SoylentNews

Summarized from a post elsewhere.

I was shocked to be alerted by my wife that the Capitol building was being evacuated and being stormed by a mob of Trump supporters.

I watched live video of congress critters evacuating.

I watched live video from outside as police surrounded the building and fought off Trump supporters. They are carrying Trump signs and shouting loudly that Trump Won This Election! And Stop The Steal.

Riot police arrived.

Later, the Trump supporters have now broken in to the building.

National Guard now requested.

They will have to re-take the building.

Fighting between the terrorists and police inside the building right underneath the rotunda.

Thanks Republicans and Trump for turning our government into a 3rd world banana republic.

Live video of the terrorists now inside the house and senate chambers going through things. Standing at the podium. Etc.

Now a man hanging from walls in senate chamber.

6 PM curfew in Washington DC.

I remember people on SN saying that Trump isn't dangerous. He's probably laughing right this moment.

National security law: Hong Kong rounds up 53 pro-democracy activists

More than 50 of Hong Kong's most prominent pro-democracy activists and politicians have been arrested in the biggest crackdown since China imposed a draconian security law last year.

About 1,000 police took part in morning raids on 72 premises across the city.

Those held helped run an unofficial "primary" to pick opposition candidates ahead of postponed 2020 elections.

They are accused of trying to "overthrow" the government. Activists say the new law aims to quash dissent.

China's government imposed the legislation on the semi-autonomous territory in June, saying it was necessary to curb months of sometimes violent pro-democracy protests.

Beijing defended Wednesday's arrests, with Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying saying they were needed to stop "external forces and individuals [colluding] to undermine China's stability and security".

But the crackdown appeared to confirm the fears of many who warned about the reach of the law, with Amnesty International saying the arrests are "the starkest demonstration yet of how the national security law has been weaponised to punish anyone who dares to challenge the establishment".

Previously: One Million People Protest a Proposed Extradition Law in Hong Kong; Gov't Acquiesces, for Now
Hong Kong Heating Up Again?
Hong Kong Archery
China Passes Hong Kong Security Law
Pro-Democracy Books Pulled in Hong Kong
Hong Kong Pro-Democracy Legislators Resign En Masse

I really do love that song.

But that's not what this journal is about. Although you may want to listen to it while you read it. Did I mention that I really love that song?

Anyway, here's a piece by Richard Hasen on Slate:

Donald Trump Should Be Prosecuted for His Shakedown of Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger

President Donald Trump likely broke both federal and state law in a Saturday phone call during which he encouraged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn the state’s election results. The president certainly committed an impeachable offense that is grounds for removing him from the office he will be vacating in less than three weeks or disqualifying him from future elected office. His tumultuous term will end as it began, with questions as to the legality of conduct connected to manipulating American elections, and a defense based squarely on the idea that Trump’s mind is so warped that he actually believes the nonsense he spews. Trump may never be put on trial for what he did, but a failure to prosecute him may lead to a further deterioration of American democracy.

The Washington Post’s bombshell report and audio recording of a Saturday conversation among Trump; his chief of staff, Mark Meadows; Republican election attorney Cleta Mitchell; and Georgia election officials featured a litany of unproven and debunked claims of voter fraud in Georgia. Trump claimed he had actually won the state by hundreds of thousands of votes and suggested Raffensperger could face criminal liability for not going after this phantom fraud.

In the course of describing such fraud, Trump attempted fraud of his own, asking Raffensperger to engage in belated ballot box–stuffing to benefit him. (Never mind that Georgia certified its vote totals weeks ago and has submitted its Electoral College votes for counting by Congress on Wednesday.) Among the most damning things Trump said was the following:

It is more illegal for you than it is for [election officials] because, you know, what they did and you’re not reporting it. That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan [Germany], your lawyer. And that’s a big risk. But they are shredding ballots, in my opinion, based on what I’ve heard. And they are removing machinery, and they’re moving it as fast as they can, both of which are criminal finds. And you can’t let it happen, and you are letting it happen. You know, I mean, I’m notifying you that you’re letting it happen. So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.

Make no mistake: In that last sentence, Trump was asking Raffensperger to manufacture enough votes to overturn the results in Georgia based upon nothing but Trump’s false accusations of fraud and irregularities. In the previous passage, it sounded very much as though he was threatening Raffensperger with some sort of criminal offense if he did not do as Trump commanded. (No evidence has emerged that, in ensuring that Georgia’s election results were counted properly, Raffensperger has committed any crime.) This request is easily the kind of corrupt conduct that could serve as a “high crime and misdemeanor” subjecting him to removal from office, though with his departure imminent it seems unlikely that Congress would take up the case. The conduct, though, is much more egregious than the Ukraine threats that got Trump impeached one year ago, conduct that was also aimed at manipulating the election by pressuring Ukrainian officials to come up with fake dirt on Joe Biden. Trump, of course, also entered office under a cloud of suspicion over his campaign’s links to Russia and Vladimir Putin’s successful efforts to manipulate the 2016 election on his behalf. In the unlikely event that Congress were to make him the first president ever to be impeached twice—impeachments can happen even after elected officials leave office—then he could be disqualified from running for high office again in the future. It has been reported that, when not attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Trump has been planning a possible third run for president in 2024.

Aside from being impeachable conduct, Trump’s actions likely violate federal and Georgia law. A federal statute makes it a crime when one “knowingly and willfully … attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process, by … the procurement, casting, or tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held.” A Georgia statute similarly provides that a “person commits the offense of criminal solicitation to commit election fraud in the first degree when, with intent that another person engage in conduct constituting a felony under this article, he or she solicits, requests, commands, importunes, or otherwise attempts to cause the other person to engage in such conduct.”

For both statutes, the easy part for prosecutors would be proving that there was no basis in fact for Georgia election officials to flip the lead in Georgia to Trump by adding 11,780 votes to his totals, giving him one more vote than Biden’s margin of victory. The ballots in that state have been counted, and recounted both by hand and by machine, and Biden’s victory is certain. And as Raffensperger pointed out repeatedly on the call, every court that has investigated Trump’s fraud claims has found them to be completely spurious. Adding 11,780 votes to Trump’s column—or removing legal Biden ballots—would defraud Georgia voters of the actual outcome they chose. Counting fake ballots or removing lawful ones would deprive Georgia voters of a fair and impartially conducted election process. That is the definition of election fraud.

The hard part for prosecutors would be proving Trump’s state of mind, because the statutes require proof of knowledge and intent. Prosecutors would have to show that Trump knew that Biden fairly won the election, and Trump was asking for Georgia officials to commit election fraud. And it’s not clear prosecutors could make that case.

As with so many things in this presidency and president, the question is whether Trump is drinking his own Kool-Aid. Reading the entire one-hour, rambling call transcript, it is hard to know if Trump actually believes the fever swamp of debunked conspiracy theories about the election or whether he’s just using the false claims as a cover to get the political results he wants. It’s not much different than Trump’s statements denying Russian election hacking in 2016, his professed ignorance of the aims of QAnon and the Proud Boys, and his speculation about whether ingesting bleach can protect against the coronavirus. And during the Ukraine impeachment saga, of course, nearly every Republican senator voted to acquit the president on the implausible basis that Trump was merely asking Ukraine to legitimately investigate Joe Biden for possible criminal conduct rather than seeking to corruptly advance his own electoral interests. In all of these cases, Trump’s conspiratorial rantings display either profound ignorance, deep cynicism, or both.

Trump is the rare potential criminal defendant to have plausible deniability about whether he accepts truths as clear as gravity, making any prosecution difficult. Add onto that concerns of prosecutorial discretion for both the new Biden administration and Georgia officials, possible claims of legal immunity, a presidential self-pardon that could relieve Trump of liability under federal law, and other political hurdles, and a prosecution of Trump is unlikely.

Despite the long odds, I would hope at least Georgia prosecutors will consider going after Trump, or that the House of Representatives might impeach him again with the goal of disqualifying him from running in 2024. Lack of prosecution or investigation demonstrates that there’s little to deter the next would-be authoritarian—perhaps a more competent one—from trying to steal an election. Trump came a lot closer than he should have this time, and next time we may not be so lucky.

Did I mention that I *really* love that song?

Pelosi Gives In, Allows Lauren Boebert To Carry A Gun In The Capitol

By John Boch via TTAG and republished with permission

Members of Congress enjoy a lot of perks. Among them is the right to carry a firearm even while they’re in the halls of Congress. But a group of Democrats set out to change that once a firebrand gun rights champion have publicly announced her intention to take advantage of that perk.

Lauren Boebert won her Congressional race in Colorado in November. She later made national headlines when she announced that she planned to take her GLOCK to work on a daily basis. That didn’t sit well with the House’s den mother and a handful of radical Democrats.

Why do Democrats want to change this generations-old policy allowing members to carry? “Ultimately, the current regulations create needless risk for Members of Congress, their staff, members of the Capitol Police, and visitors to the Capitol grounds,” they wrote in a letter.

In an effort to push back, 83 House members have signed a letter contesting Pelosi’s plans to end the concealed carry perk for Congresscritters. Planet Free Will News has the story.

https://concealednation.org/2021/01/pelosi-gives-in-allows-lauren-boebert-to-carry-a-gun-in-the-capitol/

It probably burns Pelosi that she might have to watch her mouth, and not threaten this congresswoman. A credible threat against an armed person justifies popping a few rounds off, in almost all jurisdictions.

For that matter, all Americans have the right to carry, anywhere and everywhere. Any law to the contrary is unconstitutional. "Shall not be infringed" is not open to interpretation.

Oh yeah, Republicans have their share of good looking women. This chick would look good with or without a gun strapped to her side!

https://concealednation.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/congress-gun-carry-728x381.jpg

https://www.gettyimages.in/photos/lauren-boebert?family=editorial&phrase=lauren%20boebert&sort=mostpopular

This is a journal entry about VFFS baggers and associated gear. Once upon a time, I worked with this stuff. Now I don't, and will probably forget all about it eventually.

VFFS stands for vertical-form-fill-seal and refers to a machine which forms flat packaging material around a vertical tube which is open at the top for product to enter. At the bottom of the tube, after advancing a certain length of material, it is generally sealed shut with heat and then cut loose to make one bag. Gusseted or flat-bottom bags would involve an additional step of folding the material, whereas a simple bag without any folding is called a pillow.

The packaging material is like a roll of toilet paper sitting on a spindle at one end of the machine, but instead of paper it is usually made of plastic (think candy bar wrapper), and depending on the size of the bag being produced, the roll might be 10-20" wide and weigh 50lbs. As it unravels, it passes across some parallel rollers before being curled around a forming tube. On the side of the tube, the two ends of the material meet and overlap, then this 'seam' is closed up with heat. How do we advance the material? Some machines had a carriage underneath the forming tube which would grip each bag and pull it downward before then sealing it with heated jaws and cutting it with an actuated blade. More common designs used a rubber belt pressing against the forming tube to accomplish the pulling action. Some also use a perforated rubber belt and vacuum pump to make the material 'stick' to the belt. All of these machines also used some combination of spring-loaded rollers and/or a second unwinding motor to regulate tension on the material as it feeds through the machine.

Sound simple so far? Once you have a machine that can spit out bag after bag, without much operator attention, the next step is to crank it up to eleven. Higher production rate equals more profit. This is when the timing of the machine becomes critical. The bagger has to synchronize with upstream equipment which is supplying the product for each bag, and possibly with downstream equipment that transfers the bag to a packing/loading area. It also has to keep its own functions synchronized. You can't pull the material too fast, it might tear. You can't pull it at the same you're cutting/sealing it (well, maybe you can, see below) or it gets jammed up. It also takes a certain amount of time for motors, solenoids, and pneumatic cylinders to do their thing. If yesterday the whole thing was tuned to perfection but today your cylinder is gunked up then the timing might need readjustment. In addition to the parts of the process described so far, many machines would be setup with additional bells and whistles which also had strict timing requirements. Examples would be a device to stamp a production code on each bag, an air nozzle that would blow into the tube at a certain time to help puff up the shape of the bag, or a 'shaker' that would oscillate to help settle product inside the bag.

Early computerized baggers carried forward the concept of a 360 degree cycle corresponding to each bag. Prior to the computer control, you might have a machine with a large wheel inside it that turned one revolution per bag. There'd be holes in the wheel in which to insert a peg, and each time the wheel went around the peg would make contact with a lever which would cause something to happen. That would be how you set your timing. With digital controls, you just enter a number on a keypad instead. Advance the material from 10-100 degrees, engage the seam seal bar from 110-220 degrees, engage the stamp at 250, and cut the bag at 300, etc. In some cases the length of each bag would be determined by the programmed operation of a servo or stepper motor like this, but there is also a lot of packaging material manufactured with registration marks which are then picked up by an optical sensor to get a more consistent bag length. Later machines abandoned the angle-based timing specs and allowed settings to be entered in terms of inches, millimeters, or milliseconds instead.

In order to get past some of these limitations and increase production rate further, continuous-motion machines were introduced. These advance the packaging material at a fixed speed instead of starting and stopping with each bag. Instead of a seal bar which pressed against the material while it was stationary, a thin metal band is used which is also driven continuously. The mechanisms which close and cut the bag also have to keep moving downward during the time they are making contact with it.

The UI on these things ranged from a something similar to an old pocket calculator, to an embedded 486 running a DOS program and a touch screen, to a Celeron board running Windows XP. They were generally not great, as many common operations required a long series of button presses or navigating several menus. While old machines had various cranks used to manually adjust the position and alignment of components, for accomodating different bag sizes and whatnot, newer machines replaced these with servos which were supposed to automatically adjust. Of course, for that to work correctly required a certain amount of patience and luck. On one type of machine which was prone to rudely ramming components together and jamming up, I saw some manual adjusters (made from spare parts of the old machines) get welded on to prevent this.

How does the product get into the bag? It is dropped in from above by another machine, for instance the Combination Weigher. I've been told that these were invented by Ishida in the early '80s and ran off of a Z80 CPU. The way these work is that product (peanuts, pretzels, and other such loose solids work well on these machines) dumps onto the center of the machine and then, with the aid of vibration, makes its way outward into one of many hoppers arranged along the perimeter (usually 14 hoppers). Hoppers dump their contents into a scale below. The scale sends a signal to a 16-bit ADC which gives the computer a weight/mass value in tenths of a gram. At any given time, there is essentially a random product weight sitting in each scale. The computer picks up to 10 of them and calculates the total weight that would be produced by dumping each possible combination of scales. If you have 10 scales and at least one of them has to open to dump something then there are 1023 possible combinations. It picks the combination that most closely matches the target weight, without going under. Statistically this works out well enough that it can dump something within a few grams of the target weight nearly every time.

Because the scales have one tenth of a gram precision, the computer adds a programmed safety margin to its internal target weight and samples the ADCs a second time before dumping to verify that the weight is still at or above programmed weight. This tends to add a few/10 grams of indicated weight in each bag. The actual weight being dependent on the accuracy of the machine and other factors (like some of the peanuts bouncing out and landing on the floor and never making it to the bag). If you're an MBA puke you might be tempted to devise an elaborate scheme to defeat this safety margin to "save money" based on faulty assumptions and government regulators letting you get away with shipping a certain proportion of underweight packages. Don't be an MBA puke.

That's good for now. Maybe later I'll have more trivia to post.

It’s that time of year again. The time of year when everyone and their dog waxes nostalgic about all the shit nobody cares about from the year past, and stupidly predicts the next year in the grim knowledge that when the next New Year comes along, nobody will remember that the dumbass predicted a bunch of foolish shit that turned out to be complete and utter balderdash.

Except this year. NOBODY expects the Spanish In... Oh, wait, that was a century ago. Time flies when you're having fun... but if you're having fun, why would you want to time flies?

A deadly, redundantly named worldwide pandemic has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans alone, not to mention the rest of the world, but we're the worst thanks to our cluelessly incompetent leadership. Rather than the Spanish Influenza from a century ago, Covid-19 is far deadlier.

And that ain't all! Murder hornets, record storms and flooding, record setting fires out west, the world's economies collapsing, massive protests against police officers murdering Black people, a defeated American president determined to hold on to power... 2020: Written by Stephen King, directed by Quentin Tarantino, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson.

With all of the bars closed for months, I got a lot of writing done.
I might as well go ahead and do it anyway. Just like I did last year (yes, a lot of this was pasted from last year’s final chapter).
Some of these links go to /. (these would be old stuff), S/N, mcgrewbooks.com, or mcgrew.info. As usual, first: the yearly index:

Journals:

Random Scribblings

the Paxil Diaries

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

Articles:

Q and the Real “Deep State”

Trump and the Christians

Blockbuster

Abe

Channel 49

Socialism and Capitalism

Why Are There No DINOs?

Sears

The Best Music Ever Recorded

Driving the Snakes from Ireland

A Wolf in Shepherd’s Clothing

The Trump Supporter

The Passover

Indoor Rocketry for Children

An open letter to my congressman

20 Downsides Of Electric Vehicles: Debunked

The Allegations against Joe Biden

The Perpetual Motion Machine

The Dongle

The Dongle, part two

The End of the Dongle

Ask Soylent: Silver

Ask Soylent: Do I Need SSL?

No, We’re Not All In This Together

Landslide?

The Letter

Three Administrations

The Dumbest Word This Century (so far)

How I Ended the war

Where’s My Picturephone?

A Half Century of Rock

Our Sick Society

War on Christmas?

Reviews

Sony STR-DH190

The Coffee Pot

ILIFE V5s Pro Broom

Sony STR-DH190

Dell Inspiron 11 3000

Science Fiction

Highway Fifteen

Red Barchetta

But Sir, I’m Just a Robot

Song

Don’t Feel the Reefer

Cash Drawer Bells

I’m Dreaming of a Green Christmas

I’m Dreaming of a Wet Christmas

Last years’ stupid predictions (and more):

I predicted that I wouldn’t have a book ready in 2020. I got it right! This year I'm predicting that I will release a book, maybe two.

The monster will be banished on January 20. The plague will take a while longer.

I’ll also hang on to most of last year’s predictions, and add one or two new ones;

Someone will die. Maybe you, maybe me. Not necessarily anybody I know... we can only hope. Unfortunately I hit the nail on the head last year; I lost my mother in October, and a few friends left the earth without a rocket as well.

SETI will find no sign of intelligent life. Not even on Earth.

The Pirate Party won’t make inroads in the US. I hope I’m wrong about that one.

US politicians will continue to be wholly owned by the corporations.

I’ll still be a nerd.

Technophobic fashionista jocks will troll slashdot (but not S/N). I have no idea if that one or the following held up, anybody been there lately?

Microsoft will continue sucking.

The pandemic will continue plagueing us.

Happy New Year! Ready for another trip around the sun?

U.S. cyber agency says SolarWinds hackers are 'impacting' state, local governments

And... the market rewards them

'What's the alternative?' SolarWinds boosts security firms' bottom lines

Cybersecurity providers including FireEye Inc and Microsoft Corp could not prevent a huge network breach disclosed this month by numerous U.S. agencies and companies, yet their shares are soaring for a second straight week.
...
Wall Street is betting that governments and businesses - having invested years in moving to digital infrastructure - will only accelerate purchases of the latest IT tools.

“What’s the alternative?” said Venkatesh Shankar, marketing professor at Texas A&M University.

Airbag recalls or Listeria outbreaks tend to affect shares within a narrow supply chain, from restaurants and auto dealers down to parts and ingredients suppliers, he said.

At the time of writing, the SolarWind stock price dropped on YtY from $18.55 a year ago, to $15.75 now. Crazy as it may sound after being hacked, the recommendation is "Buy", because "What's the alternative?"

This was a very busy year for me, since all my job skills are considered "essential" I was never at a point where I wasn't working. In fact, it's quite possible I worked more this year than any other in my life.

This year was also very busy for me in terms of reading. Reading has always provided me with a great way to unwind after a hard day, whether I spent it banging out ball joints or code. I try to read every night before going to sleep, and find that even if I'm dog tired I can always manage to get through a few pages before nodding off until morning.

This year started off with the best book I've ever read, Steinbeck's East of Eden. Tonight I just finished up another great book, Ken Kesey's Sometimes A Great Notion. Before I give my thoughts on it, I'll summarize the other books I've read this year and offer a brief thought or two. These are in no particular order:

• To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee - A great story, easy to read, and if you haven't seen the movie the ending may surprise you.
• The Best of Me, Nicholas Sparks - Another good story and easy to read, but...whatever, fairy tales only come true in the movies, ladies.
• Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe - One of those classics I never got around to reading, it made me weep at the cruel inhumanity some people are capable of while simultaneously rejoicing at the unflappable spirit the downtrodden can exhibit.
• A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens - Somewhat difficult to read if you aren't used to his style of writing, but a terrific story of devotion and sacrifice, and a good lesson in what goes around, comes around.
• The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie - I was curious regarding the hullabaloo that surrounded this book when it first came out, with all the talk of fatwas and such on Rushdie's head because he dared speak about Islam in a less than flattering light. I didn't like it at all, it took me 2 months to wade through it. I'd usually read 10 or so pages a night before feeling like I would just throw the damn book out the window and be shut of it. It just seemed so pointless and stupid. Don't waste your time.
• This Boy's Life, Tobias Wolff - An easy read that i devoured in two nights. Flows well, great stories told in an amusing and entertaining way.
• City of Glass, Paul Auster - A strange story with an even stranger ending. Fairly easy to read but left me scratching my head and asking, "Why, just why?"
• The Cave, Jose Saramago - The author's writing style made it difficult to read. There's a lot of dialog but no quotation marks delineating who's saying what. Every conversation reads like a paragraph of big run-on sentences. A good story, though, and worth the read, if you can handle the unconventional style.
• The Know-It-All, A. J. Jacobs - A lighthearted and very entertaining nonfiction about a guy who decided to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in a year. The author skillfully weaves anecdotes about his life into the story, including meeting Alex Trebek and appearing on 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire?'
• The End of Eternity, Isaac Asimov - A reread, and what more needs to be said about Asimov, everything he writes is great.
• The Stars, Like Dust, Isaac Asmiov - Ditto
• The Gods Themselves, Isaac Asimov - Ditto (I ran out of new material and breezed through these three books before making another pilgrimage to Books a Million).
• Jack Reacher, Lee Child - I read 4 Jack Reacher books, more of a break from having to think about what I was reading. I can't think off the top of my head which ones they were, but if you've read one of them, they're all pretty much the same.
• Cilka's Journey, Heather Morris - I read The Tattooist of Auschwitz last year and this one was sort-of a follow up. If you ever are feeling down, like life isn't fair, and everything is going wrong, read this book. It will wake you up to the realization that some people are capable of remarkable courage in the face of overwhelming sadness and tragedy. You'll never feel sorry for yourself again. Ever.

Now for a review of Sometimes A Great Notion. Like Dickens, or Saramago, the author's writing style makes it a somewhat difficult read. Ken Kesey, the author, hung around with the Grateful Dead, was a star of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and was very much a part of the trippy, acid-induced ruminations of the 60's. I'm not sure if he wrote this book while tripping on acid, or if he expected the reader to trip while reading it. Maybe a little bit of both. He bounces back-and-forth between 1st and 3rd person, and a lot of the time the 1st person parts are two different people thinking and speaking. It isn't like Faulkner did in As I Lay Dying where each person is given a chapter to speak and think, Kesey mixes it all up all over the place, often in the same paragraph and even the same sentence.

Kesey is also very liberal with the similes and metaphors. The whole book is pretty much one big adjectival description. There's some parts where it makes the story drag, like when he spends 20 or so pages talking about Canadian geese announcing the coming of winter. I found myself thinking, "I get it, the geese, everyone is affected, they keep you awake at night, you can't see them during the day to shoot them, it takes a few weeks for them to finish migrating, egad, move on!" That feeling struck me a few times while reading.

The story started off kind of slow, but by the middle half I couldn't put it down. I'll try not to give away much about the story, but I'll give a quote that kind of sums it up for me:

But if the strength ain't real, I recall thinking the very last thing that day, before I finally passed out, then the weakness sure enough is. Weakness is true and real. I used to accuse the kid of faking his weakness. But faking proves the weakness is real. Or you wouldn't be so weak as to fake it. No, you can never fake being weak. You can only fake being strong...And if you can only fake being strong, not being weak, then the kid has done to me what I set off to do to him! He's shaped me up. He's made me to quit faking. He's straightened me out.

What I take from the book is it's OK to root for the underdog, even if he is weak, but in the end, only the strong will survive. Even if the underdog prevails, the strong isn't necessarily vanquished.

If you can get used to Kesey's writing style, I highly recommend Notion. After East of Eden it's the second best book I've read (this year).

Have yourself a COVID-19 Christmas
Let your heart beat light
From now on
Our face masks will be out of sight

Have yourself a COVID-19 Christmas
Make the droplets spray
From now on
Our safety will be miles away

Here we are as in olden days
Like contagion days of yore
Flu sick friends get too near to us
Giving fear to us once more

Through the years we'll all be sick together
If red states allow
Hang an unused mask upon the highest bough
And have yourself a Covid little Christmas now

I have a telescope and I haven't used it for years due to lack of space. It's been neatly away in its box. I thought I would get it out for looking at this Jupiter-Saturn conjunction.

On Sunday I decided to get the telescope built and do a test run. I was trying to cook a roast chicken dinner and put up the telescope at the same time. By the time I got it outside, the planets were getting very low on the horizon but after a few minutes I managed to get Jupiter and Saturn just as they went behind a tree, so I had to look at them in between the branches.

The next day it rained all day and the sky was completely overcast so I missed the real event.