Coping: Trump Should Sue, and Other Ideas

(I will politely not ask if you are reading today’s column at the usual time since this weekend was National Gullibility Time.)

As I told Peoplenomics.com subscribers this weekend, Donald Trump should sue because if the shoe were on the other foot, I’m sure the U.S. Department of Just Us would be screaming violation of constitutionally protected free speech by the Chicago thugs.

And who is organizing the thuggery?  Well, here’s an idea.

That’s an easy thing to fix, though, or at least it should be if Trump’s right to free speech at his own freaking gathering is impeded by knuckle-draggers who try to bust up his rally.

In Ure’s book, free speech is just that: FREE. 

And part of FREE means not having to be there if you don’t happen to agree with the idea.  This is the same kind of Bolshevik tactics we’ve seen elsewhere on the radical Left in the past.  I know because I was one of the reporters who was regularly stampeded and gassed while covering the anti-war activists back then.

No, it was not a just war…but Trump is running for Warmonger in Chief, he’s running for President.

Now, if you want to inspect she-of-whom-we-don’t mention, THERE is your corporate war supporter.

To fill out the commentary, I should mention that over the course of 50-years of serious news-watching, it has been my observation that people’s politics get further Left, the more their incomes go down.  If incomes go too high, then things veer into the ditch on the Right, so there’s really no winning.

Still, we all know that the Right-Left dialectic has nothing to do with a real right and a real left.  It’s just the way the power players at the top keep everyone else in line.

So if you want to push more spending, you dial up the lefty groups in colleges.  If you want to dial it back a bit, you step on the right’s gas pedal.

Except in this case, the UIC promoters of terrorism and stealing Trump’s right to free speech (like at age 25 these kids know shit from Shinola, right?) can be identified.

And if they can be identified, they can be served.  As in with papers.

If it were me – and I might not even be elected county commissioner which I’m running for this fall – I would get a team of lawyers on the case.

My marching orders would be simple:

1.  Find the individuals who organized the Facebook pages and sue the living crap out of them for abrogation of Civil Rights.

2.  Sue the Federal government for the lack of response on the part of their Civil Rights group which while they seem to be able to take care of issues on behalf of the whole alphabet of genders these days, and every illegal sneaking in with a load of drugs, can’t step on the toes of the loving Left that put ‘em in office.

So there you have it.  I’ve read the Art of the Deal (so has Elaine) and this is what A REASONABLE BUSINESS RESPONSE WOULD BE.

When wronged, sue.  Sue Big and Sue Often.  And pay what it takes to win.

Of course, this would only upset the American apple cart more than it already is:  Sure as a reasonable district court judge rules one way, there would be an appeal until sooner, or later, the case would land in the hands of an Obama appointee and then it gets tossed.

But in the meantime, it would teach the kids some manners.  You can’t act irresponsibly in America and get away with it.

Or, at least, that used to be the case.

Guess we will find out in coming months whether it is still the case.

In the meantime, I’m all for raising the voting age to 25, or upon completion of military service with an honorable discharge.  Those are the people who have their feel (or boots) on the ground and have enough sense to make policy.

Spoiled kids on grants and mommy and daddy’s dime getting radicalized by the Olde Chitown Lefties? 

There’s a read Greg Hinz was able to write a fine summary in “Chicago is Still #1 for Public Corruption” last year.

All the liberals hate to be outed like this, but here we are and now we’ve all seen the evidence.

Trump should sue the promoters…pure and simply.  And with lots of significant zeroes.  Even if he were to lose, it would cause a sudden growing up of some folks for whom it is long past time.

You do remember the story from December?  A university in Scotland that had awarded Trump an honorary degree actually revoked it because, said the university, some of the things he was saying in his campaign were not in tune with what the university was peddling.

One of America’s all-time most successful businessmen (and author of the still best-selling Art of the Deal) is finding those hallowed halls of academic are still failing to teach critical thinking either to faculty, administration, or students.

The poor have always screamed at the rich.  But in Chicago, the screaming is easier than just getting out there are making more money than Trump…oh wait…that might entail hitting the books instead of the bricks.

A Useful Computing Tip

As I was laying in bed reading last night, I happened upon an interesting features in the Kindle Fire HD:  If you are reading with the idea of capping off a busy day, unwinding, and looking to decompress a bit, you should turn down the white and blue colors on your LCD.

On the newer Kindles there is a “night switch” for reading that turns off the blue portion of LED spectrum so as not to mess with your body’s melatonin levels.

As someone who is sensitive to light levels and cycles (and yes, I used melatonin this weekend to reset my personal clock a bit) this is actually a pretty cool feature.

I haven’t seen much on this elsewhere, but if you are doing a lot of late night coding and want to blow off the melatonin/sleep response, one thing to try might be pushing the monitor more to the white/blue range to scare off a sane work schedule.

A Little Code-Talking

I don’t often mention the inner-workings of the UrbanSurvival, or for that matter, the Peoplenomics.com website, or for that matter RurualPioneers.com.

But there is a fair amount that goes on behind-the-scenes which is at least partly interesting.

You should (with any luck)_ notice that the website is a bit faster this morning, which is due to me spending six hours Sunday morning on a major retooling of things.

We had a problem develop recently with an add-in which we used to speed up performance a bit.  It did the speed part fine, but it also threw the pages up so fast that it was not completely building the arriving page – so it you noticed an annoying flash of plain text, that should be mostly gone now.

Setting up a web site that has a few ads on it is always a balancing act:  I try to be mindful of the people who subscribe to Peoplenomics – don’t want to blast them with ads.  On the other hand, people who don’t subscribe?  Well, no problem with them chipping in with a pair of eyeballs on an ad or two.

There’s another angle to the ad paradox, as well.  In today’s crazy world the speed of a website has a lot to do with its rankings in search engines.  As you add content from third parties (which two of the ads in the right column are – they’re from Google) you pay a small price in speed while a line of code goes from my website tyo Google and finds an ad that might be interesting to you.

This causes round trips among the snippets of code, but with two ads, we generate about $500 a month from Google alone.  They think we have an audience worth reaching.  In the great financial scheme of things, the Amazon ads also bring in several hundred a month.  Such that by the end of the year, the advertising just about pays for the computing infrastructure, the odd book or hundred for research, with about enough leftover from that to buy a 3-pound can of coffee.

I’m still not sure why I get up early and subject either you or me to the abuse of the hour, but it’s the most important time of the day for managing our money, and so it may be for others, including you, too.

Around the Ranch:  Land Must Dry

With no rain in the forecast for a few days, we should be able to win “toilet roulette” out here in flood country by mid-week.  Septic systems are great, until the ground is saturated.  Then, not so much. 

Ours is a gravity type system – namely because while they use up more land, they are also free of pumps and such to mess things up.

Once we get the ground a little firmer, I will be able to get back to tractoring, but already we’re about to get a first taste of summer as the predicted high today is in the mid-80’s.  Next week, back to the mid 70’s which is better working weather.  Still, it does remind us that at the end of winter there is summer.  And most years, not enough of the really great weather in-between.

Shop Talk

Two projects got done this weekend, not that either is particularly notable.  But I did build up (and got running) one of those Raspberry Pi computer-based ADS-B receivers for our airplane.

If you’re a pilot, you can find how to make one of these gems by going to www.stratux.me.

The only problem with the unit (so far) is that I haven’t had time to SSH into the code and change the SSID on the wireless side of things.  The ADS-B units have become a real “disruptive technology” that we’ve been mentioning at various steps along the way.

My ADS-B receiver cost about $185 in parts.  A factory-built one runs about $900.  That’s the kind of value proposition we like to see.

All Sunday afternoon, I let the new unit throw GPS positions into the www.ifly.com/androidbeta/ software running on my latest Kindle Fire HD.  Near as I could figure, battery life with the screen on “blast your eyes out” was 4-hours and 25 minutes with the app constantly updating.

I know there’s a way to power all this stuff from the plane, but I’m not too keen to do it.  Wires strung around the cockpit of an airplane where they could get in the way just isn’t my cup of tea.  The big GPS (iFly 740 which has a superior sunlight readable display compared to the Kindle) is wired into ship’s power.

About the only other project that got finished up was I made up another set of magnetic sign material gas filler covers for my flight instructor.

Flush-mount gas caps are great on go-fast airplanes, but if you leave the plane out in the rain (and sometimes traveling you don’t have a choice) you can get water in the gas and that’s not something you want to get acquainted-with on take-off.

Solution was to get some of that magnetic sign material.  The kind they stick on the side of vehicles for advertising.  Cut into a 6” circle, then sprayed with (what else on a farm?) Kubota Orange paint, then a sticker that reminds ramp attendants what we drink…and then some label-machine labels to finish if off.

On my flight instructor’s pair, I also put ‘REMOVE BEFORE FLYING” stickers.  I’ll let you know in sox months, or so, if he forgets.

Now to the contest:

OK: I over-ordered a bit.  Can you think up anything else useful to do with these sheets of magnetic sign material?

It’s calling to me like a fresh jug of SuperGlue.  You just know there is something cool you can do with either the SuperGlue or a bunch of PVC pipe and assorted fittings.  But damned if I could think of anything at the moment.

I did try a sheet of it on the kitchen fridge, but the stainless was too good for the magnetic material to get traction.  The sheets are too small to cover a 55-gallon barrel…

Once some of the humidity leaves, I will get back to winding my anti-gravity project coils.  That went to the back burner because winding coils when it’s really humid out just isn’t fun.  This morning, we might be able to finish off that part of the project.

It’s amazing what you can do for distractions when you’re trying to be retired and realize you’re still just an over half-crazy workaholic on an unsane planet…

But that does make two of us…

A Note from Dream Land

Another “not sure what to make of it” dream.  I won’t go through the whole thing, but it somehow had something to do with AIDS/HIV and medicine.  There was also some kind of “code” involved.  So, in terms of what to look for in headlines to come, that is an odd area to pop up.

What I seem to be learning from my research on dreams is that “the future” is not so much hinted at in the specific content of a dream.  It’s more like its placement in the dream is significant.

In other words, something like this AIDS/HIV event or story was clearly “in background” and was not highly immediate.  In other dreams, where things have been more forthcoming, the dream features things that are bigger elements and more in your face.

If you think of a dream in terms of graphics:  Personal and immediate would be the foreground elements.  Impersonal, not as immediate fades toward the background.  If you, too, are working on getting more out of your dreams in terms of ideas, guidance, and insight, considering things in a foreground to background way might help you pick up more useful content from your dreams.

Or not.  We shall see…

Write when you break-even,

George@ure.net