Author: photog

Madame Guillotine

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The world is on the cusp of something great.  Artificial intelligence is poised to change the way we do everything.  And what I immediately think of is the introduction to a book.  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” is about what happens when change is unleashed on the world without any provision for how it will impact human beings.  France was leaving behind feudalism and the Industrial Revolution was changing the way the rich and the poor related to each other.  Unfortunately, the nobles weren’t up to the challenge of managing the transition.  And so, they were swallowed up in the crash of the old system and it took Napoleon to build some kind of new foundation for France and much of Europe.

We may be in a similar place.  An old order is crumbling in the face of a technological and sociological upheaval.  We have an elite class that is definitely not up to the challenge.  Their lack of self-awareness and lack of empathy for their fellow countrymen has made them the object of anger and now hatred.  Maybe Trump and his successors can intervene and save the “nobles” from the guillotine.  Maybe not.

But what is undeniable is that the age of automation and thinking machines will fundamentally alter our society.  The only question is whether the people in charge have the wisdom to direct this transformation in a way that allows people to change along with it in a non-destructive arc.

After all, the machine age didn’t eliminate humanity.  It allowed incredible productivity and created whole new industries that the children of the former age could move into.  The same is true today.  Everyone has to adjust to tools like AI that constantly hector us with their algorithmic pestering about how we should set up our reports or Power Point slide deck or whatever the hell it is that they claim to know better than us.  But when push comes to shove it will still be humans that decide whether hemlines go up or down this season and whether thin or wide pinstripe suits stand for winning on Wall Street; even if it is the algorithm that picks the stocks.

But what worries me is that the elites really do feel that they alone are needed in this society.  We can see that from what went on the last few years.  Open borders were their ploy for flooding us out with third world peasants and then levelling us down to that status; serfs.  And the COVID fiasco was their demonstration of how unimportant we really are.  The whole country could be shut down but they were unaffected and our lives could be destroyed and we could dry up and blow away and it wouldn’t bother them one little bit.

Well, the shoe is on the other foot.  Our side has a chance to adapt the revolution to our needs.  Maybe it’s the best of times.

Release the Disruptor

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I was listening to some talking heads talk.  And it was a lot of blah, blah, blah.  But toward the end one of them said “America is hungering for renewal.”  And that resonated with my feelings.  Maybe I mean that I long for good people or for good actions to start happening in this country.

I think that Obama and Biden have shown us what letting terrible people run this country looks like.  And in the blue states it’s been going on for decades.  The result is what we see in California and what we saw in Minneapolis in 2020.

I don’t expect Trump to turn on the sunshine machine and all of a sudden, it’s “Morning in America” again.  That’s not his job.  His job is to break the stuff that needs breaking.  He needs to fire thousands and thousands of bad people.  He needs to prevent the government from attacking its own people.  He needs to hold the blue states accountable for subverting immigration laws and victimizing American citizens by squandering their tax dollars by giving them to illegal aliens.  He needs to live up to his hype as the great disruptor.  He needs to disrupt all of the things that are crushing the American people.

Sure, he needs to fix energy policy and force American corporations to hire Americans.  He can do many things that will benefit us economically.  But the only way to free us from our captors is to wrest the reins of government away from the Deep State and restore our freedom from all the petty and not so petty tyrants that afflict us.  And at the top of the list is the intelligence agencies and the Justice Department.

Trump must clean house.  There is no other way to fix this thing except remove all of those FBI agents whose job it has been to spy on Trump and his lieutenants since 2016.  These are the same people who have declared people who protest at PTA meetings as domestic terrorists if they disagree with their children being propagandized about sex and race.

Donald Trump must mandate the elimination of DEI and affirmative action and use his Justice Department to petition the Supreme Court to eliminate all laws that mandate racial, ethnic, sexual and other entitlements.  We need to get government out of the business of quotas and back in the business of performing its rightful functions, like running the military and protecting the borders.

So, I agree that this country needs renewal.  But for the most part I don’t expect government programs to spark renewal, either economic or cultural.  What I do expect is that pruning away the parts of the government that actively damage America will lead to a kind of renewal.  It will allow healthy, normal activities to proceed without the warping and stunting effects of those laws and programs that currently afflict us.  All we need is for these people to get off our backs and we’ll be able to flourish like we did before all this nonsense began.

One Foot in Front of the Other

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SONY DSC

Camera Girl is fiendishly clever.  She cooks for hours in her kitchen of death.  And she sets a table with millions of calories of food on it in front of me.  The result is obvious.  She’s trying to commit murder by cocoanut custard pie.  It’s ice cream assisted suicide.  Well, it’s almost midnight and I can still breath so she’s failed again.  I live, but barely.  But Christmas is on the horizon.   Oh, the humanity!  But let’s move on.  Thanksgiving was a great success.  Mass quantities were ingested and turned into warm feelings and tightened waist bands.  Mission accomplished.

So, we will enjoy the long weekend and then get on with the business at hand.  We wake up, eat breakfast and try to accomplish the things we’ve decided need doing.  In the immortal words of the Duke of Despair, “And when the morning light comes streaming in, we get up and do it again, amen.  Say it again.  Amen.”

And that’s no different from how it was yesterday or a month ago.  The only time when this reality was upended was when the powers that be imposed the COVID lockdowns on us.  That was an existential threat to our livelihoods and even our lives.  The disruption that rolled out at us was a disaster of such monumental proportions that the reverberations caused the results of the 2020 elections and four years later it doomed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

And now the powers that be may be thinking they need to up the ante.  I think they want to get the Russians to start WW III.  It seems inconceivable that they would do such a thing.  But maybe they would.  Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland only have fifty-two days until Donald Trump fires them.  They can do an awful lot of damage before then.  And apparently, they intend to do it.

Well, we’ll all have a ringside seat for this Dr. Strangelove reboot.  The next seven weeks will be filled with drama and unintentional comedy; pathos and bathos.  But we’ll just have to be patient and let it all play out.  I intend to move forward with my priorities and deal with Armageddon on a day-by-day basis.  Living in a town that exists in a Lovecraftian quagmire of unspeakable eldritch horror I’m more or less acclimated to soul-crushing despair.  I won’t caterwaul about a few nukes lobbed into my neighborhood.  These things have to be taken in stride.  My only hope is that divine retribution will be visited on Blinken and Nuland first.  And if possible, maybe the hosts of MSNBC too.  But I digress.

So, let’s gather up our sense of humor and our much-maligned sense of reality and put the election behind us and push the inauguration into the future and just put one foot in front of the other until Donald Trump like a modern-day Moses leads us out of the desert and into the promised land where milk and honey flows endlessly and Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi are fitted with strait jackets and locked in rubber rooms, forever and ever amen.  Pass the pumpkin pie.

29NOV2024 – Quote of the Day

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I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all. Only I must observe, that the common people conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects. And thence arise certain prejudices, for the removing of which it will be convenient to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and apparent, mathematical and common.

Isaac Newton