Category: Current Events

Musk Suspends Keith Olbermann. Universe Heaves Sigh of Relief

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Alright, admittedly no one knew that Olbermann was still alive. It’s like Dan Rather. Once these guys fall off the front page they become like lint that gets trapped behind the dryer. They’re still there but no one really notices them unless there’s a fire or something.

How could you not love this?  Elon is fast becoming one of my favorite people.  Sure it could be better.  He could have shut down Dementia Joe, Obama and the Pope too.  But there’s definitely good stuff in this Musk guy.  This is kind of like a Christmas present to the normal world.

It makes me feel like Tiny Tim saying “God bless us, every one.”

There are reports he’s also banning anyone who doxxes people’s locations.  Apparently some Antifa types have been stalking Musk’s family.  And I’ve read he’s shutting down Antifa accounts in general.

We need more good billionaires.  Or maybe we need fewer evil billionaires.  Maybe when Soros finally kicks the bucket the balance will finally begin to return to the universe and the portal to hell that he maintains will collapse and Biden will be forced to revert to his true form as a giant armadillo with aviator glasses.  Well, that’s what I’ve heard anyway.

5DEC2022 – OCF Update – More Focus Stacks

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Today I was part of the long chain of knowledge that begins with the “the master of those who know” and extends all the way to my four year old granddaughter.  In the spirit of Aristotle we recreated the dialectic on the various animal classes.  I tried to explain the reason why a grasshopper was different from a mouse.  We talked about the higher animals and the lower animals and I even got around to explaining why dinosaurs are related to lizards and birds.  After about a half hour she’d had enough and we went back to a match game for dinosaurs.  And after that back to Candy Land.  Well I’d still give Princess Sack of Potatoes the intellectual edge over Plato but I think I need to get some high quality color phtots of different animals to make the discussion more compelling for her.

Once Camera Girl led her granddaughter into the kitchen to bake some pumpkin bread I decided this was a good day for some macrophotography fun.

So I took some focus stacks.  I had a tiny old Roman coin and a long dead beetle lying around so they were my subjects.

15DEC2022 beetle stack
15DEC2022 coin face 2 stack
15DEC2022 coin tail stack

The focus intervals don’t seem to have been sufficient to give a perfect stack.  But i’m using a Sony Remote Commander and it doesn’t have any calibration for the focus change.  I have a little program I can use while tethered to my laptop but the A7 IV requires a USB 3 cable and I only have USB 1 or 2.  So I’ll have to go out and get one.  But still a nice exercise.

All in all a day well spent.

Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough – Not So Much

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There was a giant uproar, “On Tuesday, the US Department of Energy (DOE) confirmed information that had leaked out earlier this week: its National Ignition Facility had reached a new milestone, releasing significantly more fusion energy than was supplied by the lasers that triggered the fusion.”

Specifically, the breakthrough was,

“In terms of specifics, the lasers of the National Ignition Facility deposited 2.05 megajoules into their target in that experiment. Measurements of the energy released afterward indicate that the resulting fusion reactions set loose 3.15 megajoules, a factor of roughly 1.5. That’s the highest output-to-input ratio yet achieved in a fusion experiment.”

But, not so fast!!!!!

“As we noted above, the 3 MJ released in this experiment is a big step up from the amount of energy deposited in the target by the National Ignition Facility’s lasers. But it’s an enormous step down from the 300 MJ or so of grid power that was needed to get the lasers to fire in the first place.”

So, the real situation is that if we expend 300 MJ of electricity, we get 3 MJ of heat in return.  Then we can take that heat and heat a hot water loop and extract some fraction of that energy as electricity.  Woohoo!

“Reaching ignition in a controlled fusion experiment is an achievement that has come after more than 60 years of global research, development, engineering, and experimentation.”

Sixty years of R&D and they’re still two orders of magnitude away from breaking even!  Calling this a breakthrough is beyond pathetic.  But instead, the idiots in charge of our national energy policy ignore fission plants.  Plants that produce gigawatts of electric power day in and out.  Honestly, we’re led by idiots practicing to be imbeciles.

Well, what can I say?  These people are completely predictable and completely clueless.  But at least they keep Ph.D. candidates employed for decades on end.  Well, the road to perdition is at least clearly paved.  Send in the clowns.

What Could Twitter Be?

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All of the revelations about government directed shadow banning on Twitter of conservatives and other opponents of various government policies is very interesting and may help to convince some few remaining idiots who haven’t already seen what’s perfectly obvious to most people of normal intelligence.  But I don’t see that it will accomplish any practical result.

But what would be really useful is if Musk decides that providing a legitimate commercial platform for non-Leftists is a profitable business model.  Of course, this is a question that hasn’t been answered.  Now, Jeff Bezos was eventually able to make Amazon very profitable.  But he had the advantage that he was able for many years to provide his customers with a product line that avoided all state sales tax.  And Google was able to capitalize on government contracts to fund their capture of the worldwide advertising market.

But what’s left for Musk to capture?  Twitter is a political gossip column and little else.  If kept in its current form it’s really not good for much.  So, what was Musk thinking when he spent $44 billion for it?

For that kind of investment, he must be looking at something enormous.  My guess is that he’s looking at some kind of integrated on-line service platform.  The question is how he plans to steal a march on his competitors.  So, if you are eying the revenues that Apple, Google, Facebook, PayPal and Amazon have, how do you steal away some of them?

His first step was easy.  Fire the worthless two thirds of your employees that spend their time in yoga and meditation rooms and demand results from the remaining people.  Right there he’s practically made the company profitable.  But after that he needs to find the future of digital enterprise.

And it’s not going to be something idiotic like Zuckerberg’s ridiculous metaverse.  Thinking the world is going to be revolutionized by everybody walking around wearing VR headsets is close to moronic.  It’s going to be something that uses artificial intelligence for something more than advertising.  Currently Silicon Valley has just been shilling for the woke powers that be who are looking to eliminate the great unwashed (meaning us).

A way to utilize artificial intelligence in a profitable and useful way is to provide those who are currently being ostracized and silenced with a platform to organize and accomplish useful things.  And not just political organizing.  In fact, the cultural and commercial aspects are even more important and desperately needed.

In fact, what Musk could make the most money on is streaming entertainment.  There is such a drought of enjoyable content that he could get his whole $44 Billion back on that alone.  When was the last time there was anything actually funny put out on television or in the movies?  Other than Dave Chapelle everyone is so afraid of offending someone by saying something actually funny that they’re reduced to just insulting straight white men, the only allowable target for abuse.

And there are many other forbidden enterprises that Musk and his partners can get involved with.  Being one of the original creators of PayPal makes it certain that he could add financial functions to his platform.  It could include payment processing, crowd funding, and even normal banking services.  Grateful customers would be more than happy to throw their other on-line business his way.  He just has to make it simple to get started.

He could steal a page from Amazon and get into self-publishing.  He could build a better smart phone.  I’ve heard he’s even considering starting his own news network.  There are all kinds of opportunities.  He could even become a site host for all the folks who’ve been de-platformed.

And these are just the things that occur to a regular guy like me.  Surely super-genius Elon Musk can produce ideas that are a thousand times better and more lucrative.  So come on, Elon get cracking, we’re getting tired of waiting.

12DEC2022 – OCF Update – Back in Winter Form

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As forecast we got a couple inches of snow last night and after breakfast I set to work clearing the driveway.  Since it was a small total I decided to forego the snowblower and just use the old snow shovel from last year.  Well two and a half hours later it was done.

So much for that COVID from last week and as far as I know this makes myocarditis or endocarditis from the vaccines I took last year much less likely.  After all a few hours of vigorous cardio-exercise should have induced heart failure if those conditions were present so, take that Fauci and company.

After my morning chore the rest of today was a day for relaxation and enjoyment.  I watched the 1951 British version of “A Christmas Carol” with Alistair Sim and later the 1938 Hollywood version with Reginald Owen.  They were very enheartening.  And I had the Monday zoom call.  The boys were in high spirits and we discussed Christmas menus and the coming gatherings.  We also discussed Elon Musk’s recent releases of transcripts of the plots to shadow ban conservatives.  They felt some good would come from these revelations.  I was less hopeful.  We all agreed that the Democrats would use every minute until the end of the congressional session spending every last penny they could before their loss of the House majority.

So the week begins well.  Christmas approaches and the nonsense in Washington becomes less and less interesting to me.  But of course I’ll follow the news just to see if they can shock an already jaded world.  After all thermonuclear war is still a rabbit to be pulled out of their hat.

Gone With the Wind

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2020 was a watershed year for how Americans thought about their country.  In the same year we witnessed:

  • the government’s tyrannical use of lockdowns over the COVID virus,
  • federal and local law enforcement’s abandonment of innocent citizens to the homicidal mobs that were unleashed by the George Floyd madness and
  • the spectacle of wholesale voter fraud being openly displayed in the Democrat strongholds of swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona during the presidential election.

2022 just reinforced the sense that normal Americans no longer have a say in how their government is run and in fact are viewed as the enemy by the federal bureaucracy, the media, academia, the public-school teachers and big business.  If any final proof was needed that there is a far-reaching conspiracy to disenfranchise and discredit normal Americans then reading the reports from Elon Musk on how the government and Twitter management suppressed and silenced any conservative voices over COVID or any other meaningful dissent should cover that nicely.

Before 2020 we thought that we were vying with the Left for control of the levers of power in an America that was troubled but fixable.  After 2020 many, many of us know that the whole political set-up is a sham.  We know that the federal courts and Department of Justice are a sham that provides a two-tier system of justice depending on whether you are a Democrat operative or not.  We know that vote counting can be drawn out for days or weeks in order to “find” additional votes needed to change an election result.

We’ve seen urban crime become a joke with revolving door justice for repeat offenders who commit anything from massive retail theft to gang banging murder.  But we’ve seen political enemies jailed without hope of bail for years at a time for misdemeanors like trespassing.  And we’ve watched a feckless military turn the withdrawal from Afghanistan into a rout while bringing us to the brink of nuclear war in the Ukraine because they don’t like Putin’s policy on gays.  We’ve seen our economy cratered and inflation destroy our standard of living, because nitwit greens think fossil fuels are evil.

We’ve watched all this and we’ve watched half the country approve of all this.

So, what’s my point?

My point is you can’t unsee this.

There are probably at least thirty percent of the people in this country that will never believe in the old concept of the United States again.  That belief has been sand blasted out of them.  All that’s left is the reality of what really goes on here.  Any appeals to their patriotic spirit or their feelings of fellowship with their fellow Americans will at most summon up a feeling of nausea.  All of their loyalty is now for their friends and family or whatever local community of normal people that they belong to.  Their feeling of belonging to a group that includes people who voted for Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi is weaker than the bonds they share with Jeffrey Dahmer or some other deranged psychopath.

Their opinion of government organizations like the CDC, FBI and IRS corresponds to what they used to think about the KGB, the Mafia or al Qaeda.  They know they are filled with evil unscrupulous people working against their interests.

And what will be the result of this change in feelings toward this country?

Well, I have to confess I don’t know.  Maybe nothing.  Our enemies may be so much smarter and more powerful than us that our hatred of them is completely meaningless.  They will bury us and change over this country into the global paradise they intend where even our graves will be blotted out when they build back better.  Maybe they’ll go from strength to strength and never even look back.  So be it.

But I tend to doubt it.  For one thing they don’t really seem to be that smart.  They believe in things like green energy that just don’t make any real sense.  And the people they favor (like the trans freaks) are extremely dysfunctional.  And the way they run their cities borders on the insane.  I tend to believe if we leave them to their own devices without trying to fix their mistakes, they’ll run themselves into a pretty deep ditch sooner or later.  My way of thinking is that we should concentrate on the places we control and do our best to exclude the Left and their policies to the best of our abilities.  And when they crash their areas be ready to salvage what can be saved and let the rest sink back into cannibalism.

So that’s my takeaway.  Old America is dead and buried.  We need to take advantage of the real world we live in now without sentiment or false ideas about who our countrymen are.  The Left is our enemy and seeing them fail is a victory for us.  Whatever we can game out of the current system is to our advantage but the idea of being treated fairly by the powers that be is nonsense.  Wake up and see things for how they really are and you’ll stand a better chance of surviving in the world that is.

H/T to Conservative Treehouse for News of Brazil’s Election Unrest

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Sundance has been following Bolsonaro’s fate after his electoral loss in the recent election.  It appears that the military may be taking Bolsonaro’s part in this quarrel over election fraud.  It seems political stability is beginning to break down all over the world.  We may be entering even more chaotic times.  Brazil is a more unstable place than America.  But it may be a test case for the people losing faith in the traditional democratic institutions.

11DEC2022 – OCF Update – Waiting for Snow

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We’re supposed to get our first measurable snowfall later today.  I dragged out the snow shovel, the one that still looked usable out of the pile I used last year.  I’ve got to get around to getting a good metal one.  The plastic ones are just not up to the challenge.  I suppose aluminum is the practical material, good strength to weight ratio but secretly I yearn for a titanium shovel.  Must look into it.

I bought a copy of John D. Brown’s book, “Create Story Ideas That Beg to Be Written: The Simple Secrets to Start Producing Terrific Ideas Today.”  I heard about it on Larry Correia’s podcast “Writer Dojo.”  Recent problems I had outlining some stories made me wonder whether I was missing the boat on standard operating procedures for brilliant authors.  So, we’ll see.

I’ve gotten through all four of my favorite Christmas Carol movies and last night began round two with the George C. Scott version.  Most satisfactory.  And I had the first season’s viewing of, “The Holly and the Ivy.”  Very enjoyable.  I’m in the mood for some old Alfred Hitchcock movies, the ones from England.  I think I’ll start with, “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”

We had Princess Sack of Potatoes over for a sleepover on Friday and Saturday.  She went home this morning.  We must have played Candy Land with her thirty times between her grandmother and me.  It is remarkable how much repetition a young child can tolerate.  But much more interesting was a game she made up with her toy animals.  She has a wooden box full of plastic rhinos and elephants and even spiders, grasshoppers, scorpions and snakes.  In this morning’s version I was the king, the rhino and someone had stolen my money and I interrogated various animals and each time I was assured that the cheetah or pig or scorpion couldn’t have stolen my money but certainly it was the next one she picked out.  And on and on through each iteration.  And in each case her defense of that animal’s innocence was heart felt and convincing.  Eventually I became convinced that I was being played.  All of these animals were obviously in cahoots.  But what would come next?  This high powered public defender was running rings around the king.  Would I next be accused of having stolen the money from myself?  Luckily Camera Girl broke up the game for breakfast.  Who says it’s good being king?

It’s remarkable to think that it’s two weeks to Christmas Day.  And despite the destruction of western civilization I’m quite looking forward to it.  Maybe that’s what it was like in fifth century as the barbarians were at the gate.  Sure they would burn the city to the ground and take all the gold and silver as spoil but you still had to celebrate the holidays in some manner or other.  Sure, Incitatus or Biden is emperor and the CDC has subcontracted to the CCP to infect the world with a gain of function bat virus so they could force us to take their mRNA poison on the government’s terabuck.  And America is right on board with the Ukraine, COVID lockdowns, transgender insanity and global madness.  But I have countless things to feel happy about and grateful for this Christmas.  Friends, food, family, life and love.

Sure we’re surrounded by the depraved but most of the damage they do is to themselves.  In a way knowing these people are driving themselves to madness is encouraging.  It proves the laws of the universe are still in full effect.  This is still a very wonderful life.  So here we go.  A new week started and things on the upswing.

Brain Researchers Are Finally Waking Up From Their Alzheimer’s Errors

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For the last twenty plus years researchers have single-mindedly chased the amyloid hypothesis as the solution to Alzheimer’s Disease.  And this has led nowhere.  Finally after hundreds of drug trials and billions of dollars spent, they’re waking up from their delusion and realizing that amyloid is a symptom of the disease not its cause.

More than anything this is an indictment of the system of selecting research and development targets in biomedical science.  But ti also may reflect the waning of the scientific method in the West too.  Considerable fraud was involved in a landmark research project that perpetuated the mistaken direction of Alzheimer’s research for decades.

The government/industry/academic “partnership” is at the center of the dysfunction that has become endemic across America and Europe.  The complex no longer rewards merit and is highly influenced by gender and racial politics and other irrelevant considerations that limit the scientific method.

But at least now maybe some progress can be made in this terribly debilitating disease.  In fact it might turn out that small molecule solutions that aren’t as costly or require such long development times as the antibody drugs might turn up now.

The Culture Wars Are Won One Child at a Time

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Legislating morality and thinking that will be enough to protect children is a mistaken idea.  The individuals who seek to prey on young people are working at the personal level and they need to be stopped at the same personal level, one on one.  Excluding these individuals from access to your children has to be done by design and diligence.

Look who has access to your kids.  The biggest pools of access are in the schools they attend.  There you have the school boards who set policy, the principals who oversee the operation and the teachers and other functionaries like librarians, nurses, teacher’s aides and administrators who directly interact with your children.  Figuring out how to evaluate the records and personalities of these people is far from a trivial exercise.  But this is your responsibility.  You’ve got to utilize any and every resource available.  Do a search for best practices in evaluating schools for safety risks like sex offenders among the staff.  Demand to see the curriculum and actual course materials that your children will be studying.  Find out what outside personnel and resources will be used in any enrichment activities the school plans for the coming year.  Talk to the teachers individually and engage them with frank questions about their perspectives about anything that the teachers might try to use to interject their personal beliefs on your children.  Note these teachers’ appearances and mannerisms.  Are they unusual looking?  Do they behave at all abnormally?  Look for danger signs.  An obvious one is an LGBTQ individual.  Worse still is someone who presents as transgender.  If the school is terrible, then look for an alternative.

And the schools are not the only danger zones.  Day care and after school activities such as gym classes, dance classes, sports, scouting, swimming lessons, self-defense classes, art classes, music lessons are all things that must be investigated to feel confident that the personnel are safe and to be trusted.  And even then, remember that other children are also to be taken into consideration from a risk point of view.  Will your child be supervised in a responsible manner by the personnel present.  Or alternatively will you be present to take care of the supervision?

And finally, the other reservoir of concern are your children’s friends and their families and parents.  Leaving your kids with strangers is extremely irresponsible.  Get to know your kids’ friends and their families.  Friends have an enormous influence on growing children.  Peer pressure about sex and drug use are extremely hard to overestimate.  Kids are horribly suggestible well into their twenties.  But do your best to exclude the worst examples among their peers that you can.  And the best way to do this is to dominate their free time with activities and playmates that you have planned and vetted.  One of the best ways for you to do this is to volunteer for the supervision of the activities that your kids will be participating in.  Coaching kids’ sports teams is a great way to see which kids are odd or abnormal.  Also, you’ll get to meet the other parents and try to distinguish the good from the bad.  But remember your knowledge of other people will always be limited.  Always be careful of the situations you leave your kids in when you can’t be there.

And finally come up with a program for making your kids aware of the dangers that they may be exposed to when you’re not around.  Have appropriate discussions with your kids about the strange things that have begun to infect the world.  Somehow, you’ll have to explain some of the abnormalities that have become commonplace in the modern American landscape.  You’ll have to explain things like homosexuality and transgenderism and how they can protect themselves from the people attempting to normalize these behaviors to children.  You’re going to have to find resources to explain these concepts in ways that don’t frighten kids but at the same time allow them to adopt a posture that allows them to keep away from it.  That is far from a trivial assignment.

This is an enormous amount of work.  You can make it easier by living in a state like Florida that is starting to legislate against schools teaching perversion to young children.  But even in a “safe” state the burden is still on you to ensure that dangerous predators don’t manage to get access to your children.  But if you’re a parent, that is your job and if you’re successful you will win the culture war in the most important sense of the term.  You’ll have protected your child from the sexual confusion and nihilism that is the worst damage that the Left inflicts on children.  And you’ll maximize your chances of someday having grandchildren that will need to be protected too.  But then you’ll have raised children that will be up to the challenge of being those parents.