d clean the floor outside the computer room. Seems the floor polisher had some funky/faulty wiring and would throw sparks and such when it touched some metal in that hallway.

                I never had to operate a mainframe, but big minicomputers (HP 1000 and 3000s) could involve quite a dance to get them up. Every few months, we’d have scheduled disruptions to the AC in the room. Lots of computers… Usually they came up on the first try. Usually.

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                1. I booted a supermini once. It was made by Reddifusion in England. It cost a lot of money. For some demented reason (running out of budget?) the boot loader had to be invoked manually via a row of toggle switches… just above knee height. Which is why the boot process involved a prayer mat, a laminated plastic card with switch settings, and tediously flipping switches and pressing the “load” button for each byte.

                  It was demented, considering even 8-bit home computers could boot up by themselves.

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                  1. When the Reader started working, he worked on a piece of HP test equipment that was run by an HP 2116 mini computer. It also had to have the boot loader fed to it via front panel switches. Fortunately they were above knee height. After his first month the Reader could key the sequence from muscle memory.

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                    1. My first boss at HP didn’t like the HP lashups nor the dedicated testers, so we had a group of Fairchild 5000C testers. (This was 1979-1990. The 5K was introduced in 1966. #Rolleyes.) Any of those that came on the market seemed to end up in our test area, and at least a few came with 2116 minis as controllers. Those loaded with paper tape, and for a while, I kept a roll of pink/silver mylar tape with a program on it. $SPOUSE objected to my using it to decorate the Christmas tree, so it’s long gone.

                      We went to a somewhat less old processor that could boot from mag tape. Getting those machines to talk to the 2100 data reduction computer was an interesting project in itself. (Interesting for me–I didn’t have to do it. :) )

                      Eventually we shifted to some (non-HP) testers that used modern equipment running Unix. It was nice not to have to program in machine code. (The 5000C instructions went through the various built-in supplies and measurement devices almost unchanged. If pressed, I could still do a simple test program from memory.)

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                  2. “It was made by Reddifusion in England. ”

                    Based on that boot procedure, I’d be willing to bet a III Forks dinner that Lucas was somewhere in the design process. 8-)

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        3. I had a Boss like that at DEC. Wonderful manager, fairly good engineer but do a demo near him or try to run a test or something and it broke. It was like he was the Gremlin from the Bugs Bunny cartoon. We went down to Maynard (actually NOT at the Mill oddly) to do a critical demo for a VP and we told him he had to stay in Nashua. As it was we weren’t sure that was far enough away but we couldn’t convince him to take the Day and stay in his house in North Weare NH. Luckily the demo worked although not without some last minute issues that we fixed before said VP showed up.

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          1. Opposite for me. I went on vacation and the server hard disk failed. Except the first vacation. Not the first work day I wasn’t there, took a few days. Just enough for those who used it could swear it was working after I left. No getting a hold of me either. We were out of phone service (early cell phone days, but even today we’d be out of cell phone coverage).

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        5. And I am the guy who can fix things, sometimes, with a thump. Including servers.

          “It wont boot! We’ve been trying for hours! We cant lose this database!”

          THUMP! Whirrr bebebeep! (Boots up normally)

          “How did you… What are you?!? … No, never mind.”

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        6. My dad killed watches with batteries. And finding purely mechanical watches rugged enough to survive his JOB was becoming a challenge. He finally found one of the ruggedized Casio watches that he applied four layers of electrical tape to the back and used a heavy leather watchband; the battery would usually survive 6 months, which he could live with. I tried to find one of the Bulova self winders like I had in the Navy, but naturally they were no longer made.
          As to the fixing by arriving issue; yeah, I’m a tech, and witness it a lot. But the computer >I< use in the shop decides to randomly blank the screen for no apparent reason. And of course, ONLY for me. I just cock my head, give it the ‘Spock’ eye, and say ‘Really ?” and by the time I accomplish that, it generally comes back and works fine for the next few hours.

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      2. There’s an old joke in the IT/techie world, that I’m starting to wonder if there might not be some truth to. The joke goes that scientists have discovered two previously-unknown fundamental particles, opposites of each other: fixons and breakons. And some people naturally emit one or the other.

        The reason I’m starting to wonder about that is because of the sheer number of times I’ve gotten “Hey Robin, can you come look at this computer problem for me? …. Never mind, it’s working now” as soon as I get there. I know it’s just chance: plenty of times the problem DOESN’T go away, but some problems are just intermittent. But still. It makes you wonder.

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        1. “Hey Robin, can you come look at this computer problem for me? …. Never mind, it’s working now” as soon as I get there. I know it’s just chance: plenty of times the problem DOESN’T go away, but some problems are just intermittent. But still. It makes you wonder.
          ………………

          Same. (Only not named “Robin”.) People would call “Hey. This is what is happening.” Setup the connection so I can see what is going on. “Show me.” Pause on the other end. “That is funny. It is working now.”

          I joked and said the program knew “mom is on the phone.” ;-) ;-) ;-)

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        3. The joke is the car that starts working properly when you visit the mechanic, or the computer that starts working properly when you go to visit the IT guy.

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          1. Man, I wish it were a joke.

            I’ve been fighting an intermittent stall in my truck for a couple months now.

            It’ll start choking and die a couple blocks from the mechanic’s but never throw a code, and once I get it to start again and pull into the shop, it’s purring like a tiger.

            All of which meant diagnosing things the expensive way: changing one part and seeing if it helps.

            Long story short, the fuel pump is covered in rust , which is probably breaking off and clogging the fuel filter.

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            2. It took our mechanic over a week and 175+ miles of driving to track down our intermittent issue. A $50 part called a “pulse control valve” that is on the venting end of the engine. Basically, if it’s not open when it SHOULD be, it forces vapor back into the engine and messes with the fuel-oxygen mix.

              Note that my fuel pump died last summer. I’m pretty sure that stupid sucker is what killed it. So… that’s a thing to check too. No sensors, no code.

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          2. From memory:

            There once was a crusty mechanic
            whose manners were fierce and tyrannic
            dull headlights would glare
            at his furious stare
            and dead engines turn over in panic!

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        4. Breakons are not new. Breakon emitters are traditionally called ‘jinxes’.

          I knew a fixon emitter years ago, the lab tech in my engineering school. His initials were RF B. That may have been a clue. He could get a good trace on any of our analog scopes with at most three knob turns, and often just one.

          One day a senior was struggling with a sixth-order analog filter. It just wouldn’t filter according to his equation. At a table nearby, a sophmore was struggling to get any scope trace at all. He asked RF to help.

          RF came over and eyeballed the scope. Senior’s circuit began obeying its equations. RF twiddled the Sophmore’s scope knobs. Senior grabbed the Polaroid scope camera and clamped it to his scope to record his triumph. RF walked away, his work there done. Senior reached for the camera’s shutter cable just as his traces collapsed and his sixth-order filter resumed its one-digit salute to the transfer function the Senior had so lovingly prepared for it.

          RF was an anti-jinx.

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      3. My brother’s presence in a house kept yeast dough from rising. He worked in a bakery for a while – they had to change his hours so he wasn’t there while they had the breads & donuts rising.
        My wife didn’t believe this could be so and bet him if he used our bread maker it would work. She watched while he measured the ingredients in and started it.
        Not only didn’t the dough rise, but the bread maker failed to heat up. It never worked again.
        The world is stranger than we can imagine.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Problem is it couldn’t be just them. First hour there you’d have to worry about life support and airlocks….

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          1. No, it wasn’t just them. There was a whole support staff of ‘normal’ folks. In fact, if there are people afflicted with a ‘Murphy Effect’ there must be others with anti-Murphy properties. Hire a few to keep the machines working.

            The ‘Murphy People’ would just have to be kept in a part of the colony far, far away from the important equipment.

            Now, if the ‘Murphy Effect’ is hereditary, and you’ve got a large group of them living together, mostly isolated… :-o
            ———————————
            Leo Bloom: “Well, if we assume, just for a moment, that you’re a dishonest man—“

            Max Bialystock: “Assume, assume!”

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    2. Sounds like the reverse of the spren (odd, often ethereal beings that are associated with a wide variety of things including fire, storms, disease, victory, etc…) in Sanderson’s Way of Kings series. One of the interlude chapters has a couple studying a fire spren. They come to the determination that the spren is constantly changing size… until the spren’s size is recorded. Then it immediately becomes fixed at that size, even if the person doing the writing is in another room at the time. The moment the size is erased, the spren once again begins to change size, even if – again – the person doing the erasing is in another room.

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    3. Sounds like the old graduate students’ joke about the Pauli Exclusion Principle — Dr. Pauli had to be excluded from the lab or they couldn’t get any work done because the equipment would have inexplicable random failures.

      One day they had a mysterious failure while Dr. Pauli wasn’t there. Some of them said that proved he wasn’t the cause. Later, they found out he was on a train that passed near the lab at the time of the failure.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Except for this being called the “Pauli Effect” back then — as opposed to the quantum-physics Pauli Exclusion Principle — yeah, this. All of this.

        The way I heard / read the train story, what had just happened so “mysteriously” was that a two-story-tall particle accelerator just fell down. No, really, literally fell apart into pieces as they were building it.

        Liked by 1 person

      2. Then there’s the set of koans that came out of the MIT AI lab decades ago: https://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/AI_Koans

        In particular, the one about Tom Knight, one of the principle designers of the Lisp machine. “A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.” Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked.”

        My guess is that the student was power-cycling the machine too fast, not leaving enough time for the internal capacitors to drain and so the machine was coming back up with its memory contents still containing the data that triggered the bug. Whereas Knight turned the machine off, waited long enough (and he knew how long to wait) for the internal capacitors powering the RAM to drain, and then turned the machine back on with its RAM zeroed out, so it would go through its normal boot process.

        But it’s more fun to tell the story the “magic” way.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Argh, I’m pretty sure that should have been “principal”, not “principle”. I’m usually a good speller, but that time the homophone got me.

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          1. That’s okay. I think we will all be assuming that any typos are some sort of code from this post onward.

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          2. “You’re a homophone!”

            “I am not!”

            “Ok, maybe you’re not a homophone. But you sound like one.”

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        2. A fix for “wont boot laptops” is to disconnect from all power cables/battery and hold the ON button for ten seconds, reconnect power, and bingo, it boots.

          Of course, one we had only worked when -I- did so.

          “Paging Mister Serling to the courtesy phone….”

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    4. Reminds of the people who can’t wear watches because their personal energy field kills the watches.

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      1. I can’t wear digital watches. At least, not on my wrist. I used to have a necklace digital watch that worked all during college, but that is it.

        Mechanical watch would probably work, but I would forget to wind it.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. There are mechanical watches that are self winding. I have several mechanical watches in my emergency kits.

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          1. $HOUSEMATE has a gadget that holds a watch (or more than A watch?) and rotates… it’s a self-winding watch winder. THAT is how rich the U.S.A. is, folks. And the “common man” can afford this.

            Liked by 1 person

        2. Weirdly the only watch I could wear was mechanical and GOLD on a gold bracelet. (It was a gift, yes. From older, rich relative.)
          The problem is I’m allergic to gold. This led to losing it, as I took it off and left is on a kitchen table, and a neighbor’s kid who was a junkie stole it…..

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  6. America is Chaos. I mean, who else would think that a loose coalition of various religious colonies inhabited by a bunch of different European expats would come together and form a country based on the concept of ‘everyone gets a vote and can choose how they want to live’ as their cohesive dream.

    Also, the never level thing. I discovered in grade school when I started taking trombone lessons that I hold my head at a slight angle. My music instructors were constantly telling me to hold my head straight. I thought I was.

    I think we might have had a flight of Biden’s Economic Visitors land in Fargo yesterday. One of my officer’s nearly ran over a couple of people looking for a way to get from the airport to the bus station. They only spoke Spanish, we had to use an app for translation. And they didn’t have any money to get themselves anywhere, so I’m not sure how they A) just got off a plane, and B) thought they would be able to take a bus somewhere.

    Liked by 2 people

        1. It’s one of those things in the back burner. I want to do calendars with my people and quotes from the books, for instance.
          Let me see, right now, in addition to writing, I’m supposed to do: A series of merch for fans. Stuff like this.
          Edit: My Country Tis of Thee, or rather go over page proofs. (A collection of essays from the blog.)
          Finish putting new covers on things that don’t got it yet. I should do this before Confinement but I don’t know.
          Get audio of Daring Finds done by younger DIL. (That depends a little on her.)
          Do a weekly reading of one of my short stories, to give away for free to my newsletters subscribers, and eventually to put out in public.
          Write the 10 or so scripts for the comics of A Few Good Men, and get the kickstarter for the first one going.
          … Do two overdue short stories.
          I’m sure i”m forgetting some dozen things.
          My problem honestly is that I need three of me. Or to outsource everything but the paying work. I’m trying to do the second. Hired people for the garden, because it was eating my life. But…. handymen are scarce. So a friend and I are going to rebuild the porch and paint the front. (Yes, yes, I know. BUT Dan hasn’t lost enough weight to replace his knees. When he does, I’ll have some help.)
          IF we can keep things from breaking, and if I work very hard, we can do this, right?

          Liked by 1 person

            4. That one! Sticky-out tongue on red with flag behind. On a pale blue or grey shirt, long sleeve, adult men’s medium, please. I’ll buy two so I’ll have a spare. Please oh please! big, irresistible kitty eyes

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  9. There was a WWII German general – Rommel, maybe? – who postulated that war is chaos, and since the American military appeared to operate in a chaotic environment even at the best of times – he concluded glumly that the Americans were getting very, very good at war…

    Liked by 3 people

      1. We forgot Sherman’s wisdom: “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it” we try to fight wars with kindness and that only prolongs the suffering.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. I included a set of supposed quotes on that in a reply in “Problems that don’t exist”. Everyone seems to know it, including us. :-)

      Liked by 3 people

    4. No joke. In the Pacific, the parallel campaigns of Nimitz and MacArthur gave the Japanese fits. And according to Geoffrey Perret in =There’s a War to be Won=, General Marshall’s training technique included subjecting the trainees to deliberate chaos and uncertainty to prepare them for the friction and fog of war.

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  10. Americans, in general, are chaotic.

    We aren’t lemmings, and trying to force us into that kind of organizational mold just causes trouble if we don’t believe in it.

    And the idiots who are trying this keep thinking that Central Planning is the tool that will solve everything, like how Jesus and the Trinity works with bible-thumpers.

    When it all falls apart…it’ll be interesting.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. They’re convinced that if we just understood how brilliant their plan is, we’d embrace it…. And then they keep trying to shove.
      We ignored and contravened the first few pushes, but since 2020 it’s getting serious. They’re like the bully poking at the little guy with glasses because they think he’s a weakling.
      As I could tell them from when younger son was the skinny little kid with glasses (looked much like Harry Potter. No. really.) if the skinny guy berserks, they’re going to have to rely on someone pulling him off before they’re minus eyes, ears, life.

      Liked by 3 people

        1. Younger son, climbing up the side of older son’s class bully, who managed to be taller than him — older son was the size of fourth graders in Kindergarten — and holding on to his collar while pounding his head with his free hand, screaming “No one beats on my brother but me.”
          Younger son was 4. 90th percentile for height, 20th for weight. He was shy, sweet and adorable. until he wasn’t.

          Liked by 2 people

          1. Good for him; bullies need to be “corrected” in the only way they understand, and if it comes from a smaller, “weaker” defender so much the better. :-)

            Liked by 1 person

          2. Now, that’s the true sibling dynamic. I can always tell when siblings are written by someone who had siblings vs. someone who did not have siblings.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Siblings may fight each other constantly, but woe betide the bully who picks a fight with either one of them. “What we do is family. You’re not family; you’re dead meat.”

              IIRC, Schmitz’s The Demon Breed had a character comment on this, referring to humans.

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                1. That’s the usual for siblings, at least the male sort; I’ve known enough of them to know that. They usually have some sort of rivalry going on; it’s in the species. But unless one is irretrievably “broken” they are as you describe. And the “broken” ones aren’t nearly as common as TV and movies make them seem.

                  Liked by 1 person

      4. Ender’s Game… hit so hard they will NEVER try again.
        Now, Ender ended it, the SURE way (eventually revealed…)
        And, well, it’s a way works.
        No, it ain’t “nice” – IT WORKS!

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  12. Manitou and Cripple Creek are awesome, you have chosen wisely.
    Lysdexics of the world untie.
    Tyslexics of the world undie.
    After the comrades burn it all down a Phoenix will rise.

    Liked by 1 person

  13. I realize this is just an introductory remark, but about this: “My first boyfriend was acquired because his older brother had math books I wanted to get my hands on.” Did you acquire the boyfriend in order to have access to the math books (which is what I think you meant, but I’m getting like the lady in “Stairway to Heaven,” and I have to ask) or did you access the matchbooks and then acquired the boyfriend.

    If it is the former (sneaky) way, then it reminds me of how N___ used to wash my dishes because I shared a bathroom in the nice barracks with R, whom she fancied. She must have told me that was the reason (but I don’t remember that part). What I do remember is making the silly remark to her that I’d buy them a salad plate in their china if they got married. They did and I did. They also drove about 600 miles to my wedding when she was 7-1/2 months pregnant.

    Liked by 2 people

  14. “No matter how much I measure, or what type of level I deploy, everything is slightly angled. (I suspect brain damage actually, because my drawing does the same”

    for the drawing, at least, it’s just something in the eyes I think. I really want to say it has to do with astigmatism, but I’m not sure that’s correct.

    The usual way to train oneself out of it is to turn the paper over and look at the drawing from the back. Then one can see where the drawing is skewing to one side or another.

    It’s funny, though, how the brain gets in the way of transmitting an image from one’s eye to one’s drawing hand. It tries to make you draw the geometry it knows the object has, but which is different from the geometry that is visible from your perspective, and you end up with something halfway in between, what you see, and what it is.

    It was a revelation to have that pointed out in the architectural drafting and sketching class I took. For some reason they never mentioned it in the art class…

    Liked by 2 people

    1. If I need to check a free hand drawing I turn it upside down. Something about knowing something is off is easier to pick up when everything is off

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      1. Yeah, the optometrists do claim that ^_^.

        I think they figure if you’re not seeing halos around ordinary objects, that’s corrected.

        … having a patient draw something to check if everything were really straightened out would add way to much time to the examination.

        Does make me wonder if it would work though.

        Liked by 2 people

        3. It’s funny–I’d almost forgotten this–when I was a young boy, if I looked at things right, I could see…refraction lines? Rainbow borders?–around things and people. I don’t now. Eyes changed? Difference in glasses? (My lenses for nearly 25 years have been polycarb, which I couldn’t get back in the day, it was all heavy glass or thick plastic and both sucked.)

          Liked by 1 person

      2. “I have horrible astigmatism”
        Are you my older sister? Because seriously, you feel like my older sister more than my actual older sister.

        Liked by 1 person

  15. My oldest sister kills electronics. She’s like Harry Dresden, except smaller and rounder. Watches don’t work on her for more than a few minutes. Computers give up in just a few hours. I keep my phone buried at the bottom of my purse when we have lunch. I don’t have the math to explain it — it’s just so.

    So Chaos Woman warps some sort of field around her and towel bars don’t hang straight. Nods head. Pretty cool, actually.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Yeah, same, but for some reason computers last a bit. Then they die in an improbable way. Like by catching fire.
      I also turn metal green, then black, then runny.
      Only metal I don’t do that to is surgical steel.
      I coat the inside of my wedding and engagement rings in clear nail polish once a month, so I can wear them.
      Grandma just didn’t wear rings, because she did the same thing.

      Liked by 2 people

    2. My – my mom also has this problem with electronics! Not to that degree, and mostly it’s software, but she has snarled more email systems, messed up more websites, and destroyed more perfectly workable computers than seem probable. Her phone is a mystery best left unsolved. Thankfully, I do not seem to have inherited this trait.

      Liked by 2 people

        1. “In other news, it appears that some foreign actor has forced the abandonment of the White House and other government buildings due to subversion of every computer, computer system and electronic gadget within a half mile radius of a particular hotel. The hotel was searched thoroughly, but no such equipment was found.”

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  16. Dyscalculia. I have it too. Caught myself at it not too long ago: read a number as 968, wrote it down as 968, then–when I double-checked–it had magically turned into 689. I’ve had this all my life and–yes–have the math scores to show for it.

    I also have the thing where streetlights turn off when I walk under them.

    You are not alone.

    Liked by 1 person

      1. I have exactly the same thing. Numbers, can’t see them. Transposing digits all the time, getting things backward and upside down, its a constant battle.

        It makes carpentry “interesting”. Generally I get by with using the piece to mark out the next piece, and a lot of labeling. “This is the TOP, this is the FRONT, this is the BOTTOM!!!!, this is the INSIDE!!!11!!!” and etc. I also make five parts instead of four, because inevitably at least one will be upside down, backward, precisely, perfectly 1/2 an inch too short, etc.

        I see these YouTube guys saying all you need is the carpenter’s triangle, and I laugh bitterly.

        Machining things to tolerance is another whole level of adventure in digit transposition. I’m not a quick machinist, let’s just say. ~:D

        Liked by 1 person

  17. You know how they say there is an exception to every rule?
    Ya, that’s me, I am the exception to the rule.
    Just to let you know there are more negative exceptions then there are positive ones so it ain’t all roses.

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  18. More on the Hawaiian Supreme Court ant-2ndA ruling: They actually cited a quote from The Wire in their ruling, as in the TV show. These people live in their own made-up reality.

    Liked by 2 people

        1. I’d think Hawaii would be more scared (or should be) of the goddess than a mere mortal soccer player. :evil:

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          1. I don’t know, when the Soccer player showed up on the Simpsons there was a pretty bad riot right after… 😁

            Like

          2. And if Pele isn’t scary enough, there’s always her mom Hina.

            No, really. Go read the stories of people who took ‘souvenir’ bits off Mauna Kea without asking first — and then had to mail, or even bring, them back. One of those even made it into a hard-SF novel.

            Liked by 1 person

    2. They also said they could ignore the Supreme Court because Hawaii tribal tradition was different, and that tribal custom superseded the Federal Constitution. What the Hawaii Supreme Court did is essentially insurrection.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. So… No pork consumption by commoners except on pagan holidays, and human sacrifice and capital punishment with axes are now okay, and all the judges are the wrong caste to judge any case. Got it.

        Liked by 1 person

  19. I dig that artwork you use here, especially the stuff like the picture at the top of this piece, super talented whoever drew that,

    Liked by 1 person

    1. No I am not surprised at all, may the Democrats and their Rino whores all burn in hell, using the bodies of the media to roast them.

      Like

    2. Apparently he did an impromptu press conference to dispute the mental incompetence documented in the report and promptly declared that Egyptian President Sisi was President of Mexico, after berating the special prosecutor and reporters for daring to question his mental ability:

      https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/02/08/bidens-unannounced-nighttime-speech-an-absolute-disaster-n4926280

      The cabal, not wanting to lose Professor Gill as their puppet, will continue to cover for him and pretend nothing is wrong.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I watched a few minutes of that drivel. If anybody needed proof of Biden’s incompetence, there it was. What wasn’t blatant lies was simply deranged.

        The Zombie Sock-Puppet also called for the Palestinians to cross the border from Gaza into Mexico. Is there an interdimensional gate we’ve never heard of?

        Biden was never competent to be president, or vice-president, or in charge of anything, really. It’s just becoming impossible to cover up any longer. Biden has spent 50 years in politics saying and doing the wrong things, accomplishing nothing beyond lies and larceny.
        ———————————
        Harris-und-Biden were never elected — they were installed, like a toilet and a bidet. Unlike them, a couple of plumbing fixtures would actually be useful.

        Liked by 1 person

        2. That’s okay, per the report on his classified document crimes that spurred the press conference they said he in fact committed the crimes, but he does not actually remember being VP or the years things happened, so because he’s no longer mentally competent he won’t be charged.

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            1. Clearly the remit for any of these investigations is “it’s a Dem, so find any reason to not charge” – but the best Hur’s team could come up with was they couldn’t possibly indict because, to a (presumably DC) jury, Biden would present himself as “… a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”?

              Charging criminal activity where the evidence goes well beyond a reasonable doubt is conditional, for only non-sympathetic accused criminals?

              Or only non-Dem?

              Combine this, the “Aloha Spirit” ruling from the Hawaii Supreme Court, and of course all the COVID official insanity, and it is no wonder that “faith in institutions” is not so very high anymore.

              Stuff like this does not increase our societal distance-from-boog.

              Liked by 1 person

      2. I’m waiting for the announcement that Biden will refuse to debate that insurrectionist. Or something similar. And then we’ll see how Trump responds.

        Liked by 1 person

    4. Given the description of what he was like in 2017, I think there’s a good legal case to be made that he wasn’t competent to take the oath of office in 2020, and that everything he’s signed off on is null and void.

      Liked by 1 person

  21. Speaking of chaos, there’s a DOJ report that basically says Biden is senile. I don’t think anyone is surprised that they’re going to swap him out for someone else, only that it took so long.

    Also, has anyone seen Hillary lately? Just saying.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. saw an interesting meme the other day, Basically listed all those who had accused the Clinton’s of wrong doing and how many committed suicide, Then Trumps accusers as well, zero on Trumps side.

      Liked by 1 person

        1. They won’t swap out Biden unless he dies, no matter how apparent both his corruption and mental incompetence are. The people holding Biden’s strings like having a mentally incompetent puppet in whose name they can rule.

          Liked by 1 person

  23. And how many kids are really being homeschooled, does anyone even know?

    No.

    Not even in states with mandatory reporting, like Washington.

    We had some minor drama where a lady in our homeschool group went in to register her kids, and was told there were only a total of three homerschoolers in the entire district.

    …. she had four homeschool kids, so she assumed homeschooler families, which was really impressive because there were FOUR OTHERS that were assigned to the same school in just our little group.

    So she came in with full blown upset because WHY HADN’T SOMEONE TOLD HER THEY WERE QUITTING—-!!!!

    ….so… yeah, at least some Washington State schools are frauding the registered home school kids attend, so the official stats are gonna be bunk.

    And then there’s the states with no reporting laws.

    Liked by 2 people

      1. They lie about test results, they can surely lie about attendance and they will because federal dollars are tied to attendance. Remember in the Teachers Unions, the Teachers Come First, the Teachers Unions are not their for the students, so they and the administrations just want to look good on paper, they couldn’t give one damn if any child got educated. spit

        Liked by 1 person

    2. Imaginary kids are so much easier on the teachers, consume far fewer supplies, and are hardly ever discipline problems.

      It’s kind of a corollary to the business rule that if you measure something, it improves: Any bureaucracy which is dependent on a number will “improve” that number without regard to any actual facts.

      So are state schools going to end up with the equivalent of “His/Her Majesty’s Muster Masters” with mandatory student formations so they can be counted?

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        2. Possibly but not necessarily.

          If somewhere along the chain of reporting daily classroom kids-in-seats attendance to the state those numbers are “adjusted” or “corrected,” the front line unionized teachers, and even the local school staff, could be in the dark. Easiest to do such an adjustment at the multiple-school aggregation stage with some quiet de-grouping and regrouping, i.e. ungroup by school, make the adjustment to what the number “should” be, then regroup by grade level, so the adjustments would only be found in a real deep attendance audit.

          Or a full in person muster for Their State Majesty’s Muster Masters.

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      2. Goodharts Law… All metrics that become goals or targets become corrupted….because people will work to game the system…
        The Hawthorne Effect… all changes to the work environment improved productivity because the workers knew they were being observed and adjusted behavior accordingly

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      3. Oregon, various districts may be cooking butt in district seats, or not. But not by improperly adding in home schooled students. The home schooled students are added in, but legally. Districts get a percentage of the per student whether they are registered at a traditional public school, or home schooled. Pretty sure they only get private school students parents school property taxes, nothing extra from the state. Districts are charged with overseeing the home schooled students progress (any bets on that they scrutinize home school attendees heavier than traditional public school attendees? Yea, not a bet I’d take either.) Home schooled percentage that the district doesn’t get, goes to the home school the student is enrolled in. Don’t know how it works if parents are doing their own program.

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    3. We don’t have any official numbers on homeschool families, or kids.
      And while anecdote is not the plural of data, we have a lot of unofficial numbers.
      Things like the sales of homeschool specific education materials.
      Things like attendance at homeschool conferences.
      Things like the numbers of hybrid or homeschool hybrid coops.
      All of these numbers are EXPLODING. Conservatively, the increase in these numbers is in the 500% to 800% since pre-COVD.
      When it comes to homeschooling, I think there’s a tipping point.
      That tipping point is what I call the “Do I know anyone” test.
      I hear from lots of prospective homeschool parents that they want to homeschool their kids, but they weren’t homeschooled and they don’t know anyone who homeschools.
      If these prospective families knew even one other family who homeschools, they would be willing to give it a try.
      Five years ago, no one knew anyone who homeschooled.
      Now, it’s still uncommon, but much less so.
      Soon, everyone will know someone who is homeschooling their kids. It may be a cousin, or a neighbor, or a co-worker.
      Once we hit that tipping point, the numbers (official and unofficial) will start to race up.
      I can’t wait!

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Kung flu triggered a lot of “Wait, you homeschool?” stuff, too– I got my sister in law (way more peoplely than I am) into homeschooling that way, because I was willing to help her get through “how to do this stuff”.

        Her school was being worse than nothing, both in what the kids learned, and in how much trouble it was to have her daughters in it. They did some kind of scheduling thing where it wasn’t POSSIBLE for her to physically do the things required for two little girls, two years apart.

        Liked by 1 person

          1. I can understand the sentiment, but we really do not want to go down that road.

            No way, no shape, no form.

            And that’s from someone who had a bad enough time decades ago that she insisted on at least trying homeschool.

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            1. The Reader is curious. Why do you think we don’t want to go down the road of mass homeschooling (or small pods – the equivalent of the one room school house)?

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              2. As Lauren says.

                Anybody homeschooling should be extremely aware that the “redefine something that I think is a bad idea as child abuse” is not just a logical fallacy, it’s one of the primary attacks against homeschooling.

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                1. The Reader thanks you for replying. He acknowledges that the charge of abuse is a common attack against homeschooling. And the word ‘abuse’ is a slippery continuum. But he believes the current state of public schooling in this country at least warrants the consideration of ‘abuse’ as a description.

                  Liked by 1 person

                  1. Hey, that outreach thing I mentioned. :D We gotta talk about it for folks to not have the freak out response!

                    The issue with “public school is arguably child abuse” only works by group guilt, which helps hide the actual abusers.

                    Much, much, much more effective to go after individual cases, applying current law, which will result in a lot of child abuse being uncovered– and also criminal conspiracy, intimidation of witnesses, fraud, etc.

                    Without harming those who are acting honorably to do the best job they can.

                    Bonus, makes it so folks don’t get upset about accusations against folks they know are innocent, which is what the abusers depend on.

                    Like

      2. Oh!

        Another thing to look at, when looking at collected numbers– what’s the definition of homeschool?

        For some of them, if you do the stuff to let your kid play school sports, it’s “not 100% homeschooled.” Some also don’t count kids taking college classes as homeschooled.

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  24. “…but I keep getting a feeling as far as fiction goes my greatest days are ahead of me.”

    And some of your readers (nonchalantly raises hand) would also tend toward the same conclusion…

    “Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.”

    Liked by 1 person

      1. I don’t remember it that way. I remember the recurring advice to ‘do the chaotic thing’, that being the way to prevent the kind of stasis the controllers bring to us.
        For ‘dreck’ I would go to anything written by Jeminsin.

        Liked by 1 person

  27. Chaos Woman. Presence causes distortion of physical measurements within her vicinity.

    Auto mechanics syndrome. The ability to cause proper functioning in an automobile while within the vicinity of a mechanic.

    Computer error elimination aura. An undefined field effect surrounding a computer technician that causes computer errors to become non-reproduceable.

    We’ve probably all experienced at least one of these. But I don’t think anyone has ever done an actual study or experimentation on the subject. Are these effects real? Are they reproduceable? Are the effects physical, or psychological?

    Like

    1. I know some of them can be explained, like car issues that go away after warming up for a bit. We had an irregular error that kept vanishing even when the techs tried to show eachother. It was a chip in the computer going bad.

      The issue is, if it’s not a constant thing, it’s REALLY hard to test for.

      Like

      1. Forkin’ Lift I use at work will stop and show either no seatbelt on or out of the seat (Leaning to this being the issue) and will not do it for the tech, and even if it happens while he is within listening range, it goes away as he walks towards it. “I guess, when the damned thing won’t move at all, call me.” More I mess with it, the more it might be both and a bad ground. It’s been at least a year, the lift is a spare, and we are waiting for replacement electric lifts, so if pulled I won’t see replacement until June or July.

        Like

      2. Our Santa Fe’s have the feature where the car motor temporarily shuts down when at a stop (not if in park and on). There are some rules to it. As my main drive stopped doing this, we’d take it into the dealership and complain. Problem is, while it wouldn’t work on the way over by the time we got there, when they took it for a test drive, it would. Reason? It’d warmed up or cooled down enough to work. Finally, it acted up for them. Now they have to go through the “proper fixes”. Replaced the battery, got a bad battery (seriously, wouldn’t start, until it finally did to get it there, and it failed for them too, immediately). Got a new battery, again (and note, new batteries took weeks to get there, not ideal). Fixed the problem for a nano second (worked for them after fixed, didn’t work for us on the drive home). Now new driver door wiring harness, repeat nano second fix syndrome. Finally they replaced the computer (personally I think a dealership computer reboot would have worked, but what do I know, grumble, not my money. Again weeks to get.) Last fixed the problem, for a few months. Ultimately I don’t drive it very far, often enough to keep the feature working reliably. So, yes, doing it again. I refuse to take it in and not have it for weeks. Besides we know how to fix it. Just take it on a < 1000 mile trip. Seriously, our second day out this last spring “magic” it was working. It is a cool feature. It isn’t a needed feature.

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  28. Stainless Steel Rat Boog advice of the day, Search 25th Amendment on gurgle, let’s have the panic really set in for the blob.

    Like

  29. The AG no doubt told the Hur,
    “Find a way to legally let Ole Pedo Joe off the hook”.
    He did, now the feces has hit the fan.

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  30. So, there is a different path one could take in that analysis.

    If total depravity is true, then there is no honest reason not to say that I am evil.

    I sometimes approximate rational.

    So, rational and evil might not necessarily necessarily imply support for an American Terror, with chekists.

    Evil is a reasonably good shorthand, but …

    Anyway, risk, cost, and time delay. These are pragmatic bases for, morality aside, preferring to avoid immensely destructive mass murder schemes.

    AKA, if I do not have any problem with initial acts, but do have a massive problem with eventual consequences that I predict.

    I somewhat prefer not to be murdered, but if it comes down to that, it is not my highest priority driving ‘yeah, no, no matter how good venting emotions by saying stuff feels, not really a great idea’.

    I am conservative precisely because I dislike risk, prefer to think on longer time scales, and gamble on ‘investments’ with very long term pay offs.

    Some people prefer short timescales, and don’t care at all if feeling good now means feeling bad later. This tends not to correlate to productive mindsets for a conservative.

    But, the big dividing factor seems to be assholes who spent their whole lives learning to live only for the sake of hurting others. For these people, terror and revolution almost always makes sense, because greater opportunity for license. If someone is not that crazy, in that way, it probably is much less sensible.

    Like

  31. Re: Your shelves, drawing, etc. at an angle (steering away from voicing opinions as that didn’t work out too well for me last time. I still ‘talk’ to people online as I would in person, so the whole ‘manners’, not to mention no-one would dare to talk to me like that in person, thing leaves me short, and I definitely don’t ‘do’ the whole passive/aggressive/cry-bully thing so walk away, so just lurking now).

    One of my many and sundry “careers” pre-military was as a site carpenter/joiner (first fix/second fix), but I just couldn’t do it since the entire mentality of “It’s 3/8ths off, good enough, no-one will see” drove me insane (but, but ‘I’ will know!).

    I actually thought about cabinet making, even talked to Paul Sellers and he found out why I had always been ‘off’ in my cuts, joints, etc.

    I’m right-handed but … left eye dominant (as are a surprising number of people who don’t know). I “line up” a cut (or when pistol shooting, the sights) and … completely miss – can you say “parallax error”?

    Now, I’m not suggesting you ‘aren’t’ chaos personified (Hey, we all have talents. Why do all of mine only seem applicable/useful in a war-zone or … possibly around you ;p ), but maybe there is an easy explanation as to why everything always seems to come out “scew-wiff” at least.

    That knowledge, and the means to overcome it via posture, stood me in good stead when learning marksmanship and, I suspect, without it I may have simply ‘failed’.

    Just a thought.

    Like

      1. Ah, but as a lady, you’re forgetting the distraction and intimidation factor (I know I fluff the most basic actions when being watched, and forget how to coordinate anything more complicated than walking and breathing if it’s a lady doing the watching. Women, ‘the collective stereotype’, assume all men are fumble-fingered-fools because we are … when they’re around).

        The effects of cross dominance are quite extreme, but easily corrected for (if you don’t mind looking a bit “strange”, or perhaps permanently whimsical/confused with a head-tilt, sideways glance and ever-so-slightly-sideways stance to everything you do). Amazingly, when you do it yourself you begin to notice how many others do it too (I won’t say most, but a large proportion of competitive shooters ‘seem’ to),

        Like everything else, recognising that there ‘is’ a problem that might affect an action, is the first step.

        (Just don’t ask about the “experimental” corrective therapies used by sundry military quacks – like taping shut the dominant eye for a week or so, in the hopes the brain would ‘re-wire’ – think driving-at speed, shooting-and being shot at, and … jumping out of aircraft with only one eye?! None of which worked, of course, but did make life a little more exciting and “adrenalin filled” for a while.)

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          1. I’m fifty-mumble yet in my head I’m still 21 (although friends suggest mentally I should reverse the digits) and it’s a terrible, heart-rending shock every morning whilst washing and shaving when I look up and … I see my dad looking back at me in the mirror (of course the aches and pains and the struggling to even get out of the armchair do hint I may be deluding myself too).

            As a nurse I worked mostly ER and ICU but did elderly care too (amongst other areas) and … you have literally no idea how many times I was “chatted up”, lewd and suggestive comments made, or how much my posterior would leave a shift bruised from being pinched by … 70, 80 and 90 year old “ladies”?! (Perhaps nursing wasn’t the best choice. It’s a terrible hit to your ego and social life when the ‘only’ women you meet and even notice you are old, overweight, confused, often aggressive and occasionally incontinent. And some of the patients weren’t too nice either).

            ‘You’ might not have been ‘looking’. ‘He’ might have been way too old, but … in his head he was still probably that insecure teenager, easily flustered and intimidated (and of course in a constant hormonal frenzy. Hint: for we men, that never stops, ever). Being older you just get a bit better at ‘covering’, usually by being gruff.

            Or is all that just me?

            Like

    2. I’m right-handed but … left eye dominant (as are a surprising number of people who don’t know). I “line up” a cut (or when pistol shooting, the sights) and … completely miss – can you say “parallax error”?
      ………………………..

      Hm. Wonder if that is my problem. Compensating. Getting better. Really need a Range where I can set the distance and work my way out. The outdoor range we use doesn’t have that option.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. It’s easy to “test for”. Just do the “make a triangle with both hands at arms length” thing, line up/sight through the hole with/at something in the distance and then alternate closing each eye. The eye where the object moves out of the triangle is … ‘not’ your dominant one.

        An easy guesstimate can be made if you, like I did, always erred in one direction (away from your dominant eye). I got lovely groups, just way to the right of where I was supposed to be aiming. Sigh!

        If you are, talk to an instructor, but usually they recommend a head-tilt and/or ‘shifting’ the pistol (still held in dominant hand) across the midline towards the dominant eye. That and/or a more Weaver stance (dominant eye side forward) instead of the now de rigeur isosceles. all of it feels unnatural at first, has to be a deliberate choice, but after a while it becomes automatic.

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