Will we all be backpackers?

I keep seeing glimpses of the future. I currently live someplace kind of safe. There are mansions, and medium quality houses but no hovels or temporary structures. Other than crest trail hikers coming through on their various sojourns, we have basically no migrants. Actually, we have the opposite, where people secure good paying jobs in the valley after being groomed by a business, and then fail to find lodging and are ultimately unable to move  here. 

So, people that want to move to this valley are discouraged from attempting it, and residents who come of age, or loose their home to wildfire must also move away and live somewhere else. There are good people here, with a forward looking attitude, but the system is set up to further concentrate the wealth into fewer and fewer pockets. And, apparently, the system drives people from their homes.

The very rich will be the ones who ride in the future. The none-rich will walk. Everyone will be fleeing all the time. no one will get to live in one place for long. Less and less of the earth will be fit for permanent habitation as energy is added to the atmosphere, and deep drill holes continue to be punched deep into the crust. 

It will be a crazy catch 22, where you need much more gear to survive, but you will carry a single fairly light backpack. There will be less clean water and air that can be consumed without extensive processing. Eventually, the places where people can live year around, and places where one can get perfectly clean water will dwindle to none. Everyone will be an unwilling backpacker.

Some amount of fighting between people is expected. So, while the earth is giving us hell, we will be visiting one another with additional troubles. Each of us currently thinks of ourselves as completely settled, and  with permanent possessions that do not need defending. We have militarized police that protect our stuff, and keep us from harming one another.

Imagine yourself as not settled. As a backpacker than is not traveling a particular trail to visit various natural wonders. Rather, you are part of a crowd that is being driven around by disease, famine, soldiers and natural disasters.

Throw in the illnesses that you usually have along the trail, but add much more fatal diseases and deliberate attacks from enemies and accidental attacks from friendlies. With no such thing as money any more, everyone will become a traveling store, specializing in some type of lightweight products. 

As a further leap for your mind, picture people who are still settled, and who fear you as a sort of locust that can visit en masse and devastate crops as well as carry off possessions. The refugee version of you would be facing.... the settled you of today, who feels violent anger toward these illegal visitors.

So, for anyone who is looking forward to ww3 or some type of apocalypse, i suggest that we drag out this phase of collapse as long as possible. we can scroll through our tweets while our cities burn. vote for liberals or conservatives that both hope to keep using oil and operating an energy grid and buying lots of guns.

Much as i have been affected by the propaganda campaign to show how great the Ukrainians and the Taiwanese really are, I question US participation in another countries border dispute. As interesting as that adventure might be, I really do not want to see the nukes fly. I, like you, hope to watch more good movies, eat more good food, and voluntarily walk trails that I need not walk [because my home has not be captured or bombed].

my gaming set up is built from the ground up [and please take a peak at my next project]

 this post will describe my custom gaming rig, which is more complex than most. It is complicated because it also provides shelter, heating and cooling, and it makes the electricity that is required to destroy monsters and demons in comfort.

I am posting this because my favorite you tuber is a master computer builder called optimum tech. I am an avid pc gamer, even though i am 64 years of age. Optimum tech is all about small system size, excellent cooling, low noise, and a comfortable gaming environment.

Having just rebuilt his main personal computer, and found the best gaming peripherals, [including building his own mouse!], he is now eyeing his desk. boy, do i have a way to devote some time to shaping wood!

This desk is sawn from a ponderosa that fell in a friend's yard. The huge, ancient tree fell over, but remained propped up on it's limbs. It was not a bit rotted. My friend is what you might call a paleo senior. he gave me the tree during a wildfire because it was too close to the house that he had built from , you guessed it, blue pine! he gave me the huge tree on the condition that I also help him drag trees down his mountain. we dragged them down the pretty steep mountain like a team of mules, and loaded them onto my trailer on a dirt road below.

I guess that what I am saying is that I did not buy this slab of wood. instead, I cut it from one of those logs that we either dragged, or cut so that it fell into my pickup bed, drove down a small mountain, and then [assisted by the paleo woman of the house], loaded onto my flatbed trailer. I then used an Alaskan mill, slicing the ponderosa sections into neat slabs with a live edge on either side.

i had to trim this particular slab on one side, so that it fits along the wall with a small gap to hide the wires.  Deciding against vertical legs, I attached it to the wall more like a large shelf. it is easier to move a rolling chair all around the room without hitting vertical legs. With a thick slab of soft wood, it is possible to optimize the edges for gaming.

About the chair: I have trouble with my back, so after a bit of whining and complaining about various mushy chairs, I behaved more like a busy monkey, and built my own chair. 

the angles fit my abused back perfectly, so that I can get to the perfect physical position for gaming and leave my feeble old body. There are tiny hard pads that go on each part, but I removed them so that you can see the wood clearly. 

I salvaged all that wood from a deck that was removed to reduce fire danger. The wheels are 4 inches tall, so they do not get stuck in a small depression, and they are soft, so they do not damage the floor too much. The result is a friction free roll, so that you can cross a room almost instantly. Also, a floor that is kind to bare feet, but is not covered by nasty carpet.

This building is my office, and as you might have guessed by now, I did not buy it or rent it. 

It was the first shelter that I built when I moved to Washington state in 2015. Sadly, I pitched the roof at 22.5 degrees, so that it's original rooftop solar array was always covered with snow in the winter. The tiny solar energy system that is set up now uses just these 2 medium sized panels on a simple rack that turns with the sun if needed.

They charge a single 200 amp hour 12 v battery that powers a small  and quiet inverter. Typically, this back up system powers my dual monitors, but it can run the gaming computer for a limited time if the huge battery in the shop is exhausted during a long storm.

The shop to the right is a more recent building with better design. The 4 LG 375 watt panels are held at 45 degrees, forming an adjustable awning for the south facing glass. overhangs are 2 feet, so that windows and fir siding are protected from the pacific northwest climate.

The deck and stairs of the office are more slabs of blue pine. To the left, you can see a project. It is an attempt at the smallest possible gaming studio.

The floor is just 6 feet square, so this is no trophy home! it does make a good bit of power with small solar panels on the round roof. and, it can be carried by almost any truck or trailer. Framed from cedar, it will last for a long time in any climate. And, I like the look of the rusty corrugated metal. 

the inside is used pine t&g, and here is the initial solar energy install that I will use to complete the build no matter where the trailer is located. All components are over 20 years old, except for the battery, which is a nice new redodo 100 ah 12.8 v LiFeO4 model.

This space is clearly calling out for some furniture made from blue pine slabs!

life and eviction at 292 wolf creek road

 I moved to the Twisp Carlton road near Carlton in the summer of 2015. 

I set up my 19 foot trailer on 10 acres, and built an irrigation system. I suppressed the weeds, and made it green and grassy. It was sold in 2018, and i moved to 292 wolf creek road to improve 45 acres of abandoned ranch basecamp. This property had been the original homestead where Wolf creek flows into the Methow river. It had ruined buildings, a giant collapsed root cellar, and was a knapweed plantation. The owners are the Belsbys, a ranch family with large holdings in eastern Washington. They would provide sewer and power, and i would drive the 420d backhoe and pile up the old buildings burn them. make heaps of big rocks, and gather naily boards. After my 400 dollar work trade was paid off each month at 30 dollars per hour, I would work at another Belsby property for a reduced hourly rate of 20 dollars per hour. 

There was power when we checked the place out, but no water or septic. We ended up trenching and running new wires to the well. We found an old out house, that I could rebuild and use. 

The neighbors started to complain from the first day that I arrived. they would drive by and lean on the horn, and shout curses out the window. The Wolf creek property owners association is a wannabe gated community with a lot of rules. And, they are notorious for driving less advantaged people from their area of the valley: They hire private investigators who trespass and take photos; They write letters that a lot of people sign and give to the county, etc. Quite a few members tried to make believe that I did not live there, and  continued to walk their dogs and ski across my rented property. They immediately got the outhouse condemned, and when we bought a brand new outhouse, they called in another series of complaints about the new outhouse.

The building inspector, the county planner, the fire department, the electrical inspector, the health inspector, and others came again and again. We were asked to build a septic system, and the Belsbys agreed to that. I built more buildings, so that I would have a shop to work in, a separate kitchen where I could cook without smoking up my tiny bedroom/office, a chicken house, a climbing gym, etc. A year went by, and we did not build or even permit the septic. weekenders continued to call in complaints during busy weekends. The county started to fine the Belsbys 25 dollars per day for no septic. The health inspector could find no heath violations on the property, so they were willing to overlook the code violation, and give the family more time to build the system. 

Sadly I found out that Daren Belsby did not own 292 WCR by himself. It was owned by Badger LLC that included a second member, who is Daren's Brother Brian Belsby. Brian visited, and was unwilling to admit that any work had been done. He considered me to be a low quality person who his brother should not have made an agreement with. He refused to survey the septic, or even to buy the permit to build it. The county got madder and madder, and sent the health inspector to try to evict me. I was taking a nap naked in the sun when I was approached by a fat drunken man with an n95 mask on. He could not speak understandably through the mask in his impaired condition, and could not explain why he had disturbed my nap. I insisted that he return to his vehicle, and drive away. Finally, standing in the spray of my sprinkler near his government truck, he was able to explain to me that he had seen my truck, and had been tasked with evicting me.  I called him the next day at his office, and he did not remember my name or the previous day's encounter. He was drunk again, and did not recognize my voice from our 90 minute talk the day before. He though that I was his boss calling, and he told me the truth about 292. Only one influential person had called in exactly one complaint. [I now suspect that it was Brian Belsby!] He had been driving around, and saw my rig, and thought that it would be convenient and easy to get me the heck out there with a few threats. About 10 minutes into the conversation, I told him who I was again, and he had straightened up enough to comprehend that. He agreed not to return for another drunken eviction attempt. I had him repeat it 3 or 4 times, and warned that if he forgot and returned, I would treat him like a dangerous trespasser. I told him that I totally understood about the drinking, and thanked him for continuing his somewhat competent work during such a stressful pandemic. However, if he continued the harassment, I would have him fired for smoking or drinking so much while working. He understood that very well, and has never found it convenient to return to attempt further evictions.

I tried to live at the Cherry Springs Ranch, which is owned by Daren and Brian's father, Gary Belsby.  Daren towed my largest building to a location near a building that needed remodeling. That was a bit of misdirection, because they actually wanted a ranch hand who could do very heavy lifting and drive over very rough terrain chasing cattle and bison. The lifestyle was not suited to a disabled elderly person, and I became bedridden and more disabled in general.

Covid hit, and I came flying back to my buildings. I started to ski very avidly, and skate skiing became my way to get up from bed, and work through the pain in my back. There will be a later blog post, [and maybe a video], about this issue of using skate skiing as physical therapy.

4 years after my rental began another complaint came in, and the county sent a bill for 37,775 dollars to the Belsbys. 25 US dollars per day for 3 years. The family hired a ambulance chasing lawyer to pester at me instead of building the septic. I had been paying the electric since I began to get disability checks, but the family retook possession of the account, and had the power disconnected. By this point, I had found 2 places to move to, but each was withdrawn after I had spent a lot of money and done plenty of work. Stuck at 292, I spent every penny that I had to purchase solar panels and batteries and solar energy equipment. I got one building set up completely, but needed another 3k to complete the other building. Then my truck died, needing a new ignition system.

At present, there is 18 inches of snowpack, and i have still not been able to lift my woodstove to install it, much less get up on an icy roof to cut a hole for the pipe. One of the two energy systems is complete, but it was drained in the first 2 days and nights of a 4 day storm. all of the perishable food was lost when the batteries quit. Frozen stuff thawed and refrigerated stuff got too warm. I had water in a tank, but it has a thick layer of ice on top now. It is nasty firefighting water, that sat in an open tank all summer.  I called the Okanogan Sheriff , and requested an emergency reconnect of the power. The officer was not from the local police force, and he seemed avid to arrest someone after my explanation. But, he explained, the real crime is not a landowner disconnecting power on a property with an unwanted squatter.  It was the landowner collecting rent for years while refusing to permit or build the required septic system. In addition to the detailed police report, i filed a permanent complaint against Badger LLC with the Washington state attourney general.

That is where I am at now. the Belsbys scratching at me, the scammy lawyer sending me stupid documents, no water or grid power, and a dead truck. I have needed medical attention to stay alive several times recently, so I estimate that I would last less than a year as a homeless disabled person. I can not tow 5 or 6 buildings around with a dead Tacoma, so I have no option to leave.  disconnecting the power after forcing me to pay it for over a year has made them seem cruel and greedy.  The family's cruelty has trapped me here. disconnecting the power has bankrupted me so that I can not move even if I find a place. The Belsby family has a history of 'helping' a poor person, and then evicting them without any of their possessions. That happened at least twice while I lived at 292, and we have an abandoned RV on the property filled with one guys chattels as well as a 25 foot trailer that was given to me after another man was ousted from Daren's home place in Winthrop.

update jan 14th 2023....

i bought enough solar panels, but not near enough batteries to form 2 complete solar energy systems. i can have lights and computer for 3 days into a storm, but the storms are 2 weeks long now! I sold my truck to  buy more batteries. so far, i ordered a single LiFeO4 12 v 200 amp hour cell, and i am testing that now. if it pasees, i plan to buy 3 more of the same cells. the 4 can be configured into a 200 amp hour 48 volt bank, a 400 amp hour 24 volt bank, or a 800 amp hour 12 volt bank. That is convenient, because i currently have an inverter of each size.

NOTE: I did save up money in a bank account, and tried to spend it on the batteries. The bank is run by the US government, and they are not sending any of their money to China these days. i was unable to buy a single battery of the desired 3. Even the helper at the government bank explained to me how to launder the money so that it can be spent on Chinese goods. [Amazon!]. However, it seems dishonest to accept disability money from the MAN, and then defraud them by using light fraud to spend it efficiently. It seems that fraud is no longer a crime in the US. Citizens are encouraged to lie in order to get more money. Lying to get money is not a sin, but rather, is now thought to be admirable. We elected a lying president!

ski conditions have gotten acceptable a few times, and i have managed a 60 km ski with little trouble. the 100 km that is my goal seems unlikely. there is just not enough time in a day. i have been trying to speed up, but then i poop out too quickly.

update feb 21

i have had some luck getting into shape for skate skiing.

I have gone over 60 km maybe 20 times, but have not reached the desired 100 km goal. I got very tired of sitting in the dark after my lead acid batteries were all drained. i sold my toyota tacoma, and bought a LiFePo4 battery with high energy density.

i set up an inverter system in my office, so that when the lights go out, I can switch to one final back up system and watch it carefully as the voltage drops.

I used an old charge control and inverter at first, but this system needs to be silent and very efficient. I used more truck money to buy a fan-less inverter from Morningstar.

The redodo brand battery has already proven to be astounding at retaining a charge [with almost no loss over time], and at taking a charge [with little or no internal resistance] In short, it stays charged, and it charges so easily that a tiny trickle will work over a long period of time. If you are familiar with solar energy systems, there is no float stage needed for a lithium ion battery. it does not require a small current to be added to stay charged. i selected the 200 amp hour 12v  plus model, which is the more expensive one that has a larger battery management system so that it can provide 2000 watts instantly.

Once a user has tried lithium batteries, i am pretty sure that there is no going back. I hope to double the battery next month, while the first is new enough to pair with an unused battery. Then, there will be 400 amp hours of 12v storage available, which is a pretty big backup. It is roughly half of what is stored in the larger buildings. The kitchen has 200 amp hours at 48 volts, and the shop has 350 amp hours at 24 volts.

update march 4

The morningstar inverter in the previous photo worked for a few days, and then had an internal fire. It stunk up the house, and had to be immediately unmounted and put outside. It is lucky that the plastic shroud over the front of the device did not get hot enough to melt and ignite and catch the wall on fire. This is the second morningstar product that has melted down on me, so it is the last of their products that i will try. It seems that they are yet another company that has loosened or stopped doing quality control. Amazon has pioneered this idea of sending out every unit that is made, and letting the customers see which ones work well. If nothing else, they can drag their heels on returning the money, and keep it for a few months at least.

 I have managed to ski 90 km on an icy day when the entire methow trails system was groomed. i skied there and back on the entire methow community trail that runs from Winthrop to a point about 15 km past mazama. I am reminded that these endurance stunts are kind of stupid. the supposed endurance athlete is simply doing 2 days of activity in a single day without sleeping in between.

Badger LLC and the eviction:

Seeing the snow melt off is making me worry about the eviction again. i have no vehicle, and have been towing a propane bottle to town on the ski trail. I also bring home food using the trail. Skate skiing with a pretty heavy pack, or adding the pack to the full propane tank on the trailer.

The property owners are the Belsby family, who own the sprawling Cherry Springs ranch in eastern Washington, Spring Creek Ranch in Winthrop, and many other properties. Daren lives in downtown Winthrop and Brian lives in a gated community near Spokane. The senior Belsbys live at Cherry Springs ranch, near Spokane.  There is some question how such a powerful family could mistreat an elderly and disabled employee. An employee that became disabled while working for the Belsby family. It seems sure that the employee must be a bad person who stole from them, and refused to carry out their end of the work. This is not the case, and there were never any hints that the Belsbys were dissatisfied with my work on the parents Cherry Springs ranch [heavy machine work, welding, mechanics], Brian Belsbys property [complete wiring of a new shop], at Spring creek ranch in Winthrop [heavy machine work, carpentry], or at 292 Wolf creek road [heavy machine work, agriculture]. 

my work at Cherry springs was well compensated, so the parents appreciated and paid for any work that they received.

It seems odd that a very powerful family would collect rent at 400 dollars of work per month, and refuse to build a septic on the property. I built 5 portable buildings, and was always standing by to do the backhoe work and the plumbing for the septic system. I made about 20 or 25 thousand dollars worth of improvements at 292, and this can easily be shown using old and new google maps. The last owner of 292 stopped by to voice his surprise that a single person had cleaned up that trashed out property. When I looked into the matter, it seemed that the 2 brothers, Daren and Brian Belsby, had both refused to work the Cherry Springs ranch. They each have something going in either Winthrop or Spokane. Daren is the head smoke jumper for the Winthrop area, and Brian has an engineering company in Spokane.  They are very very different for 2 brothers! Daren has 2 kids that he treats really well. He is the ideal dad and employer. He is always trying to help people in need, and that has led to some trouble. He met his wife, Sarah, while jumping out of aircraft into ongoing fires! Daren and Sarah own a cat 420d backhoe in working condition, and i have used this machine a lot. hundreds or thousands of hours of operation. knocking down unwanted buildings, filling huge holes, piling trees and old foundation material for burning, creating new roads, etc.

Brian owns an even better backhoe, but he has never used it, and does not know how to use it. he has an airplane, and he flies it really well. He also has 2 kids and a wife, but he does not treat them as well as Daren treats his family.  He is abusive and kind of mean. While i worked for him doing the original wiring on his new shop, his dog attacked me over and over. Brain refused to believe that the 120 lb rottweiler could attack anyone, and demanded proof in the form of a video. I was not able to shoot a good video while running from the attack dog, so i figured out how to park my truck so that i could enter the shop without letting it bite me. coming outside to pee was a big problem.  I saw Daren make many trips to Cherry springs ranch to help his parents, but I did not see Brian helping, even though he lives nearby. And sadly, Brian did not understand what an LLC is. He formed Badger LLC with his brother so that they could profit from 292 wolf creek road without being exposed to personal financial loss. But, he thought that he could lie and do crooked business deals as a member of an LLC. He believed that his identity was hidden, and that an LLC enjoyed freedom from oversight.

When i checked this, it was far from the truth. An LLC protects its members from personal loss UNTIL there is fraud or other illegal business dealings. There is no question that Badger refused to build a septic, and also continued to rent 292. Badger wanted both things. improvements to 292, work on the other Winthrop property [spring creek Ranch]. And, they wanted to avoid the 25,000 dollar fee for a septic system. It is ironic that Badger tried this fraud, because they now owe the county several times the cost of a septic system in fines, and by any definition, they owe me about 25,000 dollars in rent. They need to return any rent paid after the first year. We were allowed to have an outhouse for the first year. for the next 3 years, i was under constant attack from the neighbors at wolf creek, the county, and lately, from Badger LLC. Badger is reluctant to try a legal eviction, since it would likely lead to a lawsuit and the loss of at least 292 wolf creek road and Badger LLC. There is no way to argue anything but purposeful fraud, because the septic permitting fee was also never paid. someone who actually intended to build a system would have paid the 500 dollar fee 4 times. It is clear that they always intended to have me improve the property, and then evict me before the county tried to collect the huge fine.

Knowing both brothers and the parents, I can say with certainty that Daren would never have come up with that plan. i saw his face when he proudly showed his brother the improvements to 292 wolf creek road. He had obtained these improvements simply by giving a poor person [me!] a place to live and a backhoe to use. Brian saw no improvements, and therefore, no reason to waste money on a fancy septic system. My buildings would be lost to a disagreement between wealthy brothers. Also, in loosing the address, I will loose the disability payments from the US government. they do not give those payments to homeless people, but only to those that reliably pick up their mail at a street address. Also, any lawsuit that I might wish to make to recover the 25,000 dollars in rent would not be possible. Homeless people do not have lawsuits or attend court sessions. I could be shown to be a hapless drifter, who is lazy and dishonest and does not deserve disability payments and a safe place to live. The cops could be sent here to taze me a lot of times, and give me some random injections. put my head in a bag, and push it down into the snow until I stopped being such a poor person nuisance.

However, i called the police when the Belsbys shut off the power at the start of winter. I was paying for the power, so it was a clear attempt to drive me from 292 to avoid building the septic or paying the fine. The police were very angry about this, and asked me to write to Ecology of Washington. They are the ones who need to bring the Belsbys to court to pay the fine or build the septic. Ecology has my statement now, but it could take a long time before they begin a court case: maybe years! Our local Sherriff is very willing to assign an investigator, to find out if Badger LLC broke any laws in refusing to build the septic, refusing to pay the fine for the refusal to build the septic, and doing harsh things to a disabled renter to drive them from their own buildings.

I welcome a full investigation of these events. secrecy will help Badger LLC. They will continue to sit on millions of dollars of wealth while I am driven from place to place as a homeless and disabled person. The buildings were the last things that I constructed while I could still lift fairly heavy things like sheets of plywood and timbers. I feel that watching them burned by the Belsbys would negatively affect my physical and mental health. It seems likely that I would die very soon. Badger LLC should not kill anyone to avoid obeying laws and paying fines. That is not the reason that LLCs are formed.

I like irony, so I have to point out that i am the black sheep member of a wealthy Jewish family. My father and his brother own the Randell press. It is on 6th avenue in Manhattan. If I had wanted a lot of money, I could have just stayed home! I spoke with my father at length about the problem with the 2 Belsby brothers. The problem was very familiar to my father, who had always done the printing at the Randell press, and left the money handling to his older brother. my father was always trying to help people, including the poor homeless folks that he would find sleeping in the somewhat protected doorway of the Randell press when he opened the shop. He was not so good with money, but he was [and still is at 90!] a gifted athlete and deeply ethical. Maybe ethics and honesty are for the impractical folk that do the actual work of society. the money handlers concentrate on harming others to get more money. They use numbers of dollars in the place of ethics. Numbers on a spreadsheet are far easier to work with than human lives.

If you have to leave your state for an abortion, Dont come back!

 in my usual absurd and simplistic manner, I suggest that women who take their ovaries to another US state to get any kind of care, stay in that state permanently. 

Why would you return to a state that has seized control of your egg supply? You are not a chicken, who is owned by a farmer, and who lays eggs for that farmer! You are a person! Clearly, When Margaret Attwood wrote The Handmaids Tale, she was warning us against converting women into the property of men. She was not creating a manual for the enslavement of her gender.

So, when you are forced from your state to get medical care that is not legal there, please do not go back. I know that you have a job and a house and friends of both genders there. You had to leave to get the one fertilized egg decommissioned. Now is your chance to regain control of all the remaining eggs. You will be able to raise the offspring that you choose to give birth to; in a system where they have similar personal freedoms.

First off, I want to deal with the idea that these anti abortion laws are just the start of something. The current trend of preventing minorities from voting, and forcing women to give birth is heading somewhere. one must remember that the far right favors walls and punishments and militarized borders. They are going for something like a cold civil war.

At some point, the walls will go up, and there will be no more leaving that state. Everyone who lives in that state will become a permanent resident who may not leave. Obviously, you have to be gone before then. There may be no announcement by mail, or on the TV or radio. The state border could turn into a militarized country border overnight with no warning.

It is a backsliding of rights, so that is unusual. Imagine a young US before the slave trade got going. Then, on a certain date large scale human trafficking begins. One day, a darkly skinned person can cross from south to north, or north to south according to their own desires. The next day, they are someone's personal property on one side of the border, and they own themselves on the other side of that line. 

As far as doctors, I can not imagine a single female doctor would choose to stay in a state where the men own the woman. A woman who has gone through a lot of schooling, and has accepted responsibility for the care of others will not like being told that she herself is no longer qualified to make decisions about her own eggs or ovaries. That goes for trainees as well. Who would  train to be medical provider in a state where a raped woman must always give birth to her rapists baby, even if that baby is her brother or sister.

If people accept this state of affairs in the republican led states, it means that they will likely go a bit further, and tolerate other unusual erosion of rights. Perhaps slavery could return in some states. Certainly people of color and native Americans have been discouraged from voting. It is hard to dream up the measures that we could see, because going backwards in human rights seems deeply wrong. We could see a different minimum wage and draft requirements for blacks and whites. Women could have a birth certificate that provided to the father at birth. A Dad would legally own his daughter, and would sell her to the husband by signing the birth certificate in the appropriate box like a car title.

Yes, I find it creepy that People are using books like Mine Kompf and The Handmaids Tale as manuals for their coup attempt. Certainly Hitler's plan succeeded in a brutal and efficient manner. When he got into power for the second time, he was able to mobilize a violent minority to take over all of Germany, and then much of Europe! he told lies in a louder and louder voice until he got enough people to believe the lies. But, following the handmaids tale to it's ugly fruition is a date with disaster. And, it is good to remember that we have much much more harmful weapons than did Hitler in 1940. It is my hope that we will quit prodding Russia and China to participate in a nuclear contest with us. That we will reverse the decisions of this worthless supreme court, and put real justices on the bench. The reactionary ones were put in specifically to help with coup attempts and the further erosion of civil rights.

I suggest that we help women who wish to move out of states where they do not own their eggs. provide transport and a military escort. Help them to settle in an area that allows them to make personal birth and travel decisions. Either this right wing fandango will fade, or we will be having a civil war before we can irritate anyone into firing nukes at us. The first US civil war was nasty, but the second could be much worse. I purposely moved from a far right state to Washington when Trump took office, so I do walk the walk. I wished to be on the correct side of Trump's wall if it is built to surround the right wing states. So, that is my suggestion. If you are liberal, get to a liberal state.

compact work station for image editing and gaming.

 I had been able to build an amazing compact light gamer, and a medium sized box that can game at 1440 p. I had attempted to upgrade the medium machine with a great AMD processor. But, this failed when i was sent a bad AMD 5900x chip for close to 500 dollars. Amazon was reluctant to take it back. I threw a fit, and finally ended up just mailing it back to them and yelling at customer service.

I bought a small mother board that can handle the new 12 generation intel chips, and the i7 12700kf processor. both mother board and processor arrived in open packages. someone had already tried both items and found them wanting! The processor box had been opened, but it contained a perfectly clean processor in the intel packaging. the mother board was the one that i had ordered, but it was not in an intel box at all. it was in a taped closed bag with a little bit of paper in there saying amazon refurbished. there was no gigabyte stuff in the bag at all, although all of the usual connectors were in the bag.

this mother board was beat to hell. it could not start with any modern memory. it only booted with 2 old 8 gig memory sticks at a very low clock speed. It had physical damage, so that the video card did not fit in properly. The usb 3.2 header did not work at all. I installed windows, and tried to use the board, but it was junk.  I asked for a ups pickup for both board and processor, but Amazon customer service refused to take the processor back! I sent the mother board back, and they sent a new board in a sealed gigabyte box. I placed the used i7 processor on that board, and it all worked! holy moly, it had been months of battling with Amazon.com to try to get parts for a working high end machine.

By contrast, Amazon had given up trying to sell video cards, and the 3rd party company that I chose sent a sealed box containing a NEW and factory tested asus rtx 3080. This is a huge card, with a massive, thick heatsink and 3 high speed fans. to provide a bit of room around the huge gpu, I chose the Sliger Cerberus case. This case can handle a micro ATX motherboard, which is 9 inches square, and has extra room when you use the 7 inch square mini ITX size of motherboard.

Here is how the case looks from the outside. I got the gray color, which is just beautiful in my opinion....

and inside, you can see the inch or so of space between the lower case fans and the graphics card. the case is long enough and wide enough so that the case fans are not blocked by the gpu, and they are able to positively pressure this case. Exhaust fans at the top further enforce bottom to top airflow. There is room beyond the graphics card for a slim intake fan to it's right.

For cooling, I had originally used a much larger 14 s cooler from noctua. this removed heat from the processor super well, but left the memory and other  components of the mother board screaming hot. I have switched to the much smaller noctua NH-L9x65, and i have mounted a 25 by 140 mm fan instead of a 15 by 92 mm fan. This provides powerful blast of air to chill the m.2 drives, the vrms that power the processor, and the other hot components.

I fit in a data center drive, which is great when I use this machine for graphics. It is a 12 T iron wolf from Seagate. very noisy, but absurdly fast. I use it like a tape backup, because it is dozens of times slower than the 2 * 2T m.2 drives fixed to the motherboard. The convenience of having all images and videos on hand in the box outweighs the extra heat generated. There is ample room for at least 2 3.5 inch drives in this configuration. But, even with this large, well ventilated case, It is hard to keep components cool during gaming. This is the most fans that the Sliger company has seen in the case.

Setting up the system for both gaming and image editing is not so easy. The demands are super different. For still image editing, the i7 is fully used only for very short bursts. Fewer fans can be used, and components can be very close in the box. the environment inside the case is cool, with little bursts of heat that have plenty of time to clear out. Gaming at 4k is a hot proposition. the GPU is going at 365 watts, and the mother board and processor can use over 200 watts. The hard drive and the power supply itself make heat, and the entire inside of the case is 'heat soaked' with a certain minimum temperature. The case is a small oven during games, and if the hot air can not be quickly changed, temperature will go up and up until the processor and the graphics card and the drives all slow down to reduce their temperature.

Within the virtual world of the game, a super sized cup of hot coffee is spilling onto your virtual junk. The monsters have become jerky robots that are killing the heck out of you, and you are running in place. By the time you shoot, they are long gone! So for gaming, you get the oven hot by running a benchmark program instead of a game. then, you monkey with the fan speeds, and the voltage that is sent to both processor and graphics card. A perfect spot is sought, where the voltage is as low as possible for stable operation. As the voltage is dropped to these components, they actually go faster and faster, and make less and less heat. at some point, depending on the efficiency of the part that one ended up with, you get unstable video, followed by a crash. When using a benchmark program within windows, the benchmark program crashes, but windows is fine, and the computer keeps running. So, you can make a lot of small changes quickly, without having to restart a large game, or windows itself.

After the best settings are found in the benchmark program, you start the most demanding game, and play it intensely to see if it will crash. The same thing is going on with your heart, where you are running up it's beats to some healthy maximum. With the heart, you can not go until it crashes though! Computer gaming is not for everyone, and it is only fun for people like me who actually enjoy being highly excited and frustrated for long periods of time.

further refinements: 

the low profile cooler splashed a lot of air onto the mother board, cooling the components that were overheating. This was good enough for gaming where the processor is only used intensely for short bursts [to load new game levels]. It heats up, but then the game proceeds normally and the processor has time to cool down while the video card does the hard work. With image editing, the situation is different. the processor has long hard tasks to do, and it heats up and slows itself down. it makes a lot of noise when the fan on the inadequate heat sink reaches 100% and stays there.

I finally realized that it would be OK to use the large noctua c14s heatsink with the fans blowing the hot air onto the mother board. It just seemed wrong to get all that heat from the cpu, and blow it right back onto the hot motherboard components. I solved this problem by increasing the amount of air A LOT. I used the mellow 140 mm a14 fan against the mother board, and the very noisy NF-A14 industrial PPC-3000 PWM fan on the outside. I removed the mellow 90 mm fan that exhausts the case near the processor, and replaced it with the very aggressive and noisy fan that comes stock with AMD processors. 

for fan control, i had to use an aftermarket program that is not included in windows or mac operating systems. It is able to look at temperatures inside the computer, and base fan speeds on the maximum temperature averaged over a period of time. This is actually very important. while gaming, the fans must be aware of the temperature of the gpu, the cpu, the memory and the drives. the fans have to speed up to keep the hottest component cool. It does not matter how much noise this makes, as a slowing of the game is just not acceptable. So, I put the industrial fan on the outside of the heatsink and the aggressive fan that exhausts the case on the same fan circuit. they do not run at all when temps are normal. The fan on the motherboard side of the huge heat sink is plenty to keep the cpu cool. The 2 140 mm fans at the bottom of the case change the air in the case plenty fast. But, during gaming, when the gpu becomes a 350 watt heater and the cpu becomes a 200 watt heater, the industrial fans kick on. It is not noticable then, because zombies are chasing me all around, and my tiny home is being rocked by massive explosions. the 2 industrial fans ramp up in speed, and blow a remarkable jet of hot air across the room.

The cerberus case is set up for 2 120 mm fans at the bottom, but 140 mm fans fit if they have screw holes like the 120 mm. noctua has 2 types of fans like that: a general purpose round frame grey fan and a brown fan intended to fit on heat sinks with 120 mm fans. the fans can be mounted with screws or with special silicone fasteners that they include. wherever one can use the silicone fasteners, i do, because the fan will run silently at low rpm in that case. The fan can vibrate a little without rattling the metal of the case. Noctua has several ways of reducing noise in the case, including inventing special plastics and coming up with new ways to make plastic parts that fit like finely machined metal parts. The builder of computers does not need to learn all about fan design. they just need to pay 30 bucks a pop for each Austrian fan.

i had been using a mini itx mother board in this case, even though it is able to fit a micro ATX board. I found some problems with such a compact build, so i invested in an inexpensive micro atx mother board, the ASUS Prime Z690M-Plus D4. This board is not full of expensive attractions. instead, it has 3 simple m.2 slots  arranged flat on the pcb, and the area around the cpu is not built up tall as it is on the smaller motherboards. Thus, the memory, and the m.2 drives and the other hot components on the board get plenty of wind from pretty much any fan in the case.

the larger board also makes it easy to get into the case with fingers, and make use of fan headers, m.2 drives, and other things without much disassembly. Of course, it allows 4 memory sticks instead of 2, or much more room around a half empty memory stack for great cooling. 

After watching about a thousand you tube videos, from super users like optimum tech, i became confident enough to strip away the fan shroud and 3 fans from my rtx 3080, and replace that with 2 Phanteks T30-120 fans. These extra thick fans drive much more air through the huge heatsink of the asus tough gaming card. It is absurd how cool it runs now, with 4K gaming in the lower 60s C. i can not imagine water cooling a 350 watt video card when this simple modification is so simple and allows such quiet operation. In this case, there is plenty of room for 140 mm case fans beneath the modified gpu.

I removed the data center drive, to further increase airflow and lower gaming temps. Also, the machine runs noticeably faster without the pauses for the drive to start up. I cable managed the result to create large areas of unobstructed airflow. I added an m.2 drive to the empty 3rd slot, to make more storage after removing the huge drive.

This build still struggles with the 2 16 gig ram sticks that i started with. I have purchased the newer 13 generation I5 processor, and set up a graphics workstation using 2 32 gig memory sticks. The smaller memory and lack of hard drive space make this a dedicated gaming and entertainment machine that can tackle small image editing jobs. When needed, the data center drive is attached as a USB 3 external drive. It is actually not any slower than it is in the case, and adding it brings back the system pauses that are no longer very acceptable.

small form factor.... medium sized gamer

 This system is housed in a zzaw b2 case. this case is 3mm thick aluminum, which feels pretty high quality.

as you can see here, the case is sandwich style, using a sfx sized power supply to run parts on both sides of a divider.

This build is a pure gamer, with stress on the gpu, and cooling.

at the top, there are 2 of the ultra quiet 120 by 25 mm fans from noctua. the power supply is positioned with the intake toward the vented panel, and the output facing the exhaust fan. these fans are expensive, but they are entirely silent at 1000 rpm or less.

I used the corsair 750 watt sfx, which happens to have a fanless mode for lower energy demands. the way that the psu is positioned, the exhaust fans draw air though it, lowering it's temperature and further delaying the fan operation.

I used an old intel board with the i5 9400 processor.  this processor got a bad rep because it cost as much as a 12 or 16 thread AMD processor, but it has only 6 cores with no multi threading. just 6 threads. and guess what? for the games that I play, 6 cores that can hold 4.5 gHz can keep up with a very perky gpu.

i used the very low profile l9 [low profile, 92 mm fan] cooler from noctua to drain heat from the chip.

this leaves room for a much larger fan that blows air right around the heatsink to cool the other components. this is a noctua 140 by 25 mm fan. It turns at half the speed, but moves several times as much air.

for the gpu, i chose the ASUS tough rtx 3080, and was able to get the later version with 12 gigs of fast vram. This thing is a tank, with a full heavy back plate, and a metal 3 fan array that really goes fast.

It has no frills, other than an led to light the logo [everything must  glow!], and a little switch that tells it if you want the fan to shut off at light load. from experience, you want to allow air to flow freely through your case without passing through filters, and to clean off the innards pretty often as they get coated with dust. It is a little oven while gaming, and every degree cooler means as more frames per second.

You should always use the quiet mode, because it does not adversely affect performance. the card will make a real racket when the gaming gets busy, but it will not get warm, or stutter. As you can see, the exhaust fans are arranged to pull air through the gpu heatsink and then exhaust it out the top, so again, the temperature that triggers the fans to spin up are not reached very quickly. 

if you try this same combo, you will have to take off the end of the case with the screws and spacers that hold it, and insert the giant gpu from the open end. It is a little hard to get the screws and spacers back in with the high volume gpu! this card comes very close to the solid front panel, and it is actually threaded for a standard sized screw [times 2] If this card was not so rigid, i would have predrilled holes, and bolted it in solid.

As usual with these builds, the screw holes for the end of the riser cable do not line up with the threaded inserts in the case. a single zip tie at lower center holds it at the right orientation. The reason is that there are 100 different kinds of riser cable, and it is enough to confuse even the case makers!

and finally, please meet my assistant Yang.

he is a grey long limbed box cat.

you can look them up on you tube.

this boxcat can be used for size.......

the b2 case is well larger than the boxcat. by comparison, the smaller A1 case that contains my portable gamer fits inside of the yellow case. These small form factor builds are obviously not water resistant or sturdy enough to take blows, so they need to travel in a  padded case.

update:

i purchased a larger case for my medium gaming system. it is now housed in a Sliger b610 case. If you are not familiar with Sliger, they are a custom case maker based out of nevada. Cases are 200 to 300 dollars, and have nearly perfect, no nonsense machining. this larger case allows a tall cooler, and several hard drives. It is not sandwich style, like the zzaw case, so it does not require a riser cable for the graphics card.  more fans can live in the case, so that continuous gaming will not cause it to warm up.

small form factor gaming computers - smallest possible [ 4 liter ] build

 This is my spot for describing the tiny, high performance computers that i have been building.

Although over 60 years of age, i continue to enjoy computer gaming.

And, i am not talking about tetris.

Lately, i am playing Doom 2016 at the ultra violence level, at 1440 p and at 180 frames per second, with all settings on ultra.

Even this somewhat modest level of play requires a high wattage video card and processor.

Trying to keep 500 watts of parts relatively cool in a tiny case is a real challenge.

In fact, it is a very cool game itself!

Feast your eyes on my smallest build, from the mother board side.

The case is sandwich style, with the mother board and graphics card on opposite sides of a divider.

The case is the A1 from a Chinese company called zzaw. Actually, a pretty good case, made of 2 mm thick aluminum. 

the power supply is the Enhance Flex 600W Power Supply ENP-7660B

it is costly, and you pretty much have to swap out the noisy fan that comes built in.

So, this is a pretty hard project for an ordinary builder of large computers.

In fact, i failed to get the Noctua NF-A4x20 PWM, Premium Quiet Fan, 4-Pin (40x20mm, Brown) to run on the internal pins of the power supply. i had to leave a 4 pin fan connector sticking out of the power supply along with the bundle of wires that depart it. So, i used one of the 3 fan headers on this particular mother board, which is the GIGABYTE B550I AORUS PRO AX.

Other items that i used are the samsung 980 pro m.2 drive with heat sink,

and a set of 2 * 8 gig ram sticks at 3.6 gHz and the amd 5600G processor.

In fact, the low end processor from amd can not run an m.2 drive at it's full speed, but an expensive, fast solid state drive is still a useful investment.

The processor is also not the right choice for using with a  graphics card, because it has on board graphics that displace some of it's ordinary processing abilities.

I chose it to run without a gpu during the chip shortage when it was hard to obtain one.

When it tried to upgrade the 5600 G with a 5900 X, i received a bad processor from Amazon. This problem was rampant with the mail order companies at the start of covid.

you would pay full price for a new part, and get an open box with a bad used part.

I also got an intel mother board in a taped shut bag with no gigabyte materials, and it was broken to hell. I tried to send it, and the i7 processor [that also arrived opened and used] back to Amazon, and they refused to take back the processor. 

I had already been banned from reviewing products, because i would reveal their various scams to customers. So, not a huge thumbs up for the company that has become our supplier of everything.

 

Are AMD processors good?

This was my first experience with amd.

These processors are just for gaming, and do not work well in tight cases or for anything outside of gaming. For an example, the 5600 G is limited to clock speeds of 3 to about 4.5 gHz.

That is great for gaming, but terrible for watching a movie. The AMD chip sits there trying to bake a batch of cookies while idling at 1 or 3 % of its wattage. Even for gaming, the intel processors work much better. An intel chip will ramp up to 5 gHz, and just stay there for the whole game. An AMD chip will start at 5 gHz, but pull down to 4.3 when it is loaded. Also AMD gave up on quality control and stopped testing the chips at the factory during the shortage. so, together with the scammy way that the same dead chips are sold again and again at Amazon, you were almost sure to get a bad chip and to have trouble selling it back to amazon. The flip side of the argument is that AMD is reusing the socket for many years, instead of creating a custom socket for each generation of processor. i was impressed with how much graphics power could be packed into the processor itself, but, in the end, this really does not matter. Modern gaming simply does not work well on a processor chip. It requires a card of it's own, with a separate way to remove hundreds of watts of heat.

on the gpu side of the divider, you can see the cute little dual fan gtx 1660 super from zotak. 

this gpu is actually way more powerful than the huge 1660s of the past, because it deploys modern memory that is twice as fast. It allows this tiny box to game for as long as desired at 1080p with ultra settings, or 1440p with pretty high settings and frame rates. there is no ray tracing, and even if ray tracing existed, you would turn it off when gaming using this 125 watt graphics card.

you can see the 4 terrabyte hard drive that is jammed into the slot that has been provided for cables to change sides. i was not sure that this arrangement would work thermally, but with the bare metal top of the drive pressed to the aluminum case, the slim 92 mm fan at the top of the case pulls enough air past the drive to keep it quite cool. It is good that the case maker provided the holes on the bottom, and the tall legs, so that plenty of air could enter the case to be pumped back out through the power supply, and to send a draft past the hard drive, and out through the top. The gpu draws fresh air from the side of the case, and sends it out the top.

All fans are from Noctua, which is the Austrian company that makes the most quiet fans in the world. If there is room, it is possible to swap the gpu fans for Noctuas as well. In this case, there is 1 mm between the fans and the case, so I tied the gpu back with a zip tie and left the stock fans in place.

Performance: the standard way to get smooth gaming is to use a program like msi afterburner, and a benchmark program like heaven, to tune the fan speeds and the voltage for the gpu.

the idea is to load the GPU fully, and to lower the GPU voltage until it looses stability, and then raise it back to the last stable voltage. the fans are tuned to give both cool temps and an acceptable level of noise.
I can go into way more detail, or even create a build video if readers wish to build their own small form factor gamer.  I has been fun to learn more about modern computers. They have become a sort of light sculpture or visual delight, as well as an expensive fun-oven to play with. 

finally, we need to get a feel for the size of this build...

here is my very lovely assistant testing the small build for sturdiness.  He is clearly coiling up for a huge jump, to see if he can reach a very high shelf where he likes to roost. Also, the size is pretty apparent. it is a little small for a cat bed, or maybe even for a cat podium. The A1 case fits in a Pelican 1400 Case.

the only thing better than a cat..... is Two cats!

do current events seem fictional?

 I have been reading and writing sci fi for as long as I can remember.

I mean, as soon as I could write, and was given materials, I began a sci fi story that had been brewing in my mind. 

It was not very interesting, suggesting that a previous period in human history had been more advanced in many ways than the present time.

Real life has never gotten very 'science fictiony'.

What I mean by that: events transpired in a predictable way, where the humans often seemed sane.

To put it another way, if the real events had been found in a novel, the reader would have had no trouble believing in them.

That is no longer true.

Many recent events seem like the plot of a bad science fiction novel.

Things happen, and I say to myself: 'self, that is not really believable!'

I imagine that I am reading the novel of a lazy writer or a writer that is just plain bad.

It is possible that I have gotten too old to accept new events.

Maybe that is what aging is, and each human eventually starts to think that they may be an actor in a lazily written novel.

a decade ago, if I had been shown this outline for a book, I would have rejected it as a stupid plot for a novel:

A new type of computer program is devised, where people visit with one another remotely. they quit visiting in person. This program gets so popular that it is used by an enemy country to help elect a decisively unqualified president.

This president restarts the American civil war, had simply been delayed for over for about a century and a half.

This president refuses to leave office at the end of his term, and leads a coup to remain in power.

The coup fails, but the United States is left with a supreme court packed with highly religious and conservative justices.

Even with a democratic president, a democratic house, and a democratic senate, this supreme court immediately begins to roll back the last 200 years of progress in human rights.

Women loose the right to abortion, and minorities take a step back toward enslavement.

With some irony, a civil war reignites in Russia. [A state that succeeded in leaving the Soviet Union is  retaken by force]. 

It is clearly bad writing, because the war is symmetrical with the American civil war that has also reignited.

The only difference is that the American states were prevented from leaving the US, while this large soviet state did leave, and is being grabbed back.

More lazy writing... The US arms the soviet state that is being retaken.

At first, the US sends tank killing shoulder launched missiles.

But later, the US starts sending billions of dollars in long range missiles to the breakaway state, and positions troops along the soviet border.

It is the Cuban missile crisis in reverse, but, having had more time to forget ww2, folks have more taste for world war. It seems like it will be profitable. Well worth the human lives.

In a later blog, I would like to explore this idea of a taste for world war. Howe and Stowe talk about an 80 to 100 year cycle that brings us back to total war every 4 generations. It is their 'seasons' theory.

In the Seasons theory, a generation is embroiled in all out war, and they do not like it. The next gen has almost no taste for war, but the next has slightly more, and, after a cycle of 4 generations, the folks who were alive during the last world war are all gone. A big war once again seems profitable, and not so bad to live through.

I regret that I have no solution to present.

I mean, other than we cease to sell land mines and missiles to everyone. And, that we once again strive to reduce nuclear weapons before someone makes a second use of them in war.