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This weekend I’ll be taking part in the largest emergency communication exercise in the United States

Posted: June 24, 2021 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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The fourth weekend in June is always Field Day weekend for us Amateur Radio operators.  An estimated 40,000 of us dedicated operators will be gathering in parks. on remote hilltops, and other locations where no facilities exist, to practice emergency communications.  We will bring everything we need to communicate with fellow Amateur Radio operators all across North America, and all across the world, under very adverse conditions. 

We will operate out of temporary shelters, which include camping trailers and tents.  All of our equipment will be powered by portable generators, car batteries, and solar panels.  Our antennas will consist mostly of wires supported by ropes which are held up by trees. All of our radio equipment is portable, consisting mostly of specially designed high frequency transceivers, which have a power output of 100 watts. With that setup the club I belong to will make in the neighborhood of 2000 contacts in a 24 hour period.  The contacts will be spread out all across the world with a majority of them all across North America.

We Amateur Radio operators take Field Day very seriously because emergency commutations is at absolute center of Amateur Radio. Ir is what we do best.  Whenever there is a major disaster, such as an earthquake or a hurricane, the only communication into and out of the affected area is through Amateur Radio.  That is because of the nature of our equipment, which does not rely on any infrastructure, and our expertise.  Throughout the year Amateur Radio operators practice and hone their emergency communications skills.  Field Day is just the largest of many practice sessions we take part in year round.

To make things more fun Field Day is also a contest.  All contacts are directly between two stations only.   That is the way Amateur Radio is.  We log every contact we make and submit our logs, which are recorded using logging software on laptops.  During each contact there is certain information we must exchange with the other station. This simulates emergency messages we handle during a disaster such as supplies needed.  Field Day contest scores are posted by the organizing organization, the Amateur Radio Relay League, in their magazine called QST and on their website WWW.ARRL.ORG.  There are serious bragging rights at stake.

Field Day is also very much a social event.  Amateur Radio clubs usually organize all of the preparations and activities at each individual  location.  Club members and their families gather to socialize along with all of the radio related activities. The club I belong to, the Eastern Connecticut Amateur Radio Association really out does itself when it comes to the socializing side of Field Day, along with the more serious stuff.   We have a huge potluck supper Saturday evening. There are always people gathered around to talk and enjoy each others company.  I always brew a batch of beer for Field Day and share it with everyone.

Here is a map to all of the Field Day sites all across the US and Canada.  The one I will be at is in Thompson Connecticut, which us at the northeastern corner of the State.  It is listed under the call KZ1M.  ECARA will have six complete stations set up.  If  you are in the neighborhood please stop by.  We are open to the public.

Mazie Hirono, Stupidity, Honesty and a Touch of Irony

Posted: June 24, 2021 by datechguy in Uncategorized

Who is stupider? A stupid person or the people who elect a stupid person to high office?

That was my thought when I saw the thread concerning this exchange at Town Hall

However while that phrase came to mind I think this isn’t a case of stupidity, it’s a case of honesty.

Senator Hirono is a Marxist, and as a Marxist she is interested in ends, not means and because this is the case of course she wants every judge, every justice and every officer of the court to interpret any law to achieve her Marxist ends.

The only reason why she objects to Senator Cruz is that she said the quiet part out loud, that may have been careless but not stupid, because she knows that while it might make some complications for her fellow Democrats it won’t hurt her one bit with the voters of her state who elected and re-elected her.

But there is one more bit of irony here. Consider this paragraph:

But the law on the books offered a different model: “To enter a man’s house” without a proper warrant, Lord Chief Justice Pratt proclaimed in 1763, is to attack “the liberty of the subject” and “destroy the liberty of the kingdom.” Huckle v. Money, 2 Wils. K. B. 206, 207, 95 Eng. Rep. 768, 769 (K. B.1763). That was the idea behind the Fourth Amendment.

and a footnote that goes with it:

4 In a 1763 Parliamentary debate, about searches made to enforce a tax, William Pitt the Elder orated as follows: “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England cannot enter—all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!” Miller v. United States, 357 U. S. 301, 307, and n. 7 (1958) (citing The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations 379 (2d ed. 1953); 15 T. Hansard, Parliamentary History of England, col. 1307 (1813)).

Those words citing the original intent of the 4th amendment were not written by Ted Cruz or by Kurt Schlichter or even by Justice Clarence Thomas. They were written by Justice Elana Kagan in the Supreme Court’s ruling in Lange v. California released yesterday.

Take a note of the dates cited there. 1958,, 1953, 1813, 1763. 1763 a full twelve years before the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord , thirteen years before the Declaration of Independence and over a quarter of a century before the 4th Amendment was ratified nearly a quarter century before the ratification of the US constitution and over a quarter of a century before the 4th Amendment which this what this case is about, was approved.

Imagine that, citing not just the original intent of the 4th amendment but the original ideas behind it! I wonder if Senator Hirano disapproves?

I suspect not. Apparently there is nothing wrong with originalism, even for a liberal justice or a liberal senator, as long as it can be used to support a result they agree with.

Unexpectedly of course.

Report from Louisiana: The Vaccine Lottery

Posted: June 21, 2021 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , ,
Photo by Emin BAYCAN on Unsplash

By:  Pat Austin

SHREVEPORT – Registration opens today for Louisiana’s “Shot at a Million” lottery campaign. To enter you must be a Louisiana resident and have had at least one Covid vaccine. Prizes include scholarships for those under 18, and cash for everyone else.

The campaign is the latest effort by Governor John Bel Edwards to get Louisiana citizens vaccinated against the Coronavirus.

“We need more people to go sleeves up before we can truly end the pandemic,” Edwards said at the press conference. “’Shot At A Million’ is a reward for those who’ve already gotten vaccinated and a fun nudge for others to get the vaccine sooner rather than later.”

The prizes are funded by federal COVID dollars.

This idea of rewarding people for getting the vaccine isn’t new; for months now states have been offering incentives to get the shot which have included free crawfish, burritos, tequila shots, amusement park tickets, and hot dogs.

The concept of rewarding people for doing “the right thing” trickles on down to the school level; positive behavior incentives in schools come in the form of “bucks” or tickets handed to kids who follow dress code, open doors for others, do their homework, that sort of thing. The theory is that everyone will show good behavior in order to get the incentives and be allowed to use those “bucks” in a school store for chips, candy, or homework passes.

Currently, Louisiana is near the bottom of the vaccinated population list with only 33% of our people having taken the shot. Highest ranked? Vermont, with 64%. So in theory, someone in Louisiana stands a 1 in 1,675,152 “shot” at winning a prize in the Louisiana vaccine lottery.

We will literally gamble on anything in Louisiana.

Pat Austin blogs at And So it Goes in Shreveport, at Medium, and is the author of Cane River Bohemia: Cammie Henry and her Circle at Melrose Plantation. Follow her on Instagram @patbecker25 and Twitter @paustin110.

Bloody hell

Posted: June 20, 2021 by datechguy in Uncategorized

In Turkey, a controversy erupted because Ancestry.com revealed that many Turks have more Greek DNA than Turkish. The Turkish DNA Project, a “community project” that researches Oghuz Turks, forerunners of the Ottoman Turks that conquered Anatolia from the Greek Byzantine Empire, called for boycotts of Ancestry.com, and Ahval, an online news site reporting on Turkey but based in the United Arab Emirates, reports that revelations about Turkish DNA have “shaken Turkish beliefs in their “Turkishness.”

The Turks originated in northeastern, Asia before migrating across southwest Asia in the medieval period, leaving significant pockets of Turks in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Persia, among others. Anatolia had long been a crossroad between Europe and Asia, and had been the home of Hittites, Lydians, Celts, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and more. Classical Greece famously colonized much of Anatolia, establishing settlements along the Aegean coast and in Pontus on the Black Sea, and Istanbul itself began as a Greek colony called Byzantium. Alexander the Great spread Greek culture even further across Anatolia into Persia and India, and the Pontic King Mithridates the Great claimed descent from Alexander and from the Persian King Xerxes

In 1071, the Turks under defeated the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert, and the conquest of Anatolia began. Constantinople was conquered by Sultan Mehmed II in 1453 after a 53-day siege, and the Turks continued to advance across the Balkans and into Greece itself, taking Greece’s Peloponnesian Peninsula by 1459, Bosnia in 1463, and the Greek island of Rhodes in 1529. It was in Wallachia, in the Balkans, that Mehmed II, in 1462, faced Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Vlad impaled 23,000 Turks before Mehmed II was able to take Wallachia, too. In 1683, the Turks were finally defeated by the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the Battle of Vienna, and the Turks never threatened Europe again. At the end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was broken up, and Turkey’s borders have remained relatively the same since.

All of this history just goes to show what a mix Anatolians are. Even Turkish President Erdogan hails from a formerly Greek town that’s since been Turkified, and though would never admit it, likely has significant Greek heritage. A funny little joke the Greeks played, submitting to the Ottomans only to turn them all at least partly Greek.

Which just goes to show how little blood has to do with culture, despite what the race essentialists claim. I touched on this a little bit on Twitter with Ricochet’s Jon Gabriel (no relation) and Australian writer Gray Connolly. Culture is far more about common languages and beliefs than about ancestry, so whether the Turks have Greek or Turkic blood doesn’t matter. The Turks are tied by Islam and by the Turkish language. Both Connolly and Gabriel made the point that under the Roman Empire, a Roman was anyone who swore allegiance to Rome. Blood mattered little.

I remember when the U.S. seemed headed that way. Seems so long ago.

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