Entrepreneurship

Still Too Early – But Perry Makes Some Points

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Most here haven’t commented on the darting and illusory fortunes of the huge Republican field; I’d mentioned earlier that Perry would have trouble – double or triple BDS syndrome, a bit too much of an Aggie for Texas, God knows for the rest of the country. But that great t-sipper, Kevin Williamson, discusses the case for Perry after a strong speech. That’s worth reading and both Williamson & Perry are worth while.

Perry’s fighting, turning arguments around to free market principles, to the human: he did this earlier on the relatively friendly Fox’s Chris Wallace. Wallace pressed him on the number of uninsured Texans. Perry didn’t fight him on those grounds but on the far more important, far more serious, and far more consequential grounds of “access.” Access in Texas to health care has risen sharply with Perry’s policies. And, let’s face it, if there is enough access, all the assurances of insurance are pretty useless. Or, as Venzueleans found out, Chavez had promised to meet their every need – government promises of toilet paper and oil were there, access was not.

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It All Comes Down to Chickens

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The coop, completed and painted.
The coop, completed and painted.
Granny Jessie kept chickens during the Depression quite a lot of them, if my childhood memories of the huge and by then crumbling and disused chicken-wire enclosure, the adjoining hutch and the nesting boxes are anything to go by. Some of her neighbors went on keeping backyard livestock well into the 1960s we occasionally sampled goose eggs at Granny Jessie’s house where we could hear a donkey braying now and again. Mom had to help care for the chickens, as child and teenager and wound up detesting them so much that this was the one back-yard DIY farm element that we never ventured into when we were growing up. Mom hated chickens, profoundly. It seems that keeping chickens is one of those fall-back things, when hard times loom.

But my daughter and I were considering it over the last couple of years, along with all of our other ventures into suburban self-efficiency the garden, the cheese-making, the home-brewing and canning, the deep-freeze stocked full, the pantry likewise. I put off doing anything about chickens until two things happened: we finally encountered the woman in our neighborhood who keeps a small flock of backyard chickens, and she took us to see her flock. She told us that it was not much trouble, really, and the eggs were amazingly flavorful. In comparison, supermarket eggs even the expensive organic and supposedly free-range kind were insipid and tasteless.

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Shawyer Space Drive…Arriving.

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A science fiction writer acquaintance of mine, John Ringo, is already going nuts about this “Shawyer Drive” on his Facebook page, because he
is friends with one of the scientists involved.

See power point page and the links below:

Magnetron driven, reaction massless, "Shawyer Drive"
Magnetron driven, reaction massless, “Shawyer Drive”

Magnetron powered EM-drive construction expected to take two months
http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/04/magnetron-powered-em-drive-construction.html

Emdrive Roger Shawyer believes midterm EMdrive interstellar probe could flyby Alpha Centauri
http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/04/emdrive-roger-shawyer-believes-midterm.html

The drive seems to be a quantum “zero-point energy” phenomena that you put electricity into and get reaction massless thrust out of.

_AND_ it looks to be both scalable and improvable with better magnetrons.

This is also dovetailing nicely with a Lockheed Martin compact fusion reactor that

1. Generates more power than it uses and
2. Produces something on the order of 7.4 megawatts

See:

http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_beta_fusion_reactor

Given the reality of Space X’s and Blue Origin’s reusable rocket successes, and it seems that Mankind is about to burst out from this planet in a very big way.

See:

http://www.spacex.com/news
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-just-launched-flagship-rocket/

And all of the above is driving John Ringo to despair on his science fiction writing career.

History Weekend (Culinary History Division) – The Smell of Chili in the Morning

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(This is a slightly reworked piece I did for a local real estate blog, which alas seems to have gone dormant – enjoy! CH)

For much of the 19th century and into the early Twentieth, it was a popular San Antonio custom. Various of the public squares, notably Military Plaza and Market Square were the domain of the Chili Queens who established a custom of setting up tables and benches along the edges of the squares, in the early evening and selling chili-by-the-bowl to all comers. They would bring huge kettles of chili which they had made over their own home cook-fire during the day, and keep it warm through the evening and into the wee hours over an open fire. The chili vendors would entice customers to their own particular stands by hiring musicians to entertain diners. There are some splendid descriptions of how marvelous this would have appeared lantern and starlight shining down on the tables, gleaming on glass soda bottles, while the scent of the chili and the mesquite smoke from the fires which kept it warm hung on the night air. (I used this scene several times in Lone Star Sons, and in Adelsverein – The Sowing.) During South Texas summers before the invention of air conditioning, this likely would have been about the most comfortable dining venue for working men, for those out for an evening of gambling and drinking in the various saloons … and in later decades, for those visiting from the North or the East, desirous of absorbing a little exotic local color.

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