The January 6 Insurrection Hoax

What really took place on January 6. No deaths by intruder violence. No insurrection.

by Roger Kimball

Notwithstanding all the hysterical rhetoric surrounding the events of January 6, 2021, two critical things stand out. The first is that what happened was much more hoax than insurrection. In fact, in my judgment, it wasn’t an insurrection at all.

An “insurrection,” as the dictionary will tell you, is a violent uprising against a government or other established authority. Unlike the violent riots that swept the country in the summer of 2020—riots that caused some $2 billion in property damage and claimed more than 20 lives—the January 6 protest at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. lasted a few hours, caused minimal damage, and the only person directly killed was an unarmed female Trump supporter who was shot by a Capitol Police officer. It was, as Tucker Carlson said shortly after the event, a political protest that “got out of hand.”...

...Read the full article at imprimus.hillsdale.edu

How Is Joe Doing So Far?

 Andy Kessler wrote an interesting Opinion piece in the Wall St. Journal last Monday entitled "How to Be an Anticapitalist". He finds some significant parallels between an anticapitalist and the current USA President.

Citing a few:

1. Pay people not to work. According to a recent Morning Consult poll, 1.8 million workers have turned down jobs, due in part to the extra $300/week the federal government is offering to states.
   
   
2. Shut down pipelines that lower the cost of fuel, which creates a rise in almost all consumer goods prices, as crude jumps to over $73/bbl. It was $56/bbl when Joe took office in January. Meanwhile let your foreign government finish its gas pipeline, causing European countries to be more dependent on Russia, while leaving Ukraine holding the bag (due to its loss of gas transit revenues). A blue state governor joined in with the shutdown of a nuclear power plant in New York state, while New York city residents have been asked to cut back on energy use during a summer heat wave.
    
3.  Slow down business capital formation by raising the top tax rate on capital gains. President Biden has asked for an increase from 24% to 43%. That should work if passed, especially if you could call it "infrastructure", and use reconciliation to pass it so no Republican members of Congress need participate.
   
   
4. Waive Covid vaccine patents so big pharma won't have the incentive to create a vaccine for the next pandemic that (allegedly) comes from Wuhan. That could slow down the economy just like the current pandemic did.
   
   Then pile on some extras:  limit speech, open the borders, mess up healthcare, defund the police, don't enforce crime (have you seen San Francisco lately? Absurd!), and have your Treasury Secretary make like OPEC and get the G-20 together to come up with a minimum international tax. Wow--whose side is she on? 

Sad part--this will impact low-income families most, robbing them of what could have been a better life. With socialism we will all be equal, heck Cuba, Venezuela are both excellent examples of everyone being equal. Sadly, to get there most people got their standard of living LOWERED.

My Epson XP-960 Attempts to Die

 A member of my family owns an Epson XP-960. It is used most every day to print photos. It's been in the family about 18 months. Suddenly a couple of weeks ago it stopped working. When one turned on the printer it displayed a message indicating that "service was required".  The scanner was still operable (I controlled it from the computer)  but the printer would not print.

This article is not an explanation of how to correct the problem but merely to point out that you can "save" this printer--you don't have to take it to an Epson Service Center or buy another because of this error. And to provide a recommendation for the site I needed to get it all to work.

The Epson XP-960 has a "waste information counter" or WIC. Every time you print, this counter is incremented, until one day you've reached 100% of your number, in which case, with little warning, it causes the printer to stop. It is designed to prevent overfilling the waste ink pads inside the printer.

You can easily access these waste pads--they're in a plastic container held in by two screws, located on the bottom of the printer--just flip it over and it is obvious where the container is located. The main problem is that a user has no ability to reset the WIC. I also do NOT recommend trying to empty the saturated ink pads--it just doesn't work.

So to get the printer working, one needs a program that can reset the WIC, and around the same time, find a way to replace those waste ink pads.

Every place I looked online in the U.S., the ink pads were out of stock. This is not a small issue, I surmised. I found a site in the U.K. octoink.co.uk. I took a chance and bought a WIC reset ID (about $11), and ordered a set of ink waste pads to replace the current ones.

 The WIC program (and the unique ID) came immediately after ordering. I did get it working without incident (Windows 8.1 PC) within the next hour or so. Then it was a matter of waiting for the waste ink pads to arrive. They sent two sets--it included the plastic container box (you do need to keep the screws from the old one). It took six days for my order, I selected "economy air" or something similar. That part was around $33. In retrospect, I think you can easily get by taking the cheapest shipping option. 

In the end it was well worth it. I get to use the same printer, same drivers, and a product I am comfortable with.

The old print container and waste ink pads