Month: January 2023
16JAN2023 – Quote of the Day
Merriment is always the effect of a sudden impression. The jest which is expected is already destroyed.
Samuel Johnson
We Need a New Sideshow
Having successfully overhauled a few things on the site, I can now concentrate my energies, such as they are, to providing something worth your time reading. I looked at the news today and there are numerous news and opinion pieces about “Classified Documents.”
There are articles about more documents showing up in various Biden ratholes. There are accounts by talking heads on both sides about why there is or isn’t a smoking gun in all of this. There are articles comparing the two special counsel investigations of Joe Biden and Donald Trump. They even manage to drag Hillary Clinton’s server back into the discussion. It’s fascinating!
Well, no it isn’t. The intel agencies and the Justice Department can find a judge to decide any of these “cases” any way they want to. How they are spinning these two fantasies is completely out of our control and honestly of no interest to me. We’ll deal with the fallout. That might have interesting consequences. But nervously waiting to see what they’ll charge Trump with is a waste of time. They’ll use the primary elections as a basis of when or if to indict him. So, what are we supposed to do about it? Nothing.
And so, the news just doesn’t seem to be full of interesting things right now. Of course, it is fun to watch Dopey Joe get slapped around by CNN and MSNBC for a change. It’s hard for me to tell if they’ve gotten their marching orders on this or whether they’re also confused as to what they should do. Who knows, maybe Biden isn’t following orders and is being threatened behind the scenes if he doesn’t agree not to run again. With these people anything is possible. But interest palls quite quickly.
I guess the only value in this charade is to instruct the general public that our federal masters have long ago stopped pretending that they care what we think. In one case holding onto classified documents is just a misunderstanding; no harm, no foul. In the next case it’s a capital crime and then in the third, back to a misunderstanding again. The lesson is that reality is whatever they say it is. But for most of us we’ve already seen this show before.
I guess we need a new diversion to keep me from getting bored with the whole thing. Maybe we can watch to see how the disaster in the Ukraine plays out. That’s a real-life train wreck in slow-motion and probably a major embarrassment for the globalist project. They attempted to force Putin into a fait accompli and he turned the tables on them. He actually believes in his people and their right not to be globalized out of existence. Unfortunately, it will cost the Ukrainian (and Russian) soldiers dearly. Hundreds of thousands will die and the Ukraine will be shattered into at least two parts. But getting into bed with Barack Obama and Joe Biden was a pretty stupid decision on their part and the Ukrainians will learn a very painful lesson about how the world works. It will also cost us several hundreds of billions of dollars or more. And if the State Department and the Pentagon are really crazy it might just get us all nuked too.
Another sideshow will be the Republicans in the House. We’ll get to see how they stack up against the previous generations of Congress Critters. And this is good news for them. They’ll have to fail pretty abysmally to be judged in the same league with John Boehner’s or Paul Ryan’s gangs of stooges. I’ll confess that I have some traces of hope that they might show themselves to be better than expected. So, there is something to keep us amused there too.
But I find that there’s plenty to keep me busy in the real world. Family, friends and the doings of my surroundings keep me busy and allow me to positively impact my little world. Saints be praised, I’m even helping the local Republicans to get things done. Who knows, with a lot of hard work we might even make our corner of New England just a little less cobalt blue!
But now that I’m done with my site work I’ll have some amusing stuff coming up soon. Maybe even a few laughs.
Here’s a Post About What’s Wrong with Modern Churches
Bear Grylls is a reality tv personality. He does a lot of wilderness survival stuff. And from what I read in this article he’s hawking a couple of books and probably some other stuff too. But a lot of what he’s saying here is quite true. What he says about the modern churches rings true for me.
“He expressed his distaste for what he called “religious language,” sanitizing messages in such a way where people “can’t be honest, can’t express doubt and can’t fail.” The Church, he said, is “the place to have doubts and questions.”
“Look at the early Church. It was a roomful of people eating and drinking and doubting and struggling and arguing,” he said.
But the Church today, he said, has gotten away from that.
“Probably most of the people in the congregation have substance abuse, and probably most of their congregations struggle with porn and all that sort of stuff,” he said. “What a relief it is when a pastor can stand up and go, ‘Welcome to the hospital, folks. Here we go. I’m just standing alongside you on the road, failing our way through, but reaching out of desperation for life and love and redemption. Let’s look outwards, and love other people, and we’re in it together.’””
Religion is the next frontier that has to be reclaimed from the Left. And the sooner the better. There’s very little of it left to fix. Most of the churches are beyond repair and need to be abandoned.
Guest Contributor – pigpen51 – 16JAN2023 – Reply to What’s Wrong With Modern Churches
Question for the Readers
Update: The people have spoken! Vox populi, vox Dei.
The font size will be 14 pt. Or actually 20 px which is similar. And in my best Yul Brynner voice, “So let it be written. So shall it be done.”
Here’s a question that I’ve been batting around. What font should this blog use for posts (and everything else).
Currently it’s set up at 12 point.
“Well, now, the Emperor Charles has given them Malta, and all the rent he asks is one insignificant bird per annum, just as a matter of form. What could be more natural than for these immeasurably wealthy Knights to look around for some way of expressing their gratitude? Well, sir, that’s exactly what they did, and they hit on the happy thought of sending Charles for the first year’s tribute, not an insignificant live bird, but a glorious golden falcon encrusted from head to foot with the finest jewels in their coffers. And–remember, sir–they had fine ones, the finest out of Asia.” Gutman stopped whispering. His sleek dark eyes examined Spade’s face, which was placid. The fat man asked: “Well, sir, what do you think of that?”Currently it’s set up at 12 point. Currently it’s set up at 12 point. Currently it’s set up at 12 point. Currently it’s set up at 12 point. Currently it’s set up at 12 point. Currently it’s set up at 12 point. Currently it’s set up at 12 point.
This is 14 point.
“Well, now, the Emperor Charles has given them Malta, and all the rent he asks is one insignificant bird per annum, just as a matter of form. What could be more natural than for these immeasurably wealthy Knights to look around for some way of expressing their gratitude? Well, sir, that’s exactly what they did, and they hit on the happy thought of sending Charles for the first year’s tribute, not an insignificant live bird, but a glorious golden falcon encrusted from head to foot with the finest jewels in their coffers. And–remember, sir–they had fine ones, the finest out of Asia.” Gutman stopped whispering. His sleek dark eyes examined Spade’s face, which was placid. The fat man asked: “Well, sir, what do you think of that?” This is 14 point. This is 14 point. This is 14 point. This is 14 point. This is 14 point. This is 14 point. This is 14 point.
This is 18 point.
“Well, now, the Emperor Charles has given them Malta, and all the rent he asks is one insignificant bird per annum, just as a matter of form. What could be more natural than for these immeasurably wealthy Knights to look around for some way of expressing their gratitude? Well, sir, that’s exactly what they did, and they hit on the happy thought of sending Charles for the first year’s tribute, not an insignificant live bird, but a glorious golden falcon encrusted from head to foot with the finest jewels in their coffers. And–remember, sir–they had fine ones, the finest out of Asia.” Gutman stopped whispering. His sleek dark eyes examined Spade’s face, which was placid. The fat man asked: “Well, sir, what do you think of that?”This is 18 point. This is 18 point. This is 18 point. This is 18 point. This is 18 point. This is 18 point. This is 18 point.
There may be other sizes I can get so feel free to suggest any other font sizes. Just leave them in the comments.
Update: The people have spoken! Vox populi, vox Dei.
The font size will be 14 pt. Or actually 20 px which is similar. And in my best Yul Brynner voice, “So let it be written. So shall it be done.”
Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.
15JAN2023 Photo of the Day – 2022 Yellowstone Trip
15JAN2023 – Quote of the Day
To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.
Samuel Johnson
You Should Learn to Code!
So, as I mentioned a week or two ago, there’s a retroactive change I want to make to the site involving something called search engine optimization (SEO). It’s obscure and boring and possibly make believe but I figured I should make the change to about 5, 500 older posts. But it requires an enormous amount of manual copying and pasting so I wanted to automate it. But the database manipulations I want to make are not routine and I thought required one of two things. Either I have to learn how to program in the PHP and MySQL languages or I had to use two plugins (think of them as small stand-alone programs that can be added to my site’s software). But one of the plugins costs a bunch of money so I was too outraged to pay for it. By a stroke of good fortune, I found a different plug-in that was almost as good but much cheaper. Yeeha!
But with all things too good to be true comes the payoff. I also needed to upgrade my backup system and that’s going to require upgrading my cloud storage. Gack! Well, I’ve spent the bulk of the day setting up a link to my new storage site from the website with all sorts of problems with various layers of security programming standing in the way. Finally, it’s uploading the backup but it’s been a humbling experience. And I’m also getting a lesson in why working with redundantly encrypted data is a royal pain. It uploads at the slowest rate imaginable. But later on, tonight I’ll try to make those SEO modifications to those thousands of old posts. If the site disappears hopefully, it’ll just be a (short) refresh to get it back to its old self. But fingers crossed.
It’s still early in the voting but it looks like maybe some folks would like me to increase the font size on the site from 12 pt to 14 pt. The reason I asked about this was recently I was on a website and noticed how nice the type looked. After checking on the text I realized it was 14 pt and wondered if maybe I was making life difficult for people to read the smaller font size. Luckily that is a very easy fix to make. Even I can make the CSS modification.
Well back to the website salt mines for me. Pray that my sentence is reduced down from life at hard labor.
Signed,
photog the website drudge (not to be confused with Matt Drudge).
DeSantis Appoints Conservatives to a College Board of Trustees
Finally, finally.
A red state governor FINALLY did something to change the orientation of hyper-leftwing colleges.
“Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday made six new appointments to the New College of Florida Board of Trustees, including Manhattan Senior Fellow Christopher F. Rufo.
Rufo’s work has been featured on PBS, Netflix, and international television and has been notable for challenging critical race theory.
The New College of Florida in Sarasota, is a top-ranked public liberal arts college and is the designated honors college of the state university system.
DeSantis’ news press secretary Bryan Griffin sent a statement to Fox News Digital claiming that the academic institution has been “captured by a political ideology that puts trendy, truth-relative concepts above learning.”
“All of these appointees have a firsthand understanding of the Florida education system as a product of their work with us and the Florida Department of Education on other important initiatives. We are grateful to them for lending their time and expertise to the benefit of Florida’s students,” the DeSantis office told Fox News Digital.
“The New College of Florida is a public institution with a statutorily stated mission of ‘provid[ing] a quality education.’ Unfortunately, like so many colleges and universities in America, this institution has been completely captured by a political ideology that puts trendy, truth-relative concepts above learning.”
The statement added, “In particular, New College of Florida has reached a moment of critical mass, wherein low student enrollment and other financial stresses have emerged from its skewed focus and impractical course offerings.””
It’s about damn time! Sure this is one college in something like 3,200 colleges in America. Sure there will be battles from day one and the feds will punish the college every chance it gets. But it’s a step in the right damn direction. Now every other red state governor should do the exact same thing over and over again.
This DeSantis guy is pretty good. He’s doing the right things. He’s thinking clearly about how things can be changed and he’s reaching out to good people to do those things. He’s making Florida a much better place. That’s got to be a good thing. Whether he should be president or vice president is a different question. Maybe he should stay as governor of Florida and maybe end up the de facto leader of the red state coalition. But any way you look at it he’s making a real difference. Bravo.
Latest Green Fiasco, Offshore Windmills Killing Whales
You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.
“A New Jersey congressman is demanding an investigation into whether offshore wind projects are killing whales off the coast of the Garden State and the state of New York.
Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., announced on Friday that he would be calling for an investigation into the increasing number of dead whales that have washed up off the coast of New Jersey over the last month once committee assignments for the 118th Congress are finalized.
In less than two months, seven dead whales have washed up along the New Jersey-New York coastline, local media have reported.”
I have to admit I don’t see how offshore wind turbines are killing whales. Sea birds yes but unless these are flying whales I don’t get the connection between the turbines and the dead whales. But based on the track record of the geniuses in the green clown show I wouldn’t bet against it being so.
Well I guess the whales are just going to have to suck it up to save the planet. Maybe next time it can be the polar bears’ turn. Or the pandas. Thanks Gaia.