Author: photog

Roger Penrose’s Book

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I’m reading a book called “Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe” by mathematical physicist Roger Penrose.  Penrose won the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on black holes so he’s a pretty big brain.  But so far, the whole book has been a sort of no mathematics discussion of entropy and how the existence of the second law of thermodynamics relates to the Big Bang theory.  We spent a whole chapter talking about mixing blue and red paint in a bucket becoming purple and then how an egg falling off a counter on the floor is basically an irreversible process.  So far, I guess I follow him on time being a one-way affair.  As far as the red shift of very distant galaxies proving the Big Bang theory, I’m waiting to see if he has something a little less mundane to say.

I’ve watched a few YouTube videos with Penrose as one of the speakers and I will say he comes across as a very lucid speaker (at least as far as Nobel laureates go).  I just hope by the end of this book it will live up to the title.  But already he said something that I found interesting.  He said that the estimates of the age of the universe are based on taking the expansion rate of the universe and back calculating how long it took to get to where we are now from an initial condition where the size of the universe was a single point.  At the same time, I see how that seems like a straight forward idea and also a ridiculous one.  So, the whole universe is a single point.  What in the hell does that mean?  I’ve read that the conception of the conditions at slightly after the Big Bang has a universe that is almost infinitely hot and at the same time completely devoid of matter.  So, everything is photons?  But somehow this spawned the universe we see around us today.  None of that makes any sense to me.

I’ll admit I have a tiny brain compared to these mathematical geniuses but I have to wonder if they know what the hell they’re talking about.  I can sort of believe in black holes and neutron stars and gravity waves.  The predictions that have been made in the past seemed to have been confirmed with instruments that have measured gravity waves associated with merging neutron stars.  The measurements and behaviors seem to match exactly the theoretical modeling.  But when it comes to the cosmological models and how they correlate with observations of the universe we see very large deviations and no convincing evidence for the patchwork fixes like dark energy and dark matter.  I think we’re waiting for a new generation of physicists that won’t just sit around spinning unprovable theories and instead actually figure out ways of getting additional data.

So come on Roger, give me something in the second half of this book that I can point to and say, “That’s an Extraordinary New View of the Universe!”

Goodreads Book Giveaway February 7 – 19 of “The Sniper”

photog Book Reviews, Current Events, Life in Dunwich, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews

Huzzah!  The chance to win a free paperback copy of this desperately sought after literary jewel.  Did I say jewel?  Nay!  Miracle!!!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Sniper by Jake Barter

The Sniper

by Jake Barter

Giveaway ends February 19, 2026.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

Jeff Bezos Eviscerates Washington Post.  photog Unconcerned

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I watched a few YouTube videos by journalists.  They were hilarious.  But they were kind of long and there was a lot of swearing.  So, I embedded a news station’s coverage which was still kind of funny but shorter and without the swearing.

Bezos is firing 33% of his staff, eliminating the sports page, the Metro Section, the Middle East bureaus and most of the foreign desk in general.  And he’s getting rid of their podcast.  Well, I’m not the biggest fan of Jeff Bezos.  I think he’s a pretentious twit.  But now he’s become one of my favorite billionaire twits.  Just thinking about the number of butt-hurt leftwing journalists and their friends who will soon be looking for new jobs in a journalism environment completely devoid of opportunities makes my mouth water.  Now you might think I’m an awful human being but I’m not.  I can tell because I’m not happy about the tradesmen working on the printing presses and the other non-journalists who are losing their jobs.  For them I feel sorrow.  But the left-wing journalists are awful people who hate individuals like me and feel superior to ordinary people who don’t believe in the social justice creed that the elites follow.

So in the words of Barack Obama’s favorite anti-white clergyman, “The chickens have come home to roost!”  Bari Weiss is gutting CBS News.  Bezos is chloroforming the Washington Post and Disney is finally getting around to eliminating the crew that did a hatchet job on Lucas Films.  But this is still just the tip of the iceberg.  All of the cable and broadcast networks are being overhauled by people tasked with restoring them to profitability, if possible, or shuttering them if not.  I’m particularly curious to see what happens at MS NOW.  Initially they unloaded complete deadwood like Joy Reid but the place is still stocked to the gills with overpaid leftist lunatics like Rachel Maddow, Joe Scarborough and Jen Psaki who each make millions of dollars.  I’m waiting for at least one of these losers to get the heave-ho in 2026.  In fact, I expect the whole shooting match to be closed down within eighteen months.

So this exercise going on at Bezos’s rag is sort of a template for the rest of the industry.  Right-sizing these journalism companies will be a herculean task that may not even be possible.  The business model for journalism was upended by the internet and literally no one knows how all of this will end up.  But currently all of the people I hate in journalism sound like a chorus of scorched cats, the schadenfreude is amped up to eleven and it feels just wonderful.

And just to make sure that things continue in the right direction, that paragon of journalistic incompetence, Don Lemon has picked this moment to become a martyr for the First Amendment (or I guess maybe against the First Amendment).  But maybe sometime in the next few years one of the new or old news outfits will get its feet back on the ground and start selling actual honest to goodness objective facts at a price people are willing to pay.  And that will be really be good news.

Stalemate Here and Over There

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Nigel Farage has been the voice of British nationalism for a couple of decades.  Fourteen years ago, he drove the movement that successfully forced the United Kingdom to exit the European Union; “Brexit.”  And he helped the Conservative Party (the Tories) regain their majority and sweep back into power on the basis of his Brexit campaign.

And then these Tories ruled for a decade as the Leftists they truly were.  And this allowed the Left (Labor, The Green Party and the Liberal Democrats) to regain control of Parliament and wreak further havoc on the English in their own country.  Basically, the Tories and the Left have gone all in on turning Britain into a land of third world immigrants.

In the last few years Farage has spearheaded a new party called the Reform.

Well, the chickens have come home to roost.  Current polls show voters have the following preferences:

  • Reform – 28%
  • Labour – 19%
  • Tories – 18%
  • Greens – 15%
  • Liberal Democrats – 13%

Interestingly, this new party now leads both traditional parties; Labour and the Tories by about ten percentage points.  This just shows how hated both parties have become.  But note that neither the Left nor the Right have a solid majority on which to base a coalition.  Reform and the Tories together have 46% of the electorate.  The three leftist parties; Labour, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats control 47%.  So, the remaining seven percent must be made up of people so apathetic they still can’t figure out which side to vote for.  Basically, the electoral situation is on the razor’s edge.  Now doesn’t that sound familiar?

So just as in the United States control of the government oscillates back and forth between the Left and the Right.  And each oscillation enrages the partisans out of power and eggs them on to greater and greater revenge when they do return.

Just as in Britain, so too here eventually something has got to give.  My guess is that it will eventually cause some large-scale violence and after that there will be a political solution involving a permanent division, either complete or else some constitutional change to give greater autonomy to both sides within the states where majorities for the Left or the Right have firm control.  And probably the “purple” states will have to choose which side they want to get in bed with.

Now, this idea isn’t something I enjoy.  The United States is the only home I have ever known.  And so many things about it are wonderful.  But there is no longer one people living here.  There are two.  And they believe in diametrically opposed visions of how this country should work.  And since the Left is the group trying to change “the deal,” they are going to have to be the ones excluded from the areas where the Right wants to live.  They’re using unlimited third world immigration to drown out their opponents at the polls.  So citizenship in the blue states will not be automatically transferrable to the red states.  And you can imagine how this will end up becoming very ugly after the initial breakup of the country.  Families may end up stuck on both sides of a divided America.  But that’s what seems to be coming.