I don’t think there are many people on this planet who have thought about the perfect hot dog chili more than I. I am not proud of this but that is the way I am wired. I enjoy small pleasures in life and try to figure out how to reproduce them, and then maybe (maybe) make them better.

I understand the dynamics of creating a great chili. It is the mixture of heat, flavorful ingredients and texture. Great chilis can be served in many ways. The best chili, in my opinion, should be served alone in a large bowl by itself. It has large chunks of meat and other great ingredients. The next best way to serve it is as a topping for spaghetti Cincinnati-style, with cheese, onions and whatever else piled on top. The least appreciated way, but a very common one, is as a topping for a chili dog. I think this is mostly in the Carolinas. There if you order a hot dog you need to decide if you want chili, slaw and mustard on it, or chili, onions and mustard. It is a binary decision. Pickles, ketchup or, G-d forgive, mayonnaise are maybe things you can squirt out of a packet, if you wish. But on a chili dog the only choice is between slaw or onions, though you can always embrace the power of “and.”

Everything changed for me when American cities were burning in 2020. It wasn’t the burning so much as the hypocrisy of the experts. For months, Americans had been subjected to the unlawful suspension of their civil liberties and we were continually lectured that it was due to “the science,” “expert opinion” and the need to protect poor ol’ grandma. But as soon as there was an opportunity to exploit a tragic death to throw a grenade into race relations, all in support of progressive political interests, the supposed “science” changed and the “experts” were suddenly transformed, like lizard people, into apparatchiks, brazenly working in service to the progressive cause. Magically, racism was declared a greater risk than Covid. So long as your protesting and burning and looting were useful to progressives, the prior suspension of your civil liberties was lifted. Not so much for anyone else.

I made good time. According to the clock on the dashboard, it’s only three hours since I left home. And that’s including the time I took stopping at McDonald’s for a breakfast biscuit, and the slow traffic in Charlotte that seemed to have no discernible cause.

And yet the drive has taken me the distance of an entire lifetime. I turn the corner onto the street where I grew up, and everything looks exactly the same as it has looked for the last fifty years. Nothing ever changes here. But for the first time ever, I have a feeling I’ve never had before: I don’t really recognize this place anymore. How can that be, when it hasn’t changed?

On February 7, 2020 I posted Coronavirus 2019n-CoV: Are You Paying Attention? Little did I know then how our world would change and would continue to be affected. I am posting today about coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and the present magnetic storm that is invisible to us except in its effects. And those effects at the moment seem regionally inconvenient, just as did coronavirus in early 2020. And had it stayed there it would have been of little moment. But it did not, and CMEs have civilization-ending potential as much or more than a disease. Before you tune out, let me assure you that if this was just some “prepper” concern, entertaining as it would be for a niche audience, I would not bother to post. My intention, as it was in 2020, is to put something on your radar for consideration and thought.

There probably isn’t a better starting point than this tweet from Bret Weinstein:

We were paged out yesterday evening for a huge live oak tree limb that had fallen into the road.  It was only a little way from our home so I got the chain saw out while a couple of other firefighters went to the station to get more equipment.  I was at it for maybe fifteen minutes when a guy stopped and said his excavator was being hauled to his nearby home/business and asked if we wanted some help. The excavator cleaned up the debris in about 20 minutes versus the couple of hours it would have taken us.   We have our big annual fundraiser tonight so I’m inviting this guy and his crew to come and eat on our dime.   During the work a half dozen people passing by offered help, and this is a fairly quiet country road.  You can see another large limb that has been worrisome for a long time – our road and bridge crews are coming out soon to take these big limbs down as they give almost no warning before they come down.  The base of that limb was so heavy it lifted one track off the ground a few times while he was pushing it.

Mass protests have become popular with the radical Left because they work. They can achieve results unattainable through the political process or the courts by producing chaos and intimidating the cowardly leaders of our universities and government.

When the antisemitic, pro-Islamist demonstrations broke out on multiple university campuses this spring, most Americans assumed it was just naïve, ill-educated kids doing their thing. Why wouldn’t they? Protesting is a hoot. You’re showered with attention. You may even see yourself on the evening news. The gold star goes for being arrested and thrown in jail, where you are sure to be released the next morning.

Two elderly activists attempted to shatter the glass case housing the Magna Carta because the world has refused to stop using petroleum.  The logic of this gesture has apparently escaped almost everyone but me.

The Magna Carta embodies the notion that there are natural rights that no central power may infringe, not even one enthroned by God.  Minor nobles, clergy, guilds, et al have rights that the king may not arbitrarily supersede.  The notion of limited government is simply a corollary of the idea that there are natural rights held by individuals and other social entities that must be respected.  

I am going to vote for Donald Trump this November.

Barack Obama was the first president I ever voted for. In 2016 I caucused for Bernie Sanders and then voted for Hillary Clinton. Twenty-twenty was similar, where I voted for Bernie in the primary (the state switched from caucusing to a primary) but then voted for Joe Biden. I don’t know when it started, maybe it was when it started to seem like the Biden administration was more interested in prolonging the war in Ukraine instead of giving them what they needed to win before a generation of men were slaughtered. Or maybe it was the incessant chatter about how Trump is a threat to democracy so he needs to be prosecuted for all of his crimes, but it is just a coincidence that they all needed to be tried in 2024. But the final blow has been the Democratic Party’s inability to condemn antisemitism without mentioning Islamophobia in the next sentence or to condemn Hamasniks whom they have let block roads, trapping people for hours.

I started working with the Israel Defense Forces starting in 1983, and would continue working, exercising and planning with the IDF until my retirement from the DoD in 2016.  Yes, my interaction was limited to Israel’s defense force personnel mostly, but I was impressed by their “grit” to overcome any problem or challenge.  I may not have been happy by the way they went about it, but they were going to win no matter the odds, and they didn’t care who they pissed off to do it.  I once worked with an IDF armored unit near the northern border with Lebanon and in their command post there was hanging a 8X11 photo of Erwin Rommel.  I thought it was strange and asked why Rommel.  I was informed that “Rommel was a great tank commander, perhaps the greatest, so we study his tactics – but don’t kill Jews”.

So when I saw this from Netanyahu: Israelis Ready to Fight With Their Fingernails, Netanyahu Says in Veiled Biden Rebuff

At the outset, I would like to announce that I hereby refuse to resume my low-calorie diet and more intensive exercise regime until Palestine is free. And no Brussels sprouts, not one.  I may even order a large pizza with extra cheese tonight—Take that Netanyahu!

The unreality and pomposity of Ivy League tantrum throwers continue to amaze. It turns out that broad allegations of genocide are morally equivalent to the outrageous refusal of universities to deliver food to the barricades or to provide physicians to monitor hunger strikers lest they become immunocompromised:

https://x.com/breeadail/status/178825349021032046

From Jonathan Turley:

The backlash over the settlement of Northwestern University with pro-Palestinian protesters continues to mount. In a letter acquired by The Daily Northwestern,  seven out of 11 members of the “President’s Advisory Committee on Preventing Antisemitism and Hate” resigned this week in protest.

I guess I’m mystified a bit by the shock and outrage at Biden’s betrayal of Israel. Biden has always been a slug, and one who associates with slugs. He and all of his associates continually traffic in lies. I don’t want to burst anyone’s bubble, but this aspect of Biden and his cronies is not exactly some kind of national secret. So what wise national leader is there, anywhere, who would ever actually trust Joe Biden for anything?

I have to believe that Israel is not surprised by these events. At all. I suspect they have alternatives. If they went into Gaza wholly dependent on Joe Biden, of all people, to achieve their strategic goals and without any plan B, then they are both incompetent and infantile. I don’t think they’re either of those things.

The history of hatred for Jews can be distilled into hatred for one thing: accountability. As John Lennon sang: “Imagine no religion” — that is, no God, no accountability.

Think about paganism-hedonism (whose contemporary expression is acted out at the annual Burning Man festivities) and what it represents: unbridled satisfaction of every desire with no accountability.  That’s how spoiled brats live too. Especially the encampment kids: rich college students from foreign lands and too many pampered American students too.

We had some weather alarms last evening that sent us to our basement for shelter.  We need to be highly motivated to go to our basement, as the place is accessed through exterior steps, which means going out into the rain and lifting open the weather door to get into the basement. It’s not a particularly pleasant place. The walls were built of local stone in the 1850s, and even though it does have an ancient poured concrete floor of sorts, it’s not particularly mouse-proof, spider-proof, or airtight.

We took our phones and devices with us so we could listen to the weather reporting.  Even after the local township people turned off the sirens, the weather station people were still urging people in our area and others to head for shelter, immediately.  From the radar maps on our devices, it seemed that the storm cell that was coming our way would go around us to the south, and another would pass to the north.  The radio weather people were still expressing considerable urgency, and our son remarked that this was probably the most excitement they had had all day.  To my thinking, they were not distinguishing well between actual tornado sightings and storm cells that might produce tornados.