Hornet war update

As previously posted, I'm fighting a hornet mini-infestation around the cabin.

Last night only two hornets took the bait when I turned on the floodlights to lure them in. What changed since my earlier efforts?

Rather than using commercial hornet spray as I'd been doing, the night before I squirted responding hornets with a solution of water mixed with a little Dawn dish washing detergent.

Dawn knocked those bad boys right out of the sky.

An old theme replays this election cycle

Saw a blog post this morning that offers a dire warning, yet seems to parrallel writings from another time in American history:

"The thing is, Trump is probably going to lose in November. It’s not because the majority of voters are not down with the middle finger movement. It’s that most people are afraid of risk. Trump is a wild man and that makes him a wild card. Most men prefer the certainty of slavery than the risk of freedom, so rolling the dice on Trump is a lot to ask of voters. That does not change the fact that most people are sick to death of the PC enforcers. It’s just that they can’t quite bring themselves to defy their masters. Staying home, voting third party or knuckling under and voting for Clinton is safe, for now." - The Z Blog

I hope Z is wrong. America needs a wild card now more than ever. And Donald Trump's the only anti-establishment wild card left at the top of a ticket for now.

But I suspect he's right about this: If Hillary Clinton wins, dissenters best prepare for the kind of crackdown Z outlines in the rest of his post.

America's been at this kind of crossroads before.

"Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance, by lying supinely on our backs, and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot?" - Patrick Henry, 1775

Do we dare let the opportunity for peaceful transition or course correction pass this November, knowing those who may assume power plan to bind us, as Henry said, by hand and foot?

Lost priorities

"Unfortunately, for the future of our nation and the world, we are too focused on government handouts rather than the most basic function of government: defending us from barbarians." - Walter E. Williams

Diversity, you say?

The political Left is always talking out diversity 'n such, often bashing conservatives over so-called "white privilege."

Sometimes the Left-leaning media simply leave me speechless.

Via Twitter

By the way, HuffPo says it's hiring.

HuffPost is hiring news editors! https://t.co/ktROGIAFY6

— Johanna Barr (@JohannaBarr) August 26, 2016

Hidden defects

Why I don't like tree limbs over houses... Or trees too close to a house: Trees can look strong and healthy, hiding defects right up until catastrophic failure.

We're having the trees thinned around our cabin. This is how one of the maples looked inside.

Yup, it was hollow with only some rotten pulp at the core. We had an oak taken out with similar hidden defects.

Simple Eats

Quick, easy, and cheap.

Tonight's simple supper is grilled ham and cheese.

Likely a staple of cabin cuisine since the 1930s, at least for those cabin dwellers with access to store-bought cheese and bread.

"80 in August"

For the first time in a long time, Chicago's recorded 80 homicides in a single month.

I think it worth asking why.

Are police being less aggressive because of "community activist" pressures?

Or are thugs just being more aggressive, being fueled with excuses manufactured by social justice warriors?

Laying up wood for cold winters

Spent Friday and Saturday giving the maul a workout, laying up two stacks of firewood.

Sunday, my wife and I were about a quarter way through laying a up a third stack when a neighbor walked by and offered use of his electric splitter.

Thanks to the powered assist, two more stacks were split and stacked by end of day.

Good neighbors are as important as good location. It's the people we met living up here that sold us on this place as much as the location itself.

Damned by diversity

"For some reason, contemporary Aerica believes that it can reject its uniquely successful melting pot to embrace a historically dangerous and discredited salad-bowl separatism." - Victor Davis Hanson, writing at Townhall.com

Tricky talk and political scheming the founders warned of

The founders specifically warned that Congress, backed by a standing army, might one day move to disarm the American people, leaving citizens toothless to oppose tyranny.

Are we witnessing the start of something the founders warned of?

Retired Army Gen. Peter Chiarelli is now among those campaigning for deeper layers of civilian gun control. At Time, Chiarelli writes he's now part of something called the Veterans Coalition for Common Sense:

Some of us are combat veterans. Some of us are gun owners. All of us were trained in the responsible use of firearms and to have respect for their incredible power. All of us swore an oath to defend our Constitution and to defend the homeland. And we all agree on this: our country is in the grips of a gun-violence crisis...

The policies we support—closing the loopholes in our background check system and prohibiting known and suspected terrorists from legally buying guns—are not controversial. In fact, we are not asking our leaders to do anything that is not supported by the overwhelming majority of Americans, including gun owners. We are simply asking them to use common sense to save lives.

The term common sense must resonate well with average folk and focus groups. That's probably why so many politicians use the term to accompany twisted words and bamboozling proposals that put our rights at risk.

Pretty damn bold. Chiarelli wraps himself in the Constitution while advocating infringement of both the Second Amendment and citizen rights to due process. The Constitution considers an accused person innocent until proven guilty. Chiarelli and his cohorts wish to begin infringing on citizens rights based on mere suspicions, some of which may not even risk to the level of triggering active law enforcement investigation.

The founders warned of guys like Chiarelli and his would-be rights-crushing cohorts.

Ever read Liberty or Empire by Patrick Henry? By some accounts, it's Henry's second most famous speech, saying in part:

The honorable gentleman who presides told us that, to prevent abuses in our government, we will assemble in convention, recall our delegated powers, and punish our servants for abusing the trust reposed in them. Oh, sir! we should have fine times, indeed, if, to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people! Your arms, wherewith you could defend yourselves, are gone; and you have no longer an aristocratical, no longer a democratical spirit. Did you ever read of any revolution in a nation, brought about by the punishment of those in power, inflicted by those who had no power at all? You read of a riot act in a country which is called one of the freest in the world, where a few neighbors can not assemble without the risk of being shot by a hired soldiery, the engines of despotism. We may see such an act in America.

Henry's speech was delivered in 1788 to the Virginia legislature testifying to his insistence that a Bill of Rights be included with ratification of the Constitution.

We're now seeing an orchestrated move by political elites to un-do the constitutional safeguards the founders put in place, and that those who push for the un-doing count on dumbed-down Americans who fail to see what's falsely touted as common sense by today's political class and their allies would have been labeled by the founders as steps toward tyranny.

Choppin' Time

Had some limbs break over the cabin this week, but other trees caught 'em, so no structural damage.

Feeling better about the situation as the tree guys brought down the broken limbs, and began removing other menacing close-in trees.

But while the pros are taking down the big trees, they're leaving me a mess o' fire wood that needs splitting.

Tonight, I picked up a wood splitting maul at Tractor Supply for 15 bucks on clearance.

I'll be giving it a workout next week.

Japanese Hornets

Somewhere near the cabin, there's a hornets nest.

 And not just any hornets nest. These are Japanese Hornets.

One of the hornets on the porch floor. That's a quarter next to it to give perspective.

Big and beefy. Folks around here call 'em B-52s.

I've read up on 'em, they do indeed carry a large amount of venom.

Tonight, they're buzzing around the outdoor floodlights. Not a swarm exactly, but seven to eight at a time. I'm playing bug assassin, spraying them from afar as a new group congregates.

I'm used to the flying wasp and hornet killer making short work of stinging insects. With these guys, it's taking a long time for the poison to work its magic.

Update: Friend on Twitter says these are European hornets. Doing some checking, I find it looks like he's probably right. 

Double standard

If Democrats call Trump a 'racist' for wanting to enforce the border and deport illegal aliens, why did Democrats cheer when Bill Clinton called for much the same thing in 1995?

Truly bizarre

What the heck is going on with the Libertarians?

Has the party been overrun by LINOs (Libertarians In Name Only)?

The Hill notes:

Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson is supporting a “fee” on carbon dioxide emissions, a policy more closely associated with environmentalists and liberals.

Yeah, Johnson calls it a fee, not a tax. The same kind of semantics game that was played to allow Obamacare to survive.

Couple this with the Libertarian VP nominee's desire to restrict some gun sales without due process, and I'd say the Libertarians have corrupted themselves as bad as the Democrats and Republicans - with scarcely a party candidate ever elected, and never elected to any high office.

Anyone care to take a shot at explaining this?

Does Clinton really have a lock on the African American vote?

Have you seen how Hillary Clinton tried to scapegoat Colin Powell for her email problems? I wonder how that's going to play with black voters this fall.

Courtesy:  Hope n' Change Cartoons

Speaking of black voters, surely they see how the Clintons have grown vastly more wealthy over the past eight years, while minority neighborhoods in cities across America have lost jobs, schools and other services under the present Democrat president.

Courtesy: Hope n' Change Cartoons

"Dough Nation"

"It’s against federal law for charities to act in the interests of private business or individuals. Yet the Clinton Foundation secured high-paying gigs for its namesakes and helped for-profit corporations with family ties set up lucrative deals.

"As it turns out, that’s probably the least corrupt part of the story."

- David Harsanyi, in the NY Post

Prepare on warning

Says here that Germany's about to warn its citizens to stock up on food and water...

"For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the German government plans to tell citizens to stockpile food and water in case of an attack or catastrophe, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung newspaper reported on Sunday."

Can we trust Election 2016 politically polling from here on in?

I've been pondering political polling this morning. If mainstream media is in the tank for Clinton, why should we assume its polling is any less biased than its writers or anchors?

And it may be pollsters aren't intentionally biased, but are still missing the mark.

Most polling samples more Democrats than Republicans in part because that's how recent past elections have gone, but will the trend hold this year? Best estimate I can find is that Republican primaries drew a million more voters than the Democrat primaries, so is it still safe to assume more Democrats will trot to the polls in November?

I'd suggest some of the present polling may rely too much on old establishment models when this is an election cycle where anti-establishment is a dynamic force. And then there may be a factor of post-Obama fatigue or disillusionment in some Democratic circles. Clinton's not the energetic rock-star campaigner Obama was. Throw in the wildcard Never-Trumpers on the GOP side, and I'll hypothesize this is an election year where polls should be assessed carefully, will be subjected to some very off-the-wall spin, and many pollsters with good records in the past may completely blow it between now and November.

Oddly enough, it's a New York City tabloid taking notice

"American journalism is collapsing right before our eyes," says a headline in the NY Post.

The column, by Michael Goodwin,  says in part:

"By torching its remaining credibility in service of Clinton, the mainstream media’s reputations will likely never recover, nor will the standards. No future producer, editor, reporter or anchor can be expected to meet a test of fairness when that standard has been trashed in such willful and blatant fashion."

Food for thought

DC Clothesline asks the question: What items will disappear from store shelves first in a national emergency?

We can get some clues about which items will disappear first during a major national emergency by taking a look at where such a scenario is already playing out.  One recent survey found that over 80 percent of all basic foodstuffs are currently unavailable in Venezuela, and about half the country can no longer provide three meals a day for their families.  Thankfully, some stores still have a few things that they are able to offer, but other key items are completely gone. 

When I was running and maintaining a bunch of rental houses, I was amazed how many tenants had near empty pantries and seemed to depend on fast food or daily trips to the store for their meals.

Government disaster planners encourage people to have enough necessities like food and water on hand for emergencies,, and that's well below the two-week threshold established by Civil Defense planners in the Cold War era.

Two weeks seems like an easy threshold to meet. Two months could be accomplished with a little thought and planning, and done in a way that builds on items you'll eventually use anyway.

Gun crushing ramps up in Venezuela

The government in Venezuela can't keep the power on or keep food on store shelves.

But it seems more than willing to ramp up efforts to seize rudimentary firearms in people's possession.

One media account says 2,000 guns were crushed in a public display this week.

Are the meager arms now being used by farmers to protect their operations on government's list for confiscation?

Still working on that cabin

The cabin project is coming along nicely. Here's how it looks today.

The photo below is how the cabin looked when purchased seven weeks ago.

This was the most flattering view I could muster at the time of purchase, it was almost impossible to make out the cabin from the roadside where I took today's update photo. Many a scrub pine and other brush has been cleared over the past seven weeks.

Funny, but it doesn't seem old to me...

My Ranger turns 17 this month.

Plate on the door frame says it rolled off the assembly line in August 1999.

Still seems to fit right in most places I take it.

This just in...

Black Lives Matter to target Graceland. 

Seriously?

Slowing things down

It appears Granny Clinton has lightened up her campaign schedule.

Do the rigors of campaigning have her plum tuckered out?

Or is it that she's having trouble filling venues, and wants to avoid the embarrassment of empty seats?

Some crazy stuff goin' down in Milwaukee

Any chance Milwaukee violence spreads to the 'burbs?

Obama rose to power a relative unknown...

But how do you explain Democrats embracing Hillary Clinton despite her track record?

Via Hope 'n Change Cartoons:

Mike Vanderboegh, RIP

Never met Mike Vanderboegh in person, but I learned a lot from reading his blog.

It was Mike Vanderboegh, blogging at Sipsey Street Irregulars, and David Codrea, who blogs at War on Guns, who broke news of what we later learned was the Obama DOJ's Operation Fast and Furious that funneled guns from U.S. gun stores into the waiting hands of drug cartels across the Mexican border.

Vanderboegh's obit in the Birmingham News.

NeverTrumper suggests throwing the election, and let oligarchs negotiate a Clinton presidency

There are some dangerous people out there.  And they're getting bolder.

I read with interest that there's a member of the NeverTrump coalition who now advocates that Republicans throw the presidential election process, and gave an oligarchy cut deals so that Hillary Clinton rises to the presidency.

Via Breitbart:

The Daily Caller’s Senior Writer Jamie Weinstein, a member of the “NeverTrump” faction, has proposed a “negotiated Republican surrender” to Hillary Clinton. The suggested deal rests on the assumption that Clinton is “on a glide path to the White House,” and that Republicans would do best to appease her now.

Do these NeverTrumpers think Clinton would honor their deal once she's in office?

Do these NeverTrumpers think any Republican down-ticket on the ballot in November is worth of election or re-election if the party actively works to rig, throw or otherwise sabotage a national election?

Don't tell me the NeverTrumper camp is based on constitutional purity. Its members are outing themselves as the worst sort of traitors to the very document they pretend to hold so dear.

Second Amendment option

In comments referencing the Second Amendment, Donald Trump apparently created a great deal of angst among so-called mainstream media.

Here's what he said:

“Hillary wants to abolish, essentially, the Second Amendment. “By the way, and if she gets the pick - if she gets the pick of her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I dunno."

Trump added:

"But I tell you what, that will be a horrible day, if Hillary gets to put her judges in, right now we're tied."

Over the top?

Who'd have thought Trump could come off sounding down-right Jeffersonian?

"What country ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure." - Thomas Jefferson, 1787

This is one strange week in politics

The father of the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooter attends a Clinton campaign rally, endorses Hillary Clinton for president.

Wait. This is a "Libertarian" position?

Seems the Libertarian Party no longer respects due process provisions of the Constitution, and its VP pick sees no problem infringing on the 2nd Amendment. 

Can this election year get any more strange?

Conspiracy theorists running amok? Or is there something here?

Hillary Clinton has recently shown some strange behaviors.

Is MSM covering for her like it did with FDR and his polio?

Conservative and social media continue to offer speculation, photos and video to question that status of Clinton's health. Gateway Pundit is among those offering a recent example.

Meanwhile, Snopes.com (not a "right-wing" site) remains in the camp shrugging off "seizure" talk as little more than "uninformed speculation."

While not vouching for some of the allegations, it seems to me evidence may have accumulated beyond the point of dismissing such speculation out-right as idle conspiracy theory.

Sunday night newscast

Saw a very strange newscast Sunday night. It was led with an ABC news anchor saying new poll shows "Trump in danger."

An apparent drop in a poll puts a candidate "in danger"?

Looked and sounded more like anti-Trump psy-ops than what was supposed to be a newscast.


Here's how ABC News headlined its polling results online:

Clinton Opens 23-Point Lead Among Women, Gains With Democrats as Trump Struggles (POLL)

Here's how the New York Post headlined the same poll:

Clinton maintains post-convention lead over Trump: poll

The Post nor any other media I've seen mention anything asserting that Trump's in "danger."

Seems strange, even by European PC standards

Europe as it's been known for centuries appears to be doomed.

Doomed by its own obsessions with wider political correctness as much as its with allowing allowing societal-shattering cultural clashes that come with unchecked mass migrations.

Via Breitbart:

‘Balcony Man’ Who Stood Up to Munich Shooter To Face Prosecution for Insulting the Dead

Clinton attempts to smooth over her prior gun ban talk

Hillary Clinton was on with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday.

The Second Amendment came up:

Wallace: And the Second Amendment includes an individual right to bear arms. 

Clinton: Yes, but that right, like every other of our rights—our First Amendment rights, every right that we have—is open to and even subject to reasonable regulations . . . 

Chelsea Clinton has praised her mom for having a plan to circumvent Congress, and use a packed Supreme Court to get gun restrictions to her liking.

This is the same Hillary Clinton who's said she's open to Australian style gun confiscation (though she called it a buy-back).

Who is Allah?

Many people assume the term Allah is synonymous with the God of the Bible.

But is this a correct assumption?

From the website Answering Muslims:

According to the Qur'an, Allah is the "best of deceivers" (3:54; 8:30). The phrase is often translated into English as "best of planners," "best of schemers," or "best of plotters," but the root word (makr) means "deception." Hence, the following Qur'an verses should be rendered as follows:  

Qur'an 3:54—And they (the unbelievers) planned to deceive, and Allah planned to deceive (the unbelievers), and Allah is the best of deceivers. 

Qur'an 7:99—Are they then safe from Allah's deception? No one feels safe from Allah's deception except those that shall perish. 

Qur'an 8:30—And (remember) when the unbelievers plotted deception against you (O Muhammad), to imprison you, or kill you, or expel you. They plotted deception, but Allah also plotted deception; and Allah is the best of deceivers. 

Since the Bible declares that Satan is the father of lies (John 8:44), the question must be raised: Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?