A Kinder and Gentler Zombie Apocolypse

I am remiss on both blog and video these busy days. Richard Flentge has rejoined me at EVTV to try to get the backlog of parts orders out. But I’m still a little overwhelmed by the targets of opportunity that greet me each morning.

Two steps forward and a step back. I was discouraged to learn that the latest battery modules have a slightly altered BMS board on them. A bit smaller, tighter, very nice really. But our software doesn’t reliably retrieve the cell data from these newer modules. So it is a bit back to the drawing board to find the fix.

Another nagging issue that has haunted me for some months has to do with the way Arduino handles the USB port. Not terribly important in a car because you start and stop it so often, rebooting the system. And it would be rare indeed to have a laptop plugged into a device while driving.

But this latest video shows our efforts to develop a module allowing you to use a Tesla battery pack – the entire pack – as a solar energy storage device. I’m very pleased with how this one has come along. However, mysteriously, if I unplug the USB cord after observing it for sometime, it almost always causes the system to halt. I have a bit of watchdog code that then reboots the device, but this just isn’t proper behavior. Indeed, at times I can simply be watching the screen and it will reboot the system. This is because we repaint the ENTIRE screen over and over with a formfeed each time so that it continuously refreshes and doesn’t appear to scroll. This is very basic ASCII text after all.

But if my buffer in my terminal program reaches max data, it would actually cause the device to reboot.

The problem turns out to be a curious inability of the very core Arduino source code to determine whether or not it has a USB connection. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t bother executing all my carefully crafted print statements. But it can’t really tell. And worse, it has a serial buffer program that basically contains an endless loop under certain conditions.

I was very delighted and amazed that once I had actually chased this down to a repeatable event, Collin Kidder was able to devise a solution in two days. It’s a bit of a procedure replacing a gcc file in the Arduino installation, but it appears to work.

Again, the worst problems are the very occasional intermittents that appear and disappear like ghosts. When you can get them to repeatably appear under a given set of steps, you are on your way to a cure.

But it brings up how very different solar and power are from electric vehicles. EVs start and stop. They park. They are restarted. They accelerate using huge amounts of power and then don’t use any at all for hours or days.

Would you believe some jackass stole the LICENSE PLATES off the EV eTransit Connect? By the time I got all the paperwork together and notarized and submitted and new plates, the 12v battery had died.

But in an electrical power installation, you are on ALL the time and for days or weeks or months on end. You don’t WANT to reset anything. That could seriously interrupt the latest episode of “This Is Us” and you would not be popular around the hacienda.

This video episode is kind of a live presentation of my last blog, “Canticle of the Sun”. I credit the eggregious overreach of the alt-left libtards and their media press arm with this epiphany. It was fun to watch them go through their grief stricken moment of shock and awe on election night. After all the campaigning done BY the media and polls that apparently were fabricated outright showing Hillerary in a landslide, they just went into shock on the evening of the event. I confess. I took great joy in this. But it’s a Presidential election. It’s not like we haven’t had them before. There will be another in four years. Get over it.

Instead, a significant segment of our population went completely insane. And I mean truly mentally irrational. They have been screeching total nonsense into the microphone for MONTHS now, grasping at ANYTHING to belittle Donald Trump, in no matter how insignificant a fashion. It is a panicked and desperate cry to somehow, someway, get everyone to see that THEY were correct and everybody else was wrong – somehow.

Trump learned long ago that he could get pretty much 12 to 15 hours of all channels chanting his name with the artful, or perhaps artless use of his Twitter account. I am simply amazed that a 72 year old man has so thoroughly grasped the utility of this childtoy 140 character Internet “I AM HERE LOOK AT ME” device. He uses it surgically as his laser pointer, with the alt-left libtards and media dutifully playing the role of the house cats. And just like playing with a laser pointer with your cats at home, it does indeed drive them into a frenzy.

In a larger sense, it actually does mark the total END of the Democratic Party. I’m pleased to report that a number of friends who have been long time (generational) liberal Democrats are simply switching to This Is Us and muttering that they never signed up for THIS shit. I think the DNC will lose 1/3 of its base by the next Presidential election. Political contributions are ALREADY running at 50% of those garnered by the Republican National Committee. It’s over.

Fear NOT legitimate liberals. Republicans have an innate and unerring sense of the precise technique necessary to fetch failure from the jaws of victory. Feel free to join the Republicans as they morph into TWO political parties, the liberal/moderate Republicans, and the moderate/Conservative Republicans.

But it is the end of the alt-left libtards and the now readily viewable alt-left fake news channels. Really Americans are abandoning ALL cable news in favor of YouTube and some others on the Internet. I’m not sure the gain with Alex Jones and his liberal counterparts the Aging Turks, no better.

Of course you must already know my position on the NFL demonstrations. First, I don’t view the national anthem as entirely a tribute to the military. I suppose it is, but to me it is more a 60 second celebration of American Exceptionalism. If you have lived in America all your life you just are simply never going to be able to comprehend how very exceptional the United States of America is. But if you HAVE experienced the rest of the world from something other than the deck of a cruise ship, you very quickly get it. We are entirely alone in this exceptional nature and truly a light unto the world. Reagan’s shining city on a hill.

EVERYONE has a grocery list a mile long, a checklist if you will, of what’s WRONG with America. Myself included and you might be surprised that on my list is the gross misbehaviour of our law enforcement generally and in all matters black particularly. I do NOT share Trumps worship of the constabulary. But EVERYONE has a list of six or eight things that think are REALLY REALLY WRONG with America. Probably healthy.

But for sixty seconds, we all band together at football and baseball games etc. to sing an absurd and absurdly difficult to sing stolen British drinking club tune set to a really really bad poem by Francis Scott Keye about the war of 1812 which barely was one and certainly not one of any particular significance other than we demonstrated how expensive fighting overseas in AMerica, or Viet Nam or Afghanistan, it was for the British. And so they went home. It IS a stupid song. But I still tear up every time I hear it.

But the absurdity of the NFL demonstrations is apparently lost not only on the NFL players, the NFL commissioner, but even on Hannity and Tucker and Gingrich. I haven’t heard ANYBODY properly address this. Here we have a band of spoiled black KIDS, apparently trying to demonstrate their status as refugees from Charles Murray’s Bell Curve, by demonstrating their outrage at RACIAL INJUSTICE before a crowd of 75,000 people, ALL of whom are white (99.99%) who are wearing THEIR shirts and dying to TOUCH them or get them to SIGN something, cheering like a bunch of rock apes, at football teams that are 75% African American. ???? What the???????

What racial injustice? The only overt RACISM in that football stadium is ENTIRELY limited to the kneeling players. They are the ONLY racists on the field and calling attention to themselves AS racists deliberately.
That one team actually let their quarterback be sacked four times in a row because he would not join them in their idiotic display of mongoloid moronism is a felony level criminal act. And the man broke his back and potentially ended his career because of it. That is RACIAL VIOLENCE and a HATE CRIME of unheard of proportions committed on national television. And the end of NFL football for me. It doesn’t matter at this point WHAT they do. I will never watch an NFL football game, nor a segment of it, nor allow it to BE on the television in my home. That’s not a matter of until anything. It’s permanent. It isn’t a boycott. It’s over. I will never watch negroes bash their own brains out on the football field for cash again.

The REAL blood sport in this country is sitting in your underwear screaming at the television news. And it is one of my favorites. But I’m giving that up too. Why? Because it is not real. More to the point, it is surreal. And the epiphany came with the realization that it was so deliberately crafted. About half of you are seething over my football analysis and political crap right now.

As humanoids we have a very capable set of sensors and a processor, much like an autonomous vehicle. And in the same way, we have TOO MUCH input to really process. So we have to prefilter it, prioritize it. And so we are hardwired to focus on any information that might indicate an impending crash or collision – any kind of threat to our survival. I recently counted 63 gunshots, counting bursts as single shots, in a single 43 minute episode of a TV drama. And news shows, have quickly learned that if they can identify negative threats, coach the participants to bring out maximum drama, package them artfully, and present them in the most shocking manner possible, we will focus our attention on that as predictably as rain. Indeed, we are incapable of resisting it. It is mesmerizing. Like catching deer in the headlights.

And our attention can be sold for cash to MyPillow, Progressive Insurance and Floe, and to Budwieser. That’s right, cash. Millions per minute. For your attention span. By all that’s holy, you should at least get minimum wage just for watching the shit. YOU are ultimately the product.

But it has produced a universal deeply and darkly warped view of our world. We are a desperate nation facing imminent destruction and civilization as we know it is ending. If that doesn’t do it, Global Warming, Hurricanes, and earthquakes will surely finish us off. We are on the cusp of the Zombie Apocolypse.

I’m sorry to bring you this depressing news regarding this fantasy, but we just are not. We are living in a utopian age of well-fed, healthy, peaceful, plenty for everyone with unimaginably low levels of crime, war, and pestilence. Largely through the clever deployment of technology, we won. We are in the most peaceful, verdantly green and pastoral age in the history of mankind.

Our last few “wars” have suffered largely in the fact that nobody showed up for them. The percentage of American kids involved in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria et al is microscopic. 99% of the population had no skin in the game since Viet Nam. And Trump REALLY has this one right with his missile attack on Syria. Send in some ships, let the kids ride around in helicopters and blow shit up, and send 50 or 60 missiles in to blow some place to smitherenes. And do it at a convenient time, might I suggest PRIME TIME so it can all be on television for all Americans to cheer and beat their chests and feel good about taking it to the suckers.

Then pack up the cameras and the video cables. Cut. That’s a wrap. And go home. No casualties. No prisoners of war. No hostages. Get in, make your Z, get out. Feel good. War. The American way. Teach em bastards to poison gas children bah gawd.

Korea? I would be very pleased if everyone would pull up Google Maps right now and take a look at Korea. It’s about a twenty minute drive from Beijing. And half a world away. You have the southern half, where Chevy Bolt’s are made, and the northern half, where they eat rocks for dinner. And in the northern half, there is a squatty little turd mongoloid who rules the nation with an iron fist and has somehow learned to launch ICBM’s with nuclear warheads on them. Or so he would have me believe, hoping for ANOTHER MULTIBILLION DOLLAR HANDOUT FROM THE U.S. Don’t tell me you didn’t know we had been doing that regularly going back 20 years. Using YOUR income tax withholding of course.

IF he has a nuclear weapon and IF he has a missile, it is largely China’s problem, perhaps Japan’s problem, perhaps South Korea’s problem. Why do we have 28,000 troops in South Korea? My father fought in Korea. I never did quite understand why. But that was in 1952. That’s 65 years ago. Refer to the Google map. Why? I’m kind of Ron Paul on this one. It’s insane.

Perhaps some of you are aware that I worked for DOD contractors for about 15 years. I can assure you, if Ill Young Shithead launches a missile at the U.S., it would be shot down out of the sky before even achieving sub orbital. We were well able to do so 30 years ago. Unless something has really gone to hell, we still can. The problem then was how do you defend against 600 of them launched simultaneously, and assure NONE get through. THAT’s kind of a challenge and a lot is obviously at stake. But two or three from this pipsqueak? I say roll em and ACTION. Run Thursday, Friday and Saturday night, 8:00 Eastern, 7:00 Central.

My point is not to brain storm intercontinental nuclear war theory with you. It’s to point out that the media has extracted, packaged, and presented this absurdity as some sort of threat to you. It’s not. It’s a joke. Kind of like “man goes into Korean bar….”

Even Russia is hardly our enemy these days. From what I’ve seen of Uncle Vladimire on TV, with his wit, and his intellect, HE could have beaten Hillerary for the U.S. Presidency and didn’t need Trump at all. He made the very “tough” Megyn Kelly look like a schoolgirl in her inteview with him.

He would have had my vote anyway. Did you catch the Youtube segment where his minister of Agriculture is in all seriousness claiming they need to increase their pork exports to Indonesia. Putin is crying from laughter until he finally tells the clown that Indonesia is Muslim. It isn’t going to work… He literally had his hands over his face with tears streaming out from beneath them. Trump has his problems. And Putin has his.

Mankind STARTED to harness electricity 140 years ago – two lifetimes generously, in the entire history of the species. Today, if the temperature doesn’t suit our MOOD we yell at Alexa and have here adjust the air conditioner. Our LED lightbulbs can play music and change colors on voice command. We have a phone in our pocket that can call anyone else on the planet immediately and we can SEE them in the screen.

Cars? I have to tell you. I’m in shock. In 2008, I felt like it was me against the world. There was not a single OEM talking about producing an electric car, except Tesla and you couldn’t yet buy one of those.
Indeed, they had produced some a few years earlier, and announced the death of the electric car. It didn’t work. Nobody wanted them.

In October 2017, I have to tell you my work is done. I was advised by a 76 year old man with an eight grade education that cleans out sewers here in town that this here electric car thing was the future. And China, India, France, Norway, The NEtherlands, and the UK are all talking about BANNING internal combustion vehicles from the roads. The END of them. Nine years from there aint’ any and we don’t need any to basically its a foregone conclusion that that’s the only kind of cars that will be on earth. In a world with 1.5 billion cars? How can that be?

Obviously, I wasn’t the only one with such an idea. Or else I’m really really good.

The starving swollen bellies so prevalent in Africa in my youth have largely been replaced with kids with cell phones and NFL t-shirts. In America, obesity is the new health crisis. I buried a family friend yesterday of 82 years. But I’m seeing 90-year-olds everywhere.

And many are blissfully unaware that crime, murder, and mayhem are down 30% in the last twenty years. Traffic deaths have fallen from 55,000 per year to 35,000. In every direction and all ways, things are better than they ever have been before. But the media has essentially the entire population convinced that we are on the cusp of Zombie Apocolypse and Armegeddon. That you aren’t safe to go outside. Americans are buying guns by the shipload to defend themselves largely from OxyClean and MyPillow and auto insurance commercials.

TURN THE TV OFF!. It is a gorgeous, beautiful, peaceful world outside with MARVELOUS people everywhere searching for ways to show kindness any way they can. But we can’t see that because we are so glued to the scene of the Las Vegas shooting of 59 people. That’s one out every 5.64 million of us. No consolation to the victims, who I do empathize with, but that’s what it is.

And might I suggest, just as a possibility, that that same media reporting is a signficant contributor to the little bit of it that there is. Without media coverage, demonstrations are largely undoable. NFL protests don’t make sense. And Las Vegas shootings, apparently have no other motive.

Meanwhile, in this video, I hold in one hand a man-made “rock” that if you set it out in the sun it makes electrical power. And in the other hand, another man-made rock that you can use to store that energy. No whirling turbines. No gears. No spinning wheels. No hiss of steam or cloud of smoke. No blinking lights. Inert rocks. Silent as the night. Powerful as the sun.