Frustrations

Frustrations have once again kept me from doing any posting here.

First, let me get my warning out of the way; RANT ahead!

At first, I thought it was annoyance over cutting ties with the person I used to collaborate with on my Witchfire stories. Well, sort of collaborate. We tried to create a shared world with some crossovers for our stories. That ended over their insistence upon demonizing anyone they disagreed with politically or socially, and me saying one time too often to look at other POVs and not stereotype entire groups just because a media talking head and their sheeple said so.

So many of the problems in society today are caused by people on BOTH sides of various issues having blinders on like that. Sadly most of them are otherwise decent people. They just can’t be bothered to work past their personal biases. Too easy to hate because somebody told them that their personal problems are the fault of that group over there. Old trick though; it’s worked for Hitler, groups like the Proud Boys, and the FAR Left as well. “Hate! Fear! Follow me blindly! I’ll lead you to salvation”.

95% of the time these would-be saviors are only exploiting people for their own selfish ends by playing off one group against another.

Need I say it AGAIN?!? Judge people as INDIVIDUALS instead of using group-think and blindly applying labels that promote conflict and division.

AND THEN THERE WAS THE BLOG…

First, let me say I hate some of the new changes to WordPress. Even using a spacer insert is harder now since there’s no box, just a little circle now that you move up and down. The (picture) cropping and resize tool doesn’t work for me. They’ve even done away with the ability to select specific font size from a drop down. Now it has to be keyed in if you want to change it. Every “improvement” to the block editor seems to make it a bigger mess.

Some sort of background changes have me locked out of replying to or even liking half the blogs I follow AGAIN. This is the third or fourth time it’s happened since I started here. If I haven’t liked or commented in your blog in a while and I usually do, that’s very likely why. This change no doubt so WP can data mine blogs more easily.

Then we get back to PEOPLE as relates to blogging…

First, there’s my ongoing gripe over USERS masquerading as followers. If you’re doing THIS, you’re not reading and you don’t care about anything anyone else has to write about:

Doing that regularly just says you’re only using people to gain followers and pad your fragile ego. It’s happening increasingly from people who I’ve made effort to genuinely interact with on WP too, or at least used to. And I’m talking them doing 20+ likes in 1 or 2 minutes. I have a few pics of THAT also. I figured 8 likes was enough to make the point though.

If you don’t have time to read and have no desire to do so, just don’t reply instead of using people for your vanity. I’d rather have 5 followers like Refarmer, Joanne the Geek, Sheree, BigSkyBuckeye and a few others who will actually read, than have 10,000 fraud followers.

Then there’s another issue that’s been simmering for a long time also; appeasement and self censorship. I left and loudly denounced Twitter for similar experiences, but really WP isn’t all that different in a few regards. I speak out against some of the heavy handed aspects of the SJW movement (even though I support the overall movement / idea), then I’m evil. I have to push anything spiritual over to another blog because I might offend religious people. Can’t believe in chi and God after all *rolleyes*

Same idea with some of my adult writing. I sort of give that one a partial pass as I don’t want people to have to worry about anything vaguely NSFW here, and WP is absolutely one of the worst sites out there for providing any sort of age check tool for that kind of content. Even just an “Are you 18?” button pop-up would be nice!

Maybe NextDoor.com is a better overall comparison. Can’t write anything there other than garage sales and recipes without offending somebody. I’ve felt increasingly the same way here.

Write about self-defense or martial arts, you’re violent.

Talk about RESPONSIBLE gun ownership (and I have a very negative opinion of some gun owners), and you’re going to go out and do a mass shooting.

OK, enough said. The point is I’m sick to freaking death of judgy fucks presuming they know what others are thinking and feeling, AND that said judging fucks have the imagined godlike wisdom to tell others with absolute certainty how to live their lives or even what they should say. Yes, I’m sick of the “this means you’re a that and need to change NOW” crowd.

I’m NOT advocating people be allowed nor encouraged to run around acting like asses with no filter either. Can’t we find a happy medium though?

Truth; I’m frustrated at feeling like I can’t be me. I’m shutting away and compartmentalizing pieces of me to try to appease people who are never going to read my writing or buy any book I write anyway.

I’m not sure how quick I’m going to really get back to posting “full time” here again. I do know that when I start though, I’m going to be more ME. Politics I will still refuse to cover. The waters there are just too muddied, the real truth too hard to find and I think everyone is corrupt. Adult content is staying at SilksErotica.

Anything else is one the table though. I’ll do my best to discuss topics in an intelligent, calm manner. I’ll try to be positive and upbeat too. Trust me, I’m sick of bitchy posts here

Don’t like a particular subject in the future? I’ll make sure the headlines are clear so you can bypass it. That, and a return to days having regular topics, are as good as you’ll get.

Honolulu Car Rental Price Gouging

I got an email about this from my friend in Hawaii. It seems with the return of tourism to Oahu (which had been down 90% for almost the entire pandemic), that the demand for rental cars has gone through the roof compared to availability.

No doubt the car rental offices were selling off their fleets to help cover operating costs during the pandemic. Now that it’s ended, their short sighted move has caught them flat footed. In typical predatory capitalism fashion they’ve decided to charge over $700 a DAY for basic rentals and over $1000 if you want a convertible:

$1,000 a day to rent a car? Low supply, surging demand are pushing up prices in Hawaii (hawaiinewsnow.com)

Normally, I’m quite pro-capitalism. I understand that TO A DEGREE, supply and demand are going to factor into cost. Doing so covers the cost of increasing the supply to meet demand.

HOWEVER… Where do we draw the line in this kind of instance? Where does the law of supply and demand become predatory capitalism? I’m not sure I have an EXACT answer there, BUT, 10x the normal going rate would seem to be across that line. We rented a Mustang GT convertible a year and a half ago for our honeymoon and only paid $100 a day, which is still pricey compared to most other locations.

Wouldn’t an ethical business simply go out and buy some cars from local dealerships to increase their fleet size? At $100 a day rental rate, the car loan note can be paid for on 5 days of rental per month.

Just because you CAN do something doesn’t make it right. Look at the price hikes on insulin as another example. Somewhere along the lines the idea of business ethics got flushed and replaced with the SHORT SIGHTED idea that the only duty a business had was to provide as much short term profit as possible to it’s investors. If one has NO ability to ponder consequences, that sounds great also. In the long term though, it destroys a business’s reputation and customer loyalty. Look at Banks and Airlines as two other examples. They’re both hated.

Worse, these greedy businesses are only fueling the call for Socialism or outright Communism by people who don’t understand these are even worse alternatives.

Where Do You Draw The Line?

Yes, I’ve been away for a few days here, but trying to at least answer followed posts. I’ve been dealing with the fallout of yet another battle with my mother. I’ve tried for years to get along with her, and when she gave me her wedding (ring) set, I’d hoped we’d truly rounded a corner in a lifetime long shitty relationship.

Image from depedkto12.blogspot.com

This time around, it was over my spinal problems and how I’m supposedly not doing anything to contribute to the household here. I’ve shown the woman my first MRI report from years back, tried to explain it over and over for almost a decade, and she refuses to accept any of it. At best, I should just got get surgery because I have insurance. As if it’s that simple.

After dropping hints repeatedly, trying to explain the problem and it’s side effects, etc… I finally had enough after our last phone call. I snapped and sent her a fairly strongly worded email saying I was sick of it, and if she spent not even half the time she did researching my grandfather’s alzheimers, she’d know what I’ve been going through. Also that I was sick of her efforts to bully me and destroy my self respect.

Her response was that “maybe we shouldn’t talk anymore since she always seems to piss me off”. Typical emotional manipulation and playing the victim card. If she’d listened the countless other times I tried to explain it all, it never would have hit the point it did.

I shouldn’t be surprised. She reacts poorly to any criticism. I’ve cut her out of my life for years at a time on two previous occasions too. This is the woman who ripped into me verbally if I brought home a B and had my first step dad beat me for Cs while I was in school. When I went to college, I was supposed to take double a full time load and work full time at a “real” job. I got crucified for any little mistake to the point I went from a major extrovert in elementary school to an isolationist level introvert from about the fourth grade on.

Oh yes, and I was told I was too much of a wimp to go take martial arts so I could learn to defend myself from all the bullies that I attracted. Belts in 6 styles later (Shou Shu Chi, Tae Kwon Do, American Sport Karate, Parker Kenpo, Tracy Kenpo and Wing Chun), I guess she can kiss my ass on that one.

Never got any credit for it either after I’d achieved it.

At this point, I want to just tell her “Fine, kiss off!”.

All the self doubt she beat into me over the years always seems to factor into situations like this though. *I* should be doing more, I should do something different, word things better, be more understanding.

She’ll quickly point out this verbal abuse goes back generations also and blame her behavior on that. It’s as close as she comes to taking responsibility. Otherwise she just blames me for not tolerating it.

I’ve worked hard to grow the last few years. Longer than that really, but it’s been a snowball; slowly picking up momentum and mass. Every time I start to do better, she seems to want to throw a boulder into my calm pond. I’m at a breaking point here, or rather the relationship is.

So, yeah… When is enough enough? Because where I’m sitting right now:

Debunking a Conspiracy… Maybe Two

Famous SNL skit turned into meme fodder on the internet

I’m back after sorting out several things that may or may not get blog posts of their own. Right now however, I want to revisit the idea of conspiracy theories. I lost at least one (apparently unhinged) reader when I refused to embrace the idea that the Nashville Christmas bombing was actually a government missile attack… or a government space based particle beam weapon if you’re REALLY REALLY out there.

Christmas morning picture of the bombing aftermath in Nashville

I had some FUN with that attack in the post linked to above, but it was only fun. These people seriously believe that the government used a cruise missile to damage an AT&T facility because said facility was supposedly investigating the voting machines and election fraud. This based on an out of focus picture from a different angle than the original pictures and video. Said picture supposedly shows a fragment of a vapor trail “from a missile”:

Yes, it apparently started out as it was “an NSA spy hub” that was hardened, but still somehow damaged by a missile that couldn’t even completely destroy the cars on the right hand side of the street (first pic). Yes, this is the start of applying Occam’s Razor to this idiocy.

So let’s go back to the blatantly obvious based on the two pictures above:

A) That blurry line could be almost anything. If it’s a vapor trail from a missile, where is the rest of the trail? Why did nobody report seeing a missile?

B) Even the most basic amateur forensics would show that’s NOT a missile hit. There’s no crater. How did it destroy a “hardened spy facility” undreground and not even leave a crater? The blast radius wasn’t even sufficient to completely destroy the cars on the left hand side of the street. The debris pattern doesn’t even indicate a center of the street hit like many whackadoos are insisting.

On top of all that, there’s just the reality of how the government works. Trump also for that matter. ANY investigation into electronic tampering with the voting machines would have been done publicly for the sake of transparency. Trump also would have been screaming from the rooftops that the proof was coming. His whole election rigging theory hinged on it. Even after the fact, he said nothing.

The government doesn’t need an AT&T switching center in Nashville to do such investigations either. The internet was started as a US Government construct named ARPANET. The government still has it’s hands all over the internet with back door access to backbone routing systems at the heart of the internet. Any person who has spent any real length of time in the IT field knows this. Things like Operation Able Danger barely scratched the surface of what the government could do if it wanted to.

Even setting aside the cloak and dagger stuff, the FBI Cyber Division is one of the best cyber forensics teams around. They would have likely been leading any investigation into tampering with the voting machines from their headquarters. Trump had already cleaned out anybody who had opposed him at the FBI also, so one can’t simply claim bias as an excuse here.

So, NO, there was NO INVESTIGATION and NO CRUISE MISSILE ATTACK to stop it and ‘save’ Trump’s presidency.

Let’s take Occam’s Razor a bit further however…

Why would the government spend $850,000 dollars (the cost of a tomahawk cruise missile) to launch a blatant and highly messy attack when so many easier options are available IF there was something going on that needed to be covered up?

For starters, they could just “spike” the target area with a virus or malware of some sort that would take out any software based evidence and potentially damage hardware as well. Any PEOPLE that present a danger can have Clinton administration style accidents & suicides (ie Vince Foster shooting himself in the head and THEN throwing his own body in a dumpster), OR simply discredited as conspiracy nuts and Alex Jones fans.

If I wanted to put together a far more plausible conspiracy theory around the bombing, it’d be something to this effect:

The RV carried a black ops team that went in and neutralized the troublesome area. They went in unseen via a trap door in the bottom of the RV and went into the sewers before breaching the AT&T building. The gunshots heard at 4:30 and 5:30 were the team taking out security or witnesses. After the job was done, they detonated the RV to cover their tracks, escaped via the sewers to an unmarked delivery van, and drove off. Other people in the NSA immediately put out the story of this rogue AT&T contractor obsessed with 5G and coronavirus, and the public has a cover story. The broadcasted warnings from the RV about a bomb were more about drawing attention away from the black ops team’s escape than actually keeping innocents safe.

The difference between THAT and the missile strike theory? TONS of money and much more surgical level control over the operation and it’s outcome. It’s still about as likely as my Die Hard theory in the post linked above though, LOL.

5G and COVID

While we’re at it, let’s BRIEFLY tackle this one also. Let’s start with 2 seconds of background.

The whole conspiracy took flight when a holistic medicine doctor named Thomas Cowen (a few unverified sources say he was barred from practicing “real” medicine), posted a YouTube video about how 5G and the “electrification” of the Earth’s atmosphere was causing coronavirus. All it took after that was a couple of celebritards tweeting about it and BANG; the theory went wildfire level viral.

The trouble here is that none of the above people have any sort of background in radiology. For the record, I don’t either. While I *do* believe that all the radiowaves put into the air may be having some sort of negative effects, I also know something else:

Radiation (and all types of electromagnetic energy are broadly classified as radiation) exposure doesn’t cause or mimic the symptoms of contagious diseases. The effects are completely different. On one extreme, you have cancer as an effect. THAT takes strong radiation. Much further down the line, we have the vertigo and impaired thinking / brain fog and moodiness caused by directed microwave attacks on US personnel at the Cuban embassy.

So, while I’d be more accepting of the modest possibility that 5G is responsible for all the mentally addled people on the far left and right who only want to fight with others and see threats everywhere, it’s NOT responsible for COVID-19. If anything is, it’s the Wuhan Institute of Virology (which another reader has argued doesn’t exist, because their media told them so, never mind the website and ability to find it on Google Maps).

Conclusion:

My point with the last (Wuhan) remark and the Clinton one earlier is that there’s enough legitimately shady stuff going on in the world without having to invent wild, unsupportable shit to explain every little thing that goes bad. That’s actually my biggest gripe with conspiracy theorists and theories:

They draw attention away from legitimate wrong-doing and are used to discredit anyone who wants to hold government and big business responsible for those legitimate wrong acts.

The fact of the matter is the missile attack nuts and other fringe theories out there actually discredited any legitimate effort to look into voter fraud. And the voter fraud was definitely real. Trump didn’t gain a single vote after the polls closed and lost substantial leads in 8 states. I kept track of the numbers over that time, and what happened is a mathematical and statistical impossibility. It would mean every area left uncounted at midnight on election night voted 100% Democrat.

I don’t miss Trump one bit. He was a toxic, narcissistic bully. The areas remaining to be counted after election night all normally leaned Democrat also, so it’s possible Biden might have won regardless. I’m only concerned about making sure the process stays untainted.

OK, enough of that, I said I was done with politics. That above situation is a perfect example of how conspiracy nuts actually HURT the cause they’re trying to promote though. THAT is why I brought it up, and to point out that one can see something fishy without going to extremes to rationalize it.

Before anyone on the Left posts a comment about all the right wing idiots out there, keep in mind that the COVID thing is a universal idiocy not limited to the far right. Likewise there’s the conspiracies spun by leftists that all cops are out to murder black people and that the military is full of terrorists ready to repeat the storming of the capital and completely overthrow the government. Glass houses & stones and all that…

All y’all crazy people need to get your heads straight. And I’m done venting, LOL.