James 5:14,15 – “Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him.”
I’m standing on this promise, and holding God to His Word about it.
The right-wing of America is having a real “moment” about this topic all over social media, and I’m going to point out the obvious problem with this idea. You can take it or leave it. After several days of making this argument on Twitter, I find a lot of people are leaving it. Still, I do what I can.
Let’s get a couple things out of the way up front. Yes, we can “seed” clouds to cause precipitation. That’s been around for a long time. That’s just chemistry and thermodynamics, and it only works in ALREADY-FORMED weather patterns.
And, yes, there are patents for inventions that would seek to control the weather. So what? There are also patents for teleporters, anti-gravity, telekinesis, ESP, and contacting the spirit world. Getting a patent just means you’re the first to seek legal protection for an idea, not that the invention works now, or that it will EVER work in the future. Even if you think that a patent proves an idea not only works in theory, but is evidence of a working invention, do you think the government would put a weather control device’s method of operation in the public view for others to understand and copy? Do you think other countries would respect that copyright under threat of a patent infringement lawsuit?
This isn’t a question of technology. Well, it IS, but that’s secondary. This is primarily a question of ENERGY.
Hurricanes are caused by the air in the northern and southern hemispheres moving in opposite directions. (If you study mechanics, you can see the reason why this happens in the equations.) These opposing bodies of air move past each other and get mixed, making planet-sized eddy currents. That’s why they only happen on the equator. If you are going to create a hurricane — or direct it, or intensify it, or diminish it — you will need to influence the way the air is moving in BOTH hemispheres, and redirect it to your liking. And then, if could manage THAT, and no matter what sort of machine you think might do that job, you’re going to need to POWER it.
Meteorologists have done the math, and the amount of energy in a hurricane is roughly equivalent to the total output of all of mankind right now. EVEN IF you could produce this much energy for the job, you’d still have to APPLY to the atmosphere of the entire globe, within HUNDREDS of miles north AND south of the equator. You can’t just stop the air moving in some area to put it somewhere else. You’re going to have to control basically the whole thing.
Weather patterns are the movement of a literal astronomical amount of air and water, and are produced by 1) the rotation and orbit of the planet (moving the air mechanically), 2) the heat from the planet’s core and the sun (causing expansion and contraction of air with the temperature over nights and days), and 2) the interaction with the gravity of the moon (causing rising and falling tides, increasing and decreasing pressure on the air above). These forces are MAGNITUDES larger than anything mankind can control.
Lastly, yes, the government has always been DECADES ahead of the private sector in any sort of technology that could be used as a weapon. But let’s be clear: they are only ahead in the PRACTICAL APPLICATION of the technology. They are not BREAKING THE LAWS OF PHYSICS or inventing new ones. Even if you believe the government has created some secret satellite-based raygun to produce these kinds of pressure and heat differentials to influence the atmosphere over most of the globe, there’s no way they could power it. This would be WELL beyond all known or even theorized physics. It’s simply not possible.
As my second cerebral processor was doing whatever it does while my primary one is busy doing work, I was reflecting on The Watchmen. Why? I don’t know. I haven’t been watching or reading anything related to comics or superheroes lately. I read the graphic novel in college, on the advice of a friend. He also told me that it was so complicated, there was a second book that explained all the references. I eventually found a copy of that book at a book store, and thumbed through it, but never bought it. I was astonished at how much lied under the surface, which I hadn’t noticed, and I always felt I was a pretty attentive reader.
I just looked and see now that you can get an “annotated” version of the book with those notes in the margins. I wouldn’t mind getting a full-color hardback version of this, but the point of this post is just the amazement of making a piece of art that is so complex, nuanced, and multi-layered that there’s actual utility in making a book like this. I mean, there are some movies that invite this level of introspection, notably Primer, but I can’t think of a lot of others. (I mean, sure, Tenet, but that’s because it needs to be explained, and then you’re forced to conclude that, no, it really did suck.) I can’t think of any other piece of art that deserves this kind of treatment.
The “Crusty Crab Pizza” episode aired on August 14, 1999. It’s been 25 years, and it still lives rent free in my head.
I work in a company within an industry that is figuratively being strangled to death over emissions standards, and I have to sit here and look at this.
The increases from the East have dwarfed the decreases from the West. I suspect it’s just “off-shoring” the pollution through outsourcing production, while being able to make political hay, and not an actual organic increase.
A Sweet Baby Inc. employee named Camerin Wild, who claims to be non-binary, admitted that his goal is “burning the games industry to the ground.”
Source: Sweet Baby Inc. Employee Admits Goal Is “Burning The Games Industry To The Ground”
If you follow the gaming industry, you can’t escape the ideological war that’s being fought about wokeness in modern games. It mirrors the fight about wokeness everywhere, but it’s a much more compact world, and easier to keep tabs on. The wokes have succeeded in education, government, news, and movies, and are moving to the last “safe space” for white males: video games. And, boy, have they done some damage!
Most recently was Concord, a squad-based shooter from Sony, which failed so hard, they forcefully refunded everyone’s money and closed down the servers after just 2 weeks. It’s estimated that development took 8 years and $400M. Almost all of the triple-A releases of the past couple of years have been complete failures, and when you dig around in the credits of these flops, you keep finding one company in common with all of them: Sweet Baby, Inc.
So here’s a GDOC — a game developer of color — who works for Sweet Baby — giving a talk about how to “burn the games industry to the ground.” Now, I get it. Yes, those words are literally on one of his slides, but I understand the larger context. He wants to see the games industry as it has existed to be destroyed, and rebuilt in his image. Literally. Which means he wants to see any and all stories about white, male protagonists eliminated in favor of anything and everything else. The forthcoming Assassins Creed Shadows is the picture-perfect example. It features a black, gay samurai in feudal Japan. I don’t think you can get any more removed from context or expectation in favor of an anti-whiteness narrative.
It’s fine. Whatever. There are plenty of good stories that don’t center on a white male. It’s not even uncommon. The difference here is that they have taken a concept centered around “white” males (excepting that Japanese people are not “white”), and simply substituted the main character with something that’s the antithesis of the concept. For people who are strutting around trying to tell other people that they’re the experts in how to write “engaging” stories, they don’t seem to understand what they’re doing at all.
I watched some of the video, looking for the problem, and found it pretty easily.
Brooks did not write the jokes to come “at the expense of whiteness.” He wrote the jokes to come at the expense of racists. This is a massive, critical flaw in reasoning and understanding. Gene Wilder is the co-star. His character is white. He’s “us” in the movie. He’s showing white people how to be white and not be racist. No one denigrates or humiliates or makes fun of Wilder’s “whiteness.” To say that the jokes took white people to task simply for being white is to miss the entire point of the movie. This logical fallacy presumes all white people are racist. Not only is that wrong — which I’m sure this GDOC would admit — but it’s also being racist yourself. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone be so blithely hypocritical while trying to be taken seriously as an expert before.
On top of this, the movie was hilarious. That’s another thing these woke warriors seem to always forget. It entertained. It succeeded, not because of the message, but because it was well-written, and had talented actors and a talented director. These people think they can just “put a chick in it, and make her lame and gay,” and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. They forget it still has to succeed on its own merits. Look no further than the past couple of years of Star Wars and Marvel programming from Disney to see how well this works. Both of these billion-dollar franchises are circling the drain thanks to these kinds of ham-fisted efforts to force all characters and story lines to come “at the expense of whiteness,” and yet still not be either interesting or entertaining!
The bottom line is that 73% of the US is still white. I know George Soros and his NGO’s are working overtime to bring as many non-whites as possible over the border in as little time as possible, but we’re still a majority-white country for now. If you want to make any money in popular entertainment, you’re going to have to at least make it palatable to white people. That’s the majority of the market. That’s where the money is. You can’t insult this demographic for the sin of having been born white, and then expect them to give you money. Well, I mean, you can, but then you don’t get to act surprised when your projects fail, and you and all of your friends get laid off.
At the end of the day, American corporations may love to preach against the evils of “whiteness,” hire for it, train about it, donate money to it, but they still worship at the altar of money, and sing praises to greed. They find themselves in a terrible pickle, and I’m all broke up about it.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “You know, I do think that several members of Congress in some of my discussions have brought up media literacy, because that is a part of what happened here. And we’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so that you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation. It’s one thing to have differing opinions, but it’s another thing entirely to just say things that are false. And so that’s something that we’re looking into.”
“It’s another thing entirely…” Is it really, though? Remember that the government-permitted, medical-community-approved, corporate advertising about tobacco used to be this:
Keep this in mind while you ponder the past 40 years of messaging from the incestuous government-corporate relationship about what our diet should consist of, and the products that fill our grocery store shelves. Think about how the tide is turning against highly-processed foods and seed oils as more and more data about how harmful they are escapes the clutches of the 7 “food” companies that make up 95% of our supply chain, and the FDA. In another 10 or 20 years, we will be looking back on what they have collectively done to the US and the epidemic of chronic disease that has happened as the result, and wonder why we let them get away with it. Again.
Jillian Michaels: People are being “sacrificed on the altar of unchecked corporate greed.”
And what about examples of other kinds of corporate harm? The movies Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action, and Dark Waters all document cases where huge companies knowingly caused harm to people, their communities, and even their own workers. When cornered by inescapable evidence, they deny, deny, deny, and have the press write favorable articles. When finally convicted in court, they either declare bankruptcy or continue to fight the ordered payments. All the while, the board and the executives continue to get paid extravagantly as the legal proceedings drag on for decades. And every time we find a public-safety atrocity being knowingly committed in the name of corporate profits, we discover that it was a collusion between the senior officials of the company and the governmental departments that were supposed to be regulating them. It’s not the exception. It’s the rule. Our corporations are literally killing us in the name of profit, and the government and the media are all in on the grift.
So now, because of the “dangers” of “misinformation,” we’re supposed to ignore this history of “science” and “safety”-based “standards” from the government and the media and corporations, hand over the keys of our national public discourse to the likes of AOC — or, rather, some faceless, unaccountable, unelected governmental agency she intends to create — and trust that they are going to correctly separate fact from fiction, and keep everyone honest? Really? After all of this? That’s the plan? And there are actual, living people who are in favor of this? People smart enough to tie their shoes believe this is a good thing?
The government has been wrong about so, so many things, and more are coming to light all the time: tobacco, a new “ice age,” “peak oil,” weapons of mass destruction, vaccines, climate “change,” COVID, seed-oils… the list goes on. I’m not trying to go full conspiracy theorist here. These are complicated topics that defy one-line answers about how we should deal with them. But it’s been shown very clearly over the past few years that our government doesn’t have a special dispensation of understanding. They’re bureaucrats who hire experts, and experts are all over the place. The only way to get to the truth is to talk about it, even if that includes people saying things that are wrong. And, yes, even if it includes people saying things they know are wrong.
Besides the realm of pure conspiracy theory (9/11? Las Vegas shooter? Trump assassin(s)?), the government has been telling us things that have been proven they knew were wrong since WWII. Given all we know now, why should we grant them a monopoly on purposely saying wrong things? What could it possibly take for you to be distrustful of the government, if you’re not already? I’m not saying you have to completely disbelieve anyone in government ever says, but at this point, how could anyone believe that the truth isn’t at least somewhere between the three-headed government/corporations/media monster, and knowledgable people in the public? Besides the complete abrogation of the First Amendment, this alone precludes any notion of creating a governmental bureaucracy to police information.
As we approach another US Presidential election, my only question is: Will these sudden vote surges for the Democratic candidate happen this time around? It’s confusing to try to sift through everything individually, so I asked ChatGPT to summarize the voting irregularities from the 2020 election. It pointed out significant jumps in 5 battleground states, all from mail-in ballots, that almost entirely went for Biden.
I know that many of these have been recounted and investigated, and still stand, but the situation still doesn’t pass the “smell test.” If this data is true, then almost 100% of people who use mail-in ballots is a Democrat, and that just “feels” statistically impossible. On the other hand, ChatGPT pointed out that this didn’t happen in 2016. At first, that’s pretty damning, but if you consider that COVID was in play, and liberals (in general, as a group) were much more averse to getting out of the house than conservatives, it couple explain a lot of the statistical disparity.
Either way, it’s noteworthy that every other first-world country has gotten rid of mail-in ballots already.
The senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 beepers made by Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, which several sources say were brought into the country earlier this year.
Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a company in Europe that had the right to use the Taipei-based firm’s brand, the name of which he could not immediately confirm.”
The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it,” he told reporters on Wednesday, without naming the company which did make the devices.
Source: Israel Hezbollah War: 3 Grams Of Explosives Per Pager: Israel’s Complex Op To Hurt Hezbollah
Focusing on the branding is missing the point. The CIA was caught intercepting shipments of Cisco and Juniper networking gear and installing backdoors into them before letting them continuing on their way to customers. The Mossad could have done the same here. The lesson here, to “high interest targets,” is not to trust the supply chain. This is a trick that only works once. So why did they choose to do it now, and to this group of people? That’s the real question here.
After 15 years of doing Rails applications, I finally had a serious need of utilizing long-running background jobs to get things done, and setup Sidekiq. My jobs are database-bound, but my database was being underutilized, so I opened up the connection count, and let it “breathe.” In production, I can easily run 20 threads on a single, small VM, and wind up getting 20x the throughput.
I can’t say it was straightforward getting it all running on Ubuntu. The “new” systemd subsystem seems like a regression from the old ways of setting up services with plain init.d and update-rc.d. I also don’t like snap, and I’m starting to think that I should switch to Fedora, but that’s another discussion.
Anyway, Sidekiq: great success.
There were a handful of websites I found way back in the 2000’s that I liked, and kept on a short list to check every few days. This one stuck in my head because of the domain name, which I thought was terribly clever. I dug it up in the Internet Archive. It’s been taken over by some film company? Or something? I’m not clear if it’s run by the same people or not.
Another one was called “The Bassment” (sic), made by a guy who worked at SGI. It was named that way because he played bass, too. I can’t find it in the archive. It was run out of an Indy he had at his house, which inspired me to run my own web and email servers out of my house for 15 years.
There were others, like “Ze Frank,” who has moved to TikTok and YouTube (and probably others).
Anyway, I just wanted to capture the kind of free design that used to be prevalent on the internet before everyone started using “engines” and “templates” and “front ends.” And, no, the irony is not lost on me, sitting here using WordPress with a stock theme. And, sure, I started to rewrite another custom web site for my personal use, but I was using Bootstrap anyway. I readily admit that I’m not creative, but I used to at least try.
The web used to be a wild frontier of programmers and artists and writers who were exploring the new medium. Now, it’s just YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, et. al., etc. There are very few personal sites left. It all got so boring. And for all the “AI” that’s supposed to be in “the algorithms,” TikTok and YouTube offer me 20 pieces of crap for every 1 thing I might have been interested in.
