The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip tried to make sense of it. Existing inflation “might be part of the explanation” for why capital is not fleeing to the traditional safety of U.S. bonds, but that fails to explain the apparent lack of faith in the Federal Reserve’s ability to come to the rescue. “Technical factors” like hedge funds shedding their bond holdings are similarly unsatisfying. “The more fundamental explanation is that global investors might be changing how they view the U.S,” he wrote. In cruder terms, our allies and partners abroad think we’ve lost our minds, and there are few indications that sanity will be restored anytime soon.

We’re not yet even talking about foreign adversaries like China, supposedly the target audience for our exercise in economic masochism. “There were recent fears that China might try to retaliate against Trump’s tariffs by selling some of its own bond holdings,” Ip noted. “There is no evidence that it has, but the possibility has highlighted the risks to the U.S. of a trade war morphing into financial war.”

You read that right: Not only has China held in reserve its own economic weapons in a global trade war that has so far primarily rattled America’s allies, but our deteriorating position also provides China with even more leverage over the administration than Beijing had just two weeks ago. That might explain why the Trump administration isn’t waiting around for Beijing to make the first overture in trade talks. Trump is asking Xi Jinping to request a phone call from the White House — presumably so the president can save as much face as possible as he engineers a retreat from the conflict on which he embarked wholly unprepared. (1)

For every seller of a treasury security there is a buyer.  If they dump their securities, the buyers get a good deal because fund will obtain the PAR value and an increased yield.  The Chinese dumping treasuries would be beautiful for people who wanted to earn a good interest rate on their capital by investing in American government bonds. The commenters making waves about the Chinese body politic selling their treasuries are selling pablum.

Convincing the American people that neither they nor their children deserve a good return on bonds and savings accounts is the worst thing about the about pablum economics lesson pushers. No American hurt from the tariffs because the money wasn’t even collected for them yet.  The heavily capitalized funds tanked the stock market to terrify people.  The Wall Street Journal is on the side of the outsourcers and always has been. It once was a great information source for those who wanted to be informed.  It has turned into agitprop but still has useful headlines about CEO changes, lawsuits, and the like. It is turning into NPR for the literati.(2)

1. https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/counter-intelligence-friday-april?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=108011028

2. https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/counter-intelligence-friday-april?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=108054614

As I broadened my reading in the Greco-Roman and Jewish literature of the period, I began to observe numerous reports containing phenomena similar to what we find reported by Matthew at Jesus’ death. The frequent mention of darkness, apparitions of the dead, the earth shaking, and celestial phenomena peaked my interest. I wondered whether these things reported by Virgil, Dio Cassius, and Josephus were all intended to be understood as events that had occurred in space-time. Or were they an ancient literary device—“special effects”—meant to ac-centuate an event of cosmic, even divine significance?2 So, it appears that this ancient practice continues in some locations to this day.

Then I observed similar phenomena in Acts 2 when Peter ad-dressed the crowd, saying the speaking in tongues they were witnessing was in fulfillment of Joel 2. He goes on to list other phenomena men-tioned by Joel, including wonders in the sky involving the sun going dark, the moon turning to blood, and signs on the earth such as blood, fire, and smoke. Joel concludes by saying that in that day everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Peter then testifies how Jesus performed wonders and signs while among them. He rose from the dead and now they should call upon His name for salvation. Similar phenom-enal language appears in Jesus’ Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24 where the sun and moon will go dark and the stars will fall out of the sky. Many evangelical scholars interpret the celestial phenomena in Acts 2 and Matthew 24 as apocalyptic symbols with no corresponding literal events involving those celestial bodies. I became persuaded that the raised saints in Matthew 27 belonged to the same genre.

WSL really was wonderful for development and running Linux applications with underlying Linux features.  I used it for development using Pycharm.  The problem is that I would often return after 12 hours and see a message that the terminal could be closed with a CTRL + D which indicated that the service had stopped for some reason.  I suspect these occurred when available RAM conflicted with the /dev/share features of Linux.  Troubleshooting it would take too long. I don’t trust the releases from the Windows store because forced updates in Windows can take features away or cause unexpected problems.  I upgraded my Windows 11 home desktop to Windows 11 Pro specifically so I could disable Windows automatic updates via group policies, service disablement, and registry modifications that fail to stop auto updates on Windows 11 Home.

To create a long use time capsule of sorts, I decided to switch to Alma Linux 8 from Fedora 38.  Alma Linux 9 follows the tradition of RHEL 9 and removes the easy support for Python 2.

I setup Alma Linux 8.10 Cerulean Leopard, installed from the KDE live DVD, and installed r Studio server to access via web browser.

edit /ect/dnf/dnf.conf and add keepcache=True

dnf install epel-release    
dnf config-manager -enable powertools    
dnf install R    
dnf install python2

The python2 install installs pip2.7 automatically. One calls pip2 via the pip2.7 command.

As regular user the following is required for a script I made because parsedatetime changed after version 2.5 and is no longer compatible with the previous versions.

pip2.7 install parsedatetime==2.5 --user

• Install rstudio-2024.12.0+467-1.rpm from direct download

• Install rstudio-server-rhel-2024.12.0-467.rpm from direct download

systemctl enable rstudio-server

Configure the firewall to allow 8787.

usermod -a -G rstudio-server <username> 
setenforce 0

The last instruction to turn off SELinux is temporary until I can ascertain the specific rules that will need modification to allow it work. With SELinux enforcing with the initial configuration, the server cannot be accessed via web browser remotely

How do it yourself basic auto foam repair¹ provides a great demonstration of filling a damaged car seat with replacement foam.

Growing Strawberries in Plastic Bottles² demonstrates how to grow strawberries in hanging bottles.  This video really interested me.  Last year I planted some strawberries and strawberries produce daughter plants and require an intensive amount of cultivated land if one intends to grow them at ground level.  This works very badly if one is attempting to grow them anywhere near grass that needs to be cut with a lawn mower.

Sunchokes – from garden to gut³ includes an incredibly wonderful pickling recipe that requires no heat.  More research on this is necessary to insure detailed plans and safety.

How to Make Flat Bread⁴ demonstrates a great and simple way to make flatbread cakes.

Root Depths of various garden plants⁵ provides a great estimate of some fruit depths and generally agrees with Larry Hodgson’s version, but Larry’s has a few more plants and estimates different root depths for a few of them.⁶

The following relate so an old book.  This is not medical advice, and I am not a medical practitioner.

Dietetics for Nurses by Fairfax T. Proudfit, 1918 contains details of enzymes in the human body.  This book also contains tables of foods and percent of carbohydrates.  This book contains extensive details and dietary plans used early in the previous century for many medical ailments.

A recipe for nut cream to use in place of butter is found in Food Remedies Facts About Foods and Their Medicinal Uses by Florence Daniel, 1908:

”…nut-cream for brain-workers. Pound in a mortar, or mince finely, 3 blanched almonds, 2 walnuts, 2 ounces of pine kernels. Steep overnight in orange or lemon juice. It should be made fresh daily, and may be used in place of butter. ”

You Won’t Believe This Potato Trick⁷  shows how to grow potatoes from planter containers. How I Grew 450 lbs of Potatoes In Just 200 sq. Ft⁸ contains a great example of a wooden support system for the plants.  The plants sit in the containers on the ground and grow up through the wooden stakes.

Using a container like a miniature greenhouse will boost growth rate.  One Square Foot is the recommended space for sweet potatoes.  Turn One Sweet Potato into 100LBS of Sweet Potatoes is a great video on how to manage sweet potato slips.⁹

Today I picked up Yukon Gold Potatoes, Pontiac Potatoes, Red Onions, White Onions, and Yellow Onion bulbs in preparation for the upcoming gardening season.

1. How to Do It Yourself Basic Seat Auto Foam Repair DIY, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N14VbKUdctk.

2. Growing Strawberries in Plastic Bottles – Surprising Results!, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjW3ZWkLyHU.

3. Sunchokes – from Garden to Gut (Permaculture Living Non-Monetised), 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7xHhRIwISQ.

4. How To Make Flat Bread – The Oldest Bread In The World – Perfect Survival Bread!, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6BHwAoljng.

5. Ly, Linda. “How to Find the Root Depth of Vegetables (Chart Included).” Garden Betty, March 6, 2020. https://gardenbetty.com/how-deep-are-the-roots-of-garden-vegetables/.

6. Hodgson, Larry. “Root Depth for Vegetables.” Laidback Gardener (blog), May 21, 2020. https://laidbackgardener.blog/2020/05/21/root-depth-for-vegetables/.

7.  You Won’t Believe This Potato Trick: 235 Lbs in 200 Sq Ft!, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrytUqXE9Ns.

8. How I Grew 450 Lbs of Potatoes in Just 200 Sq. Ft. (You Can Too!), 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYdC60Hvxow.

9. Turn ONE Sweet Potato Into 100 LBS Of Sweet Potatoes By Growing SWEET POTATO SLIPS! [Complete Guide], 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0igp5IzO21g.

remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links_extra', 3 );
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links', 2 );

Kinsta also provided another very useful function² and that was one that removed the various update notifications in the dashboard.

function kinsta_hide_update_nag() {
remove_action( 'admin_notices', 'update_nag', 3 );
}

add_action('admin_menu','kinsta_hide_update_nag');

Another very useful function for WordPress is one where you may add additional mime types for upload to the library.  This is useful for uploading compressed archives in different formats. Chris Meller’s venerable blog provides the source.³

add_filter('upload_mimes', 'custom_upload_mimes');
function custom_upload_mimes ( $existing_mimes=array() ) {

	// add your ext => mime to the array

	$existing_mimes['xz'] = 'application/x-xz';
        $existing_mimes['zip'] = 'application/zip';
	$existing_mimes['xml'] = 'application/xml';

	// add as many as you like
	// and return the new full result

	return $existing_mimes;

}

Somewhere along the way I picked up the following items to use as release notes within the scripts that I create.

E.g. 11/05/2024: [*] Changed URL to 1.1.1.1 from 8.8.8.8

[+] = Added
[*] = Changed  
[^] = Moved  
[=] = No Changes  
[x] = Deleted  
[!] = Bugs  
[_] = To Do  
[>] = Migrated  
[<] = Migrated

1. Kinsta®. “WordPress Disable RSS Feed,” August 30, 2016. https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/wordpress-disable-rss-feed/.

2. Kinsta®. “How To Disable WordPress Update Notifications (Plugin or Code),” July 4, 2022. https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/disable-wordpress-update-notification/.

3. Meller, Chris. “Modifying Allowed Upload Types in WordPress | Chris Meller,” July 26, 2007. https://blog.chrismeller.com/modifying-allowed-upload-types-in-wordpress.

The funding of college should be the prime factor in deciding where to move. Many such programs have funding that might cease to be available in the future. Children might not want to go to college. The reason for this as the factor in determining the states is because it demonstrates a commitment to equal protection under the law. Universal higher education funding demonstrates it by offering the programs to all students and without regard for program preferences. Universal higher education funding demonstrates that the people of the state care about the young. That is not to say the states have everything in order. Tennessee for example is a well known for privation in certain segments of its economy economy, as is North Carolina. Montana has high suicide rates. New Jersey makes people think of Ben Affleck.

These states were selected because they offer universal higher education funding without regarding to the specific program selected. This selection is a subset of states that guarantee higher education funding, however many states require specific programs. These programs often purport to be high demand areas, yet the labor environment disagrees. For Example, Kentucky claims that information technology is a high demand career field, yet there are areas with a quarter of a million people in them, where one would be lucky to find five job postings for a systems job per year. There are more system administrators in one large city in Pennsylvania than the entire state of Kentucky, yet thousands of Kentucky students are told that information technology is a high demand career within the state. This is but one example. The same issue will arise in other states.

New York offers a program, but is not in the list because it incentivizes sociopathy. Wisconsin offers a program, but its continuation is determined on a per year basis and the state seems to be a contributor to the national schizophrenia. Maine and Connecticut have programs that match the criteria but they eliminated religious exemptions to vaccination. No one who loves their children should move to place that will not allow one to opt out of placing the child into a premature death lottery without the possibility of exemption for reasons of morality.

Kentucky is here due to a confluence of factors that make it uniquely interesting. E.g. one of the nation’s lowest Gini Coefficients, poor social indicators of health, labor market issues, long time spans of overwhelmingly one-party rule, with each party having taken decade long turns at the wheel, a unique position as the only state where public sector employees outnumber private sector employees, etc. In a way it is the most communistic if one considers communistic to mean that the government controls the means of production – as in the government furnishing the voter with a paycheck. That was as of my last research on the subject, but more detail will appear on the subject later.

North Dakota is here because it is apropos of the maxim “If a man wants a job, he can have one”. I lived there. My favorite economics professor is there. It’s a good place if you will risk frostbite in less 5 minutes at 50 degrees below Fahrenheit in order to live somewhere apropos of the mentioned maxim. They also have good fields and excellent bird watching opportunities.

This project will take a long time. It is a labor of love largely for myself, and one which others may take pleasure from. It may also provide useful intelligence for political activism and policy debate. Massachusetts is very costly. One of the interesting things to ascertain is whether people from less affluent places could even manage to move there in the first place. Michigan has a large Islamic contingent growing and that may prove to be a confounding variable when analyzing historical data. New Jersey is a land of high wages and UFOs, North Carolina is a red state with opposition to unemployment insurance. Over the first few counties, I will find some good information that transfers easily between analysis. Good data sources may vary between states. For example, many states suddenly hid all their vital records data such as births and deaths after 2021. The analysis will vary. My ultimate goals include formulas for the cost of housing, the probability of find a job in particular fields, and even an estimate of the probabilities that given job would have rest periods like 10 or 15 minute breaks in addition to a lunch break.

States very greatly. My non-maxed unemployment insurance in North Dakota 10 years ago was more than the 150% of the maximum unemployment insurance available in North Carolina or Kentucky a decade later. Kentucky mandates lunch and rest periods because of some hard work by the originators of the name redneck almost 70 years earlier. A similar situation exists with Massachusetts social benefits like unemployment insurance relative to those in some of the other states. The term liberal relates to the posture toward the education benefit. Some of the states in the list are profoundly illiberal in other areas. Merely offering an education program in no way assures the state’s counties’ greatness relative to another state’s.

The final states for the ranking of counties are Massachusetts, Michigan, Tennessee, Vermont, Georgia, Montana, North Carolina, and New Jersey, plus North Dakota and Kentucky. These are the Liberal 8 plus North Dakota and Kentucky.

One may recognize an allusion to “A Ranking of States” by H. L. Mencken. Mencken’s ranking of states was a legendary work which still remains readable and informative in the present day. The ranking of counties will have a similar aim albeit with a slightly different focus. The mission is this case is to function as a resource for trans-generational migration. Trans-generational migration means relocation for the betterment of one’s children and to help ensure future generations survivability through geographic location selection which best supports the continuance of the family line.

The analysis on where to place one’s future descendants will lead to some uncomfortable realities. Economics is called the dismal science after all. For example, the early death rates in almost every Kentucky county skyrocketed at the same time. What relationship might explain things like that? Those kinds of questions will be answered with data, hypothesis tests, probabilities, charts, and historical context.

A name will be introduced for the set of states containing the counties which will be analyzed. The name is the Liberal n where n is the number of states selected. In similar fashion to the G7 or G8 in the global environment, the Liberal 7 or Liberal 8 will refer to the states in this environment. The final number may not be 7 or 8, that is for example. There will also be a plus two, which consists of North Dakota and Kentucky. The analysis by county will consist of everything from employment and housing features to suicide probabilities and local colleges. The ranking is not the same as those rankings one sees about the best colleges or best town, but about the best place to plant descendants. Some of the data types that will likely be included will include sample data related to work and life conditions as reported by people in those counties. Readers may suggest counties of interest and I may review those counties at some point. Countering confirmation bias is an important task in any endeavor, so counties outside of the Liberal n may be studied for comparison.

Economics is the study of how humans allocate resources. In olden times the field was called political economy. The terms were split into politics and economics by university wanting to distinguish classes between trade oriented and government operations. The Bible contains numerous sections related to decision making around resources. Some articles in this collection may relate to prophecy and events because the events affect the economics of individuals. This work is about the making of decisions and not about the idolatry of wealth or politicians. It is impossible to separate morality, amorality, and immortality from decision making about resources. Therefore the work assumes a moral dimension. Some articles may analyze the the views promulgated by others because such views often play a role in individual decision making.

The next step in the ranking of counties will be the official identification of the liberal states for purposes of the project.

This list doesn’t relate to more in depth management tools. This list is for easy console monitoring of a server running such games as ARK Survival Evolved.

Rebecca at Basics by Becca expressed her view on allowing the potential opinions of other people to dissuade one from following their own way. “Find out all the things that make your heart sing and go after them! It might be a little bit scary at first – but who cares? Don’t let other people’s opinions stop you from following what makes you happy. The more time we spend doing our passions, the easier it becomes to find our voice [1].” She further admonishes one to stop caring what others think about you. “This goes hand in hand with the last point – once you stop caring so much about what others think of you, you will start to feel a lot freer. It’s okay to make mistakes and it’s okay to be different! Embrace your authentic self and let it shine [1].” She recommends being bold, and letting go of the past.  The phrase about letting go of the past possesses great salience for me. “This one is hard but so important! Living in the past keeps us stuck and makes it impossible for us to find our voice because we are too caught up on what has already happened instead of living fully in this moment right now [1].” Other great action points including finding one’s tribe, expressing one’s feelings, and letting yourself be free. “Take off the mask and just BE YOURSELF with no apologies attached. Don’t worry so much about whether things are perfect or if people will judge you – just be yourself and don’t let anyone else define who that is. You are free to be anything you want, so take the time to figure out what makes you happy, go for it fully without apology [1]!” She says to be authentic: “Be honest about what matters most to you in life, because only by doing this can we be fully authentic. If society’s expectations are not on your list, ignore them and follow your own path[1]!”

Jennifer Hamady in Psychology Today mentioned that “Creativity is an imperative for a well-lived life [2].”

Sam Watson said “One of the advantages of writing blogs is that it can help to refresh and consolidate you thoughts on a topic. “ [3] His view coincides with my own.

Research has shown that writing about traumas improves time management over time. Dr. Pennebaker found that writing for short periods of time produce improvement, and writing for longer periods of time also produces improvements [4]. In an interview on the subject, Kim Mills asked “Do people have to write on a regular basis to see a really significant effect? Do I have to write something every day to really experience the benefits [4]?”

“Oh my God, no.” Dr. Pennebaker answered. “To give you an example, I write maybe two or three times a year when something miserable is going on. When I hear about journaling and writing every day, I just get nervous about it. I would hate that because I use writing when I’m dealing with something that is ugly, unpleasant, painful. And if life is going well, why in the world do I want to introspect that? I want to enjoy life when it’s here and when there’s bad things, writing for me helps me get through them [4].”

1. Becca, “18 Powerful Ways to Find Your Voice.”
2. Hamady, “The Truth About Creative Expression.”
3. Watson, “Geostatistical Modelling with R and Stan.”
4. Mills and Pennebaker, “Expressive Writing Can Help Your Mental Health.”