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Folks, my administration has weathered some terrible storms. Harvey, Irma, and Maria have been the worst. And North Dakota had the absolute opposite, a very serious drought. We’re working hard on it, and it will disappear, it will all go away. It's a fine November day in Washington: crisp, breezy, partly cloudy, with zero percent chance of impeachment. In the West it's nice and warm, they're having their Indian summer, I guess they call it Native American now (I think I might have more Indian blood than a lot of the so-called Indians that are trying to open up the reservations). Arizona and California are having some great beach weather. And in my home town they're looking forward to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, which is always tremendous. Folks, you've had Thanksgiving before. It's always fantastic, right? In China, they have National Day, that's their biggest holiday. Great idea, they celebrate being a country. We have a better country, we don't celebrate that enough. So I said, let's celebrate it more. Let's take the holidays we already have and make them into national days. In addition to what they already were. Get ready for #NationalDayofThanksgiving! But it won't happen unless President #TrumpProclaims it.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim Thursday, November 23, 2017, as a National Day of Thanksgiving. I encourage all Americans to gather, in homes and places of worship, to offer a prayer of thanks to God for our many amazing blessings. 45.wh.gov/HwPuBv

Yesterday, I issued pardons to a couple of real turkeys. pic.twitter.com/fsS8B8f5UR 🍗🍗-- I mean 🦃🦃 -- who stayed in a nice hotel the night before. At the .@WillardHotel in Washington. pic.twitter.com/Zz20w6si6k pic.twitter.com/EOvxDcjiQl It's nice, it's not the nicest, it's not the Trump International Hotel. But, Emoluments Clause! Let me tell you, we need to repeal that. It's killing our economy. #MAGA 🇺🇸

Update: ate some delicious ham. 🐷 They told me it was ham. I hope Al Frankenstien is OK (not really). 🍖 Watch my video! pic.twitter.com/nQhi7XopMW

The shocking truth is coming out about Dem Senator Al Franken from SNL and from Minnesota. It's not so shocking. I look forward to a thorough investigation. It will confirm what we already know -- he is a fat pig, slob, dog and disgusting animal who has ZERO respect for women. 🐷 Who forcibly kisses them, filling their mouths with his foul slime. 🐽 Who treats them like SHIT. 💩

He apologized. He says he respects women. Tell that to Israel, Al! Tell that to Israel. 🔯

Low I.Q. Al Frankenstein came to the Senate cafeteria, and insisted on joining me. He was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no! Up close and personal, he could only be described as attractive if you like a man with a bad complexion who is built like a linebacker. Not exactly one of the great beauties of the world, according to anybody. I have a picture of Fat Al when he was a huge, huge WHALE. 🐋 He lost weight, he's still a fat slob! I just took that picture out of the drawer where I keep it. I just took it out. Not for long, believe me. The picture is really bad, speaks a thousand words. DISGUSTING!

Al Franken is disgusting, both inside and out. If you take a look at him, he's a slob. How does he even get on television? If I were running the Senate I'd fire Al. I'd look him right in that fat, ugly face of his and say, "Al, you're fired." We're all a little chubby but Al's just worse than most of us. But it's not the chubbiness -- Al is a very unattractive person, both inside and out. Beauty and elegance, whether in a man, a building, or a work of art, is not just superficial or something pretty to see. I really understand beauty. And I will tell you, he's not. #MeToo #ImpeachHim

Every hour we're getting calls from reporters from the Fake News Washington Post asking ridiculous questions. And I will tell you, this is owned as a toy by Jeff Bezos. Amazon is getting away with MURDER, tax-wise. He's using the Washington Post for power so that the politicians in Washington don't tax Amazon like they should be taxed. He thinks I'll go after him for antitrust. Because he's got a huge antitrust problem because he's controlling so much, Amazon is controlling so much of what they are doing. He's using the Washington Post, which is peanuts, he's using that for political purposes to save Amazon in terms of taxes and in terms of antitrust.

@LennyMBernstein of the Washington Post called the WRONG person in Alabama. When he called Pastor Al Moore looking for a woman to make "damaging remarks" about Judge Roy Moore. And offered a "$5000 to $7000" reward. DISGUSTING! www.facebook.com/WKRG.News.5/videos/10155917973537500/

I'm going to make a MAJOR, MAJOR statement later. Time & date TBD. Maybe tonight. Nobody really knows. I don't think anybody really knows. But later. #TrumpTV 📺

Thoughts and prayers with the people of Iran. Who just had a major, major earthquake. 7.3, with hundreds and hundreds killed. I called the president of Iran to give condolences on the terrible earthquake. I tried to call him. But I couldn't get through because of his cell phone reception at the site.

I've said before, they have suckered us. Iran has suckered us. They have taken advantage of stupid people, stupid representatives, people that are incompetent, whether it's Kerry or our president. I don't blame Iran. After all, who can blame a country for being able to take advantage of another country for the benefit of its citizens?

To the Supreme Leader of Iran, if you're listening, thank you for limiting the range of your missiles. I really believe you limited it. I accept it, because you said so. I have a lot of things going on, I'm very happy I don't have to worry about your missiles. Very happy. I know you work with North Korea. You have great chemistry with North Korea. Which has become a threat. As long as we stand together, that threat will never happen, doesn’t even have a chance. The entire civilized world must unite to confront the North Korea menace and the entire world is watching us right now.

To the families of the victims, we are praying for you, and we are here for you. And we ask God to help see you through this very dark period. May God bless the souls of the lives that are lost, may God give you the grace of healing and may God provide the grieving families with strength to carry on. Good luck to everybody! Good luck. ✝️🙏

I love what's happening with #SESTA, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act. Which did tremendously well in the Senate Commerce Committee. Senator Feinstein loves it. Senator Portman and Senator Blumenthal are sponsoring it. Sheryl from Facebook loves it, Facebook is all for it. 21st Century Fox, which is Fox News, loves it. Disney, which does great work with our precious children, loves it. Google, Oracle and HP, some of our biggest cyber companies, love it. Almost everybody loves it.

But some LOSERS don't love it. They don't get it. They say "Oh, SESTA is censorship!" It's not censorship. Believe me, it's not censorship. The Consumer Technology Association, the Internet Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontiers Foundation -- these are foolish people. They don't understand that we need to close up our internet. To stop the pimping that has turned America's internet into a big, big brothel. The biggest. As you know, we're having major, major problems with the pimping sites. The pimps have taken over our internet. SESTA can fix this problem easily and quickly. We can begin to #LockThemUp. China was having tremendous problems with its cyber, they got it under control. We must do the same. Folks, tell your senators, don't listen to the fools. Don't listen to the losers. Tell them to pass SESTA! We need it very badly. Time is quickly running out, we must act fast, and hopefully Congress will act faster and more effectively than anyone. I know one thing about Congress, if they work on it hard, it will happen. We DESPERATELY need SESTA. I am sitting in Beijing with a pen in hand, waiting for our senators to give it to me. I have pen in hand. Believe me, I'm in China, I have pen in hand. 🇺🇸🇨🇳

So, I'm running a Debian knockoff. Did a distro upgrade, primarily because Liquorix kernel is barfing all over Jessie. The distro upgrade went alright, and some irritating quirks in the system were cured. I wasn't expecting that - how long has it been since a system ran noticeably better after an upgrade? Stuff is mostly incremental, and unnoticeable these days.

After booting to the new system, I attempt to install Liquorix again, and it barfs again. I do get a message this time, leaving me hopeful - I need a couple specific packages to satisfy Liquorix kernel. So, apt-get update, then apt-get upgrade. Those packages and a half dozen related are installed. But, apt-get barfs now. /var/apt/ is now locked. So, the only thing to do is dpkg --reconfigure -a

Not possible. My file system is read only now.

I didn't document stuff, so I can't reconstruct all the steps I took, but EVERYTHING failed. I read at least a dozen different pages, trying to figure out how to fix my fs. fsck was being entirely uncooperative, no matter which DVD/USB I booted to. So, screw it - I guess I'll have to install something. Look around the net a bit, think, look at the ISO's I already have downloaded, and decide on Manjaro. Write it to a USB, try again to recover my files system, and fail. I change my mind about installing Manjaro. I decide on Siduction - write that to USB, boot up, and again, decide to try recovering my file system (one more time) before proceeding with installation.

And, the file system is fixed. There were no errors or anything on the part of fsck. It found errors on my root file system, and fixed them. Simple as that.

Obviously, the system was recoverable. It's recovered. It can't get any more obvious than that, can it? So, why did all those rescue disk images, and various distribution ISO's all fail? For a few moments, I wanted to point at systemd as the culprit, but Siduction runs on systemd. So, what is different between Siduction, and everything else I was working with?

I might imagine that Siduction is the distro most similar to the installed system - but that gets me nowhere. None of the administration tools are "different" from one distro to another. I might imagine that one (or more) of my DVD's or USB's was improperly burnt. But, ALL OF THEM???

I might also presume that my SSD is getting ready to barf. Possibly, there is some kind of error going on in the "hard drive" that affected me a dozen times, but didn't trigger on (roughly) the 13th attempt to fix the system?

Or, maybe we're just experiencing an especially heavy cosmic ray storm? Phhhttt - I give up. I've got my system back. Unless it barfs on me again, I'll blame those cosmic rays, or gremlins. If it does barf, I'll stick a new SSD in, install Siduction, and hope it's not some other bit of hardware that caused the problem.

And, maybe I'll just give up on the Liquorix kernal. That's where all of this nonsense started.

Folks, time zones can be very confusing. In Massachusetts they're trying to decide, what time zone are they in? Here in China, as you know, they don't have time zones. And it can be very confusing for a child when his father goes very far away, crossing many, many time zones. I know some of you just finished a tremendous election. Very sad for those of you who are Dems. Because my great Republican Party did amazingly well. While your party is dead. It's dead and the DNC doesn't know why. They don't want to know. But I think the very crooked DNC is a big, big part of it.

It's been a year since our tremendous election of November 2016. One of the best elections, probably the best election ever in the history of the world. In which I said we'd better stop business as usual and not be beholden to ways of the past which were not working. And the American people gave me a HUGE victory. Which was really a victory for them. Because I always, always put the American people first. Some of my great Republican candidates do too. And those who do have done very well. Congratulations to the winners! Big wins for my Republican Party in the House of Representatives. Massive win in the Electoral College! pic.twitter.com/7ifv5gT7Ur

But we had a couple of LOSERS. .@ChrisChristie is a big loser. Maybe, probably the biggest, because he's very, very fat. A big fat slob. He needs to go on The Biggest Loser to lose a lot of weight. He didn't lose weight, he lost the election. He gave me his endorsement last year, but it was a big negative for me. A huge negative, almost a disaster. I think he was angling to be @VP, can you imagine if I'd picked him? It would be like Laurel & Hardy!

Ed Gillespie, who never supported me, also lost. He's a hard worker but he's a LOSER. He was always against what I stand for, against Making America Great Again. When my terrific alt-right went to Charlottesville to protect our statues, protect our heritage, culture & history, he was against them. And it was a disaster. So he lost, big league.

It's a sad day for our great states of New Jersey and Virginia. It's not sad, because they voted out LOSERS. Who are Republicans. Who happen to be Republicans. But it's sad because they voted in Dems. Who are losers because they're Dems. Who are Dems because they're losers.

Meanwhile, I'm in China. Which is amazing. Very different from the USA, it's like night and day. The wealth of China is amazing, it's really something. We've made other countries rich, while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has dissipated over the horizon. Thinking about holding a big rally in Tiananmen Square! I'm kidding. Obviously I'm kidding. The Chinese are very rich and very happy. Of course they're happy, they have everything they could possibly want. Except Trump hotels. I'd love to have big, beautiful Trump hotels in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. I'm very busy right now but my people, if you're listening, you can think about opening hotels there. That will be a great day for China.

Had a great time in Japan and Korea. Japanese burgers & Coke are just like ours. pic.twitter.com/9RiaibqNLO Korean food is fantastic. Strange, but amazingly good. They have something called Taco Tuesday. Which they do every Tuesday. It's a big tradition for them. I had a taco 🌮 and a burrito 🌯 -- those are like stuffed crêpes, they make them with a thin, round bread like a crêpe -- for lunch there. And for dinner there was corn, ribs and TRIPLE chocolate cake with raspberry sauce. It's the threesome of chocolate. Which I never had before. I had double chocolate before, they added a third chocolate. To make it three. It was the best chocolate cake you've ever had in your life. It was my first triple, I felt like I lost my virginity all over again. Like I was a baby before this. For me it wasn't a triple, it was a home run. Tremendous! I'm going to tell the chefs at the White House, at both White Houses, all about Korean food. Maybe they can bake me a cake with four chocolates! They say travel expands the mind. I think it can expand the waistline too. But a slob like Chris Christie can get fat without going anywhere. pic.twitter.com/wyOdmqcFLd

Stay safe while I'm away. Above all, stay away from the NFL. Don't go to the games, don't watch them on TV. Boycott the NFL until such time as they respect Anthem, Flag and Country. And good luck. Good luck, everybody. #USAStrong #NFLBoycott #Neverwatch #BoycottTheNFL #BoycottNFL 🇺🇸

A while back I discovered that they’re selling photographic film again, so I bought a package of three rolls of 35mm Kodak color film. Not sure what I’ll photograph, but the Minolta 35 mm SLR takes a hell of a lot better pictures than my phone. Actually, than any phone—and any digital camera.
        I got home, set the film aside (it’s a lot more expensive than the last time I used film) and looked for my camera, which hadn’t been used for a couple of decades.
        I couldn’t find it. I was sure I’d put it in the middle drawer of my dresser, but no matter how much I rummaged I couldn’t find it. And damn it, I’d paid eighteen dollars for the film and didn’t keep the receipt. That was a few days ago.
        So yesterday I decided to look again, maybe it was in a different drawer? I looked through all of them, and finally rummaged through the one I’d looked in earlier. And I found a small case with a zipper, and there was a camera inside.
        An old sixteen millimeter, the kind you used flash cubes with. Looking more, I found another camera. It was a cheapo as well. And then at the back of the bottom of the drawer, there it was. My old camera, the SLR (I have another 35mm but it’s not nearly as good).
        Checking it out I wondered if I could remember how to use it. On the bottom was a screwed in battery cover. I opened it and stuck the battery in my pocket, since after half a century that battery’s certainly more than dead.
        So I want back to Walgreen’s for a new battery.
        They don’t make them any more. It’s a mercury battery, and they no longer sell anything with mercury in it. And it’s a strange 1.6 volts, the new ones are 1.3 or 1.5, which is going to make my light meter inaccurate. I’ll have to experiment to find out how to adjust it... that is, if I can get it to work at all. It’s thinner than the old battery, and I don’t think the polarity is marked. And it’s thinner, so I’ll probably have to use aluminum foil as a spacer to make it connect. That means I’ll have a burrito from La Bamba for lunch tomorrow, because they wrap them in foil. I’m not buying a whole roll for a square inch of foil!
***
        Two days later as I was eating my burrito I remembered that film changed sometime in the 1980s, with the film speeds changing from ASA to ISO, so I put off opening the battery until I could do a little research. I found that the camera’s built-in light meter wouldn’t work; conversion was more complex than converting Fahrenheit to Celcius. So now I’m going to have to schlep all the way over to the west side of town, or all the way up to the north side.
        And then I thought of the other camera—the one we call a “phone”. It could probably be used as a light meter, so it looks like I have a little more research.
        So I downloaded two or three photographic light meters, all of which were completely incomprehensible and none of which came with instructions.
        So it looks like my only recourse is to go to the camera store and buy a light meter. I googled, and everything was either on the far north side of town or the far west side. One listed was Best Buy, and since I’d decided to hook my TV to the network I needed a cable and went there.
        They had the short cable I needed, and lots of camera supplies, but no light meters. It’s probably because cameras had built-in light meters for the last half century, but film changed from ASA to ISO three decades ago or so, so it would no longer work even if they still made batteries for it.
        So I asked the guy for directions to the camera shop, got in the car and looked at Google Maps, and couldn’t find the damned place! When I got home I looked it up again, have a better idea of where it is, and will have to go back out there, but I’m calling first.
        I should have called. I found it on the map, drove out there, and found the hard to find camera store.
        Their cheapest light meter was over $250! That’s way, way too much. The store guy explained that it was because so few people are shooting film now, and new cameras have built-in light meters so they only made really fancy ones. It made sense, but of course I was disappointed. Not sure what to do now, I’m not paying that much for a light meter! I only paid fifteen bucks for one when I was a teenager.
        Then, on my way out, I saw something that cheered me greatly—a small blackboard with a notice that they could digitize VCR tape! It’s worth twenty five bucks to me to get that tape of my kids when they were kids digitized.
        But I still don’t know what to do about that light meter. Guess I’ll have to check Google Play again and try all the light meter apps. I’m not very hopeful...
        Any ideas?