I've been getting a bunch of helmet buffeting at speed on the highway, so I decided to do something about that

This slick wing mounts to the existing windshield and allows the rider to direct airflow as he sees fit. This is a German part.

The riser blocks weigh about nothing but still feature a good sized rubber bushing

After a bit of cable adjusting for routing, the bar fell right into its new cradle

I just retrieved the Tiger from the dealership. They did the first service and I have to say they turned up the smoothness meter just a tad. That bike is like glass to ride.

But it has a pretty good buzz in the handlebars, something not uncommon to triple cylinder bikes. I wanted to raise the bars a bit and while searching found these cool bar riser fitted with a rubber bushing!

Now, that thing is a vibratin' hand full of paint korecktin' and scratch removin' hardware. About the same time it shakes your blood in your appendages into a uniform distribution of clots, the scratches yield and a pretty truck starts to emerge!

Today after cutting the grass I piled on the C-Max truck to finish polishing it out. Essentially, I just started all over. I purchased a random orbit polisher with foam velcro pads and some Maguires mirror glaze polish

It started out looking like this:

I started it up and immediately filled the garage with unburned diesel white smoke!

CFR Globalist: End U.S. States, Build China-style Regional Gov't
by Alex Newman 
Introduction at Oath Keepers by Shorty Dawkins, Associate Editor   

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), wants to destroy America, plain and simple. In this article, by a foreigner, writing for the CFR, the elimination of the States is proposed. Of course it is never mentioned that it was the States who joined together to create the United States and the Federal Government. Just where Mr. Khana thinks the Federal Government has the Constitutional power to abolish the States, he chooses not to mention. The CFR is the main pusher of Globalization, whose goal is to create a Centralized one-world government, economy, army and religion. - Shorty Dawkins, Associate Editor

Excerpts from the article:

It is time for the United States of America to ditch the whole "states" thing, and for the federal government to re-organize the nation politically into massive regions with powerful regional governments fully subservient to national and even international authorities. The goal of the dystopian "economic master plan" is for America to become more like Communist China on the road toward a North American Union.

That might sound ridiculous - perhaps like the ravings of a mad man - to the average American. After all, the United States is, by its nature, a union of 50 states that have delegated a few limited and defined powers to their agent, the federal government, in pursuit of, among other objectives, securing "the Blessings of Liberty." If globalists get their way, though, that "antiquated" notion would be tossed on to the ash heap of history.

Writing in the New York Times last month, a mid-level globalist operative with the war-mongering, global government-promoting Council on Foreign Relations argued that there needs to be a "new map for America." "Advanced economies in Western Europe and Asia are reorienting themselves around robust urban clusters of advanced industry," wrote Parag Khanna, a CFR globalist and self-styled "leading global strategist," whatever that means. "Unfortunately, American policy making remains wedded to an antiquated political structure of 50 distinct states."

Instead of the 50 states, Khanna argues that America's new map should be based on regions, each with its own regional government. "We don't have to create these regions; they already exist, on two levels," the CFR operative explained. "First, there are now seven distinct super-regions, defined by common economics and demographics, like the Pacific Coast and the Great Lakes. Within these, in addition to America's main metro hubs, we find new urban archipelagos." Federal policy should be used to bring it all about, he said.

^^^^Concur, good write-up!

Food processors = oxygen thieves  :D  >:(

Oxygen thieves = casualties following some catastrophic event.

And

That is why more and more I am saying we just need to cover down on our people and the rest will self adjust.

Grinders are for cave men!

I use flap wheels!  ;-))

Speakin' of welders...I think I am going to invest in a flux core mig unit for the farm. I need something down there with all the stuff I seem to be breaking like every time I go down there...I think a flux core machine of modest means would be the right answer.

I like this concept of using other folk's threads to carry on side bar conversations...even startin' whole new conversations... (double wink)

How's the rifle working out?

I actually have to get back on it...Having some FTF malfunctions. Like the bolt gets jammed up on some magazines. Some of the magpuls jam and the metal mags seem to work well. Dunno, something is messed up...

Nice chunk of property Don!  Ive been looking and often thought, can't hillbillies measure 90 degrees square?

Not back in the early 1800's when those properties were divided up. Mine was an old Amish farm

That is a nice shot Don and gives a better perspective when you do describe how big it is.

What other land are you looking at, I guess the yellow lines are boundries and north is up?

North is up, correct

I am looking at acquiring all the plots around me, 450 total acres

I believe this unconscionable president and his legion of yes men have laid the ground work for a war that will annihilate a lot of humanity. He is a devil, our president, plain and simple. He has enabled Iran's government whom I believe to be completely under the control of Satan, the ability to develop nuclear weapons. Heck we're probably even helping them!
 
That bomb has a Jewish target and will initiate a nuclear war that at best case will only destroy the middle east and parts of Europe. That's the best case. Of course along with that will come the collapse of the global economic system and the fall of American life as we know it today.
We can hope all we have to deal with is 1930's style poverty, after a 20% dieoff following the collapse of the food/transportation nexus, but I'd bet we will see a nuclear fallout and perhaps a few well planted mushroom clouds on our turf.

That's the best case. Worst is a global conflagration with numerous nuclear detonations fired from aggressive nations to keep certain powers in their corner. Think N. Korea won't hit Seoul? or Tokyo? While Israel is taking out Iran, think Riyadh won't get incinerated as well?

And while all this Jewish/Muslim killing is taking place, do you think the Muslim populations in Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, and other places are going to fall in lockstep behind their respective governments?

Nope, I don't think so. Call me a student of all that I have seen in 30 + years of military duty and studying my enemy. Nossir, you're looking at the whole ball of string. All this enabled by all of you who did nothing...Mostly the youth, but also the complacent, who blindly followed their leader as he marched them off the cliff...





President Obama—with the help of an equally arrogant 38-year-old national security fabulist, Ben Rhodes—remade the Middle East to empower America’s most hated enemy.

                                                                                                                     

By David Reaboi

May 9, 2016

The Federalist

There are few things in the world less popular in the United States than the Islamic Republic of Iran. As the then-new, optimistic promise of the Obama presidency beckoned in 2008, Gallup found that overall opinion of Iran in this country was 8 percent favorable and a dramatic 88 percent unfavorable. These numbers have been remarkably consistent over time; there’s no better evidence that, in the eyes of the American people, Iran is our enemy.
U.S. public opinion of Iran
By 2009, the American people were well aware of the anti-American and anti-Semitic ranting of Iran’s then-president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and were worried about the Islamic Republic’s development of nuclear weapons and clear threats to use them. Even without Iran’s direction and sponsorship of militias killing of thousands of American soldiers in Iraq, the genocidal anti-Israel pronouncements of its leadership, death sentence on novelist Salman Rushdie, or efforts to advance the worldwide Islamic revolution on which the regime is based, the American people have not forgotten the 30 years of enmity since Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution.

However, even as the American people remained rightly skeptical of Iran in the last year of President Obama’s first term, the Obama White House had begun secret talks with the Ahmadinejad regime, which would result in the world’s acquiescence to Iran’s nuclear program.

Create an ‘Echo Chamber,’ Then Cast off Allies
How would the American people react to knowing that an administration, then still stinging from Republican critiques of its anti-Americanism and weakness on the world stage, was holding secret negotiations in Oman with the most powerful still-standing member of George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil”?

Under these conditions, Obama—with the help of an equally arrogant 38-year-old national security fabulist, Ben Rhodes (with whom he’s said to “mind-meld”)—succeeded in remaking the Middle East to empower America’s most hated enemy, the only United Nations member state committed to the annihilation of another state: the theocratic Islamic Republic of Iran.

Rhodes and Obama knew that, for anyone but the hard-left to accept a deal with America’s bitter enemy in Tehran, a new narrative needed to emerge, even if it was relatively transparent nonsense. As Rhodes explained to his bemused interviewer, David Samuels, in a New York Times Magazine profile this weekend, it was first necessary to lie to a corrupted and inexperienced American media about all sorts of things, beginning with the nature and intentions of the enemy Iranian regime. Subsequent lies were caked on, as the White House took advantage of a dangerous mix of journalists’ ignorance, their ideological and partisan commitment to the administration, and, finally, their career aspirations.

Rhodes said, “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns… They literally know nothing.” Thus they will believe what he tells them. He also tells friendly non-governmental organizations and think tanks what he is telling the journalists. Those outlets produce “experts” whose expert opinion is just what Rhodes wants it to be. These ignorant young journalists thus have quotes that look like independent confirmation of the White House’s lies. Here’s how Samuels describes the scene:

In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. ‘We created an echo chamber,’ [Rhodes] admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. ‘They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.’ (emphasis added)

Of course, spinning reporters and promoting experts isn’t exactly new; it’s been standard practice in political warfare since the birth of the first press corps. What’s both new and frightening is what Rhodes’ and Obama’s effort furthers. As Lee Smith sums up in the Weekly Standard,

For the last seven years the American public has been living through a postmodern narrative crafted by an extremely gifted and unspeakably cynical political operative whose job is to wage digital information campaigns designed to dismantle a several-decade old security architecture while lying about the nature of the Iranian regime. No wonder Americans feel less safe—they are.

Rhodes’ ‘Plot Line’: Iran’s Newly Ascendant Moderates
First, the lies and the denials about the negotiations. It took months before a few dogged journalists started to ask questions about the talks Obama officials were engaged in with Ahmadinejad’s regime. In February 2013, then-State Department Spokesperson Victoria Nuland flatly denied “direct, secret bilateral talks with Iran.” Republicans on Capitol Hill were nervous about the rumors, but the media was willing to accept the State Department’s denial. The secret negotiations with Iran also alarmed America’s allies in Jerusalem, who had also been kept in the dark about their closest ally’s clandestine meetings with their most potent adversary.

Nuland’s successor, Jen Psaki, would later admit that, as Fox’s James Rosen reported, “the meetings stretched back to 2011.” By that time, as New York Times Magazine makes clear, Rhodes had fashioned a new origin story for the administration’s negotiations: that a “thaw” in American-Iranian relations was made possible by the election of Iranian “moderates” in the summer of 2013. Samuels writes of Rhodes:

He is adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials. He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press. (emphasis added)

One of the “overarching plotlines” Rhodes crafted credited Hassan Rouhani’s election in June with signaling a new willingness of Iranians to negotiate that the Obama administration then embraced. Obama, of course, would play the hero; the villains, however, numbered in the thousands, like the cast of “Ben Hur”: neocons, and those darkly loyal to Israel’s interests; partisan Republicans; knuckle-dragging warmongers, and other enemies of the peace.

Of course, it was all a lie. Firstly, Rouhani is no sort of moderate. He has presided over a steady uptick of executions of Iran’s dissidents, as well as sexual and religious minorities. Even more egregious, though, was the lie about the genesis of the negotiations, as Obama sent Rhodes and other select emissaries to talks with Iran’s hard-liner relentlessly anti-American president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad just as the latter was promising Israel’s annihilation.

Nevertheless, Psaki echoed this narrative, saying negotiations, “really picked up after [Iranian] President Rouhani’s election.” The clearest example of this (now obviously false) narrative was peddled directly to Congress, in testimony by Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to the president and national security advisor to Vice President Joe Biden. On November 13, 2013, Kahl opened his remarks:

The long-simmering nuclear crisis with Iran is approaching a critical inflection point. The election of Hassan Rouhani, a moderate former nuclear negotiator, as Iran’s new president has re-energized diplomacy between Iran and the P5+1 (the United States, Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia). Sanctions have taken a heavy toll on the Iranian economy, and Rouhani believes he has a popular mandate and sufficient latitude from Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to reach an accommodation with the international community in exchange for lessening the pressure. The prospects for a comprehensive agreement to peacefully resolve the nuclear impasse have never been higher.

Obama’s ‘Compadres’ and ‘Force Multipliers’ in Action
Now, as Samuels reports, the White House knew it had enough political will and ideological accomplices in the media to jam the story down Americans’ throats and score a political victory:

Rhodes has become adept at ventriloquizing many people at once. Ned Price, Rhodes’s assistant, gave me a primer on how it’s done. The easiest way for the White House to shape the news, he explained, is from the briefing podiums…. ‘But then there are sort of these force multipliers,’ he said, adding, ‘We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people, and you know I wouldn’t want to name them—‘

‘I can name them,’ I said, ticking off a few names of prominent Washington reporters and columnists who often tweet in sync with White House messaging.

Price laughed. ‘I’ll say, “Hey, look, some people are spinning this narrative that this is a sign of American weakness,”’ he continued, ‘but—’

‘In fact it’s a sign of strength!’ I said, chuckling. (emphasis added)

Samuels is chuckling because the game is so obviously rigged, even an outside observer would notice the con man’s shills trying unsuccessfully to blend into the crowd. Among the honor-role of “compadres” Rhodes has “become adept at ventriloquizing” are Zach Beauchamp and Max Fisher—two leftist Vox.com writers who couldn’t more closely resemble Rhodes’ remark, “they literally know nothing.”

Beauchamp is notorious for alleging the existence of a bizarre land-bridge between Gaza and the West Bank which (naturally) the Israelis use as a weapon of war against peaceful Palestinian commuters. Fisher was recently plucked from Vox.com to ply his trade at The New York Times where, evidently, policy expertise and basic subject matter knowledge aren’t as important as eagerness to both take nasty swipes at Israel and play Rhodes’ ventriloquist dummy.

This brings us to al-Monitor’s Laura Rozen. Perhaps no other reporter in Washington is as identified with voicing the point of view of both the Iranian regime and the White House. Unfortunately for the American people, this is anything but a difficult balancing act: the party line, in both cases, is almost always identical. Rozen’s relentlessness in being on-message earned her a mention in the Times by White House Director of Digital Rapid Response Tanya Somanader, who ran the administration’s Iran Deal Twitter. “Laura Rozen was my RSS feed,” Somanader told Samuels. “She would just find everything and retweet it.”

Rozen’s willingness to swallow the administration’s lie—sorry, Rhodes’ “overarching plotline”—that was manifestly untrue about the origin of the U.S.-Iran negotiations was, as always, total. Here she is in al-Monitor on October 15, 2013:

US Secretary of State John Kerry met for thirty minutes with Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in New York last month. Noting the meeting, and the historic phone call between Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and President Obama, a senior U.S. Administration official told journalists Monday that ‘rubicon’ had been crossed. ‘This is a direct consequence of Rouhani and Obama breaking the taboo,’ Ali Vaez, senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group, said of the US-Iranian meeting here Tuesday. (emphasis added)

To complete the echo chamber, others wrote very similar stories pushing Rhodes’ phony narrative. Here is CNN, authors Laura Smith-Spark and Jim Scutto, on October 16, 2013:

This week’s high-level talks in Geneva are the first such talks since the election of President Hassan Rouhani this summer raised the prospect of a shift in direction from Iran. During a visit to the U.N. General Assembly in September, Rouhani’s diplomatic approach raised hopes in the West of a thaw in relations with Tehran and progress in negotiations on its nuclear program. Rouhani’s visit culminated in a phone call with U.S. President Barack Obama and a meeting between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Iran’s Zarif. (emphasis added)

Once Rhodes’ “force multipliers” in the media had cemented the narrative of a post-Ahmadinejad “thaw” in relations that led to negotiations, the White House was able to weaponize it against deal skeptics. First, it was used against French President François Hollande, a doubter of the nuclear talks. “Why France Is to Blame for Blocking the Iran Nuclear Agreement,” blared Daily Beast writer Christopher Dickey on November 10, 2013:

After years of discussions, the world’s major powers had finally devised a promising deal to stop Iran’s worrisome nuclear program—until France’s petty bureaucrats thwarted the plan. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s high-profile visit to New York during the United Nations General Assembly, a phone call between him and President Barack Obama, and repeated positive signals from Tehran—even from the supposedly hard-line Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—had raised expectations had raised hopes of a thaw in U.S.-Iranian relations after more than three decades of hostility. (emphasis added)

The White House also used its weaponized “force multipliers” in what was evidently a Rhodes-led campaign to shout down opponents of the Iran deal. The Wall Street Journal’s Sohrab Ahmari recounted the pushback against an op-ed he’d written following Rouhani’s election in June 2013. Speaking about those “force multipliers,” Ahmari noted:

The White House’s “force multipliers” were put to work every time the American people got too close to the truth about the Iran deal. This was most in evidence while a few intrepid reporters at the Wall Street Journal or Associated Press broke revelations of numerous radical Obama administration giveaways, especially the Parchin side deal.

Iran was allowed to make a deal with the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect itself, and the terms of this deal were never turned over to Congress as the Corker-Cardin law required. Once again, friendly media action covered illegal action. Ignorant journalists who knew nothing but what they had been fed were willing partners in shutting down the debate. This gave cover for the president’s few allies in the Senate to stage their filibuster. It was successful, as the Senate never voted to accept or reject the Iran deal. The failure to disclose the side deals’ terms to Congress violated the Corker-Cardin law.

Ignorant journalists who knew nothing but what they had been fed were willing partners in shutting down the debate.

Similarly, the White House’s pet journalists fell all over themselves making sure that every outlet in America described the post-deal elections in Iran as a victory, inevitably, for the theocracy’s “moderates.” They described the election in glowing terms, as if it were a clear endorsement of openness brought about by Obama’s wisdom.

Rather, the elections should have been seen as a rebuke of the president’s policy, as 99 percent of reformist candidates were disqualified before any votes were ever cast. To even compete, so-called “moderate” parties were forced to accept hard-liners loyal to Khamenei. The elections thus cemented hard-liner control of Iran as never before. Ayatollah Khamenei, to underline this, declared that anyone who thought that the future of Iran was in diplomacy instead of missiles was either a fool or a traitor. But if you read it in American newspapers, thanks to Rhodes, you’d think that Iran has continued moderating in a positive direction.

The effect of national security policy enacted and cheered on in the press in this way has been disastrous, as real experts tried to warn us it would be. Those experts were shouted down by a mob that “literally knows nothing,” but is happy to participate in a mutually beneficial information operation.

‘Restructuring the Narrative,’ Whether You Want It or Not
The White House’s political war on Iran deal opponents reconfigured the debate as a partisan issue, as Rhodes had planned. With the very notable exception of the Associated Press’ Matt Lee, most of Washington’s journalists, who are supposed to be the eyes and ears of the American people, actively helped them.

The White House’s political war on Iran deal opponents reconfigured the debate as a partisan issue, as Rhodes had planned.

In the New York Times Magazine, Rhodes—and, by extension, the president he continues to work for—confessed to misleading the media, members of Congress, and the American people, all in service of a truly massive re-alignment of the nation’s interests and security.

Abandoning longtime allies while embracing states that have long been enemies is a massive strategic shift more momentous than what can ordinarily be explained as “foreign policy”; in a free society, it requires the assent of the American people. Like its manipulation of the Constitution’s treaty process, this White House subverted that assent to convince Americans that they live in a different, less dangerous world.

Operating as if we live in that different world, though, is a treacherous illusion. Some of the tangible results, not yet a year after the Iran deal: the consolidation of hard-liner power in Iran; the collapse of the ban on Iran’s testing of ballistic missiles; the collapse of the arms control regimes preventing Iran from buying heavy weapons and missiles from Russia; Iran’s staging of multiple new ballistic missile tests; and, finally, that Iran has generated so much new enriched uranium, they’ve had to ship tons to Russia.

Reconstructing the truth isn’t new for Rhodes who, based on Samuels’ account, still clings to the juvenile literary tastes and the mock rebellious pose of the Williamsburg hipster he once was. Samuels writes,

When I asked Jon Favreau, Obama’s lead speechwriter in the 2008 campaign, and a close friend of Rhodes’s, whether he or Rhodes or the president had ever thought of their individual speeches and bits of policy making as part of some larger restructuring of the American narrative, he replied, ‘We saw that as our entire job.’

It’s a fair bet that most Americans didn’t sign onto a duplicitous “larger restructuring of the American narrative” by junior fiction writers when they sent Obama to the White House in 2008. But it’s what the country got and, thanks to Rhodes’ work creating his “force multipliers” of freshly minted star journalists and partisan experts, will continue to get.

General comment from a happy person:

This is the kind of thing I/we really like seeing on this site. A realistic and practical build which is well documented, and could be duplicated by just about everyone. Write-ups like this one empowers and energizes not only the viewership, but the builder as well.

I think God meant for us to work with our hands and to be good stewards of things. A slide in camper being restored  just fits with that theme. Husband and wife working together, doing something cool, and working toward a goal.
Yep, I like it!

Brit Hook

Second is a AW-139, another fav of mine, I got my type rating in it at the factory near Milan, Italy.

Nate, you own that or rent it?

Same one Duane owns

I gotta say, I'm impressed.  Was this your first tire change??  Most people, including myself can struggle with this for hours...then give up and take it to a bike shop.  Maybe because you lost a tooth in the process or you're tired of loosing paint from your wheel.

Nice work.

Well, first in a long time...Like decades

Had help...Your brother!

How's the tooth? ;-)

Good for him!  It's nice to see people reaching their goals.

Well said

FYI, since the media does not inform you of good stuff, I'd estimate that maybe 75%-90% of the bombers fail in executing their mission. They always seem to blow themselves up beforehand. Or they detonate and no one gets hurt or they blow up their buddies. It was weird hearing that every day in the intel briefings...

Put a smile on my face, was always a good way to start the day that way over there!

Good News!

Quote from: Flyin6 on May 07, 2016, 04:07:32 PM

I buried him on the hill overlooking the whole farm...Right beside the fire pit. He is free to roam wherever he wants to now.

So sorry to hear about your loss. They are man's best friend. Prayers sent for you and your family.

Thank You

^^^Good follow through

I am still happily eating through my ever renewing Toyos

Thing is, although I have to step up and buy tires more frequently, I pay no attention to muddy conditions, trailering, driving on wicked cross slopes next to trees or anything else.

I'm wondering if that truck might not be able to pull Sarge out if it gets stuck!

That is just outstanding!

-Spoke with Ashley, for the record if you could put lights on the moon he would do it.....

-Then Norm called, always interesting conversations with him I might add.

-Met with concrete slinging contractors

-Called steel suppliers & setup meetings

-Went to HD & bought material for shed trusses, laid them out and cut them up for assembly tomorrow.

-Laid out some product designs on acad

Now relaxing......

Worked on website,

Worked out

Lunch with my wife

Visited the Triumph dealership to chitty-chat

Health food store to pick up vitamins

Tried to get a haircut...failed at that.

Read about some cool parts

Searched for Hide Site junk I need

Helped pre-ranger modify a Nerf pistol for more power...IT WORKED!

My system is still working perfectly after several years

I sample the oil and it always comes back with barely any change.

Now the big caveat is that in the 9,000 or so miles between resets of the oil change indicator I have added around 3-4 quarts of oil to the system. So obviously the oil is getting renewed to some extent. Having said that I haven't seen a 10% change in anything even when I had 30K on the same oil. I ended up changing it just because I couldn't stand it anymore. But, I believe I could still be running the oil I poured in there in 2012, just top up and change filters at the 25K and 50K intervals Amsoil calls for.