Newsbleat

This morning I listed an old lapidary machine on ebay. I have a few of them lying around that I’d acquired in trade back when the craft store was busy struggling to survive, and failing, and there’s a fair pile of stuff left yet just taking up space and contributing to the general clutter. I’ve been looking at it long enough, time for it to go. Now that I’ve broken the ice and navigated ebay’s current listing form, that seems to change more often than the tides, and succeeded in getting a first listing up, more will follow. This is my New Year’s Day Resolution that I committed to today, which I’ve officially declared to be the real New Year’s Day. Calendar printers, take note.

The ebay listing form has gone through a myriad of changes since I first joined up in 1995, and most of them have been confusing as hell. Then, just when you think you’ve mastered the damn thing, everything changes and you get to do it all again. If ebay isn’t the cause of the expression “If it ain’t broke, DON’T FIX IT”, then they should be.

Of course, everything they’ve done, every change they’ve made, has been for their benefit, not for those of us who use their online auction service, to make them more money, more more more money, as we watched in dismay while their rates and fees increased and more were added and the cost to us just kept on increasing in direct proportion to their hold on online auction selling. The greater their share of the market, the less competition they had, the more they charged. They called themselves ebay, but for us users, it’s Feebay.

I’m not even sure anymore. When they started out the fees were around 7% of the sale and now it’s at least 13%, maybe more. Sotheby’s Auctioneers charges less. I know, I’ve sold with them, and they have the wealthiest clientele on the planet. But for us general riffraff, it’s ebay because Sotheby’s has no interest in our cheap junk and no one forces us to use ebay. The plain truth is that they’re a lot more profitable than selling stuff at a yard sale on our front lawn.

They have refined their methods of making sure they get theirs first so exact and perfect that I don’t see any need for them to keep coders on the payroll anymore and chances are they already fired the ones who wrote them all that perfect, money-grubbing code. Less employees, more money for them. Yes, I do see ebay as being run by the living avatars of Ebeneezer Scrooge. So sue me for my opinion. I have good reason for it. Yes, I know that businesses are not charities but does ebay have to be quite so ruthless? It’s just offensive to me.

GLUTTONOUS MONSTER

© The Face Of A 3,500 Year Old Mycenaean Woman Has Been Revealed. Image credit: Juanjo Ortega. Dr. Emily Hauser, a historian and author, commissioned a digital facial reconstruction based on a clay mold of the woman’s skull.

Blacks do their best to come up with imaginative names for their children. Like Trayvon. It wasn’t until one named Trayvon got shot and Obama claimed him as a surrogate son that anyone had ever heard of that name, but it caused interest in black naming to greatly increase in the public mind.

In light of this wonderful imaginative naming trend, I have some suggestions to offer. Granola, Canola, Victrola and Shinola would make great names for black girls. I was thinking maybe a new TV game show modeled after Name That Tune, called Name That Coon could prove to be really popular, what do you think?

The name I’ve been saving for last is Ebola, since a lot of blacks all have it now and more are getting it, wouldn’t it make a great name for some little black infant girl? Ebola Jackson. Ebola Obama. Come on, tell me if that doesn’t really have a great ring to it, huh?

W.H.O. chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the very same person who backed Fauci and the Covid fraud, declared the Ebola outbreak to be a global emergency last week because the W.H.O. needs money to keep living it up in luxury. Ebola will have to spread out from Africa and into Europe and the Americas before it’s a global emergency, and that isn’t real likely since most people don’t get physical with the dead. The Africans do, someone dies of Ebola, they’re practically taking bites of the body in all the little rituals for the dead that they practice.

That’s why Ebola spreads among Africans, it’s their filthy practices. GOOGLE SAYS: Ebola spreads only through direct contact with body fluids of an infected, symptomatic, or diseased person. Google failed to mention that it’s also spread by handling a diseased corpse and then sucking on a finger, rubbing an eye or picking one’s nose or handling food and eating it without washing hands.

ANYWAY… this is the Afternoon Newsbleat Topic for today because there’s a genuine effort afoot to bring Ebola here and spread it around to start another Covid type panic scenario. Don’t go for it.

As we enter a brand new Fire Season here in sunny and Very Dry California, the two reservoirs above Los Angeles are both literally bone dry. Not a drop of water in either one, they were both completely drained shortly before the Pacific Palisades fire started and burned down the 16,000 homes that the water was supposed to be there to save. The reason the mayor gave for draining the water away is patently moronic and plainly invalid, and extremely suspicious to someone looking at land values. Fortunes may be made by opportunists because of this, and I’ll say no more about it. Not my concern.

As heavily populated as the whole Los Angeles basin is now, from the ocean to up and beyond the Hollywood Hills behind L.A., which are heavily forested with very dry and volatile brush, it will only take one idiot with a match and a westerly wind to wipe out a large portion of Southern California because there’s not enough borate powder on the planet to stop a fire that big, and there’s sure no water for it either.

All they have water for is drinking water and water rationing is coming soon as the summer comes on. Water rationing in California is a common occurrence in summertimes, people are told to flush toilets less, are fined for washing their cars in their driveways and watering their lawns.

Dirty cars and dead lawns have been the modest price that So. Californians have had to pay over the years because of the periodic water shortages, but things have changed. Now there’s so very many people living in all those wood houses that burn so brightly that were open land before, that will be cinders without water to put out fires when they start and which is exactly why the Pacific Palisades homes all burned down, all Sixteen Thousand of them.

I have a bad feeling about this year’s fire season.

My little garden in the early morning light. Not too bad for the middle of May, huh?

One of the cherry tomatoes is over 3 feet high and the other is close behind, the large type tomato plants are around 2 feet, those low lying plants in the raised bed are cucumber, butternut and acorn squashes for winter consumption, yellow squash and several scallop squash varieties I’m trying out for best flavor, along with some scattered lettuce plants, cilantro and a few radish varieties. In the far background in large growing pots are zucchini, which is already getting huge, and some perennials, horseradish, comfrey and peppermint.

The big green thing in the background, just right of center, on the ancient fence is a Thompson Seedless grape plant that’s been producing well. Out of view is a second raised bed, yet to be planted with starts but currently growing a crop of peas and cilantro. Also doing well are the two fig trees, and the little apricot tree I planted up on the hill in back has a nice first crop on it. Had to cover it in netting to keep the damned birds off it. I mean, if they would leave something in exchange, some old diamond rings or other trinkets they might have lying around their nests, I wouldn’t mind so much.

Soil amendments matter. That black soil has no relationship to the nearly worthless rocky clay dirt of the desert up here, it’s years in the making as I’ve added more compost and steer and chicken manures each spring along with blood and bone meal, wood ashes and Osmocote, which is a pelletized mix of lots of trace minerals. I do this every spring to replace what I’ve taken out in food.

The desert dirt at the bottom of this was tilled to a depth of about 8 inches and a few hundred pounds of rocks, large and small, removed and several cubic yards of nursery potting soil and fertilizer were tilled into it along with a couple pounds of store-bought live worms. If I remember right, that was 12 years ago. Once you have a good garden going, it’s a gift that keeps on giving only as long as you keep giving back to it.

I asked Google AI if the quality of meat has really badly degraded over just the past 2 or 3 years. Google AI responded: “It isn’t just you. Across consumer discussions and culinary circles, there is a widespread consensus that commercially available meat has changed. The shift is largely driven by industry changes prioritizing mass production and profit over traditional methods

Then it went on to describe the practices that have resulted in the truly serious degradation of the quality of meat, and not just in flavor and texture but in food value and safety. You actually might be healthier if you substituted tofu. Think on that one. They bred the cattle to mature faster to slaughter and no longer dry age the meat but pack it in bags of water to age instead, which all results in flavorless, mushy, water-soaked meat shot full of hormones and antibiotics.

Today, even the fish are all farmed, the only wild fish left in common supply at affordable prices is canned tuna, because tuna is actually a range of different related fish species that thrive in the ocean and would be nearly impossible to farm because they have such a wide feeding range.

All commercially farmed animals, pigs and chickens and fish, have been deprived of free ranging where they live off nature’s bounty, have free movement and eat a wide variety of foods. Instead they’re penned in and restricted in movement, often severely, so that they gain a lot of fat, and are fed a controlled diet designed for rapid weight gain. They’re processed solely for maximum profit with total disregard for flavor or food value, from the beginning of their lives to the weighed and sealed packages at the meat counter.

Why has it come to this for us who need good food to be healthy? It’s very simple. 8.3 billion people. 8,300,000,000 people. Eight point three times ten to the ninth people. To feed the burgeoning masses, the quality of the food must inevitably suffer in order to produce enough.

So now we have Bill Gates and others growing ersatz protein from cancer cells and farming crickets, and the specter of Soylent Green rises from the ancient archives of Hollywood films as a genuine possibility, as Planet Earth now circles a sun that’s sun-spotting and solar flaring Earth into the worst global El Nino drought in known history. Yes, it’s a fact. Food production is already way down. Shortage will empty the warehouses of what’s stored. That’s when the fun will really begin. 2026 is expected to be bad. 2027 is expected to be very bad.

The Main Stream Media isn’t going to tell you this because of the panic it would cause, but I don’t care about the panic, go ahead and panic, riot, loot and burn. You will anyway eventually, might as well get a good start on it now.

Yeah, I know, I keep harping on this crap but it’s real and valid crap, the world is way overpopulated and the tipping point has arrived when the meat tastes the same as chewing cardboard because quality NO LONGER MATTERS. Remember when taste and quality were the drivers of competition? That’s GONE! Now the stuff is crap, the price is unaffordable and fuck you if you can’t buy it, go eat the hens they slaughtered because the poor little egg factories were used up, it still tastes a little like chicken and even though it’s worthless it still puts something in your stomach, or go fill up on cheap starches. Anything for a meal.

A brand new news report states that an “explosive device” was found by workmen inspecting the dam underwater at a Mobile, Alabama water reservoir that’s designated as Critical Infrastructure.

Very little else is said about it other than it was later detonated safely. I’d like to know just exactly WHERE on that dam it was placed and how big an explosive it was, was it capable of remote detonation and are there more of these at a lot of other critical water reservoirs.

Is it time to do some intense inspections of all the nations dams?

That was the statement, in big bold letters, on a bumper sticker on the back bumper of my car in 1968, during the Vietnam War. It did piss off a lot of rabid blood and guts types and someone eventually tore it off when I wasn’t looking, demonstrating that those against my little protest were cowards and sneaks.

Today the Ukraine War rages on, but Trump says “not much longer”. Why does he say that? Simple. Both sides are running out of warm bodies to shove into the hamburger grinder. Can’t fight a war without fighters, no wonder everyone is trying so hard to develop killer robots.

The North Koreans, we are told, commit suicide if they get captured in battle because it shames the enemy and other bullshit reasons but the real reason is that their Great Leader told them their families would be slaughtered if they didn’t do it. That’s how worthless those people are to both Russia and N. Korea. No shame though, Russian soldiers have equal value, or lack of it actually.

This has been a bogus war from the start as far as the stated goal of conquering Ukraine is concerned. That’s more like the fortune cookie after the chow mien. The obvious reason for depleting Eastern Europe of so many young men was to test out new weapons in the field. The use of drones in warfare has been tremendously technologically advanced. It’s been a real revelation how useless tanks have become against drones and how difficult it is to defeat them. As methods evolved to jam their radios, jam-proof drones have been developed.

Along with this is the rapid development and the beginning of actual deployment of autonomous killer robots. That’s what Ukraine actually is, it’s a testing ground in real time for autonomous robot warfare. Right now the goal is using robots to kill people, how well they do is the current measure of effectiveness, but once the armies of the poor nations have been decimated, or while it’s in process, more likely, the testing of robots against robots will begin. After all, whoever has the most successful robots wins, right?

I wonder where all this will end. Wait, didn’t they make a movie about this?

Silver and gold are up again. My stash of precious metals is mostly in silver, simply because it’s more volatile than gold by far, and if you wait until it bottoms out and then buy, by the time gold has risen 20%, silver will have risen 40% – 50% and it’s time to sell. I’ve made a lot of “spare cash” over the years with timing and patience.

This last time around, however, when gold went over $5000 an ounce and silver hit $110, I held off selling, though I could have made enough profit to buy a couple nice new Teslas. This is because I knew the bubble was going to have a very short life, and apparently most others did as well, because the actual purchase price when it hit its low of $72 an ounce last week was still in the $90’s per ounce instead of being close to the low.

I was expecting that, which is why I didn’t sell. The buyback would have eaten nearly all my profit and it would have been a race to even make a profit. As it is right now, silver is back up to $87 an ounce and while it will no doubt keep rising and falling like the tides, it’s going to trend steadily upward. The “experts” online say it may hit $110 again by the end of 2027. I’m pretty sure it will be at least $150 an ounce by then because of inflation and industrial demand. Gold will also rise with it, of course.

I might be wise to sell it all off before the end of this year, however. The two primary Globalist factions seem to be unifying and the more they come together, the more everything is affected. We all know how unpredictable life has become simply from all the unbridled immigration promoted by the Globalists. It will become much more so with the looming food and fuel scarcity and inflation. Values are going to change, hunger and scarcity always bring new perspectives with them.

You’ve all been very patient waiting to hear about my stereos, so no more revelations on our impending doom at the hands of mutant aliens, for awhile anyway and besides, this is far more important that something like the extinction of humans. Such a boring species, Hieronymus Bosch’s portrayal of Hell was really just an average, everyday depiction of human behavior.

Yes, My Stereos. Well, after ebay belched forth an exact vintage replacement in prime working order for my sadly ailing power amplifier and it was hooked into the system with the other matching components and all was working properly, I decided to connect it to my old speakers, which are a pair of Qysonic Arrays purchased in 1984, same year the book was written about. And I have to say, as a prediction, it fell abysmally short. Anyway, My Stereos…

On doing so and playing a Jon and Vangelis cd, it was immediately obvious that there was nothing wrong with the speakers, so the distortion must have been all in the one remaining functional channel of the old power amplifier.

Since I’d already purchased a very nice used vintage Mitsubishi pre-amp through ebay as a backup, and I now have a new pair of high end tower speakers because I’d thought the old ones were farshimelt, like I said before only I didn’t say farshimelt, and now know they really aren’t farshimelt at all, it only made sense to find and purchase a matching vintage Mitsubishi power amplifier, a media cabinet, heavy speaker cables and so forth and so on, and set this all up in my bedroom so I can have fine stereo music in there too.

The speakers are in place, the cables are run, waiting on the arrival of the amplifier and cabinet to complete this project.

When you live alone and don’t support a wife who Thank God left me without demanding alimony, but no doubt her taking up with another woman was a big help in that, and the ungrateful kids are gone so no one is coming to me for help anymore, they all got married and are stuck with having to help themselves, it’s in times like these that we get to selfishly spend it all on ourselves and don’t have to worry about making anyone else happy, let alone put up with any of their happy horseshit.

Can you imagine if I was still married and had a kid or three running around, with a stereo system in the living room and another in my bedroom? The kids would be fighting over what horrible music they wanted to play, my wife would be playing some shit from some lesbian guitarist and I’d be running for the circuit breakers.