(the scheduler….didn’t.. so this was posted a bit after noon ) Should have been at 8:30 AM

I cut these final rounds on Friday afternoon and will be breaking them up Saturday morning for splitting later.

Man, that was a big tree. It fell in April due to wind….literally pulled the roots out of the ground, and I have spent the summer cutting the tops, branches, and most of the smaller parts of the trunk for firewood for later this winter. I gave about a cord to my neighbor as he was short for this year. Plus about 5 ricks to Ed as he is 75 and just failing physically and can’t cut and split his own any longer.

I did a quick count of the rings and extrapolated a bit and determined this tree was about 130 years +/- old….A nice white oak. A shame to use it for firewood, but no sawmill will take a yard tree for fear of nails.

Big wood

This is the last of it, and it needs to season a winter before burning.

For size reference, that saw is a 1976 36 inch bar McCulloch Double Eagle 80. What a beast of a saw. Made for someone who is more man that me, I gotta tell ya.  4 hours cutting with that thing and I am DONE. My forearms and wrist are toast.

Better than bucking a crosscut saw with another person though.

Each 16 inch thick round weighs between 450  and 550 lbs,  so that is about 3 and a third tons of wood. It’ll lose 15-20% of it’s weight due to evaporating water over the winter though.

Still gotta split it and stack it yet, so the work ain’t done.

I burned some calories today and will burn many more in the near future. Better than a gym membership.

Now the narrative is how the folks in the Lower 9TH Ward were somehow discriminated against because they were mostly dispersed into other cities in the aftermath of the storm and were not paid to return….(forgetting that many may not have wanted to return) and how no one, not even the city of New Orleans wanted to help rebuild the lower 9th (mostly probably because it was below sea level) and they were given FEMA loans rather cash handouts….so it must be discrimination against Black people…

Watching the narrative of the 20th anniversary of Katrina hitting New Orleans.

And yes, it is a narrative.

They skip all the (actual) failures of the city government, and the state government, and instead focus on the claimed failures of the Federal government in the aftermath.

But the reality, despite the narrative, is that the Nagin administration failed to do much to prepare despite the forecast that the hurricane would hit the city heads on days before, that the pumps had not been maintained for years, that the flood control structures had been allowed to decay over decades leading to broken levees, that the evacuation efforts were almost comical in their implementation and the leadership criminally incompetent at the city and state level.

But watching the media gloss over those failures, you’d think that the DNC types had done a wonderful job, both before the landfall, and afterwards.

And that just ain’t so.

Trump has threatened to send National Guard troops to large (and Democratic run) cities to quell crime…..

They all, to a man repeat the Mantra:

“Crime IS Down!!”.

But so what, crime is down from a high, but the one thing they don’t say is that crime is at an acceptable level. What is an acceptable level of crime?

And they can’t really fight crime because the source of the crime would scream and cry in outrage that they are being unfairly targeted…..the blacks and the illegal invaders from south and central America.  They’d claim ” Racism!!!” Until, and unless you fundamentally change the culture of inner city blacks, the crime in their segment will stay at the level it is. Unless and until you stop the handouts so that people will need to either work or starve (Or drug test for Gubmint handouts) drugs will be an issue, and even then, impulse crimes will still happen.

Illegals have their own problems, but mostly, they are similar.

But until you address those issues in those two demographics, all you can do is claim “Crime is down” not that “crime is at a level that is acceptable”…and that it is at a level similar to the predominantly white suburbs….

“Crime is down!” is not really a great accomplishment though.

It would seem that the California Appeals Court has chosen to ignore a ruling by the US Supreme Court.

“… There is no basis for affording property rights less protection in the hands of legislators than administrators,” Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the court in April. “The Takings Clause applies equally to both – which means that it prohibits legislatures and agencies alike from imposing unconstitutional conditions on land-use permits.”

The high court vacated the first appeals court ruling and remanded it back to the court for further deliberations. But last month, the California court reaffirmed its first decision, finding that the traffic impact fees were constitutional despite the higher scrutiny advanced by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Why then, should anyone follow a ruling by either the Supremes or the California Appeals court?

If a lower court  (or any government agency) chooses to disregard a higher court, Then why should any of us follow any court ruling (or for that matter, any law at all) with which we  which we disagree?

Either we have the rule of law, adjudicated by the courts and enforced by the police, or we don’t. There is no middle ground. Law or Anarchy. Choose.

Minneapolis school shooter Robin Westman revealed as transgender and anti-Trump

There is a pattern here.

Leftist and trans or lesbian seems to be the thing for school shooters lately.

Perhaps we need to have better controls on people with gender issues.

If it saves one life…..

“Walk away with calmness””

“To make a bad time worse, spend it wishing for impossible dreams”

“No one else can see your potential if you don’t”

“Sometimes you have to let go of something good to make room for something better”

“Walk with grace”

“A goal in often not something to be reached, but rather something to aim for”

“It gets easier, eventually you just stop giving a fuck”

“If you love life, don’t waste time, for that is what life is made of”

“The people you associate with today will shape your future”

Pretty much as I expected, really. After some real, careful review, All the “Uncommanded Discharges” of the M18/P320 were simply found to be mishandling.

Additionally, a review of weapons discharges throughout Air Force Global Strike Command showed none had been attributed to malfunctions, the news release stated.

Much like the early GLOCK’s, the trigger safety caused a lot of people to shoot their firearm because they weren’t handled correctly. This is what led to the implementation of the “New York Trigger” because the NYC cops couldn’t be trusted to not shoot themselves or others with a normal trigger weight so they needed an extremely strong trigger spring to prevent the negligent discharges. Back then, the consensus was often that GLOCK firearms were supposed to be dangerous, but nearly all of the issues were “Booger Hook on the BangSwitch” issues (or stuff in the trigger guard when reholstering) , not mechanical failures. I believe that this is the issue with the SIG’s as well. The statistics bear my conclusion out. At this point, it is Urban Legend level of idiocy though.

Sig has mishandled the issue, but they are getting screwed in Social Media.

Took my parents shopping in Traverse City, along with a friend

It’s either a 5 ish hour drive or a 1 ish hour flight.

We flew. I own a decently fast airplane, after all.

We chose to burn some avgas and save some time. The choice is 38-40 gal per hour at 210 knots or so or 28-32 at 185 knots. We chose faster.

The flight up was hazy,, technically VFR (but not really) for much of the way,  and I did not get any decent photos of anything due to the haze at altitude……

This was on the way back, just above the clouds about 8 pm  heading more or less south southwest

200 knots at 10K

Shortly after that, we descended and it was clouds and IMC pretty much down to 4000 ft. A little bumpy in the clouds but not too bad….

(Sorry it is sideways, I don’t know why and do not have the tools to rotate it…..exercise is good for your neck, or turn your monitor )

So 1.2 up and 1.3 back, with about 0.4 IMC on the way north and 0.5 on the way back.  Both ways we had brutal (like 55 knots at one point) direct crosswinds at altitude.

The landing at KTVC was perfect: RWY 280 with 17kt gusting 26 at 320, and it was textbook perfect (I get lucky once in a while). Upwind wheel first (and I didn’t even chirp the tire), then the downwind one, then the nosewheel.  If you had had a drink in your hand the ice wouldn’t have even clinked. For once there were witnesses. I wish I had video, but I was too busy to hold a phone….

The landing back home was good, but not as perfect as the one at Traverse City.

A great day with my parents too. Shopping and then dinner at Sorellina. The only downside was that, because I was flying, I couldn’t have a glass of wine with dinner.

It don’t get much better than that though. The real reason I own a plane and fly is for days like that.

But I doubt it.

The DNC is strapped for cash, many of their big donors have chosen not to donate this election cycle.  So have many of their smaller, yet still significant donors.

And this just after DOGE cut all that funding to USAID and all the other NGO’s….you know, the ones that got billions in unsupervised taxpayer grants and who employed all those second and third sons and daughters of those wealthy people (who were unemployable in the private sector) at inflated salaries and that generated such huge profits in the procurement, shipping and distribution of “aid” by USAID and those NGO’s…..

Coincidence? Possibly, but I honestly think that this loss of donations is not just a random happening.

The US taxpayer was likely funding (if indirectly) much of the DNC this way. And now that those taxpayer funds have dried up, so have the donations….