Thursday Morning in East Tennessee

From the comforts of my air conditioned house, I write articles, mainly my opinions, and post them on this blog as well as Facebook sometimes.  I have a daily readership or at least those that stop by for a quick looksee of about 10-30 hits each day.

The Tennessee Valley is going to be experiencing 90 degree temperatures today and for the most part, I am going to be remaining inside.

I only watch FOX NEWS these days and it appears that the news is the SOS everyday...  SOS is same ole shit...

• Defunding Police
• Critical Race Theory
• Eliminating Whiteness
• Black Lives Matter
• WOKE Awareness
• Illegal Immigration

I watch FOX News for about an hour or two and then I have had enough of all the bullshit that is going on...

I would like to have full employment

I would like to have a growing economy

I would like to have a strong military

I would like for the USA to be the global leader

I would like to end all wars

I would like to end all racism

I value my freedom of speech

As a decade+ long cancer survivor, I value life in all of its aspects...  and, I realize that we will always need management even though most managers are ASSHOLES, arrogant, and egotisticals sons-of-bitches...  I also realize that the wealthy must always be around regardless of our political system or type of government.

It is THE WEALTHY THAT FRIGGING PAY FOR EVERYTHING...  and if we screw with them too much they will just move out of the USA...  they can live anywhere...  they will create a new USA no matter where they decide to live...

Sometimes, the general public is just plain STUPID...

Just Being A Democrat

 

Done Away With Cable TV

 

JULY 2021...  marks the date that my wife and I finnally eliminated our dependence upon CABLE TV...  Prior to this month, we had internet, cable, and phone from our local cable provider and no only were we experience connectivity problems but technical support was lacking in competence as well.

We both have cell phones so we no longer needed our landline through our cable provider.

We went from a cable coax connection to the internet to a fiber optic internet connect which is must faster and much more reliable and has greater bandwidth than cable internet.

We went from cable TV to HULU LIVE which includes much more than our current cable package and the fee is much less than what we were paying.

In short, we are getting more for less money each month.

We are streaming HULU through a ROKU device which is a one time equipment purchase.  And, we have all of ROKU's free channels and movies as well.

We also have a KODI box which was a one time equipment purchase and while it offers access to more recent movies and is no always reliable...  so, we don't use it much.

Later in the week, we are going to make another one time equipment purchase for a digital antenna where once connected to our TV, we will be able to watch local channels free-of-charge within a 50-100 mile radius.

Our HULU contract is on a month-to-month basis which is good...  but our fiber WIFI is on a 2 year contract which does gives us some concern but something with which we have to live...

BREAK FREE OF CABLE...

LOKI

 

Being Political

 

Different

 

The Weird Election of 2020

 

Ooopps

 

Microsoft Ends Windows

According to Gregg Keizer at Computerworld...

With the arrival of Windows 11, and its once-a-year update cadence, Microsoft is effectively turning its back on its Windows-as-a-service model.

Microsoft's once-vaunted Windows-as-a-Service (WaaS) is in tatters. Windows 11's introduction last month — and more importantly its proposed servicing and maintenance scheme — did that.

The fact that Microsoft bent to the seemingly inevitable should be credited, even if the company took years to reach a cadence that many customers had pleaded for almost immediately. But the failure of the Windows-as-a-service model likely also has a downside, chief among them the tainting of that strategy — perhaps to the point where it's no longer an option through the foreseeable future.

Pluses and minuses, then, as usual. But which is which?

Microsoft had big plans for Windows 10. Enormous plans. The operating system would not be the next upgrade from Windows 7 but would be the final version for the rest of time. Rather than replace Windows 7 with another edition that would eventually age out of support and be supplanted in turn by Windows 10+x, Windows 10 would be constantly refreshed, with new features and functionality added to major updates released first three, then two times a year.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Pandas

 

Western Future

Early in 2020, after a mysterious coronavirus emerged out of China and then raced across the globe, a quiet new year took a screeching turn. Stark images of ventilated patients in Italian hospital hallways soon filled our newsfeeds. Panic erupted across the West. One after another, governments that had been telling their citizens everything was fine suddenly screamed at everyone to shelter in place and avoid all human contact. It felt like the modern world had just met its Black Death.

With no living memory of such scenes, Western audiences reached for the timeless literature of apocalypse to make sense of it all. But whereas ancient traditions of end times blamed spiritual causes for the collapse of civilisations, we, being the moderns that we are, opted for what we imagined to be a ‘scientific’ discourse – the so-called genre of collapsology. 

Although some modern scholars, such as Edward Gibbon, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, retained essentially spiritual explanations for civilisation decline, while embedding them in empirical ground, those who would shape our interpretation of COVID-19 came from a different tradition, one that took inspiration from Thomas Malthus’s 1798 thesis about the natural consequences of human development.

Neo-Malthusians credited environmental feedback loops, not moral failings, for regime collapse. In the 1960s and ’70s, works by Paul Ehrlich and Donella Meadows et al argued that the world’s population was growing so fast it would soon outstrip resource supplies, leading to (among other things) widespread food shortages. More recently, Jared Diamond wrote of the role that environmental depletion and diseases played in the fall of civilisations, and his theory that the collapse of Easter Island resulted from overexploitation of the natural environment has enjoyed particular resonance. 

For its part, the COVID-19 pandemic revived old theories about the role that diseases played in regime collapse, and we were reminded that plagues had laid low the Roman Empire and destroyed European feudalism.

Except, that wasn’t what happened. At least, not quite the way supposed.

The thesis that environmental stresses cause regime collapse remains a topic of great debate. We can start just with the cases mentioned above. The alarmist warnings in the 1970s about overpopulation soon gave way not to concerns about food shortages, but about the problems caused by global overproduction of food, which was driving down food prices and accelerating the urbanisation of the developing world. 

Regarding Diamond’s book about Easter Island, pretty much from the get-go it faced strong criticism for its questionable evidence. For similar reasons, many historians of the Roman Empire doubt that the plague played a part in its downfall. As for the Black Death, in much of Europe it didn’t end feudalism but actually reinforced it. 

More generally, measured by the scale of the loss in human life as a proportion of the total population in the affected areas, 19th-century epidemics of cholera, and the flu pandemic of 1918, all took a far greater toll in the Western world than COVID-19. Yet you’d be hard-pressed to find hints of regime stress in response to any of them.  TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE, CLICK HERE...

Taking Our Guns

 

Who's Telling the Truth

 

Need Comfort?

 

Becoming WOKE

 

Remember Orwell?

Being Political

 

Crazy Cats

Most Radical President

 

Movement

 

Make Me Smile

Cooling Off

 

Technology: A Double Edged Sword

Troy Frisby Reports...

From a lost kayaker whose phone saved his life to a missing man found thanks to a bracelet, here are stories of tech with the ability to save lives and impact the lives of Americans.

Like William Rogers, a tech school teacher who fell through the ice on a frozen river. Hypothermia quickly set in.

"First thing I did was try to walrus up on the ice, knowing that I needed to get out of the water as quickly as possible, and the ice just kept breaking underneath me," he said.

Thankfully, while he didn't have his phone on him, William was able to use his Apple Watch to call for help.  "I told them that I probably had 10 minutes before I was not gonna be able to respond anymore," he said.

Fortunately, firefighters made it there in five minutes.

Elsewhere, a high school lacrosse player's near-death experience led to a protocol change in the league.

Peter Laake was hit in the chest by a routine shot, but he fell and was unresponsive. On-site doctors began chest compressions, but they didn't work, so they used an automated external defibrillator (AED), which reset his heart.

"I heard voices for a couple seconds, and my eyes wouldn't open for a couple seconds," Laake said. "But when my eyes did open, I remember seeing seven to eight people just in a circle around me. So, pretty crazy."

Moving forward, USA Lacrosse decided to make chest protectors mandatory for all players, not just goalies.

In another story, a National Guardsman invented a new beacon that might just be the future of rescue methods, using drone technology.

Saige Martinez, who has a math degree, said, "The time that it takes search and rescue personnel to get to the person, it’s supposed to fill that gap and provide first aid supplies and live updates about the situation as well as GPS location."

The beacon was his final project for a college course he took to break into the tech field.

So a hiker just has to find it and click a button. The device records their location and their oxygen levels, but Saige decided to make it more resistant to the elements.

Unusual

 

Neanderthal Carving

Germany’s Einhornhöhle, or Unicorn Cave, in the Harz Mountains got its name from the treasure hunters who thought fossilized remains in the dark passages belonged to unicorns. Archaeologists digging at the site recently found something almost as unlikely: a 50,000-year-old deer bone with a geometric pattern carved by Neanderthals. The discovery, reported on Monday by a team of researchers from the University of Göttingen and the Lower Saxony State Office for Heritage, adds to a growing body of evidence that Neanderthals created symbolic objects—perhaps what we would call art.

Artifacts found at Unicorn Cave in the 1980s proved the site was actually a hideout for Neanderthals during the Middle Paleolithic period (roughly 300,000 to 30,000 years ago). A German team of archaeologists revisited the cave in 2014 for new excavations, and, in 2019, while investigating the untouched layers of Ice Age soil buried there, they found well-preserved animal bones with cut-marks. Among them was the toe bone of a prehistoric (and now extinct) giant deer.

“It showed six groves which together form a chevron-like decoration,” said Thomas Terberger, a prehistoric archaeologist at the University of Göttingen in Germany and one of the authors of the new study in Nature Ecology & Evolution, in an email to ARTnews. Radiocarbon dating proved the object dated to 51,000 years ago—when Neanderthals were the only human species roaming this part of Europe—and analysis on the bone showed that these etchings weren’t butchering marks. (The researchers even performed some of their own experiments carving cow toe bones, and found that the bone was likely boiled first.)

“Step by step we learned that we not only found an exciting object, but that we are dealing with a small bone of a large Ice Age animal that was definitely decorated by Neanderthals,” Terberger said. “From my point of view this find belongs to the initial phase of the use of symbols and is on the way to making art.”

The carved deer bone is just the latest bit of evidence that Neanderthals engaged in symbolic behavior. From other discoveries around Eurasia, scientists know our extinct cousins may have mixed pigments and adorned their bodies with feathers and talons. In 2014, archaeologists reported the discovery of a hashtag-like geometric carving inside a Neanderthal cave in Gibraltar. But do those works amount to art? This latest finding isn’t likely to settle the debate.  TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE, CLICK HERE...

Go To Work

 

Reserved

 

Evil Trump & Kind Joe

 

AOC's Intelligence Showing...

NATIONAL
AOC RESPONDS: Ocasio-Cortez Defends $58 Sweatshirts Because ‘Transactions Aren’t Capitalism’
posted by Hannity Staff - 7.20.21

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded to growing criticism on social media Monday night after Reuters reported the Democratic Socialist spent $1.4 million on ‘Tax the Rich’ themed merchandise for her web store.

“Not sure if you know this Sean, but transactions aren’t capitalism. Capitalism is a system that prioritizes profit at any & all human/enviro cost. But [for what it’s worth] our shop is unionized, doesn’t operate for profit,& funds projects like free tutoring, food programs,& local organizing,” fired-back the lawmaker to former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.  TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE, CLICK HERE...

The Stairs