Hello, Hello.  Is There Anybody Out There?

photog Current Events, OCF ,

We got five or six inches of really wet heavy snow last night so of course the power goes out and also the cable, internet and phone lines.  The generator faithfully kicked in so Camera Girl and the dogs were warm and cozy while the male contingent was tasked with clearing the snow.  Of course, the snow blower is suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome so the snow had to be cleared the old-fashioned way.

To add insult to injury the electrical failure is less than five hundred feet from my driveway and so there are the trucks and electrical crew and even some fire fighters standing around looking puzzled.  I thought about going and talking to them but reconsidered.  I’m guessing some of my neighbors already have and I figure the more times you bother those guys the slower they’ll fix it.

It’s about eighteen hours in and I’m sort of resigned to a world without connectivity.  The only phone is an old flip phone that we keep around for emergencies.  I charged it up and Camera Girl called the kids to let them know we’re alive.  I called work and said I was declaring a snow day.  When the driveway was clear I went to a wi-fi location and checked to make sure OCF was up today and that has been the extent of our electronic communications for the day.

No news sites, no X, no nothing.  All things considered, it’s not so bad.  I guess if the utility reliability continues to decay out here in the hinterlands of Dunwich, I’ll have to ask Elon Musk to provide us with our own dedicated Starlink satellite, a small nuclear power plant and maybe a spaceport.  Dunwich is located at the nexus of the Terran/Great Old Ones dimensional rift so a small dedicated interdimensional port makes a lot of sense.  If he’s not too busy with his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) role-playing game maybe he could get working on that.

Well, whatever the New England states have done to the power grid it doesn’t bode well for the future.  I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that a generator with a cut-in switch that can handle the full electrical load of a home is now standard equipment around here.  You can be without power for a week in the winter at any time.  So natural gas or a large propane tank is what you need.  Getting enough gasoline might not be a safe bet if everyone is without power and out searching for fuel.

Well, anyway, while I sit here isolated from Al Gore’s world wide web and information superhighway, I think about how the Democrats want to cut away the last links of reliable energy we still have.  The blue states are going full speed ahead to criminalize the internal combustion engine and anything else that uses fossil fuels.  I guess that Trump’s term will be a decision point for some parts of the country.  Without his support, all of the promised charging stations and other green energy rigamarole won’t be there to allow for the fossil-fuel-free-wonderland they envisioned.  It may turn out that their deadlines are not be feasible.  And if they insist on them, there may be some serious blowback from the voters.  It might become quite interesting for Gavin Newsom.  Instead of the bullet-train future he promised he might be leaving on a different rail, one that includes tar and feathers.

Dark Ages

photog Current Events, Trump , , ,

When I was a lad back in my high school days, Brother Columbkille would lecture us on the Age of Enlightenment and the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution as separate phenomena.  But ultimately, they were the various manifestations of Europe getting its feet under itself again after the various crises of the “Dark Ages.”

Probably one of the biggest disruptions was the chaos that resulted from the Rise of Islam in the south and east and the expansion of the Scandinavian and Slavic peoples in the north.  The wars and disruptions from all this jostling around kept stability from taking hold everywhere from the British Isles to the Iberian Peninsula to the Balkans for almost six hundred years.

But once the Spaniards, English and French finally got their domestic problems ironed out they pretty quickly got with the program and began modernizing their commercial and military methods and before you knew it, they were even modernizing their governments.  Well, some of them did.  The Spaniards lagged behind, the French went mad and burned their government to the ground and the English found a relatively balanced approach that experimented with revolution while maintaining the trappings of tradition.

But here we are, six hundred years into Renaissance civilization and something is changing.  European civilization has overwhelmed every other culture, scientifically, militarily and economically.  It created a global network that exported the humanist “creed” to every corner of the planet.  But in its latest iteration humanism has become nihilistic, anti-human and specifically anti-European.

This can be seen in the latest wave of self-hating anti-white propaganda that has swept across Europe and North America.  And in the effort to flood the countries that had a majority of European population with third world refugees and declaring that this was a necessary and desirable outcome, regardless of the chaos and hardship this inflicted on the citizens of these places.  Apparently, these people needed to be punished for being prosperous and law-abiding.

It can be claimed that Donald Trump is a reaction to this policy that the Left has instituted.  He is the clearest symbol of a resistance to this desire by the Left to destroy the people who build the modern world.  He seems to have been the only one in the elite class to speak the truth about what those in power in both the Democrat and Republican parties were intent on accomplishing.  And because of that they did everything they could, up to and including assassination to stop him.

Hopefully they’ve failed and Trump will get a chance to reverse as many of the nihilistic policies as he can.  Here’s hoping he takes a chain saw to the FBI, CIA, IRS, the Departments of State, Justice, Education and Defense and altogether shuts down things like NPR.

But even if he does all that he wants to do, there is something genuinely wrong with our culture.  The people who teach in our schools and colleges, run our corporations, and preach in our churches look at the world in a nihilistic way.  They think there is no difference between a family where a man and a woman raise their biological children and an arrangement where two men adopt someone else’s children and try to convince them that all of that is normal.  They believe that people whose skin color happens to be white but whose ancestors only arrived in this country a lifetime after slavery are somehow responsible for any disparity in economic condition between them and the descendants of slaves, one hundred and sixty years after emancipation.  Social Justice has become a religion and the teachers in our schools are the evangelists.  That’s got to stop.

What seems clear to me is that the most important change going forward is one of education.  The stranglehold that the teachers’ union has over public education must be broken and alternative schools must be given equal funding to that provided to the public schools to break the spell that public education has cast on the young people of this country.  If Trump can repurpose the Education Department to provide real school choice he will have performed a great service to the nation’s children.

I see the beginnings of this with states providing vouchers for school choice.  And I see that Texas and Florida both have some higher education choices that avoid DEI and other anti-white discriminatory programs that abound in most colleges.

It’s hard to know if things are turning around yet.  I think Trump’s term will be the test.  If he fails, I think we will see resistance at the local and state level become the only solution and that may involve open defiance of the federal government.  But I’m just speculating because a failure of Trump to turn around the Left’s agenda would be a terrible blow to conservatives everywhere.  It would herald a dark time for us.

Tom’s World – 04DEC2024 – Miscellaneous Subjects

photog Guest Contributors, Photography, TomD ,

Tom | Flickr

TomD

No theme this week, just a few shots on misc subjects.

DSC685 One of the cats around here. Sport is as good natured as a cat can get, always calm and affectionate

DSC861 A dining car from the 1940’s. It a part of a railroad museum here in NW Florida.

DSC1296 Keep this around the house as personal defense. I tend to modify my weapons but the only thing I’ve done with this one is to install a decent trigger. For someone who’s been a competition shooter for decades, I simply cannot live with a Milspec AR trigger, they are the equivalent of nails on the blackboard.

DSC264 I 10 over the East Bay. This bridge was built in 2005 to replace the bridge destroyed in the 2004 Hurricane.

DSC1435 I live in farm country in NW Florida and there are two main crops: cotton and peanuts. Peanuts aren’t exactly photogenic.

SONY DSC

DSC1408  A transmission line cutting through the North Georgia hills

DSC 1789 Marietta National Cemetery in Marietta, GA. Most of this cemetery is from the Battle of Atlanta though there are some from later years. The graves are almost all Union Soldiers, the Confederates have their own a few miles away. And if this is what the winners got……..

SONY DSC

DSC 1613 Another from Marietta National. The was/is a monument to the Minnesota Troops.

SONY DSC

DSC0286  An example of the homes of the late 19th century in NW Florida.

 

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TomD

 

 

 

Tune Out

photog Current Events , , , ,

Do you ever get tired of being pushed around by technology?  At the risk of being declared a Luddite boomer, I feel that the endless treadmill of technological innovation is all just a bit much.  And calling it innovation is sort of a euphemism.  This year Windows decided that instead of its lousy “Mail” program I needed to switch over to its differently lousy “Outlook” whenever I wanted to access my emails.  Well, I didn’t want to switch.  So, every morning when I started up my laptop, I would click on the Mail icon and it would start up Mail.  But a second later the Mail window would disappear and the Outlook configuration window would pop up telling me to go through the torture of surrendering my access to my own e-mails to Microsoft.  I would then use the Task Manager to close down the Outlook program and then I would click on the Mail icon again.  I would have to repeat this ritual three times before Outlook would give up and allow me to use Mail.  But the next day it would be the same madness again.

Luckily, I used to use an open-source program called Thunderbird for my email interface.  So, I tried loading it up on my laptop and eureka! it worked.

And every few days Microsoft tells me about photographs that I loaded on my laptop last year.  What the hell!  When did I give Microsoft permission to put my photos on their damn cloud?  We really have a problem with the technology companies.  Their overreach in every facet of our on-line lives is becoming absurd.  Many years ago, I had a laptop with Ubuntu as the operating system.  I was always complaining about how everything was clunky compared to Windows and how the open-source equivalents for Word and Excel and all the other proprietary programs were weird and unfamiliar and less sophisticated.

Well, maybe I’m changing my mind.  I’m seriously considering having the computer I use on the internet, open-source.  No Microsoft, no Cloud, no nothing.  I think Elon Musk and whoever Trump puts in at the FCC should do a deep dive on the privacy problems that Microsoft, Google, Amazon and the rest of the tech companies cause.  We’re monitored and analyzed and prodded by these companies and each time they “upgrade” their products they ratchet their control of your online existence a little more.

The latest annoyance is having to provide a secondary check on your identity through a cell phone.  Apparently, an e-mail address is no longer enough.  They need you attached to a sim card or they’re not happy.  Even Amazon wants to institute this but I’ve stoutly refused to knuckle under and, well, Jeff Bezos knows I spend a lot of money at Amazon so he’s patient.  Or maybe he’s noted my age somehow and knows that old codgers still believe that the customer is always right.  Too bad he can’t pass that idea along to Bill Gates.

Well, that’s enough complaining.  I’ll have to check into the practicality of a completely Microsoft-free internet computer.  I can’t think of an issue.  I’ll keep the programs that I use that are proprietary on a separate desk top that isn’t plugged into the internet.  In your face Bill Gates!  Commie.