Category: Current Events

04JUL2023 – Happy Fourth of July

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Well, now that Juneteenth is an official holiday, July 4th is left for us bad thinkers who believe in equality but not equity.  The Fourth of July can no longer be celebrated but instead remembered as something that was once glorious but is now lost.  Maybe one day we’ll regain it.

But this remembrance day will still be a time to enjoy family and friends and reflect on the achievement of the Founding Fathers and their rebellion.

 

Here’s a little reminder.

In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness of his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton
Massachusetts: Samuel Adams, John Adams, John Hancock, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island: Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery
Connecticut: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott
New York: William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris
New Jersey: Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark
Pennsylvania: Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross
Delaware: George Read, Caesar Rodney, Thomas McKean
Maryland: Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia: George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton
North Carolina: William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn
South Carolina: Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton
Georgia: Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton

 

 

03JUL2023 – A Plea for Leniency

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This holiday “weekend” has been chaotic and fragmented by forces personal and institutional.  Saturday and Sunday were large family gatherings during which no usable amount of website work was possible.  And that is as it should be.  But just to make sure I was completely ineffective I’ve been wasting my time trying to figure out why the new Google Analytics (GA4) data was so awful.  I could see the “Realtime” pageviews but the reports that approximate the old ones were blank.  Well after hours and hours of horsing around on-line trying to tweak them into compliance with my needs, I find out the real problem is they’re time delayed.  The results can be hidden for up to eight hours.  How useless is that?  Oh well.  Now I have a completely new reason for hating Google.  They’re probably trying to save money.  The cheap bastards!

Well, France is burning.  This must be their Summer of George moment.  It sounds like their police haven’t taken a knee yet.  Who knows?  Maybe they’ll bite the bullet and fight the war they’ve created for themselves within their own country.  Or maybe not.  It’s an interesting moment.  Macron is a useless weasel.  In point of fact, he probably gives useless weasels a bad name and they’d like to disown him in order to get out from under the cloud of revulsion that he generates around him.  I wonder if this will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and throws France into the arms of the Right Wing.  After all, it’s a long summer left and things may get much, much uglier before it’s over.

It looks like Elon Musk is serious about turning Twitter into a legitimate town square.  Crippling the Big Brother bots that scrape the site for instances of bad think is very encouraging.  If instead of 900,000,000 tweets being scraped a day it’s 8,000 well, that’s a reduction of about 99.999%.  Not bad!  Seriously, he’s got a tiger by the tail and they’ll surely make his life hell but at least he’s putting up a fight.  For the first time Twitter is somewhat fun.  I even see some of the “bad thinkers” rattling around in there.  It’s down-right egalitarian.

On the local front, Dunwich has been inundated with a Noachian flood that is even frightening the fish in the local swamp.  I was trying to imagine how I would get pairs of the various species, male and female into the trunk of my car but I kept worrying about the poor transgender salamanders that might be discriminated against in the mini-port-i-sans that I would create out of household items found in Camera Girl’s recycle bin.  I was thinking that the dairy creamer bottle would be best.  I was trying to figure out what would be the internationally recognizable symbols for male salamanders and female salamanders to adorn the bathrooms.  Possibly accentuated eyelashes for the girls?  It’s so complicated.  But regardless we are very waterlogged at this point.  The vegetable garden hasn’t given up the ghost yet but the zucchini does appear slightly bilious.

Recently Camera Girl has placed a sign in the kitchen that declares, “IT IS WHAT IT IS.”  Apparently one of her sisters believes that this is one of her favorite expressions.  Now, for years Camera Girl has claimed that she invented “JUST DO IT” well before Nike trademarked that saying.  Well, I’m a little dubious of her claims and those of her nuclear family.  But looking at that sign every time I range into the kitchen I am becoming more of a fan.  I am surrounded by faits accomplis everywhere I look.  Let’s face it, almost every enterprise and government jurisdiction is a racket or a grift.  Being outraged is a waste of time and just keeping track of them is a full-time job.  Saying, “it is what it is,” is another way of resetting the situation and moving onto something more profitable.

So, most of the time I don’t bother looking for the articles decrying some outrage.  Instead, I look for one pointing to something practical like joining a boycott or finding an alternative platform for something or supporting someone who leans our way.  But I most enjoy punishing my enemies.  I’ll do far more to see Mitt Romney primaried than supporting some moderate who “will get the independent vote.”  But coming to terms with how bad things really are is liberating and it’s healthy.  Lately I feel a lot less down.  So, “it is what it is.”

I’ve got some work on both Tuesday and Thursday and an out of state trip on Saturday so there will continue to be a slightly lower throughput.  But next week is the new regime.  And I promise to do better.  So, hang in there.

A Western Source Discusses the June 8th Ukrainian Assault at Mala Tokmachka

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Ukrainian and Western sources discounted reports of serious losses of armored vehicles in the mechanized assault Ukraine began on June 8th south of Mala Tokmachka in southern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Oblast.

Now Forbes reports on the outcome.

“In a bloody hour or two, the 47th-33rd Brigade battlegroup lost nearly a fifth of Ukraine’s M-2s, a fifth of its Leopard 2A6s and half its Leopard 2Rs. The United States promptly pledged more than enough extra M-2s to make good the June 8 losses, but Ukraine’s European allies have yet to pony up more Leopard 2A6s. And there literally aren’t any more Leopard 2Rs.”

What seems clear is that mine clearing equipment being used by the Ukrainians is not completely effective.  And with the density of the Russian minefields this becomes a critical problem.  So this seems to eliminate the rapid mechanized assault that NATO planned for the Ukrainian “spring” offensive.

“No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”

02JUL2023 – Microscopic Images

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Okay, either a Star Wars cantina denizen or something that lives on the planet where the Alien xenomorph came from.  The photo has all kinds of depth of focus so I assume it’s a focus stack.  But so what?  That’s still a good bit of work here.

 

 

Elon Musk Throttles the Throttlers

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The US inteligence agencies monitor hundreds of millions of tweets every day (a process known as scraping) to know who their enemies are and to use their friends at Google to throttle these voices on the internet.

Now Elon Musk has turned the tables on these mega-users.  He’s put the following limits on reading tweets:

– Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
– Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
– New unverified accounts to 300/day

Now notice, these bots reading Twitter probably aren’t even verified accounts paying Elon his eight bucks a month.

So they can only read 600 posts a day.  And if they open new shell accounts those accounts can only read 300.

The feds are going to have fit.

Good!

 

 

Here’s a Seeming Paradox

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We’ve spent untold billions of dollars to fight the war on drugs and we’ve not only lost but we’ve given up and let it fill our streets with homeless and killed millions of children.  The Taliban who have basically nothing shut down the drug trade in one year of running Afghanistan.  So which is the better government?

 

 

30JUN2023 – OCF Update – This’N’That

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Now things are getting into the summertime social season.  We have two family parties this weekend and then Fourth of July and on and on.  This afternoon Camera Girl spotted a big painted turtle on the grass.  Turns out it was laying eggs so being the natural historian that she is she collected them and is incubating them in a sphagnum moss set up.  Apparently, they’ll be a science experiment for Princess Sack of Potatoes and then they be released back into the swamp to maintain the delicate balance between the mold and the mildew that we all depend on here in Dunwich.

I spent some more time struggling with the great GA4 project.  Half of the websites and YouTube videos are people cussing about how much worse it is than its predecessor.  Well, what can you do?

I read a bunch of critiques of the SCOTUS decision on affirmative action.  Even the Z-Man’s Friday podcast was about it.  I think they mostly reflect the feeling that this will be like pulling teeth to get the colleges to obey the law on this.  But my way of looking at it is it’s a starting point for the red state governments to force the colleges in their jurisdictions to obey.  None of the Ivy League schools will.  Their state governments will work with them to ignore the Supreme Court using obfuscation.  Well, let them.  I went to a state college and they could teach science and engineering the same as Harvard and Yale.  Maybe better.  No dirt people are going to get in the Ivy League schools so who cares anyway.

The other interesting case was the Supreme Court once again overruling Colorado in its insistence that people working in the wedding industry must celebrate same sex marriages.  That poor wedding cake baker had the Supreme Court find in his favor and then Colorado brought another case against him, this time over some trans-nonsense.  I predict Colorado will continue to harass this other woman who builds websites and doesn’t want to build a gay themed one.  They’ll find some other trumped-up case, slightly different, and go after her again.  But as I said these rulings reinforce the standing in the red states and if we can hold the Supreme Court for a while, they will provide the basis for restoring the social fabric in the red states.  After we lose the Court, it’ll take brains and guts to tell the feds to pound sand.  Let’s hope we find men who have those attributes when we need them.

It was kind of amusing reading and watching the various lefties running around in circles screaming about the affirmative action case.  There was one video with Joy Reid castigating Justice Thomas.  Now I consider Joy Reid to be one of the stupidest people on God’s green Earth.  The fact that she also graduated from Harvard is conclusive proof that this rejection of affirmative action for college admissions is absolutely necessary.  If she was admitted, a virtual cretin, to the premiere university of the United States then obviously there is no objective criterion for their admissions.  In the video she goes on and on speculating on how Clarence Thomas must have some kind of deep-seated self-hatred that forces him to wreak vengeance upon black people.  If there were any objective standards in this country, instead of Harvard she should have been sent to a group home where she could have performed chores she might be suited for, like filling sacks with sand or scrubbing toilets.  Now the unlucky viewers of MSNBC have to watch her on the screen making absurd claims about talented and serious people.  Maybe someday when MSNBC closes down, she’ll find her rightful place in society as a dunk tank clown.

So, all in all, it was an interesting day.  I will be spending considerable time at these various family gatherings on Saturday and Sunday but I’ll do my best to provide some content for the faithful.  Enjoy your weekend.

Oppressed Obamas Inconsolable on 400 Ft Yacht in Greek Isles

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No one feels the pain of the black underclass being denied admittance to Harvard like Barack Obama and family.  They could barely choke down the caviar and champagne because of the indignation over social injustice.  So brave, so tragic.