Author: photog

07AUG2024 – Quote of the Day

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And yet there is nothing so badly imagined: nature seems to have provided, that the follies of men should be transient, but they by writing books render them permanent. A fool ought to content himself with having wearied those who lived with him: but he is for tormenting future generations; he is desirous that his folly should triumph over oblivion, which he ought to have enjoyed as well as his grave; he is desirous that posterity should be informed that he lived, and that it should be known for ever that he was a fool.

Charles de Montesquieu

Monday’s Done

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Farmer Cthulhu in His Fields

After a hard day of de-lousing a 600 ft tall squid-headed dragon you’d think I could relax and eat my supper in peace.  Instead, I’m confronted with a thousand-point drop in the Dow.  Back during the Black Monday crash in ‘87 a five-hundred-point drop was a catastrophe of mammoth proportions (about a 20% of the Dow).  Now double that drop is just a few percent of the DJIA.  But it certainly makes the talk of recession sound a lot more ominous.  I have to assume that Kamala, Queen of the Cat Ladies, will throw a hissy fit and demand that Dopey Joe threaten to fire everyone at the Fed if they don’t lower interest rates.  Well, sure.  That will fix things up, won’t it?  Well at least until November anyway.

Everybody is thinking that Iran will attack Israel and we’ll get dragged into it.  Well, I hope not.  I’m guessing that Iran will work through Hezbollah to harry the Israelis in the north, but not attack them directly.  Netanyahu has quite a problem on his hands to neutralize Hamas.  It’s almost as if his only option is to separate the women and young children from the adult make population and fight the men without inflicting casualties on the innocent.  Well, if he figures that one out, he deserves a Nobel Prize for War.

The Ukrainians have installed their new F-16s in Odessa and I guess hope to use them to attack Crimea, Zaporizhzhia and maybe elsewhere.  It remains to be seen if Ukraine can change the status quo of Russian dominance in air defense over Eastern Ukraine.  The F-16s are supposed to be superior to the Russian fighters.  But ground-based defenses are a serious threat to even an advanced aircraft like the F-16.  We shall see.

I saw that Real Clear Politics has shifted the polling to a Kamala Harris lead of a point or so.  Well, never underestimate the number of blue-haired cat ladies in the American population.  Imagine Commander in Chief Kamala Harris reviewing the troops in Iran or Venezuela or Mexico by Zoom call and giving a rousing speech about the new battery driven aircraft carrier painted green and “manned” by a wholly trans crew.  Or imagine Kamala giving a speech at the United Nations outlawing “whiteness” and pointing to the success of post-white cultures like Zimbabwe and South Africa.  Or just imagine Kamala dedicating the addition of George Floyd to Mount Rushmore.  Well, not exactly an addition.  More like replacement.  Those dead white guys would have to be erased to make room for Floyd’s head.  Now that’s progress alright.

Looking around at what’s going on so far this week makes me nostalgic for my time at the de-lousing procedure at the boiling acid vat of Cthulhu.  Sure, the sulfuric acid fumes are lethal and the parasites are the size and ferocity of wolverines but the mission is simple and words still have their real meaning.  The same can’t be said for the “real world.”  In what universe is Kamala Harris a world class leader?  By what objective standards are the results of Bidenomics prosperity.  By what double-speak was Kamala’s handling of the border crisis a success?  Bring on the acid vat!

Is a Hive Existence the Future for Humanity?

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You could say that socialism is the evolution of human society.  Ever since the Neolithic larger and larger groups of humans have been adapting their lives to the advantages and disadvantages of “civilization.”  Other than some tribes living in the Amazon jungle or the New Guinean highlands humanity has abandoned the hunter gatherer and nomad lifestyles for civilization that allows for agriculture, permanent settlements, scientific innovation and the joys of income tax.

Ever since the first “city” in Sumer began dictating how the fertile crescent would be fertile and how the Sumerian farmers would pay their tithe to the great god Enki we have lived in a continuously more regimented society that slowly but surely has begun to resemble an ant hive.

Now, from time to time there have been revolts.  Chiefly these have consisted of nomads swooping down and ransacking the ant-hive.  The last big example was the Germanic sack of the Roman Empire.  The various Goths, Vandals, Franks and Lombards turned the checker board of civilized life over for good and proper sometime in the mid-400s AD.  These pastoral barbarians not only burned and pillaged the various cities of Western Europe but they set the cause of insectoid existence back a thousand years.  But here we are fifteen hundred years later and evolution has made incredible strides.  The hive has been modernized, mechanized and now automated beyond the wildest dreams of priests, bureaucrats, or even Aldous Huxley.  Even in his science fictional brave new world Huxley at least maintained the conventional male/female dichotomy and sex roles.  In our factual brave new world, the “scientists” aren’t as technically proficient as the ones in Huxley’s tale but they can still do a lot of damage with some hormones and a scalpel.  And since the objective isn’t to build a functional genetically engineered human ant hive but rather to cull the herd down to a controllable size, the results of their modifications don’t have to be eugenic, just not immediately lethal.  And add in all the other programming that has been used to discourage the young from family formation and you have a considerable effort being expended to make this a truly brave new world.

But is this really our future?  Are we going to be whittled down to small “sustainable” population of “alphas” to be the royal caste and the rest of the population will be a manageable number of workers who will toil their lives away without leaving a trace after them?

Despite the resources and organizational control that our betters possess I find it improbable.  I think it’s more likely that some less advanced but more motivated people will manage to upend this system just as the tribesmen did to the Romans all those years ago.  Maybe it’ll be the Mexican cartels or maybe it’ll be some nation state that doesn’t want to be globalized out of existence.  But whoever it is, the imperative to be human will outcompete the logic of the hive.  Turning humans into cyphers may work for Amazon.com and Google but only because we haven’t been driven to the wall yet.  There will come a time when it becomes apparent to the more intelligent that we are being driven to extinction for the sake of the convenience of the few.  At that point, resistance will occur and hopefully the insects will lose.  If not, “Long live the Queen!”

Pools and Fools

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Just to let me know what she thinks of my July as the end of New England summer theory, Mother Nature has been laying on the torrid heat and drenching humidity.  ¡Ay, Chihuahua!

Fine.  I glory in the heat.  Although it did make a moving job, I was stuck with a wonderful excuse to sweat like a pig.  Well, that’s what showers are for anyway.  Today I got the swimming pool back in line.  We’ve spent the last two months trying to find a leak that has been draining about 700 gallons of water a day.  I was getting ready to switch pool companies when they sent their heavy hitter back with a mandate “to make the crazy old guy happy.”  Well, whine bitterly enough and you get some action.  So, after convincing myself that the leak is at least 80% fixed I refilled the pool from my poor abused well and adjusted pH, chlorine and added the algaecide and voila, Princess Sack of Potatoes has a cool place to splash around in for the week.

Camera Girl will be in full charge next week because I will be incommunicado.  Tonight, I will load up the photos and quotes needed to get me through the next week and a half.  Then tomorrow I’ll try to get a couple of posts done ahead of time to minimize the dead air on the site.  If I’m lucky World War III will break out and spare me the annoyance (bad joke).  But maybe they’ll be some really big news that will make it easy for me to generate copy.

I read that Trump is talking about debating Kamala on Fox News.  Now wouldn’t that be a hoot!  If there weren’t any ringers in the moderators to protect her, I imagine Kamala would come off sounding like a mental patient.  I mean she is a mental patient and without a teleprompter or someone to keep Trump from attacking all her weak spots she just might run off the stage screaming by the ten-minute mark.

As I posted on earlier, Zelensky is now preparing his countrymen for the reality that they will have to come to terms with Moscow.  Putin is laying claim to all the areas with majority Russophone populations which I think is about 30% of the Ukrainian land area.  And he is demanding the neutering of the Ukrainian army, along with a constitutional amendment forbidding NATO membership.

Along with Zelensky’s fear that Donald Trump will cut off his weapons supply, the recent Russian success along the combat line in Donetsk and the difficulty his army is having locating and keeping recruits is bringing home to Zelensky that pretty soon the current terms that Putin wants may look like a bargain a year from now if his military collapses and the Russians can walk into Kiev.

Well, you never know how a war will turn out but it is starting to look like Joe Biden’s war is coming to a disastrous end.  But naturally, for Biden that would be par for the course.

What a shame that the Democrats have made home ownership an impossibility for millions of young couples who want to start a family.  You’d think for that reason alone, the Zoomers would all vote for Trump.  Well, time will tell.  For their sake I hope Trump wins and actually has the smarts to fix the economy.  I don’t assume it’s guaranteed that he can fix it.  Our economy and the government’s finances have been tricked up by the geniuses in Washington for a couple of decades now.  Things may be so fouled up that fixing will take a decade to accomplish.  Well, Donald, good luck.