Gromnir

silver only sorta/kinda follows such trends. again, in spite of economic turmoil this year, silver dropped precipitous. less than $12 an ounce? reason we were surprised we had bought silver is 'cause we hadn't bothered to look at silver. who would expect with economic turmoil and rising covid deaths silver would tank to that degree? sure, we had the order in, but sub $12 were only a bit more likely than an alien invasion scenario. ordinary and reasonable people tend to lump all the precious metals together... is why you see all those silly precious metal commercials on tv when there is some kinda economic downturn or instability. everybody knows how gold and silver increase in value and is reliable when there is turmoil. is not a wrong assumption, but silver doesn't behave same as gold. admitted, something similar happened with silver back in 2008ish. by 3rd quarter, we were already deep into recession, and then silver dropped to less than $10. would eventually increase to more than $45 in 2012(?). am retired. we don't need the silver drama. HA! Good Fun!

a week ago we used a drop box to vote. today we final got notice the ballot had been received. still feels like a win. HA! Good Fun!

culinary confession: when we make pork carnitas, 90% of the time we use our instapot. takes literal three days to do the duck carnitas if we go confit. takes one hour (less) to do pork carnitas. our pork carnitas usual includes beer, orange juice, lime juice, ancho chiles, mexican oregano, cumin, garlic, salt, onions and sometimes we throw in a cinnamon stick and a bit o' ground cloves for a bit o' extra bite... don't have a specific recipe. quick. easy. delicious. we prefer duck carnitas, but instapot makes diabolical simple. HA! Good Fun!

didn't read this earlier. is wrong. you are using a personal liberal v. conservative spectrum which don't match traditional definitions if you put sotomayor 4th amendment opinions on the conservative end o' the liberal v. conservative spectrum. cops win = conservative. is not particular deep or profound, but that is how law enforcement cases ordinarily gets placed on the liberal v. conservative spectrum. look at current law enforcement actions in places such as portland and chicago and ask if is liberals or conservatives supporting? am knowing you don't see as we describe, but am suspecting you got some prejudices which kinda fog your vision on this. scalia's 4th amendment decisions were noteworthy precise 'cause they did not fall w/i the expectations o' conservatives. criminals using 4th amendment to avoid justice? is not something conservatives support. and keep in mind with 4th amendment cases we are talking 'bout folks who would be criminalized but for the Constitution, which is an almost uniquely american legal concept. you are switching libertarian for liberal, which is just one reason why liberal v. conservative ain't fungible with Court philosophies. perhaps we may offer an easier example, even if is fifth amendment. miranda were considered a liberal win. J. earl warren wrote the 5-4 decision in miranda and since that time more conservative Courts and Justices have chipped away at the ruling. warren were appointed by a republican President, but he went rogue and is considered one o' the most vocal liberal voices on a particular liberal Court. miranda is considered a liberal win. sotomayor is not quite as liberal as were warren. the real lesson here is that it is not good to use liberal v. conservative to describe judicial philosophies and is a particular poor benchmark from which to gauge predictability. am not sure we agree with how you distinguish textualism. leave for another time. however we will observe how both Congress' crafting laws and the executive's writing rules is purposeful ambiguous-- is an expectation and reliance on interpretation by the Courts to fill in gaps to make legislation and executive action workable. is the root problem which if addressed would eliminate much o' the debate 'bout legitimacy o' purposivism, textualism or whatever other theory o' interpretation employed by judges and Justices. apologies for double, but complete unrelated to our immediate previous post. HA! Good Fun!

y'know, am suspecting this were an auto spellcheck error, but it kinda works. HA! Good Fun!

every pandemic in recent history has had a resurgence 6-8 months following the first. europe suffered their covid-19 exposure a couple months after china in the spring. the US got hit ~one month after europe. china was facing a serious second wave in june-july but they promptly reimposed harsh social distancing measures in multiple areas. any shock europe is being hit hard today? this resurgence were complete and utter predictable. is one reason why the epidemiologists were begging people to get numbers down as much as possible in the summer 'cause the predictable resurgence would be a multiplication o' existing cases. curiously, the fox news and breitbart folks somehow look at the current situation as evidence that wearing masks and social distancing is, at best, ineffectual. science challenged yahoos. Fox News Hosts Downplay Coronavirus, but Network Brass Take It Very Seriously, Memo Shows so maybe less science challenged and more a matter o' a callous and mercenary hypocrisy. HA! Good Fun!

the lack of punctuation makes it possible to read the quoted in ways most amusing. hoon likes to be funny, but am suspecting too many actual agree with the sentiment. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/?cid=rrpromo does trump have a chance? sure he does. am not sure people understand how odds work? fivethirtyeight had trump with a better than 28% chance o' winning in 2016. trump would love to have same numbers this year, but he still does have a chance. nevertheless, if your political future (and more important the increasing high chance o' facing criminal charges) hinges on the election, am suggesting "in the bag" has a different meaning for trump. HA! Good Fun!

you clearly are not watching fox news or listening to far right radio. almost forgot, and speaking of hypocrites: muslim ban HA! Good Fun!

made duck carnitas. went the multi-day confit approach for the duck. had real mexican coke on hand which we use in the braise and drank as a beverage with the meal. am not sure if the cane sugar makes a difference, but we had a theme, so... ate so much. can't move. feeling sleepy and incredibly satisfied. HA! Good Fun!

would be reassuring if the only problem with the kavanaugh opinion were sloppiness. Brett Kavanaugh Just Endorsed A Radical Legal Theory That Could Cause Election Chaos am knowing we have said before that the Constitution does not actual recognize a citizen's right to vote for President. am gonna assume such an observation do not carry the weight it should. trump, barr and other political opportunists is a serious threat to the legitimacy o' the election.

we got a rather fancy outdoor grill and that is where we cook most o' our fish. as much as we enjoy fish, we don't like for everything to smell like fish. we default to outdoor cooking of fish. am knowing some folks like to use cedar planks and we do so if we got something which ain't gonna fit in our 10" pan, but the cast iron is the workhorse. better to use cast iron than stainless steel on the grill with all the greasy smoke. in the extreme rare scenario we cook a piece o' salmon indoors, perhaps during january or february when is raining, we will break out the steel. HA! Good Fun! ps we make fish stock every four months or so. indoors. is a good thing we live solo 'cause am suspecting is no way a significant other would allow us to make fish stock with a nice, long, aromatic simmer.

am actual less concerned 'bout the fbi FBI agents urge Biden and Trump not to fire Christopher Wray william barr and donald trump will try and minimize and marginalize christopher wray and fbi efforts, but am believing wray and the individual fbi offices 'round the nation is trying to carry out their mandate. is a reason fbi were not used when troops were sent by barr to portland and elsewhere, and is fbi investing giuliani and bannon. am knowing some folks cannot bring selves to trust the fbi and that is fair, particular in these times. personal, fbi is one o' the fed organizations 'bout which am least concerned. HA! Good Fun!

we had to buy a separate cast iron pan for our fish, 'cause the fish always stayed with the pan. for years, to get smell/flavor complete outta our cast iron, we would need do a quasi reasoning where we would grease up the pan up with vegetable shortening and then cook our pan for an hour... or two at 500F. got so annoyed we went out and bought a dedicated cast iron pan just for fish. looks tasty btw. HA! Good Fun!

bork s'posed carried out the order 'cause the guys who did resign asked bork to stay... and the supreme court position bit from nixon at the time were hardly a meaningful offer and nobody, including bork, took serious. the writing were already on the wall for anybody to read... save for nixon and nixon voters. even so, am admitting it were a bad look to be the guy who didn't resign. similar, some folks suggest audrey strauss shoulda' resigned when barr "fired" geoffrey berman, but berman told her to stay. woulda' been unfortunate if ms. strauss and a bunch o' other attorneys from the sdny office resigned. HA! Good Fun!

not strange given the time. is impossible to communicate the difference 'tween pre and post bork SCOTUS appointments. relative apolitical. qualifications and character o' the nominee were subject to review, but not philosophy or imagined politics. of course republicans would choose a nominee who they believed would make republican agenda more successful. of course democrats would choose a nominee more sympathetic to their aims. senators reviewed character and competency and politics were almost irrelevant... as hard as that is to believe nowadays. bork were qualified. bork were not having character issues making him unsuitable. shoulda' been a slam dunk. HA! Good Fun!

the money disappeared. and jpl is federally funded... through a contract from nasa. 40 years. 40 years o' tech and experience advancements since 1981 and you are comparing as equivalencies? once nasa were sidelined and were no longer a national endeavour it still managed to produce advances in spite o' obstacles. spacex has a long way to go to come anywhere near replicating results o' nasa. HA! Good Fun!

why does this point not resonate more? not only did nasa do first, but they did forty years ago. previous image link is busted am thinking you are giving those nasa guys far less credit than they deserve. shoulders o' giants and all that. HA! Good Fun!

@Guard Dog one point we tangential spoke to but is possible gd and others is unaware, so am gonna address brief. questions which come before the Court is ordinarily novel in at least some important way. the democrats and more liberal media has done a fantastic job o' selling Americans on the notion that acb on the Court is a death knell for roe, griswold, obergefell and even loving. is not an unjustified position as multiple Justices has expressed a desire to overturn and so too does acb based on past articles. HOWEVER, and this is a big however, the affordable care act is what the democrats were hitting hard during the acb hearings, and is far less clear acb would vote to strike down obamacare based on the case coming before the Court. while it is true acb criticized the roberts decision upholding the aca, the current case is dealing with a novel legal question only tangential related to the previous aca case. the current aca case deals with a question o' law acb has addressed previous and her previous decisions actual suggest she would vote to preserve the aca insofar as the current case is concerned. 'cause people do not know the law, politicians may spin issues such as acb and her threat to the aca. am thinking mcconnell efforts to get acb on the Court will backfire. as we noted previous, getting acb sworn in before the election means is no longer a voting issue, so no motivation to get apathetic conservatives to vote. however, the fear democrats managed to drum up insofar as the aca being in danger during a pandemic may just result in one and possibly a couple republican senators losing their seats. long term the acb appointment may be a gain for conservatives, but if republicans lose the senate, it will be at least in part 'cause democrats adept used the hearings to create a whole lotta anger 'bout doomed roe and aca and the truth is the aca is looking anything but doomed from our pov. HA! Good Fun!

chicken or egg? intuitive we tend to think the professor reverses. look at the civil war and the medical advancements which came out of the conflict. you don't sudden decide to halt medical advancements in the hope o' preventing future wars or those who might die 'cause o' medical advancements. we ought to limit biomedical advancements until we attain world peace 'cause is possible such advancements will lead to bioweapons? idiotic suggestion. basics o' icbm technology existed before the so-called space race and the military involvement in such the only reason the US invested so heavily in peaceful applications o' space exploration is because o' the competition with the ussr. it were the military funding which accompanied kennedy's promise to beat the soviets to the moon which made the apollo missions possible. is not as if icbm tech and advancement woulda' stopped or been undermined by absence o' a space race, but all those peacetime applications resulting from nasa's and the soviet efforts to reach the moon woulda' been lost or retarded. will need to read further, but after an admitted all too brief and unfair look, daniel deudney appears to have complete reversed the typical/ordinary progression. oh, and while am knowing gd favors privatization o' space exploration, am disagreeing whole hearted. but for obama choices to defund nasa, we would likely already have returned to the moon and would be much further along in our goal o' reaching mars, and would be literal dozens and possible hundreds o' ordinary life altering technologies resulting from the need to overcome the scientific hurdles preventing us from safe returning to moon and then going to mars. so many wasted opportunities. any President who cuts nasa budget instant gains our derision and scorn. ... the threat o' possible and future terraforming technology used in wartime applications is so utter remote and divorced from current 2020 reality as to beggar the imagination. any sorta serious consideration o' terraforming planets w/i the solar system is skipping so many intermediate steps as to make the suggestion comic.. but since am talking comic... moon hoaxers and those who wanna cut nasa budgets is on our list HA! Good Fun!

am knowing is a terrible analogy, but for us, umbrella academy season 1were more like justice league and umbrella season 2 were closer to guardians of the galaxy... well, with all the dad stuff, am s'posing were more like guardians of the galaxy 2. heck, season 1 o' umbrella were even filmed darker-- more blue and grey. season 2 were far more sunny and silly than season one, and considering the ridiculous collection o' characters assembled, trying to be dead serious felt like a disconnect for season 1. HA! Good Fun!

back in may we got a heads up from our financial guy that we had just bought silver... lots and lots o' silver. ... had a moment o' confusion followed by horror. why on earth would we buy silver? silver bounces all over the place 'but it doesn't bounce a whole lot. is tough to make money with silver, and apparently we had bought a sh!7 ton o' silver. costs somewhere 'tween eight and twelve dollars simply to get silver out o' the ground, so we had an order to buy silver up to X dollars if silver dropped below $11.80. X in this case were not a small number. back in may, silver dropped to $11.70. sudden, Gromnir is a silver baron? exaggeration? not by much. *groan* silver has been all over the place since may, but it did go up considerable. with how f'd the markets is thanks to lack o' stimulus and election uncertainty, we decided we needed more cash, so we called our financial guy and told him to sell all our silver at $XX.30. that number were hit today. first world problems but you got no idea what a relief it is gonna be to not look at silver prices obsessive every day... since may have spent at least 30 minutes every day dedicated to checking silver price and trends. all the talk o' watermelon had us jones for a watermelon fizz. 'cause am old, we almost always have ginger ale on hand. combine our frozen watermelon, ginger ale and lime juice. am understanding gin is a staple in such a combination but we do not consume alcohol as a beverage. yummy. HA! Good Fun!

predictability in a Justice is a good thing. if issue A shows up in Case B and a Justice decided yea on issue A previous, why would we think it is a good thing for the Justice to be unreliable and for us to have no idea how they will decide issue A in the future? lack o' predictability o' a Justice or judge? how is that a good thing. sure, in most cases before the Court, Justices is s'posed to be deciding novel issues o' law. just because politicians and media misrepresents an issue as being well established do not make it so. predictable is less concrete if is a novel question. that said, am baffled at implication that unpredictability in a Justice or judge is a positive. bork. all comes back to bork. know what a nominee were likely to decide on pivotal questions o' law were not considered a bad thing before bork. scalia was better known for sec and transactional stuff before being on the Court, nevertheless, we had a good idea o' how he would decide on a wide range o' 1st and 4th amendment cases previous to his senate approval. good. is good to know a Justice is reliable. the thing is, bork made it obvious that having opinions which polarize is bad for a nominee. any appellate judge with SCOTUS aspirations stopped having opinions beyond their actual Court decisions, and even then, the silliness 'bout not being able to speak to an issue w/o knowing specific facts o' a case is idiotic. acb would have been absolute useless as a law school professor if she couldn't come to conclusions based on hypotheticals. am thinking too many folks confuse ideological extreme with predictable. ginsburg v. alito? why those two for most predictable? most ideological extreme members o' the Court, even with ginsburg, were sotomayor and thomas. the thing is, on pivotal cases, thomas is extreme likely to go solo with a concurrence or dissent. most predictable Justices current (scalia were extreme predictable before his death) is, in our opinion, kagan and kavanaugh. kagan has an extreme well developed legal philosophy and a large body o' scholarly and judicial work which makes her decisions predictable. predictable is good. 'course Justices need show their work. how a Justice arrives at a decision and the minutiae o' such decisions is just as important as is predictability. kavanaugh, for example, has been near as predictable as were scalia, but unfortunately legal philosophy guides kavanaugh a bit less than scalia or even thomas. kavanaugh is a political creature akin to rehnquist... who were also extreme predictable. there is a few Court pairs which is extreme dependable, but the exceptions to seeming rule is what gets attention. roberts and kavanaugh have a better than 90% chance o' deciding same, but as am sure gd is aware, roberts went against type in a few high-profile cases this last term. converse, sotomayor and ginsburg were lockstep almost as often as kavanaugh and roberts... almost. however, on the high profile cases there were no disagreement 'tween ginsburg and sotomayor. dunno. am thinking borking messed up everything. ginsburg, btw, were the last Justice to clear state that roe v. wade were decided based on unsupported legal reasoning before being admitted to the Court. ironic? HA! Good Fun! ps so is clear, how predictable a Justice decides liberal or conservative is Not The Same as is how predictable is the Justices' decisions. sotomayor is most likely to decide liberal on so-called liberal scale. kagan, a s'posed liberal Justice, is less likely than sotomayor to decide predictable along the funky liberal v. conservative breakdown, but her decisions is amazing consistent given even a passing awareness o' kagan's philosophy and her past decisions. probable is no more clear.

watermelon may be frozen but texture will change drastic. suggestion: puree melon (remove all seeds) and then freeze in ice cube trays. throw the frozen cubes/balls o' watermelon in a ziploc bag and store in the freezer almost indefinite. watermelon rind is underutilized and may be pickled and/or preserved. deep-fried watermelon rind is also surprising tasty, but we would not recommend trying to deep fry watermelon rind which has been previous frozen. HA! Good Fun! ps (edit) forgot to mention seed removal... though one assumes such would be self-evident. bad to assume.

Judge rejects Justice Dept. bid to short circuit defamation case brought by woman who accused Trump of rape "In a 59-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan wrote that Trump did not qualify as a federal “employee” under federal law, nor was he acting “within the scope of his employment” when he denied during interviews in 2019 that he had raped journalist E. Jean Carroll more than two decades ago in a New York City department store." ruling is no surprise. however, am gonna observe how acb's most notorious fed case ruling had her decide that the government could not be sued 'cause a guard's repeated rape o' a female prisoner fell outside the guard's scope o' employment. trump just added a justice to the Court who has already shown her hand as to how she will vote if this case gets SCOTUS review. ps/follow up last observation 'bout the aryan invasion stuff which we admitted know virtual nothing and what knowledge we do have is decades old and came as maybe five minutes during an undergrad humanities course somewhere 'tween covering gilgamesh and the iliad. am not claiming expertise and am barely aware o' the theory. evidence o' invasion is a result o' common sense, genetics and aforementioned language commonalities. archeological evidence o' aryan invasion has been kinda undermined. is no historical record neither. limit to same evidence would make donald trump and stephen miller claims 'o an invasion o' the US southern border by peoples from central and south america over recent decades equal plausible. afterall, recent decades has seen considerable influx o' peoples from south and central america into existing populations particular in the south and western US resulting in observable genetic and language changes. am not gonna be a hypocrite... which brings us back to why am confident acb finds 'gainst trump in a a imagined future SCOTUS case addressing the defamation claims o' ms. e. jean carroll. HA! Good Fun!

Times Square Billboards With Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner Stir Skirmish ... y'know the lincoln project has gotta be slack-jawed that javanka is providing them with so much free publicity and extra exposure. the trump couple turns a times square billboard into a national and even international story? as government officials and public figures they have a worse chance o' succeeding in a defamation case 'gainst lincoln project than we do o' winning the 2021 miss america contest-- am thinking we would score ok in the interview portion but now that the swimsuit portion has been removed, we got no shot at victory. more amusing is the following: "The couple might be greeted warmly in some parts of the city, said Joe Borelli, a councilman from Staten Island — which voted for the president in 2016. Mr. Borelli said he has no insight into “polite society” but noted that Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner “are always welcome on Staten Island.”" folks unfamiliar with ny may not get the joke. an example o' a staten island high society event would be the local knights of columbus holding a barbecue/monte carlo night to raise money for a neighborhood catholic church, the society of st. vincent de paul, or maybe even a new scoreboard for the baseball field/complex where little league games is held. the idea o' jared and ivanka voluntarily spending time in staten island 'cause is the only place in ny where they is still welcomed is funny and absurd. if trump loses in november, am almost gonna miss 'em. almost. HA! Good Fun!