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Month: January 2016

How would you do in supermax?

Let’s hope none of us ever have to find out. But it appears the keys to surviving solitary confinement with your sanity intact are “grit” and an ability to direct your imagination. Here’s the official grit self-assessment. So where do you rate? Me? Well, directed imagination, I’ve got. Comes with the writer territory. Grit … not so much. I think, though, that when people take the grit test they’re tending to do the “90 percent of everybody is above average” variety of evaluation. Sitting at our computers it’s easy to say, “Yeah, sure, I never let setbacks discourage me. And…

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Living space!

This is going to sound very silly to some of you smart guys, but I’ve never been up in the attic crawl space of this house. Reasons are complicated and I’ll probably go into them in some future BHM article. I knew generally what was up there, but until today I’d never even climbed a ladder, stuck my head through the cobwebby little hatch, and flashlighted around. I didn’t go walkabout up there; just stayed on the ladder. But where I thought I’d find only unappealing but potentially useful storage space, I found this: That peak is about nine feet…

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Weekend links

Well. Now we know why the “service economy” keeps growing even as everything else falls into the Dumpster. The whole story in one graph. Here’s another big story in one graph. This one’s about gold. Are MSM outlets Photoshopping pix of Hillary (or using Photoshopped pix provided by her campaign) to make her look as much as 30 years younger than she really is? This is precisely why we should be using email encryption even for sharing our chocolate chip cookie recipes. Smack that snotty, crowing NSA right in its face. (Tip o’ hat to S.) Will Switzerland end fractional…

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Update: Mike Vanderboegh work weekend

The event is next weekend and Mike has an update on the work party/bbq. Donations have already helped make some repairs but more gratitude offerings are always welcome to help feed the volunteers, buy supplies, and enable Mike to finish writing Absolved once his house and yard are in order. If you’re going to Pinson to help out, plan to provide your own overnight accommodations, but the Vanderboeghs and donors will supply what sounds like plentiful food. And thank you!

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Paul Kantner, RIP

Oh no. Another great classic rocker — folk-rocker, acid-rocker — is gone. Paul Kantner was always a favorite, not only for his slightly geeky beauty, mellow voice, and style, but because he had a science-fiction sensibility that marked his greatest songs. For all his rockstar cool, I always felt like he was One of Us — the high school misfits, the people who “think too much” for their own good, the ones who’d probably rather be in their bedrooms reading Asimov, Heinlein, and Bradbury than getting public attention. People who’d rather not be messed with by authority, too. Besides, I…

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Friday links

“Ayn Rand Made Me a Communist.” Um … you’d probably have to be a regular New Republic reader and already know how Jacob Bacharach is one; he doesn’t actually explain, except in a vague-ish indirect way. It’s still an interesting essay, though. Question not asked: If this homeless guy can do all this, then why is he homeless? Not a bad analysis of how the R-Party is coming apart at the seams. Leaves out factors you and I know well, but seems right in its basics. Georgia state representative commits civil disobedience to get medical marijuana to sick kids. Yeah,…

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A mega-scrounge project (not mine)

In the olden days, people around here built garages (or perhaps they were originally carriage houses) on steep, otherwise useless, hills. The front of the building faced the street while the rest of the structure stood on posts. These great old garages had magnificent 4 x 12 treated floors you could have parked a tank on. But the combo of wooden understructures and unstable soils of the hills doomed the buildings. Ninety or a hundred years later, most of them are gone and those that remain look like this: Until a couple weeks ago, this one was still completely shingled…

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Another major atmospheric “punch”

You easties had your snowpocalypse days in the headlines. Now the action shifts. After (yet another damn) major atmospheric river fist-punches the NorthWET tonight, it’s going to swing south and seriously clobber California by Friday. Could also be catastrophic windstorms, even a cyclone, by the weekend (though maybe not). Stay tuned.

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Wednesday links

The feds have broken the Oregon standoff with arrests and one killing. A remnant remains. Leaders were apparently lured out on the pretext of attending a community meeting and trapped at a roadblock. Why? Why not wait them out? (H/T db) David Codrea exposes and righteously blasts the latest junk-science study op-ed from “prestigious” anti-gun medical sources. “Does stupidity cause gun control, or does gun control cause stupidity?” Bear Bussjaeger speculates. I’ve never understood the mentality that official (or family) wrongdoing is fine as long as no one exposes it and that any person exposing the wrongdoing is somehow the…

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Tuesday links

In the schadenfreude department: Melissa Click, the social-justice pecksniff who shoved one reporter and called for “muscle” to remove another from a public demonstration, has been charged with assault. Despite using annoying “gun violence” language, this CNN article brings the good news that mental health professionals aren’t likely to sit still for Obama administration attempts to label every mentally ill person as too dangerous to own a firearm. With statistics, even! From Microsoft: useful, creepy, or both? If this is accurate in describing how classified material “escapes” from secure servers and ends up on private ones, then Hillary and several…

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