There is an ugly truth that a lot of liberals don’t want to admit. Wearing your heart on your sleeve doesn’t get you very far in this world, it certainly doesn’t solve the world’s problems. It’s not the thought that counts, which is too often America’s motto.
What created the opening for the Trump monster? Fakery, and lots of it. There is a reason why Trump is every day hammering his anti-DEI message, and it’s not just because he’s racist as are many of his supporters. It’s because DEI has been a failure on many levels – it’s about doing a lot of talking and not a lot of concrete action to change the relationship between the races, to lift up all people of different races and classes. Liberals have done absolutely nothing to reform the media, which profits via advertising that sells products by getting viewers by playing up racist memes about crime in society. Nor have they done anything to slow the chants of consume, consume, discard, discard (*as long as you put it in the blue bin)!
Too often in the mind of liberals, it’s okay to build that coal power plant as long as it has solar panels on the roof and commerical-grade landscaping trees in front of the coal piles. After all, we need electricity. And we need it cheap, to make sure the poors and the “job creators” can afford it. It’s okay for the police to pull over, and smash the head of the African American man whose taillight is out, as long as the cop doesn’t first call him a nigger. After all, he’s probably a criminal, as most of people that the police arrest for crimes are black. Need to reduce crime, as it is scary and a threat, as we are constantly told on the news. Even if the real solution is to reduce poverty, improve mental health and build better communities with more recreation, parks, and things for bored youth to do.
Liberals love individual action and virtue signaling. Why undertake fundamental changes to public policy, when you can have a parade honoring a long dead civil rights leader or build a highly visible solar farm along the highway? Or better yet, condemn individual people for by being racist, uttering the word nigger in a blog post, and not woke enough, or being anti-climate action by driving a big jacked up truck and not having solar panels on the roof. You evil racist! You evil earth hater!
The truth is doing the right thing is not always popular. But we as a society can’t go on forever dependent on the automobile in far sprawling suburbs, with consumption of material goods subsidized and extremely cheap. Liberals can’t go on saying we can’t raise prices on consumption, lest we hurt the poor. The poor don’t need cheap stuff, they need housing, healthy food, recreation and good meaningful work. They need to be able to save and invest, and not be constantly bombarded with commercial messages saying to consume.
We need to move away from a society that constantly reminds us that African Americans are evil thugs. The news media needs to stop it’s racist reporting of crime, it needs to loose the commercial incentives to highlight violence and hatred. If people didn’t turn on the news every night to see the latest group of African American offenders paraded across them, then maybe we would have a different perspective on race. DEI isn’t the solution, but we shouldn’t have our media constantly reinforcing racist stereotypes and then pointing their fingers at who they think is racist.
Truth is liberals created the Trump monster. They made their often weak ideas into cartoons, their tepidness lead to mockery and an opening for reactionaries. If Biden can’t help me, maybe Trump will. At least Trump won’t be into all the fakery that liberals have adopted, the thought goes. If things are dysfunctional, we might as well try something new. Even if that new is racism and drill baby drill. It’s so awful.
The soaring price of eggs has alarmed consumers and the agriculture industry, and practically everyone in Washington is pointing fingers in various directions to direct blame.
It’s hard to lay America’s egg crisis at the feet of any one politician. But agricultural experts say politicians in Washington and around the country can do more to help curtail the highly pathogenic avian influenza, or avian flu, responsible for the deaths of more than 40 million egg-laying birds last year.
Because of short supply, egg prices rose 14% from November to December alone, and they are projected to rise another 20% this year, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
Grocery stores across the country are limiting egg purchases, Waffle House announced a 50-cent surcharge per egg, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced the shutdown of all live poultry markets in the state through February 14 to try to contain the spread.
“This is significant. This is having a big impact on the farmer, on the consumer throughout the country. Everybody’s feeling this,” said Bernt Nelson, an economist at the American Farm Bureau Federation, or AFBF.
Industry leaders including the American Egg Board are calling for a “comprehensive response” to the virus to stop the spread and stop prices from rising. The potential solutions, however, are contentious and expensive, and there’s no broad agreement about how to move forward.
I am not sure who was playing or won but I was surprised how well stocked Walmart was when I went there in the evening.
I made sure to leave my parents house after 6:30pm so that I wouldn’t hit the traffic and bright lights heading over to Glenmont. With the nearly full moon and the snow on the ground, plus salt on the roads I wouldn’t describe it as a particularly dark evening. Walmart was quite empty, and I was noting it was well stocked which made for a good shopping experience. Forgot to get toothpaste but I should hopefully have enough to last through the week.
Still in a bit of a haze from that sleeping pill or two I took last night before bed because I was worried about counteracting that caffeine had mid-day to snap awake before driving out to my parents house and then coming home and shopping in the evening. But I am certainly regretting my decision come today. I slept well, well past 6:30 AM which is very late for me, but I am just in a complete haze all day today.
All and all yesterday, wasn’t a bad day but wasn’t that productive either. I did dig out my truck and did some scrubbing down of the kitchen. Did some reading and worked on some maps. You know, just the usual things for a weekend. And then I went to the folks house, hung out for a while, and did my wash. Apparently, Mom and Dad are planning a 50th anniversary party over Easter Weekend so that might dash my plans for that weekend, but maybe I’ll plan a trip for the weekend before or after to the Adirondacks before the black flies are out in force. It might be cold and snowy out now, but we all know what is coming.
Been working on some new maps and content for the blog, as lately things have gotten a bit stale and needing of refreshment. As much as I’m interested in programming and databases, it’s important to stay skillfull and be able to make nice looking maps using QGIS — even if I do much of the data processing in RStudio or using a DuckDB. Or some other language like Python or C. But it’s good to keep making maps, get practice and get ideas on how to make things look beautiful.
I am oddly very proud that I use the XFCE 4 desktop environment on my computer. I love it, so old fashioned but fast.
It has not changed much since 2003, and even back then it was released as a throw back to the late 1990s for those who wanted a fast window manager and hated the gloss and new ways of doing things of Mac OS X, Windows 2003, and most notably GNOME 3. I just remember to 2003, how awful I thought GNOME 3 was and how refreshing of a throw back XFCE was.
Maybe that’s the great things about Linux in general. You don’t have to change as old reliable programs keep working with small features added over time but generally keep running the way they’ve always run.
AWK is the classic example – it’s turning 50 next year – a half century old – but it keeps working as it always has and still gets small useful new features like adding native CSV parsing. While Python can do much of what AWK does, nothing beats AWK for simple data processing.
The Mackinac Bridge is a suspension bridge that connects the Upper and Lower peninsulas of the U.S. state of Michigan. It spans the Straits of Mackinac, a body of water connecting Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, two of the Great Lakes
Even with the unusually cold weather we’ve been having, it’s clear that things are getting warmer as the sun angle increases! The sun angle is much stronger at 32.8° compared to less then 24° only a few weeks back in December. It was noticable and helped melt away much of snow we got last night, along with the warmer temperatures. Dusk isn’t until 5:48 PM which on a clear day means much more light in the evening. Spring is coming!
It should be entertaining to see when I get home to see where my neighbor puts his trash cans, now that he signed up for trash service. My old neighbor always put his trash and recycling cans on opposite sides of the driveway, which made it like threading a needle with my big jacked up truck. He was trying to get the landlord to put it on the rent bill, but I was like no, I’m quite happy hauling my cans to transfer station myself and saving the papers and other burnables for starting fires up at camp.
so that I wouldn’t hit the traffic and bright lights heading over to Glenmont. With the nearly full moon and the snow on the ground, plus salt on the roads I wouldn’t describe it as a particularly dark evening. 
Walmart was quite empty, and I was noting it was well stocked which made for a good shopping experience. 
Forgot to get toothpaste but I should hopefully have enough to last through the week. 
because I was worried about counteracting that caffeine had mid-day to snap awake before driving out to my parents house and then coming home and shopping in the evening. But I am certainly regretting my decision come today. 
I slept well, well past 6:30 AM which is very late for me, but I am just in a complete haze all day today.
I did dig out my truck and did some scrubbing down of the kitchen. 
Did some reading and worked on some maps. You know, just the usual things for a weekend. And then I went to the folks house, hung out for a while, and did my wash. Apparently, Mom and Dad are planning a 50th anniversary party over Easter Weekend 
so that might dash my plans for that weekend, but maybe I’ll plan a trip for the weekend before or after to the Adirondacks before the black flies are out in force. 
It might be cold and snowy out now, but we all know what is coming.
as lately things have gotten a bit stale and needing of refreshment. As much as I’m interested in programming and databases, it’s important to stay skillfull and be able to make nice looking maps using QGIS — even if I do much of the data processing in RStudio or using a DuckDB. Or some other language like Python or C. But it’s good to keep making maps, get practice and get ideas on how to make things look beautiful. 
XFCE