Clayton Cramer.

Boomer Greed

2026-06-07T15:01:01.261-06:00

‘The golden years are not golden’: Boomers are hoarding most of America’s wealth and power because they’re terrified of outliving their money
The arrogance of that title really steams me even the article quotes a number of Boomers refuting that title in part.
1. "Hoarding": like we are never going to spend it. For the most part, Boomers are not overwhelmingly rich. There are homeless Boomers and many barely making their rent or mortgage payments. I am not one of them, but I know such.
2. Power: does he mean we elected Trump? Or that we reliably show up to vote? Zoomers can fix this easily enough.
3 Where is our "hoarded wealth" going after we die? We are not taking it with us. We are going to leave it to our GenX children who Zoomers will again claim are hoarding. Much of my wealth is already spent on meals out and services overwhelmingly provided by younger people.
4. Houses? Yes we bought houses for $106,000 in the 1980s on wages commensurate with those prices ($45,000 was my salary at the time). We paid interest rates that seem horrifying today. I refinanced a mortgage at 10.5% in 1989. We had a 18.5% car loan. (We had pretty good credit at the time.) Life was not easy back then.
5. We had limited capabilities because of technology. A few years ago, my son asked, "Hiw did you buy houses before the Internet." Slowly and carefully .
BZoomers need to stop whining or Boomers might buy billion dollar yachts and sink them at sea to deny that wealth to the Zoomers.

More Weirdness From the Combined Minds of My Wife and Me

2026-06-07T10:06:19.393-06:00

Canis Ex Machina

It had been 40,000 years since the Great Collapse when our expedition reached HD56689 B. We knew that before the GC our ancestors had seeded B with our distant cousins. Would they still be recognizably human in culture. Other planets we had explored were still physically human with slight variations in size and color (two-meter adults on Rigel F with coal-black skin, one meter adults with interesting and sometimes beautiful primary color skin spotting on HD44449 C). These were startling, but we grew to see them as just interesting variants on the basic human pattern.

What we found too disheartening was civilizational drift. Some had gone cannibal; the sociologists recorded what they found. After losing a few sociologists to the pot, we decided this was a civilization best studied from drones and moved on. Others completely lost technological knowledge; they had reverted to hunter-gatherer societies with no apparent forward progress in 40,000 years to the state from which they had regressed.

HD56689 B was unique. We could see evidence of an advanced civilization: large cities; some strangely narrow, unpaved roads; what seemed to be something like very large bird roosts made of concrete. The population was clearly shrinking. We contacted the small remaining leadership. After a bit of struggle getting the AI Translators working with what seemed (t us) a very primitive language, we pieced together what happened.

Their ancestors separated from the mainstream of human technology by the GC had started insanely breeding the Earth-origin mammals to do the important jobs of machines. The swifferhound had a large fine haired tail. It was very small, about 500 grams. It would climb shelves and use its tail for dusting.

They bred the vacuum shepherd to inhale dirt and dust into outsized lungs, then exhale the contents outside. They had fairly short lifespans because of high lung cancer rates.

They bred a transport elephant with a very broad flat back on which enormous loads could be strapped to the mid-abdominal tusks. (Our biologists suspected some now lost to them gene editing played a part in that one.)

They bred bats to 40 meters long with commensurate wingspans that carried humans on transcontinental journeys from batplane roost to batplane roost. They consumed vast quantities of insects and birds on the way. This limited them to travel on the only settled continent and outlying islands.

Tractordogs operated the only agricultural machinery they had still produced. Combines were operated by their canine pilots through the fields.

It was both unsettling and impressive to see our mighty species operating almost without technology. So why was the civilization dying. Some centuries before, at what they now called Peak Animal Helper, an interspecies virus spread rapidly through all the mammals killing most of them in one generation. While survivors carried a gene for immunity, the generations of careful breeding made the survivors weak and less effective at their functions. As an example, chauffeur dogs sometimes intentionally crashed ground vehicles so that they could devour the occupants.

We tried to explain the concept of machines as less vulnerable helpers and dogs as companions, but I fear the concepts would not stick and future explorers would find empty cities here.

This whole concept was dreamed up by my wife as ww were returning from a star party in Payette. There has to be a better title for this. Maske suggestions!

Support for Gay Marriage Falling. Why?

2026-06-07T00:48:12.993-06:00

Andrew Sullivan, a prominent gay journalist has an answer that makes a lot of sense. 6/5/26 Daily Dish:

The New York State legislature recently tackled the vital, pressing issue of whether the terms “mother” and “father” are cruel and oppressive. They concluded that these terms are indeed transphobic and need to be replaced in law by “gestating parent” and “non-gestating parent.” “Paternity” is also bigoted and axed. Among the Democrats, the vote was, natch, a few shy of unanimous. And let’s not kid ourselves: Hochul’s signature is inevitable. On all questions gay and trans, the Dems are now entirely controlled by trans and “queer” extremists....

I suspect the queers are so insulated they don’t even realize that this is what they have been effectively saying to Joe Public for a decade now. Remember when they told you that gay and lesbian people were just like everyone else, and just wanted to be left alone? Scrap that. We’re actually queers who believe marriage is a “fundamentally violent institution” and that the sex binary is a white supremacist fiction. Now we’ve gotten marriage, we will indoctrinate your kids in queer and gender theory, fire you if you don’t repeat our pronouns, force girls to shower next to boys in locker rooms, give irreversible sex changes to minors, and insist that “a penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.”

Yes. When LGBs pleaded for rhe right to be left alone, there was little argument. Active and aggressive prosecution of LGB activities in private was out of fashion. Police had more important problems to pursue. When "the love whose name we dare not speak" refused to shut up, it was hard to ignore.

The genital mutilation of children made a lot of people upset. That LGBs who wanted to be left alone were now automatically assumed to be tied to the T and Q did not help. LGB sex seems positively tame compared to cutting off genitals and breasts.

Star Party in Payette

2026-06-07T00:23:43.000-06:00

I hate doing star parties in summer. If it's really not dark until about 10:00. People with much better eyesight could see Venus well enough to aim at it 20-30 minutes before me. Venus is at the gibbous phase right now. Not very interesting.

Jupiter was more interesting. Even my Televue-85 was showing multiple cloud bands at 108x. As much as I am frustrated by the inability to control the mount for goto and even somple centering, it tracked very reliably. Jupiter stayed center of eyepiece even at 108x as long as 30 minutes. By comparison, Dobsonian owners and one gal with an alt-az mounted Newtonian were busy moving and adjusting every couple minutes.

The Televue-85 is a very small aperture refractor of exceptional quality. It does not have the resolution of the 8" telescopes but it is dramatically inferior, either. When it was showing two bands, an 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain was also showing two bands. The light disadvantage, which is the square of aperture, is not as severe as you might expect because your eye does a pretty good job of compensating for brightness difference.

The Televue-85 is not the best choice for planetary observing although it id gorgeous on the Moon. It is better suited to deep sky astronomy because its short focal length allows a very wide field of view, well suited to the Pleiades or globular clusters such as M13. My 50mn eyepiece provides a 3 5 degree field.

The great advantage is portability. It weighs about ten pounds and on the mount it weighs about 20 pounds. At one point I realized that I might be able get the Sun so I could pick it up and carry it to a better location.

We had a decent crowd of people out there.

Things That Drive Me Crazy

2026-06-04T15:30:00.000-06:00

I ordered a roof rack system from Amazon thst clamps onto the Hyundai's roof bars intended for that purpose. The left and right attachment mechanisms of course have locks to prevent theft. The key fits three of the four locks. It will not even insert into the fourth. The logical step would be replace one appropriately keyed, or even all four. No. All Amazon can do is send me a new unit. Keep the bad one. I may try and figure out to repair that bad lock.

It is hard to believe this is cost effective.

Explore Scientific iEXOS 100-2 Mount

2026-06-04T15:30:00.000-06:00

This afternoon, I took it out and looked at the Sun. I must have gotten pretty well polar aligned because it was trqcking very well. Obviously, two star alignment was impossible, but i was able to use LURD (left, up, right, down) buttons to center the Sun in the eyepiece.

This evening, LURD was completely useless. It is random how ExploreStars app works.

The Declining Importance of the Strsight of Hormuz

2026-06-04T07:03:40.000-06:00

No, not a MAGA talking point. 6/4/26 New York Times:

But with every passing day, the world is learning to live without the Gulf’s seaborne exports.
1Just as the Covid-19 pandemic and President Trump’s tariffs forced a significant rewiring of global supply chains, the Strait’s closure has prompted a similar adjustment. You might be part of it. When gas prices rise rapidly, people start to limit their driving. Walmart just reported that customers are now buying less than 10 gallons of gas at a time on average at its filling stations.
The United States, Brazil, Canada, Kazakhstan and Venezuela are already increasing their oil production. Large releases of crude oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve are also helping to cover shortfalls. Like a stream that finds its way around a fallen log, markets locate new supplies when the old ones are suddenly cut off.

At some point, the Iranian crazies will get poor enough for their religious objections to evaporate. By then, Iran will be a less important source of oil. And on the bright side, reduced consumption of oil will make the world a better place for Greenies.

Goodbye to Mercury

2026-06-04T06:46:57.000-06:00

Rhe element, not the planet. As part of thinning stuff we do not need in preparation for our move, a few items have turned out to be harder to dispose of then I expected.

Back in the 1960s, mercury was something with which most kids had some chance to play. It is incredibly dense (13x water; lead will float in it), very standoffish from almost everything, and with a weird negative meniscus. Unlike water which will slightly rise on the inside of a container, mercury will do the opposite.

It was not generally considered a particularly risky material to have on your hands. We always washed thoroughly after handling it and we all knew it did not belong in our bodies.

Somewhere in the 1970s or 1980s, the worryworts turned mercury into thr great hazard. My recollection from chemistry classes turns out to be what EPA says: mercuric organic compounds are terrible neurotoxins and represent a serious hazard in your body including through cuts in the skin and seafood. Mercury vapor is a serious hazard and letting it heat is a bad idea. But elemental mercury is not terribly dangerous to handle.

From the procedures required to dispose of it, you would think that it requires a haz-mat suit and air cover. We are having a hard time finding somewhere that will take it.

The uranium seems to be even harder to properly discard. This is radiation meter test sample, bought on Amazon, and delivered in normal mail, not a leadlined van. It is not uranium metal but a thumbnail sized piece of uranium ore.

It is an alpha particle emitter. Alpha particles are low energy and are stopped by a sheet of paper, your skin, or the metal can in which thus uranium sits. Like mercury, you do not want in your body, where even the short range of alpha particles can be a carcinogen.

Heck, small amounts of uranium show up in ground water in the Boise area. Yet that word radioactive causes worrywort paranoia, even at the very low levels and intensities of alpha particles.

Anyway, I do not need either the mercury or the uranium sample. I just need to get someone to accept them. The difficulty in finding a place to properly dispose of them suggests that for all the worrywortism, the powers that be want this stuff in a landfill.

A Sense of Loss

2026-06-04T05:25:58.000-06:00

One of you is scheduled to come take this 1983 Encyclopedia Britannica away Thursday or Friday. They are, in any rational sense, an obsolete marker of a 20th century literate middle class American family. You wanted a comprehensive overview of human knowledge not just for your own curiosity, but as a starting point for your kids when they started school. While encyclopedia are never a particularly good source for a research paper, like Wikipedia or Grokopedia, they were a starting point for enough knowledge to know what to ask next.

These were a uniformly bound and in the case of the Britannica beautiful above and beyond their content. They represented an attempt at presenting a consensus of educated academics at a time when that phrase still meant something positive.

Articles were usually anonymous but you would sometimes get surprised at identified authors for some entries. An article in the 1963 Americana (with which I grew up and which were a companion on many boring weekends when I was 10 or 11) about American English was by H.L. Mencken, about as expert a user of 20th century American English as you could pick. He is remembered today for the acerbic "Puritanism.—The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." This is not a fair statement of Puritan concerns but it captures well Mencken's wit, and style with a pen.

Another was an article about vigilantism by Glenn S. Dumke, for many years chancellor of the California State University system, back when that was a sign of education not Marxism or other forms of woke. His article observed what I have since discovered in my deeper reading: In Gold Rush California, vigilantism were an expression of popular justice often no worse than the legally constituted courts.

As the title of this posting implies, there is a sense of loss as these leave. They are the loss of an aspect of 20th century American middle class idealisn that for all its flaws aimed high and achieved much. They also carry a sense of wistful personal loss. My wife and I bought these around the time our daughter was born in 1983. They were expensive (about $1100, if I recall correctly) but something of a statement that we were going to bring our daughter up in a home that put knowledge and education at the core of her life. We already had a 1963 Americana, but the Britannica was always first in class so why not the best?

Goodbye, dear friend.

Again, Demand for Traditional Racism Exceeds the Supply

2026-06-03T14:49:14.582-06:00

6/3/26 New York Post:

WASHINGTON — The Southern Poverty Law Center paid reluctant white nationalists and Ku Klux Klan members thousands of dollars in donor money to remain in the notorious hate groups — even making them whole for money spent on cross-burnings, the Justice Department alleged in a shocking superseding indictment filed Tuesday.

Of course progressive racism, against whites and Jews (who are after all white) and Asians remains in high demand as well.

California in Disarray

2026-06-03T14:45:42.338-06:00

The primary election for governor has British-born Trump-endoraed Republican Steve Hilton in the lead. 6/3/26 BBC:

The California governor's race remains up in the air a day after the primary vote, with British-American former TV host Steve Hilton and onetime Biden cabinet secretary Xavier Becerra at the top of a crowded field.

The contest could take several days to decide due to the volume of postal ballots cast on Tuesday to pick the top two candidates for November's general election.

Becerra, a Democrat, has vowed to oppose President Donald Trump. Hilton is a Republican endorsed by Trump.

6/3/26 CNN headline of course misleads:

Spencer Pratt has spent months waging a guerilla campaign against incumbent Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, riding the buzz generated by AI-generated videos, viral moments and some big-name supporters as he seeks to capitalize on dissatisfaction with the way the city is being run.

He may now have five more months to make his case.

Bass secured a spot on the November ballot and Pratt was running in second place as of early Wednesday morning, ahead of progressive city councilwoman Nithya Raman and 11 lesser-known candidates as more ballots were being counted. No candidate appears likely to exceed the 50% threshold to win outright, which means the top two will meet head-to-head in the November election.

Not just ahead but likely beyond margin of fraud ahead of DSA #3.

Light Pollution Map for Target Area

2026-06-01T16:33:13.976-06:00

Purple is bad: Bortle class 6. Surrounding zones are class 5, then class 4.

What is Bortle?

If you have never been to a Bortle class 1-3 sky, you have missed so much.

The Explore Scientific iEXOS 100-2 Mount I Bought

2026-06-01T16:13:00.000-06:00

I bought this because I wanted a small easy to transport mount for public astronomy with my Televue-85. That it was a goto mount just made the.$300 price all the better. It is very well made so I was very disappointed when it started behaving erratically a few days after it arrived

The factory said it was fine. When it came back, i suspected the problem was that it needed more than 12V to operate; goto mounts demand a lot while slowing across the sky

It now appears that the intermittent problems that I am seeing hs because the bundled ExploreStars app is, in the words of SuperGrok, "abandonware": software free but largely forgotten by its authors and supported like they no longer remember their child. It works but unreliable enough that few people use it.

What most owners of the mount use are ASCOM (a standard free Windows driver package) or INDI (the Linux equivalent). Planetarium programs such as Carte du Ciel and Stellarium can control the mount through the ASCOM drivers telling it where to go (ditto for KStars in Linux). So using a laptop, not a tablet or cellphone. This takes away much of the simplicity of a small tablet.

Kstars under Linux is pretty clumsy to control the mount. Setting these up under either Linux or Windows is clumsy because you are either on the Internet reading instructions or connected to the mounts server, not both. Lots of disconnecting and reconnecting. I ordered a USB WiFi adapter so that I can have both open at the same time. I have done this before in the 1980s where I set up a PC with two Ethernet cards to create a LAN analyzer, so i know it can be done.

In any case, if it turns out to be too clumsy to use for goto, it is still a nice compact mount for public astronomy.

UPDATE: I spent some time with the manual for Explore Stars (which does not match the app), some time with SuperGrok, and some analyzing what it seems to want to do. I think i have ExploreStars app figured out. I will try this tonight.

UPDATE 2: Up too late gathering documents for the HELOC.

UPDATE 3: Low amperage. The battery had been used to operate the Losmandy and the iExOS without recharging.

HELOC

2026-06-01T13:29:00.000-06:00

I have been looking at a way to get a bridge mortgage as a backup in case closing of current house is delayed past closing date of new house. My credit union loan officer made a/pretty brilliant proposal: take a Home Equity Line of Credit on the old house. If we need to pay cash when closing date arrives, we pay for it with the HELOC, then when the old house closes, it pays off the HELOC.

If there are no surprises between offer on old house and closing, we do not need to use any of it. If there are, we have a few months of hefty payments on the HELOC before sale of old house.

AI

2026-05-31T09:21:49.000-06:00

5/30/26 Axios:

AI tools might be hallucinating less, but they're still spitting out inaccurate answers cloaked in polished, hyper-confident language....
Driving the news: New research suggests AI note-taking tools (often called AI scribes) can help in medical settings, but only in tandem with professional reviewers.
A Yale School of Medicine study this month found that first-year medical students who revised their own clinical notes with AI-generated drafts generally maintained note quality.
But the AI notes themselves often omitted important details, including symptom duration.
Two-thirds of students said the notes were "helpful as a first draft," but 21% said the note taker "may reduce my ability to learn how to write a good note."

Looking at the papers submitted by my students this last semester, I saw a lot of this: very polished prose, drawing confidential conclusions with weak or no supporting evidence. And of course, hallucinate sources.

I use SuperGrok for some tasks in the shop or for astronomy, but I have learned mostly to use it as a really good search engine. It makes enough mistakes that I never completely trust it

Sorting Mementos and Junk for the Move

2026-05-30T10:07:31.080-06:00

Do any of you have a cassette to digital capacity. Let me really stretch: 1600 dpi 9 track magtape?

Do They Have Frigidity Problems?

2026-05-30T00:41:30.622-06:00

From an open source science journal:

Glaciers are rapidly retreating worldwide duto anthropogenic climate change, with severe implications not only for ecosystems and water security but also for cultural memory, emotional wellbeing, and environmental justice. In the Andes, glaciers are more than reservoirs of ice—they are living beings within Indigenous cosmologies, ancestral knowledge systems, and everyday life. This essay explores the cultural, emotional, and symbolic dimensions of glacial loss, focusing on Andean communities who view glaciers as sacred entities..
Glaciers as more-than-human beings

Is it that hard for an editor to say, "Yes, I understand that indigenous cultures have strong mythological beliefs about glacierz but that does mean we mistake that for science. Find whatever journal Carlos Castaneda editing now for this article."

You're Having a Bad Day? Ask These Candles How Their Days Have Gone!

2026-05-28T15:50:59.912-06:00

I used to by mistake use these to make the bearings on my Dobsonian move more smoothly. (That does not work. Clean them thoroughly instead, especially of any candle wax.) I kept them in the telescope in the last house. Think of the punishment "hot house' in Cool Hand Luke or the marvelous parody in Take the Money and Run, where the protagonist is locked in a hot house for two days with a life insurance salesman.

At Least He is a FORMER CIA Official

2026-05-28T08:51:24.000-06:00

5/27/26 New York Post:

A former high-ranking CIA official who allegedly lied about his credentials to secure $77,000 in bogus military leave was busted after FBI agents found a mind-blowing fortune, including $40 million worth of gold bars, hidden inside his Virginia home.
The feds conducted a raid at the residence of David Rush last week, uncovering a staggering 303 gold bars, $2 million in cash and nearly three dozen luxury Rolex watches, according to court documents.
Rush, until recently a “senior executive service-level employee” at the CIA, reportedly requested the massive haul of gold and foreign currency for “work-related expenses” between November and March.

If all the Medicaid/Medicare fraudsters and crooks who did not have a a good reason to take $2 million of gold bars home were routed out, would we still be running a deficit every year?

The article explains that he was caught when he defrauded the government of $77,000. This led to the discovery that his bachelor's and master's degrees did not exist nor his military pilot's license.

If the CIA is this careless about background checks, how careful are the other departments?

The profound greed, too. $40 million is a lot of money. You can live very, very comfortably on that forever. He could have stolen $2 million, created a new identity (he did work for CIA) and never been caught.

Do You Recognize This?

2026-05-27T20:05:06.563-06:00

I am organizing my entropic collection of telescope parts preparing for my cross-country move. Stuff I do not need (how many 2" to 1.25" adapters did I buy and when?) I will sell. Some parts make me scratch my head and say, "What is this?" It is beautifully machined and polished. Might I have upgraded some part of a Losmandy mount in the long tunnel of time?

I Would Not Want These Released Either

2026-05-27T14:54:00.000-06:00

Especially if I was senile and dishonest. 5/27/26 NPR:

WASHINGTON — Joe Biden sued the Justice Department on Tuesday in an effort to block the release of audio recordings and transcripts of the former president's interview with a ghostwriter that were obtained by the special counsel who investigated his handling of classified documents.
Biden's lawyers said in a lawsuit filed in Washington's federal court that the Justice Department plans to release the files to Congress and a conservative group, the Heritage Foundation, after the department had previously argued that they were exempt from disclosure under the public records law.
Biden's lawyers argued that the disclosure would "constitute an unwarranted invasion of President Biden's privacy."
"Every American, including a sitting or former Vice President, has a right to privacy in the personal conversations he has within his own home," his attorneys wrote. "And when the U.S. Department of Justice obtains that private information through a criminal investigation, the Department bears a particular responsibility to protect it from disclosure."

Trump was prosecuted (and his wife's lingerie drawer was searched) as part of an investigation into failure to properly handle classified documents. I would think Biden deserves the same attention.

I Have Seen a Lot of Evidence That the Standards for Federal Judges Are High Enough

2026-05-27T09:52:58.329-06:00

Willingness to accept expert declarations that fail the Bellesiles Test (do the cited aources actually exist? Do they say what the expert claims?) What are clearly ends-driven decisions.

Among the most disappointing was a district judge in Fresno who refused to hear expert testimony about the history of domestic violence disqualification in the colonial period, insisting that at Duke University Law she learned that women and children were chattel property and so such a question was irrelevant. Of course, the only women and children who were chattels were slaves. Free women and children had defined rights. Of course chattel alone defined mobile (non-real estate property). All chattels were property. "Chattel property" is redundant.

Oh yes. Another case that came before her in the courtroom was a guy who spoke no English and was seeking a more lenient sentence on a case involving possession of 50 pounds of meth. She gave him a more lenient sentence.

She may have learned this at Duke Law (an institution that leaves me increasingly unimpressed), but humility is an important trait in a judge. 5/27/26 CNBC:

A federal judge has been disciplined for having sex in their chambers with a high-ranking law enforcement officer within earshot of staff, attending a partisan political event and for lying to superior judges who investigated the claims, a disciplinary committee revealed.

Still Amazed at Her Cluelessness

2026-05-26T19:11:00.000-06:00

Mayor Bass talks about how nice Los Angeles was when she grew up: affordable housing; no homeless people on the streets; jobs. She wants another four years to fix what she failed to do in her first four years. Oh, and she forgot to mention that in the 1970s they need let reservoirs go dry and let thousands of homes burn. If voters relect her, they have no one to blame but themselves.

Ancient History

2026-05-26T10:43:09.103-06:00

At least into the 1950s, it was fashionable to bronze each baby's first shoes. My mother kept all of her childrens' bronzed baby shoes on the mantle. I am not sure if these were dipped or more likely eelectrocuted.

Eventually, I received one of mine.

Telescope Winch

2026-05-26T01:19:00.000-06:00

The new house will need a telescope winch for lifting Big Bertha off the base and the 8" reflector off the Losmandy mount

I have been thinking about all night. I will four pulleys secured to studs in the garage ceiling. Ropes through pulleys. One end of each rope will need a hook that can grab a loop without scratching. The far end of each rope will be tied to weight plates. For lifting Big Bertha, two 25 pound weights on each will counterbalance most of the weight. About 10 pounds of force pulling down to lift the telescope off its base. Then push the base out of the way and slowly lower the telescope to the ground.

For moving the 8" reflector, loosen the clamps holding it on the mount, and obe 15 pound weight on each rope to lift it off. This requires a stand under each rope end where the weights will sit when not actively lifting telescopes.

I have done this before for moving a anowplow from my wife's Blazer. I was younger and strong enough to put the pulleys and rope up myself.

In case you are curious, this is part of how multitasking stones ended up at the top of cathedrals. Counterweights means you only need a few dozen peasants pulling on the rope