Listen Up - 11-3-2021

Listen up leftist Democrats and progressives: This b.s. of pre-judging, stereotyping, categorizing, and labeling everyone who disagrees with you or your radical initiatives and policies as a racist or as a violent radical isn't cutting the mustard. And you moderate Democrats, if there really is such a thing anymore, You need to speak up against the bullshit. I think we're seeing some of that in yesterday's election results, but leading up to Election Day your silence has been deafening. So, listen up. Moving forward, you need to speak up. Because if the radical, progressive left continues to brand concerned parents who want a say in our children's education as terrorists, and if radical progressives want to defund police departments, and you don't speak out against that kind of nonsense, you're in for a really rude awakening in 2022.

I read a lot. And a lot of what I read are books about US History. In book after book I have read about famous historical figures who were slave owners, and about others who opposed slavery. I have read many books about the conquest of the west, which was more a conquest of Native Americans and of Mexico in the southwest. The reality of what took place and how Black and Native Americans were treated is NOT some dark secret that evil white propagandist historians hide from you or your children. It's readily available on a library shelf in every city and town in America.

I would contend NOT that there was not racism toward both red and brown/black skinned people. Surely there was, and anyone who denies that there indeed was is stupid, lying, or both. But I would contend that the underlying motivation for what happened to red and black skinned people was greed. Evil? Yes. Racist? Yes. Greed? Absolutely. I also contend that not all whites were party to it, supported it, or endorsed it. To blame all whites for it, I can't abide with that. And to blame all whites for it more than 150 years AFTER slavery was abolished, it's never going to fly with me.

Listen up. Lemme tell you where my interest in dialoguing about race ends. Finis. Kaput. Done. Done for. As soon as that discussion blankets all white people with generalizations and stereotypes that would absolutely be unacceptable things to say about black, brown, red, or yellow skinned people. And to me that seems to be the basic premise of the controversial Critical Race Theory, this presumption that we need to understand the evils perpetrated by whites and how it has led to unfair advantages that we as whites have enjoyed, and the unfair plight of people of color. I don't see a single fucking solution in it anywhere. It's finger pointing, blaming, and perpetualizing the problems of the past into the future. It fixes nothing, except maybe to satisfy someone who's thinking, "I sure told them motherfuckers."

Listen up. I'm not defending racists. I'm not defending deniers who would claim there was no racism or that there is no racism now. I'm not saying racism isn't an evil to be addressed and treated as what it is: evil. I'm saying stop generalizing and using it as an excuse for every disagreement we have. Not all whites are racists. Not every problem every person of color has has racism at its roots.

Listen up: lemme give you another example of the kind of ridiculousness your race obsessed and divisive leaders are doing that's a big backfire waiting to happen: paying people who enter our country illegally $450,000.00 per person because their families got split up. Oh, and blaming Trump and racist Trump supporters. Just stop it. This is insanity. But you so-called moderate fuckers, you're saying nothing about it. You're too chickenshit scared of the leftist progressives, so you remain quiet while radical judges, lawyers, and progressive leftist leaders peddle this nonsense. When, not if there's backlash, and there sure as hell will be, YOU and YOUR SILENCE will be to blame.

Biden's approval rating is in the toilet. Where it should be.

Listen up. Democrats lost by a surprisingly good margin in VA. It's neck and neck in NJ. In Minneapolis, the ridiculous defund the police initiative went down in flames. Whose fault is that? First, it's the fault of the radicals Democrats have allowed to control their party, their President even. And second, it's the fault of every moderate Democrat who was squeamish about the radical agenda and failed to stand up and say, "These radicals DON'T speak for me." Want to know what you can do different moving forward? How about vocalizing that Senators Manchin and Sinema have the right idea. How about telling your Senator, your Congressperson, and your local Democratic Party organizations that you support Manchin and Sinema and that you want to see more moderate, reasonable policies and hear more reasonable voices in lieu of these radicals. 'Cause, listen up. The shit your party is doing right now, from the puppet in chief, down to the activist in your neighborhood, it ain't working.

Saturday Quick Hitter - 10-09-2021

 

Biden's numbers are in the toilet. We know why. He's a terrible president, a weak leader, and a puppet of far left progressives.

Moderate Democrats are afraid of the far left part of their party.

Independents are unhappy about the direction of our country.

None of this will end well. Not for Biden, me, you, not for anybody. Progressives will stop at nothing to get their way, and breathe fear into the lives of anyone who dares to oppose them, which is how and why moderate Dems have been so effectively neutralized and silenced. President Biden cowers and kowtows to them.

It's a mess and I hope in 2022 moderates and independents will rise up and squash the anti-American, anti-capitalist, progressive, totalitarian racists who now effectively control the Democratic party.

It's bad y'know.

Couple of Thougths on Facebook's Whistleblower - 10-6-2021

The Facebook whistleblower's revelations shouldn't surprise any of us. It's obvious Facebook has continuously engineered and re-engineered the Facebook experience. For none of the reasons the whistleblower felt it necessary to speak out, I was disappointed in how those changes impacted my interactions with friends. Before I delve into that, let me describe, in the simplest terms I can, what Facebook did.

Back in the earlier days of Facebook, our timeline, or 'feed', would present the posts made by all our friends in chronological order. Then for a long time they started showing us 'top stories'; I think that's the way they said it. But with determination and effort, we could still select 'most recent' as our preference for our timelines. I remember again and again having to go back, frustrated about it as hell, and re-select 'most recent'. Facebook's definition of tops stories is probably less what that says it is and more like 'most likely to get users to click on it'. Eventually, if I am not mistaken, the option to see 'most recent' was eliminated altogether.

Something else that happened during this slow transition, and this goes back a number of years, is that the algorithm was also changed to diminish how often we see posts from friends with whom we don't often interact. So if I have an old friend, a school chum, perhaps, and we don't talk or at least rarely talk, the program reduces visibility to each of us of the other's content. This always bothered me. I can still see their content if I go specifically to their timeline, but with 500 or 700+ friends, that became rarer and rarer. So I lost touch with many people who I came to Facebook specifically to stay in touch with.

Facebook didn't do ANY of the above to improve our experience. They did it to increase the number of mouse clicks we make each time we're on. Money for them. They study our behavior, individually and collectively, and continuously tweak the algorithm to put likely mouse clicks into our feed and to remove less likely mouse clicks. So screw my old school chum and the fact that Facebook allowed us to connect and to stay in touch. That may be what I want, but it's not what Facebook finds to be in their own financial best interests.

The content we have shown Facebook to be profitable is the stuff that gets us mad. Political stuff. Social stuff. Controversial stuff. We click on it. You and me. As we do, our timeline adjusts itself away from other content and toward the controversial stuff slowly but surely. And thus we enter into the echo chambers of our own political thought. And sadly, and scary, too, is that this echo chamber is far less affirmation of the good things the politicians and personalities we support are saying and doing, but more often it's the stuff that angers us that those with whom we disagree are saying. And a lot of that kind of content is very caustic, hateful, and spiteful. We become inculcated with animosity to the other side, a natural reaction to being immersed in things that inspire our anger. The Facebook echo chamber specifically engenders division.

As a result of this, I know I am personally guilty of muting people, friends of mine, who are deep within their echo chamber, find these caustic and confrontational positions normalized, and then push them out. I can think of one dear friend from work, and African-American woman, whose posts I took as in essence calling me a racist again and again and again. Regretfully, I defriended her. But it seemed pointless to try and convince her I'm not a racist simply because I disagree with her on US immigration policy. Another friend of mine, this time from my football tailgate group, repeatedly posted articles by Dan Rather and the like that called Trump supporters, which I take to include myself, as stupid. I took it to mean she thinks I'm stupid for supporting Trump. How else was I supposed to interpret that? I muted her. I miss the interactions, but I'm not fucking stupid. I just disagree with you. Joe Biden if the fucking stupid one. There was a guy I know from when I was working. During the 2016 election, he posted that he was "ready to go to jail" over the election. I muted him, too.

Before I tell you why I think all three of the aforementioned friends were so comfortable insulting me, I want to make this perfectly clear: this is not exclusively a problem from the left. The one on the right is just as problematic an echo chamber as is the one on the left. I cringe at some of the garbage that's been normalized that comes from both sides.

That fact we're deep in these click driven echo chambers doesn't make us right about anything, but it sure makes us think we're right. I know speaking for myself, and this is probably true for most of you who are taking the time to read this, I like reading articles that are aligned with my own views and opinions. It's reinforcing. The echo chamber that our clicks, mutes, defriends, unfollows, etc., create is that, but times 1000.

This brings me to the concepts of 'fact checkers' and 'disinformation'. It's all well and good for Facebook to say they're going to ramp up fact checking efforts to reduce disinformation, but I know damned well that whoever they designate the arbiter of truth and accuracy will be someone deep in the left's echo chamber, and as a result their thinking will be highly propagandized, leftist, elitist, and anti-right in almost every way. It's further down a slippery slope, not a fix to the problem.

This mouse click and greed driven echo chamber has been bad for social and political discourse. It has divided families. It has ended friendships. It has created far more problems between people than we even realize.

If Facebook offered two options: 1) See content from ALL of my friends, and 2) See most recent content, rather than tailoring my experience and pushing me into my right wing echo chamber, I'd take it on a heartbeat. Whether you're on the right, or from the left, wouldn't you? Oh, and for the record, I don't trust Facebook to fix this problem. There's more money in divisiveness for them than in letting friends stay in touch, and besides, the arbiters of accuracy and truth they'll employ to do it are ALL going to be from deep within their echo chamber, anyway. It's damned if they do and damned if they don't. Because my two options, 'all friends' and 'most recent' are not going to be anywhere near any option that Facebook will actually consider.

No Mean Tweets 10-2-2021

I have no confidence, as in none, zero, zip, zilch, nada, in President Joe Biden.

 

Lyin' Joe Biden

• I don't believe he's honest. He lied about the 2500 troops in Afghanistan, he's lying about all kinds of stuff. He was a dishonest plagiarizer 35 years ago, he's a liar now.
• I don't believe he's mentally competent.
  
• I don't believe he has the energy the job requires. He's a tired old man.
• I don't believe he projects the image needed for diplomacy in the US's best interests (which I don't believe are his puppet master's interests, anyway).
• I don't believe he's a leader who can get us through a crisis. In the Marines we'd talk about leaders we'd follow anywhere. I wouldn't follow Joe into a convenience store to buy a candy bar.
• I don't like how he's handling issues (well not him, the puppet masters who make him dance and talk): Covid is worse numerically, not better. The Afghanistan withdrawal was a disaster, the border is a mess, the economy is faltering, on and on and on.
• I don't like his advisors, their vision of America is a polar opposite of my own. Under Puppet Biden the US will decline. It's happening now.
  
• I don't believe he gives a damn about me or other middle and upper middle class voters at all, not a rat's ass.

Joe Biden is the worst and weakest President of my lifetime. But hey! No mean tweets.

Bucket List Dream Trips - 9-30-2021

I'm 64 years old. There are things I still want to do in the way of travel. I'll call these my "Bucket List Dream Trips'. In no specific order:

1. Pacific Northwest -

I want to hit the US National Parks in Washington: Mount Ranier, Olympic, and North Cascades. On the same trip I want to explore Vancouver Island, including beautiful Victoria, and take the train from Vancouver to Whistler, B.C.

Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

2. Maine, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick -

Acadia National Park in Maine, visit Wild Bill while there, then north across the border to Cape Breton and Halifax. A ferry to St. John's Island would be an awesome add-on, but maybe that's a little much.

Cape Breton Highlands National Park, Canada

3. Utah National Parks -

Bryce Canyon, Zion, Canyonlands, Capital Reef, and Arches. Throw in North Rim of the Grand Canyon, Horsehoe Bend, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, and Santa Fe, NM. A 3-4 week adventure.

Arches National Park, Utah

4. Alaska National Parks -

Wrangell-Elias, Katmai, Kenai Fjiords, Lake Clark National Parks. This one seems the biggest and the hardest. It's furthest away, covers the most miles from start to finish, and probably requires small plane transportation to at least one or two. This trip would be my biggest "dream trip".

Wrangell-Elias National Park, Alaska

A Good Man in the Brig and A Puppet in the Oval - 9-29-2021

It would be kinda fun to see the President, Secretary of Defense, and top military brass coming unwound the way they did if not for the fact that the USMC LtCol who is the guy told us the truth about the Afghanistan is in the brig awaiting his court marshal. Was he out of order for speaking (the truth) out of turn? Absolutely. He's already lost his command, resigned his commission and lost his military retirement, and been given psychological evaluations.

You know how it is. Telling the truth is such a bad thing in a liar's administration like this one. Well, honestly, I'm not 100% sure it's a liar's administration as much as an administration that operates in an alternative reality. A bunch of useless Harvard and Yale policy wonks who've never lived and worked outside the bubble of their political circles keep pulling Puppet Biden's, oops, President Biden's strings. And Joe says what they tell him, regardless of how silly and ridiculous it makes him look.

I get there are consequences, and that LtCol Scheller was out of turn with his remarks. I have no problem with him losing his command and being processed out. But the fact he's in the brig, which is 'jail' for you civilian types, and the liar-puppet in chief and his military leaders are still not accepting blame/responsibility for the extremely poorly executed withdrawal from Afghanistan, and that the Harvard and Yale crowd pulling the puppet's strings on the economy and everything else aren't under a microscope is mind boggling. I don't expect that, as Democrats in Congress hold the gavels these days, and they live for the lousy policies of the Harvard and Yale Biden puppeteers.

And one last thought: I have as little regard for Jen Psaki as any Democrat ever had for any of Trump's spokespersons. Surely she has a tough job making excuses for this lying bunch. But her explanations on the economy and on everything else show how far out of touch with reality she and the rest of the clown's puppeteers truly are. She's probably having coffee with some Harvard puke, talking 'policy' right now. Because it ain't Joe informing her of the details, I guarantee you that!

CCP Virus thoughts from Matty P 9-28-2021

 

CCP Virus thoughts from Matty P:

I wear a mask sometimes when I absolutely don't have to. I don't really believe in it, but if the poor bastards working at Kroger and Walmart have to wear it and if the little old lady who's scared shitless because media has convinced her that people who don't wear them will kill her feel a little better about things if I wear one, I'll do it. I don't really believe the masks do much except reduce the dispersion of germs when a person with the virus sneezes, but only if that person happens to be wearing one. The rest of us? I'm kind of a "chain link fence mosquito guy".

I got the vaccine (moderna) and when we get back to Florida next week I'll seek and get the booster as soon as I can. I was very disappointed when I learned that people with the vax can still catch and spread the CCP Virus, but it does seem that hospitalizations, ICU patients, and fatalities are disproportionately tallying with unvaccinated people. Another thought: as the number of vaccinated people continues to climb, the percentage of cases will skew higher and higher toward us vaccinated people. This makes total sense. But from the very beginning, long before there was a vaccine, the important number for me has never been total cases or positives, it's been the numbers of very sick people and fatalities. Total cases has and continues to be a shock and awe statistic, but with only a small percentage of cases resulting in serious illness and death, it's simply NOT the statistic that concerns me. But people ARE getting very sick and dying, a small but VERY REAL percentage.

I am taking extra Zinc, Vitamin C, and Vitamin D daily. They're reported to help immune systems in general, and they're thought by many to be helpful in thwarting the CCP Virus. Are they? I don't know, but I'm at least as confident in them as I am in wearing masks, so I take them.

I know of more people who caught CCP Virus in 2021 than I did in 2020, and they're a mix of vaccinated and unvaccinated people. One (age 67) said he was quite sick. He told me he showed his first symptoms just 6 days after he got the J&J jab. How's that for bad timing? He might have caught it at his vaccination place! Most people seem to recover in a week and a half to two weeks, whether they're vaccinated or not. That's the good news. The bad news is some people get really sick and die, and it would seem to be almost random. For 20+ guys it's no big deal, then someone seemingly in good shape gets it and gets deathly ill.

I still don't trust the government or big pharma. Yes, great things have been done, but I don't for one second believe that big pharma's motivations are purely altruistic. Money, baby, they're in it for the money. So inexpensive or common treatments will always be scoffed at in favor of super expensive treatments supported by super expensive research and testing. Big pharma and their elected and broadcast media bought and paid for puppets will always use every resource to undermine and destroy the reputation of treatments that don't cha-ching big pharma's cash registers. Sadly, big tech and social media companies are fully on board with big pharma's self-helping propaganda.

 

It's funny having a place in Louisville, Kentucky and another in Florida. No doubt Louisville has been more restrictive on its individuals and businesses. Again and again I see places either closed or running a skeleton crew because they either don't have the business, or more commonly that they can't find workers. Just yesterday I saw the O'Charley's off Breckinridge is closed. And the Book-A-Million I was in yesterday (yes, I was looking at books again) in that same area had all its normal cash registers closed. I paid for my books at the little Joe Muggs cafe they have inside. Florida Governor DeSantis was mocked and derided by lefties and super political blue staters, but if you ask me, he did the right thing in protecting the Florida economy. If people are scared and worried they'll catch CCP Virus at a store or restaurant, stay the fuck home, don't close the place. At some point these issues are personal choices. And, by the way, many states and municipalities were far too slow to cut off the extra unemployment money. If the state is open and the restrictions are lifted, people need to get their asses back to work or live with the financial consequences of their personal choice not to.

Last thought: any time I'm around a sizable group of people, as has been the case several times this month, I take my temperature and check my blood oxygen on a very regular basis, at least daily for at least a week. Hopefully if I am infected, I will see it coming and can reduce the chances of spreading it by quarantining myself early.

 

Now, live your lives. Don't be stupid. Don't be scared, either. You don't want the vaccine and you have your good reasons? I respect that. I disagree but it's your choice. You don't like wearing, or perhaps you always wear a mask? That's your choice, too. You don't want to go into this store or that one because they require a mask? Don't go in. You prefer in a place that requires masks because the masks make you feel safer? Put that fucker on and patronize the place. Spend all you got there. It's your choice, your money. But let's quit judging each other over our choices. Seek understanding. Except those of you who are wearing your masks while driving alone in your cars or while riding your bikes in the park. You fuckers are dumb. Really dumb.