Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves. It is to preserve the distance which separates us from other men. To grow more indifferent to hardship, to severity, to privation, and even to life itself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Month: December 2024
05DEC2024 – Photo of the Day
Tom’s World – 04DEC2024 – Miscellaneous Subjects
No theme this week, just a few shots on misc subjects.
DSC685 One of the cats around here. Sport is as good natured as a cat can get, always calm and affectionate
DSC861 A dining car from the 1940’s. It a part of a railroad museum here in NW Florida.
DSC1296 Keep this around the house as personal defense. I tend to modify my weapons but the only thing I’ve done with this one is to install a decent trigger. For someone who’s been a competition shooter for decades, I simply cannot live with a Milspec AR trigger, they are the equivalent of nails on the blackboard.
DSC264 I 10 over the East Bay. This bridge was built in 2005 to replace the bridge destroyed in the 2004 Hurricane.
DSC1435 I live in farm country in NW Florida and there are two main crops: cotton and peanuts. Peanuts aren’t exactly photogenic.
DSC1408 A transmission line cutting through the North Georgia hills
DSC 1789 Marietta National Cemetery in Marietta, GA. Most of this cemetery is from the Battle of Atlanta though there are some from later years. The graves are almost all Union Soldiers, the Confederates have their own a few miles away. And if this is what the winners got……..
DSC 1613 Another from Marietta National. The was/is a monument to the Minnesota Troops.
DSC0286 An example of the homes of the late 19th century in NW Florida.
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TomD
Tune Out
Do you ever get tired of being pushed around by technology? At the risk of being declared a Luddite boomer, I feel that the endless treadmill of technological innovation is all just a bit much. And calling it innovation is sort of a euphemism. This year Windows decided that instead of its lousy “Mail” program I needed to switch over to its differently lousy “Outlook” whenever I wanted to access my emails. Well, I didn’t want to switch. So, every morning when I started up my laptop, I would click on the Mail icon and it would start up Mail. But a second later the Mail window would disappear and the Outlook configuration window would pop up telling me to go through the torture of surrendering my access to my own e-mails to Microsoft. I would then use the Task Manager to close down the Outlook program and then I would click on the Mail icon again. I would have to repeat this ritual three times before Outlook would give up and allow me to use Mail. But the next day it would be the same madness again.
Luckily, I used to use an open-source program called Thunderbird for my email interface. So, I tried loading it up on my laptop and eureka! it worked.
And every few days Microsoft tells me about photographs that I loaded on my laptop last year. What the hell! When did I give Microsoft permission to put my photos on their damn cloud? We really have a problem with the technology companies. Their overreach in every facet of our on-line lives is becoming absurd. Many years ago, I had a laptop with Ubuntu as the operating system. I was always complaining about how everything was clunky compared to Windows and how the open-source equivalents for Word and Excel and all the other proprietary programs were weird and unfamiliar and less sophisticated.
Well, maybe I’m changing my mind. I’m seriously considering having the computer I use on the internet, open-source. No Microsoft, no Cloud, no nothing. I think Elon Musk and whoever Trump puts in at the FCC should do a deep dive on the privacy problems that Microsoft, Google, Amazon and the rest of the tech companies cause. We’re monitored and analyzed and prodded by these companies and each time they “upgrade” their products they ratchet their control of your online existence a little more.
The latest annoyance is having to provide a secondary check on your identity through a cell phone. Apparently, an e-mail address is no longer enough. They need you attached to a sim card or they’re not happy. Even Amazon wants to institute this but I’ve stoutly refused to knuckle under and, well, Jeff Bezos knows I spend a lot of money at Amazon so he’s patient. Or maybe he’s noted my age somehow and knows that old codgers still believe that the customer is always right. Too bad he can’t pass that idea along to Bill Gates.
Well, that’s enough complaining. I’ll have to check into the practicality of a completely Microsoft-free internet computer. I can’t think of an issue. I’ll keep the programs that I use that are proprietary on a separate desk top that isn’t plugged into the internet. In your face Bill Gates! Commie.
04DEC2024 – Photo of the Day
04DEC2024 – Quote of the Day
Without music, life would be a mistake.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Nature Finds a Way
In this creepy world we live in where children are targeted by “educators” to redefine their genders and pushed away from the behaviors and activities that they enjoy it’s hardly surprising that things like adventure books for boys have essentially disappeared.
Of course they’ve vanished. All the authors are women and they have to toe a very definite line if they want to be published. You can’t have adventure for boys. You can’t leave the girls behind. You can’t even have them following along. They have to be in charge.
So, boys stopped reading books. Instead, they went to superhero and Star Wars movies. So, what did the movie studios do then? They hired female directors and studio bosses and turned the Jedis into girl-bosses and turned Captain Marvel into a girl, of course.
So now the boys are giving up on superheroes and concentrate on video games. And of course, the game manufacturers are feminizing and queering the video games.
You see the pattern.
Now, there is the flip side of this progression. First the book industry began to fail when the publishing houses dictated a leftist and feminine slant to books. No one bought their books. Now the movie studios are foundering because even their summer blockbuster superhero movies are tanking. If the video game makers succeed in eliminating the things that males enjoy in video games, they will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
So far, the trend in entertainment has been all in one direction; female. And the trend in their fortunes has also been all in one direction; down.
Well, I think that is beginning to end. There is a development in the world of entertainment that seems to be diverging from the pattern. And it even involves elements of each of the media I mentioned above; books, movies and video games. And it involves the part of social media that I found the least promising; “influencers.”
Apparently teen-age boys and young men are finding community inside the YouTube channels of influencers who write fan fiction around some popular video games. These sites have tens and even hundreds of millions of viewers. And the clout that this kind of following produces even allows these influencers to have their stories turned into movies. Think about that. Some guy who writes plots around some popular first-person sci-fi video game can get a movie made from his stories and it has a built-in audience of millions.
Look at how this short circuits the whole woke female industrial complex. You avoid the woke publishing industry, woke movie industry and woke video game industry by tapping into a ready built audience of young men and boys looking for adventure and violence. As Jeff Goldblum’s character, Dr. Ian Malcolm said in Jurassic Park, “Nature finds a way.”
I find this both fascinating and encouraging. These kids have broken out of the feminist struggle session hell of modern entertainment and escaped into the wild. That is an immensely encouraging thing. And if it continues to advance it will wipe out the alternative. No one wants to see Girl-Boss Jedi Knights making the universe safe for middle aged lesbian Jabbette the Hutt. No one will pay to see She-Hulk bust out of her clothes and rampage through Manhattan’s theater district to catch a performance of Hamilton. No boy wants to play a video game where his character has to be in drag.
Of course, the powers that be may try to squelch this latest attempt at non-feminist entertainment. But at this point even Google is probably seeing which way the entertainment dollar is moving (and where it’s not). I could be wrong but I think there may finally be a reaction brewing in the entertainment world. And it might be that the future isn’t female.
03DEC2024 – Quote of the Day
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
Friedrich Nietzsche
03DEC2024 – Photo of the Day
A Sense of Loss
“I can imagine what can be, unburdened by what has been.” “Cannibals ate my Uncle Bosie.”
We all will feel a real sense of loss when Joe and Kamala move onto the next chapters of their lives. Well, Kamala will anyway. There is no next chapter of Joe’s life. There may not be a next paragraph or even sentence. If Biden shows up at the Inauguration, I hope someone will have had the foresight to bring along a body bag and some absorbent material; kitty litter or paper towels or something.
But we will be losing a lot. I can remember in 2021 and 2022 when things were truly awful with COVID and the restrictions around it. It was only Joe’s struggles with gravity that gave me the will to go on. And what about Kamala’s pronouncements about yellow school buses and Venn diagrams? It was only this level of idiocy that gave me the hope that even the American public would back away from the edge of the Abyss and send these two boobs packing in 2024. Sure, it was thin gruel to keep us going for three and a half years but it was all we had.
And it worked! In July when I watched Joe Biden in the debate it was like the clouds parting and the sun blazing out at me. It was the promise of all those gaffes, flubs and pratfalls coming home to roost for the Democrats. And it was not only that. It was this fumbling, bumbling, inarticulate, incoherent dementia patient juxtapositioned against all the sound bites of politicians and reporters and talking heads like Morning Joe swearing on a stack of bibles that Jumping Joe Biden was “as sharp as a tack,” that “this version of Biden … is the best Biden ever.” It was Christmas in July. The horror and panic that descended on Washington and Hollywood and New York was hilarious. And the more the Left begged Biden to drop out the more he doubled down. The interview he did with Stephanopoulos was remarkable. You could see the pain on Stephanopoulos’s face as he tried his best to put the dots together for Biden on how hopeless his chances were.
And finally, when Pelosi and her hatchet-men had delivered some doomsday ultimatum to Biden to force him out of the race, imagine the horror the campaign faced when they evaluated how they could package and sell Kamala. Their first idea was the best; don’t let her say anything except, “joy.” They used that for about a month, that and whatever versions of it they could frame. I guess the most embarrassing was Kamala is “brat.” But eventually they had to let her talk and that would eventually remind voters that presidents have to be able to speak and by extension, think. And of course that is Kamala’s weak point. Well, it’s one of them. She’s also unlikeable and, perhaps worse, she’s incandescently inauthentic. Everything she says comes across as an absurd lie that everyone can see through.
And so, the Left went from Biden to Harris. Scylla to Charybdis. Bad to worse. Dumb and dumber. I can only imagine the horror of the campaign team. There must have been an ocean of booze imbibed during the campaign to keep the staff from bolting for the exits. And the Democrat voters told themselves so many lies and so many contrasting versions of the truth, that it must have been like some kind of self-inflicted brainwashing protocol. Yesterday, Biden is a super genius. Today he’s a doddering moron and Harris is a political dynamo and a lock for the win. Tomorrow they’re praying for the Never-Trumpers like Liz Cheney to save them from a razor thin margin. And then the morning after, it’s a wipeout and she never had a chance. And thus, was spawned a thousand TikTok videos of angry women screaming at their phones about fascism, the 4B Movement and never going to Thanksgiving ever again. Oh, so wonderful, oh so painful.
Well, we won’t have Joe Biden to kick around anymore. I doubt anyone will even attend his funeral. And Kamala will return to California where she hopes to become governor. I kind of doubt it will happen. If nothing else this campaign has made a lasting impression on everyone about just how stupid this woman is. Maybe she can be mayor of San Francisco for life. Those people have so much white guilt that setting up Kamala as a figurehead leader would make sense to them. But that’s about as far as she’ll go.
So that’s it. No more Joe. No more Kamala. When will we see their like again? Never!
It gives me a feeling of emptiness, of loss. We need a new leader for the Left. Will Obama or Michelle fill the gap? I kind of doubt it. Well, we’ll have to wait and see. Goodbye Uncle Bosie. It was fun.