21NOV2022 – OCF Update – We Go On

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Good morning.  The sun is shining the cold has set in and everything is in motion for the Thanksgiving holiday.  And everyone has his part to play.  Even I, the laziest man in Christendom, have chores and errands and must play my part.  Wonderful.

We fulfill these parts even as the edifice of western civilization degrades and crumbles all around us.  And I say, okay!  No more whining, no more railing against the corruption and greed that fuels the destruction.

Play into the storm.  Look for the advantage.  Protect you and yours.  Intelligence and reason are real.  Even if the world pretends they don’t exist, they do. Teach your children that the hot stove burns and poison kills and a loaded gun isn’t pointed at a friend.

There are plenty of things to do.  Ferret out the things that have value and hold onto them.  Find the good people and show them your value.  Don’t waste your time on nonsense.

Do something to make things better every day.  It doesn’t matter if it’s insignificant.  Make each day count in some way.  Even if it’s something you have to do anyway.  In your mind find a positive aspect and accomplish it.

Don’t lose touch with your people.  Reach out to them even if they’re far away.  In our all-encompassing communication infrastructure, there’s never an excuse for losing touch with the people that mean something to you.  Take a moment and say something meaningful to one of them as often as you can.

There’s no need or room for despair.  What’s needed is work.  Find something meaningful to do and DO IT!

The Republicans are useless and evil.  the Democrats are in charge of everything and satanic.  How is that different from 99.9% of recorded history.  Maybe we had Camelot in this country for a couple of hundred years and now it’s over.  Suck it up.  Move on.

Keep your eyes open for something better that comes along.  Don’t give up on politics but don’t expect the good guys to come over the hill and restore us to the 1950s or even the 1980s.  That’s highly unlikely.  Settle for someone doing something that makes things a little less horrible.

Believe in yourself and believe in common sense and believe in the good that you can do for your family and friends.  There is good and evil and there is right and wrong.  Use the brains that God gave you to figure out the difference and make the hard decisions.

And keep your eyes open in case there comes a point where you need to jump out of the way of anything really, really bad.  That’s the one that worries me.  But worrying doesn’t accomplish anything so keep that in the back of your mind and do all of the rest of it today and tomorrow and the day after that.

And that day after that is Thanksgiving!  So, get on with it and there’ll be turkey and stuffing and pumpkin pie waiting for you on Thursday.  That’s good enough to keep me going.

20NOV2022 – OCF Update – This’N’That – Of Mice and Math

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Sunday, the day of rest.  A good day to regroup and sets things in order for the upcoming week.  Especially this week.  Had a blast with the old grandsons yesterday.  Fun outing, good food.  Got home and skipped dinner.  Skipped all food and drink and maybe that was a mistake.  I was still recovering from that virus that was in the house the last couple of weeks.  But I figured I could skip the cold meds.  Big mistake!  Woke up at 4:30 am with a splitting sinus headache.  So, I beat a hasty retreat to the cold medicine and then sat up for a half hour to let it knock down my sinus inflammation.

But today I’m definitely on the mend.  So, I spent time working on minutia.  I’ve been using the Logitech M570 Wireless Trackball Mouse as my pointing device for the last six or so years.  It’s a great device in most ways.  But unfortunately, the switches for the left and right click buttons give out after a couple of years.  So now I have three of these things that double click when they shouldn’t.  I finally looked into the problem and found a YouTube video that shows how to replace the microswitches and eliminate the problem.  Now I’ll have to buy a soldering iron and some other bits of gear and become a technician.  Well, that’s kind of fun.  Plus, I’ll fix the other two mice and become mouse anti-fragile for the foreseeable future.  Yeah me.

The other thing today was about was to delve into vector analysis.  I never had the time back in the day to play around with the more advanced theorems to get a solid handle on the tensor notation.  In the past I’ve been exposed (as if to a disease) to Del Notation, Dyadics, the Laplacian and equally complex concepts.  The Kronecker delta and how to expand the determinant was something I had to memorize in order to solve some problems in physics.  But if I’m being honest there was very little comprehension on my part at the time as to how these manipulations made sense.  Now I’ve got some time I think I’ll take another whack at it.  The question as to whether I still have sufficient brain cells to thread my way around it and whether those brain cells can retain it remains to be seen.  But it might be fun.

So, amid my other occupations I’ve added electronic technician and math student.  That should make Thanksgiving week an interesting time.  Maybe I’ll buy the microswitches and soldering iron on Black Friday and get some huge discount.  I’ll probably also have to buy some kind of giant magnifying glass on a flexible arm just to see the attachment points for the switches.  It’s a pity I can’t purchase new eyes too.  But once again, the future we were promised all those years ago before Blade Runner hasn’t quite materialized yet.  Well, no need to get all whiny about it.  Magnifying glass works too.

So here we go into Thanksgiving Week.  Turkey, gravy, stuffing, pumpkin pie, old movies and family.  What’s better than that?

Twitter Becomes the He-Man Woman Hater’s Club. Good!

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I think this is highly significant.  As a veteran of tech startups I think Elon Musk has discovered why these companies end up as bloated SJW-infested day care centers.  Women.

Nerds are socially inept with women.  When nerds who found successful companies introduce women into their workplaces they soon allow themselves to be manipulated into handing over control to these parasites.  Maybe this will be the beginning of a wave of change in Silicon Valley; social media platforms that provide an actual service that people will be willing to pay a few bucks for as opposed to crappy sites that spy on you for the feds, regulate what you say and provide no meaningful social interaction.

20NOV2022 – Quote of the Day

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I dreamed once that I was going to be hanged; but I was not at all surprised about it. Nobody was. My relations came to see me off, I thought, and to wish me “Good-by!” They all came, and were all very pleasant; but they were not in the least astonished—not one of them. Everybody appeared to regard the coming tragedy as one of the most-naturally-to-be-expected things in the world.

Jerome K. Jerome

Flim-Flam Man Runs Out of Other People’s Money

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For years people have been trying to explain to me exactly what function crypto-currency performs.  And for the life of me I still don’t get it.  And I’m not a hundred percent sure they know either.  The only answer I can remember is “block chain.”

So when I read about a crypto-exchange company called FTX that scammed it’s depositors for something like eight billion dollars I wasn’t in any way shocked.  Instead, I was gratified to hear that it seems to have specialized in Democrat investors.  So that cheered me up a little.  I read that Larry David and Katy Perry were fans of the company and its founder, the improbably named Sam Bankman-Fried, was the second largest donor to the Democrat Party during the mid-terms, behind only George Soros in total dollars.  And I thought, “Is there no end to the greed?”

The scam worked by siphoning off the funds in the depositors’ accounts into a separate company called Alameda while keeping two sets of books.  The money in Alameda was used to fund a cryptocurrency of Bankman-Fried’s design.  But when the crypto-bubble burst and FTX customers tried to remove their funds there wasn’t anything left in Alameda to transfer back to FTX and the whole thing was exposed.

And now I hear that maybe FTX was also some kind of money laundering outfit for the Ukrainians.  Well, at a certain point you run out of outrage.  Eventually we’ll learn that Hunter Biden collected his billion dollars somewhere along the line.

So, what’s my point.  Maybe there isn’t one.  But it definitely reinforces the idea that the people in charge are in cahoots with crooks that steal money on an industrial scale.  And the feeding frenzy seems to be reaching a crescendo.  Possibly they know they’ve crashed the system and they want to syphon off everything they can before the collapse absorbs whatever’s left.

What I haven’t read about yet is Bankman-Fried being arrested or indicted for such a massive fraud.  Maybe his friends on the Left haven’t figured out whether they’ll be implicated in this trainwreck.  What I have heard is some of the larger depositors complaining that lawmakers who were recipients of campaign contributions by FTX should return them as a partial recompense to the depositors who’ve lost everything.  I’m guessing that that’s not going to happen.  Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer really need that money.  It would be grossly unfair to punish them for someone else’s crimes.

So, let’s call FTX just another example of selective justice.  January 6th defendants are rotting in prison cells for misdemeanors and felons who steal billions of dollars are allowed to keep their spoils and not even have to show up in court.  Seems about right.

Can I find anything positive out of this whole thing?  Yes.  Pretty soon even the toadies of the elites will discover that there isn’t enough pie to go around even for them.  When the ladder is pulled up, they will be left down here with us, in the cold, eating bugs.  It should be very educational for them.  I hope they’ve managed to avoid making too many enemies among the dirt people.  They’re not good enemies to have.

19NOV2022 – OCF Update

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Today I escape from The Compound and bond with the old grandsons.  We’ll watch pathetic superheroes skitter around the big screen and eat some popcorn and then hang out at my local steakhouse and talk about their latest adventures.

It’s a source of wonder and joy that they actually like me.  Reliable sources inform me that’s not a typical result.  So we’ll spend some time and absorb some calories and maybe fifty or sixty years from now when I’m just a headstone in a field one of them will have a stray thought about me and maybe smile.  That would be perfect.

So things will be a little slow starting out today.  Enjoy your Saturday.