Newsbleat

They finally got the message, that the USA isn’t going to pay this bill. France has announced that they’re sending “Defensive troops and defense systems to Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea port city Yanbu to secure the city’s energy facilities from Houthi attacks”. “We are going to send military resources, that is to say, soldiers, radar systems and defense systems, to protect this site – not to get us involved in any conflicts, but to protect this site,” Macron told French media Thursday.”  France is joining the United Kingdom, Italy, Greece and others already there defending Europe’s oil supply, since the US has pointedly declined the Saudi’s repeated requests to defend them.

The French have no desire to involve themselves in a fight with Iran but they’re stuck without a winter supply of energy to heat their homes this coming winter unless they step up and act to protect it. The USA is no longer going to sacrifice our soldiers and treasure to do what France and the rest of Europe should be doing for themselves.

Because Putin won’t quit, Russia’s oil refineries are being destroyed by Ukrainian drones while Saudi Arabia’s refineries are being attacked by Houthi missiles and Iran’s drones. You can pump all the oil out of the ground that you want to, but it can’t be used unless you can refine it and it’s for damn sure that Western Europe has zero interest in defending Russian refineries.

 

Last night I watched a couple episodes of “World’s Worst Neighbor”, and while I have to admit that they were worse than Mr. B. Riggs who was my neighbor for ten years, they weren’t worse by much.

The neighbor in his place  now is a far different sort, he’s a rather stupid fellow who thinks he’s a clever con artist. He does have a definite work ethic, to his credit, stays busy around his place doing repairs and steadily adding more and more doodads and trinkets to adorn his home and grounds, literally to a fault, with the little windmills, dry birdbaths, wind chimes, things that light up at night and so forth.

It’s the con artist part that makes me avoid him. It’s okay to gaudy up your home in hopes of gaining attention, some of us have that need, it’s what you do once you have someone’s attention that matters. This is the same person who tried to just walk into my home uninvited and painted my cedar fence white that’s entirely on my property and faces his, without asking. Among a variety of lesser intrusive and disrespectful offenses.

Yesterday afternoon, on driving back from the short trip to the post office, he came walking up wanting to show me something in his back yard that “might concern me”, and what it is, is where the people who did the rehab on his home in the aftermath of Mr. Riggs ownership, had jack-hammered away about 16 feet length of the retaining wall that held back the earthen 4 foot high cliff created when his parcel was made level on our sloping hillside by bulldozing the earth away where our property lines meet.

The rest of that 50 year old retaining wall is in bad shape as it is, but still has perhaps 15 or 20 years to go before it collapses, as did the portion that was removed. Now here’s the thing: Two things, actually. The first is that where the wall was removed is a newly replaced 50 foot tall power pole, sunk 7 feet into the earth, the cliff is only 3 feet away from it, is 4 feet high and is eroding now, endangering the stability of that power pole.

The other thing is that this retaining wall, built on our mutual property line, is there because the developer created that cliff to level the lower parcel, and by law the owner of the lower parcel is fully liable for the maintenance of that wall because it was created for the improvement of his property, not mine.

So back to John the new neighbor showing me how he’s attempting to deal with the erosion by cementing 4 by 4 wood posts in the ground to brace up a couple sheets of 1/2 inch cheap chipboard, and he’s filling the 4 foot deep gap between them and the cliff with dirt, leaving about a foot width of walkway alongside his garage.

I pointed out the folly of this feeble construction and told him he needed to build a real wall with concrete blocks and rebar and that’s when the con finally appeared. “Aren’t you concerned? What do you think? Do you think this will work? Doing this is expensive, those concrete blocks are expensive, I don’t have the money, what would you do about this” and so on.

Wishing  him Good Luck on his project, I went home. This is all a good thing, really. Don’t get me wrong, this is no problem for me, just the opposite, it’s More Entertainment. There’s a lot of liability here, and none of it is mine.  Now I’ll be watching closely when our winter rains come, to see how his chipboard holds up. One phone call to the power company will have an agent out here inspecting the mess if things start looking bad and the pole is endangered, the power company will fix the problem and hang a big fat lien on his property title and I’ll have a nice new section of retaining wall.

 

I just deleted the post about “Iran’s future and why it matters” because I don’t think anyone gives a shit, to replace it with this post, because everyone at some time has wondered how magnets work. I have, all my life, and I finally put the pieces together and figured it out a few weeks ago.

Modern physics bears me out, as do several major, publicly accessible AIs. In case you’re wondering, I’m a sort of armchair physicist. Mathematics are not my thing, philosophy and the ability to visualize are my tools in exploring and understanding our world, and delving into the Alcubierre Warp Drive Metric is what provided the path to the answer. Give credit where it’s due.

It’s all about Resonance. Physicists have found that all forms of energy operate within frequency ranges. Light, for instance. It was the discovery of how to make light resonate within a “cavity” that created lasers. This, by the way, is exactly how RADAR works, as I learned when in the US Navy. When energy resonates within a cavity, called, of course, a “resonant cavity” because the physical dimensions of the cavity correspond to the wave length at resonance, this allows the resonating energy to accumulate within the cavity. Then a burst of energy is inserted, forcing out the accumulated energy as a pulse.

All energy forms are related under one set of rules except for the Strong Nuclear Force, which I won’t get into here, and this is why magnets make electricity, electricity makes magnets, generates heat, generates light, radio waves and so on. It all starts with atoms.

Atoms, composed of three basic particles, have a collective frequency which is the combined frequency of its particles. ( I have to insert here that “particles” is just an expression for points of energy. All “matter” is composed of points of energy.)  What binds atoms together is the resonance of these frequencies with each other. Atomic particles, Protons, Neutrons and Electrons, all have resonate frequencies that bind with each other.  It really helps if you can visualize this, so think about three people with beautiful, strong voices who are singing a song, one carries the basic tune and the two others start harmonizing. Suddenly the sound has more force, more solidity, it pulls you in. Now imagine a dozen singers, singing in harmony.  Just as it is with human hearing, resonance is an attractive force in atomic structure and all energy forms including sound have points of resonance.

Resonance combines energies and locks them together and at the atomic level where everything is pure energy, cancelling resonance is what releases that energy. It seems vast to us, the amount of energy of an atomic bomb that results from such a small amount of explosive material, but it’s not, that’s just our comparison of it to lesser chemical reactions.

Now to Magnets and Iron, which is the magnetic material we’re most familiar with. All elements have their inherent properties, gold is a soft metal that never oxidizes, chromium is an extremely hard and brittle metal, oxygen readily combines with most other elements, and so on. Iron atoms have the ability to re-align in a polar manner in the presence of an energy field. I think this is an inherent property caused by their specific field combination of protons, neutrons and electrons but I haven’t really focused on that and I’m not sure, so don’t quote me. In any case, if you induce an electric current in a piece of iron, it will magnetize, or if you rub a piece of iron, like a needle, with a magnet, it will magnetize the needle.

What happens is all the atoms polarize under the influence of the applied energy field. Think of billions of spinning gyroscopes all perfectly aligned with each other, their axes all pointing in exactly the same direction and all of their energy fields resonantly locked together and radiating in the same direction along the axis and you then can see why magnets do what they do. The combined field is almost infinitely greater than that which one iron atom produces.

When a magnet comes near iron, its field begins resonating with the fields of of the atoms in the iron and this resonation increases as distance decreases and more of the magnet’s field is able to interact with the iron and the mutual polar alignments increase. The atoms are pulled tightly toward each other through resonant attraction. Simple as that.

About 3 years after I bought this place that I live at now, I got a whopping big water bill and a search revealed that the pipe to the house from the City water line ran diagonally under the recently laid new concrete driveway. Apparently the pipe wasn’t buried deeply enough and the weight of the slab poured above it cracked it.

Since I wasn’t going to rip out the driveway, I ran a new pipe alongside of it and connected it into the house water system, bypassing the old pipe. That was about 11 or 12 years ago and in the interim, I’ve had to shut off the valve at the street a dozen times to replace the toilet flush gadgets and a few sink faucets and so forth, and that City valve has started to leak. I needed to replace yet another toilet flush valve last week and couldn’t shut the water off fully, and had water all over the bathroom floor before I was able to complete the replacement.

Then yesterday, the old sink faucet in the other bathroom gave out and I wasn’t ready for another flooded bathroom, so I did what I should have done sooner. Went to the hardware store and bought a PVC plastic ball valve and a can of PVC glue, turned off the water as best it would go, cut the pipe and glued in the new valve. Fortunately, it held and now, when the new bathroom faucet arrives, I can take those pipes loose without the mess.

It’s a good thing I can do this stuff or I’d be constantly making some happy plumber’s new BMW payments every month, at the rate things keep falling apart around here.

He did it. Today Trump announced a deal with Denmark for what amounts to a virtual takeover of Greenland. A deal was made at no cost to either party for the US to have total military dominance over Greenland along with mineral rights, forever. No one else allowed except NATO allies on US approval. This will do wonders for the people there, the US is about to start building new bases and they’ll be employing many of the locals. Prosperity is finally coming to those poor, hard-scrabbling folks in Greenland and a massive security boost is coming to North America.

Just two days ago I told you that petrol in Europe was going to get really scarce, really soon, and you over there should stock up on some spare fuel. This morning the Saudis told European refiners that they’ll get no oil next month because they had to shut down that pipeline that the Houthi’s blew up. Repairs are going to take awhile.

I wasn’t expecting the pipeline attack to be the cause of this, I was expecting the Houthis shutting off the Bab al Mandab Strait to  be sufficient. The Saudis aren’t saying much, blaming this all on the pipeline, but not much is going through the Strait of Hormuz now in spite of Trump’s claims and most likely this is because the Saudis decided not risk any more tankers to the Houthi threat now that they’ve taken over the Yemen port city of Mokha, at the mouth of the Red Sea and the pinch point of the Bab al Mandab Strait.

The Saudis are in serious trouble and their request to Trump yesterday for military aid was denied, as I knew it would be (and said so). They and the rest of those M.E. oil producers are going to have to fight this battle on their own.

This is a comment Trump made to Axios yesterday about the conflict with Iran:

“I have a big decision coming up. Do I want to go in and annihilate them [the Iranian regime] or do I not? It’s a big decision. Anything could happen with me.”

Gee, I don’t know. Should I annihilate Iran or should I not? I might, I might not, who knows? Anything could happen with me. Umm, REALLY? Anything could happen with me?

We have two grocery stores in our little town, one is a locally owned franchise store called Grocery Outlet and the other is Mega Monster Corporate Giant Octopus Vons Grocery. Since the much higher priced Vons has fresher produce and always has better brands, I shop there when I’m after specific stuff.

Bear in mind that I’m getting crankier as my left eye very slowly but definitely gets a little darker over time and I don’t like it. It’s causing me to screw up, nothing major, but small mistakes add up.

Anyway, no problem getting in the door and getting the initial shopping done in the produce section, then on to the meat counter where I asked the woman I’d never seen in there before, for 2 pounds of bacon and 4 of the nice big sausages next to the chorizo sausage, which will burn your mouth out and make it permanently useless. She hands me my packages and off I trundle, to get a dozen eggs, a tub of margerine and two bottles of my favorite creamer. Then a few more items and over to the checkout. Now the fun begins.

I slide my card through the strip reader, NO. Push it into the chip reader. NO, strip reader, NO, finally the chip reader accepts it, BUT FIRST, would I like to donate to… No, I would not. Okay, I’m asked to give to something else, I push No, okay then, would I like to be involved in some other goddam thing, No, I push NO a third time and then it presents me with two options, “If you agree to allow us to send you email ads from God Knows how many sellers of whatever we sell your information to, Press Here”. NO. At that point I uttered JESUS CHRIST, which earned me a scowl from the fat, dumpy old twat at the register.

My hell sakes, what is wrong with those people that they do their best to make shopping in their stores as repugnant an experience as possible? No one goes to the grocery mart to be hounded for donations to anything, and it happens I researched what they do with the money and only 3% goes to any charity, the rest is “operating expenses”.

On arriving home, I found that I’d bought the coffee creamer brand that I hate because they’ve changed their colors and appearance to mimic the best selling one, which is of course the one I buy, because it’s the best. I wouldn’t have made this mistake if it weren’t for that Damned Eye, and Poe be damned as well.

Ah, but we’re not quite done. I told that butcher lady I wanted four of those sausages. Somehow she heard Three, which is what I actually came home with but at least that’s all I was charged for. There is that.

A duck could quack a better lie than when “President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the war with Iran could reach what he called “a really good conclusion” even before the November election, suggesting the conflict could end sooner than he previously expected” and this isn’t the first time he’s pushed this nonsense, while “Vice President Vance warned Wednesday that a U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East would trigger a “worldwide energy crisis” as Iran continues targeting commercial shipping.”

Quaaaack quack quack. Trump is spouting this crap for November votes, trying to keep economic confidence up in the face of the inflation bubble that keeps getting bigger. In fact the Fed FINALLY increased the Federal interest rate to slow inflation down, no doubt too little too late, while Vance tells the whopper that the US getting out of the Middle East fracas would cause a global energy crisis, when the truth is that the US caused it by being there and there’s no chance of it all ending until Western oil production is back in a commanding lead. The Nov. mid-term elections have nothing to do with it.

I explained all this in recent posts and no need to bore you with a re-run, I’m just having fun watching these con men do their spiels. While you’re listening to their blatant lies, keep in mind that Vance is the Numero Uno choice for the next US president. Would Diogenes laugh, or despair? What do you think?

In my post below, “Remembering With A Vengeance”, I stated that the US wasn’t going to help the Saudis against the Houthi attacks, and in this morning’s news I have confirmation of that:

“US President Donald Trump said on Saturday that the Houthis had phoned his administration asking the United States to keep out of the Yemen war. Vice President JD Vance said on Monday the United States was in direct contact with the group, without giving details.”

Re-reading this morning’s post, I thought it might be good to point out that my Great Uncle MacDonald lived to 102. Almost everyone else on both sides of the family made it to 95 or longer. If you’re waiting for me to expire, I suggest you don’t hold your breath. I’m in great health.