Can't remember why anymore, but, when we were very young, our mum suddenly blurted out from the kitchen, as we played in the dining room:
'If all the other kids in school make a dash for the edge of a cliff, will you follow along?'
The answer was of course obvious, and we told her so.
'Good!' she said, and got back to whatever she'd been doing.
We have a new program in the works. We're keeping things close to our proverbial chests. We have a name for it, but we're not saying anything about that for now. It's a kind of text editor, that much we can reveal.
Other than that, there's not much happening on the software front, for the simple reason that there are no platforms worthy of investment. Windows was once a default, not for its excellence but for its pervasiveness. Everybody got Windows, Bill Gates became wealthier than Warren Buffett, then along came the Pfizer Killer Vax. Enough said.
Apple showed promise, only because Apple acquired Steve Jobs and NeXT. But even Steve was no match for the soy demographic in Cupertino. Jobs left us, was replaced by a non-savvy new CEO who made the company hysterically wealthy by creating virtual monopolies that effectively enslaved people, and did so in a way so they were somehow grateful to be in chains.
A good OS should be both universal and ubiquitous in one form or another. A conscionable OS vendor should concentrate on the OS and leave the bells and whistles to others. Unix may dominate the planet - and that's good - but there are so many perverse 'flavours' out there, promoted as ‘platforms’ instead, and third party application software is not portable. And Apple and Google are responsible for the enslavement of people who choose to use a so-called 'smartphone'.
We don't use smartphones. Have perhaps held one at one time or another. But no more. We hate phones in general. We don't even like toys. Especially not toys for grownups. But Tim Cook seems to have come upon something. Namely that grownups can often be fascinated with toys. Not toys for their own beloved children, but toys for themselves.
Over ten years ago, Rick Falkvinge came on Swedish television brandishing a smartphone, walking towards the stage, asking the public 'do you want to see the world's best-ever spy device' over and over again. When he was finally centred on camera, he held the phone up one last time and pushed it forward in case someone still didn't get it.
'This. This is the world's best-ever spy device.'
No one in the audience got it. Over ten years later, all too few get it.
Don't jump off the cliff. Don't be stupid. Serious advice. But we know, as our ancestors knew, that some people won't heed good advice. There are more smartphones in use than there are personal computers. Personal computers were a bit of a drag anyway. For Joe Blogs at least. Joe Blogs took high school courses in how you save a MS Word document to disk. Seriously. Our children showed us. (They couldn't believe it either.)
One of them showed us the study questions for an upcoming exam. How many bytes in a kilobyte. That's 1024 of course. The teacher - hired in from an evening school, right off the boat from Cape Dumbfuck in Afrika - marked the answer as incorrect and supplied '1000' instead. Ten dollar bet that the teacher thought '1024' was just some random scribble.
Smartphones make things easy. You have to like phones in general to begin with. Which we do not. The idea of disturbing audio images pouring into one's consciousness: no. Once we held a course in conversational English for a bunch of rich old ladies. We were told beforehand that one of the rich old ladies was in fact a famous rich old lady, wife of a famous composer. After that first class, she was introduced to the others who began fawning all over her.
'What's life like living with such a famous composer?' asked one of them.
'Very quiet!' said the famous one.
Same here. Do not like noise, unless it's our own noise. Phones are off or disconnected. Smartphones don't exist.
Smartphones aren't very smart anyway. They certainly don't make people smarter. On the contrary: their manufacturers use every opportunity to make people dumber.
The technology behind smartphones can at times be impressive, at least in the abstract, but they're not making people smarter, Or making the human world a better place.
And everyone but everyone is or should be acquainted with the inherent security and privacy risks. But people don't care. Because everyone else has one.
All that money wasted. To compromise lives. With what ultimately turns out to be junk.
Kari Ann
She's listed on some sites as Kari Ann Lake Halperin. She's become a movement. We love Karizona too. Scottsdale used to be the per-capita wealthiest burb in the country.
More than any other, Kari Lake's run for governor became a worldwide symbol for WTF is wrong with our sick societies and how do we fix it.
But how about on the other side? How about her opponent?
Her opponent is Kathleen (Katie) Hobbs, the one responsible for the shitshow back in 2020. Hobbs is still in government and officially in charge of arranging and overseeing her own election. Arizona currently has a governor who evidently didn't do much and has now reached his end of term.
A few days ago we dropped a piece online. This one.
We scrambled all day when we heard the curious story of Michele Swinick.
Things have changed a bit since then.
There have now been reports of Dominion machines being fine on election day - until the Dominion techie came in at noon to fix something that didn’t need fixing, whereafter the machines suddenly stopped working.
Most troubling is the report from one of Kari's people - that in fact those machines were up and running perfectly since the start of 'early voting' in the second week of October. And then, abracadabra, and after inspecting all 223 of them on 7 November, the eve of the election, 70 of them started failing. Out of the blue. Just like that.
The most recent reports are that 48% of all polling places in Arizona suddenly had issues on 8 November. Issues they did not have one day before.
No stolen elections here! Oh no!
One of Kari's latest videos is not on YouTube. Wonder why. But it's available on GETTR, IG, and most likely Rumble too.
It's a short verson of Tom Petty. Kari's husband, who likely made the clip, cut out Mike Campbell's solo, but you get the point. People were wondering what Kari's response would be, and now they have it. And it's nigh-on perfect.
And not to wax political here, but we've noticed a lot of nastiness online, and you'd never guess what side it always comes from. This is a bad sign. It's a sign of a culture in decline.
Before we move on, just to point you to all the testimonials that have come in out of the Arizona shitshow. You can find them, for example, at Kari's IB page.
https://www.instagram.com/karilake/
We'd like to direct your attention to this one.
Some great editing by, most likely, Jeff Halperin. Now just reflect: There are at least three people behind this mess. Two of the others were Bill Gates and Stephen Richer who together started a PAC last year to defeat Kari Lake. Yes. And they're responsible for the machines. Yes.
The GOP like to vote on election day. Sacred tradition. Gates and Richer and Hobbs know this. They're all 'anti-MAGA'.
Not that we know a lot about what 'MAGA' is, but we can see the rallies, and those people seem to be having fun. More and more they've become outspoken against war in general. For who in their right mind would not be opposed? The frequency and the sophistication of the comments against warmongering have grown recently, and that's a good thing. And now they call it 'American First'. OK, which part of 'America' do they mean? OK, we get the point. But, beyond that, is the unspoken part: 'we'll leave the rest of the planet alone'. Which is no small mouthful.
With over 800 military bases in three quarters of the nations on the planet, with creepy biowarfare labs surreptitiously sprinkled about eastern Europe, with who knows what going on in other parts of the globe, with US naval fleets following ocean rims...
One of the most puzzling and perplexing things we've ever seen is this zany acronym system used by the US forces. They just make that shit up. OK, so ask yourself this: How do you figure out which lieutenant colonel outranks the other, if one is connected to ABSCXMMR and the other is with XYZSS2BXK? You can't. It's alphabet soup.
Imagine if all the money spent on the Hegemon were brought back home. That's all US taxpayer money. US taxpayers are the biggest suckers in the world. The US has roads falling apart, people living in the streets, issues everywhere with infrastructure. And most people would like more disposable income at the end of the month - you know, like the Russians have. (That's' another one they don't tell you. Along with three years full salary for infant care. And who knows what else. But long live Big Brother.) Imagine if all the money sent to Raytheon were actually kept in your own pocket.
How about China? They're out to destroy everyone, right? Who knows. But the Russians are not, and how does one know that? Because they already have too much on their plate. And had Russia wanted to destroy anyone, especially the US, they could have done so years ago. Their military is so far ahead of the US today that it's not funny. Russians today are living the life with a quality and a standard found perhaps in Europe in the 1980s. They have it very good indeed. They don't want any hassles. Period.
But most of what Ike's buddies in the MIC burn money on is for toys that no one will ever use. That cannot, by definition, be used. Ever. As Joshua said, 'the only winning move is not to play'.
Elon and Donald
Did you know Babylon Bee was cancelled by Yoel Roth and Vijaya Gadde at Twitter? Did you know Jordan Fucking Peterson was too? No matter. They're back - if they want.
We were cancelled too. Three accounts all at once - and Twitter had helped us set up the one of those! We have other accounts of course, but we don't use them. Who would want to use them? Twitter is a cesspool. It's a Kindergarten where a diabolical head mistress spikes drinking water with bad acid and then lets the kids loose in the playground to eat each other alive.
Just how bad Twitter really is can be seen right now in realtime. For the undaunted Elon Musk, the individual behind the $44 billion takeover, put this out earlier tonight.
The poll at time of writing has 54.8% yes and 45.2% no with 5,639,937 votes.
That 54.8% respond in the affirmative is of course a good sign, but what's of grave concern is that 45.2% exhibit symptoms of serious mental illness.
There've been a lot of clips this past week on how Twitter staff are pampered in the extreme. Red wine on tap. Free. Gourmet foods and dinners all day long. Some estimate that those meals are worth in the hundreds. All this for a dying company that's not once broken out of the red.
This is how empires decline. The Pax Americana, established de facto in the wake of WWII, is at an end. And, for the US, things can go one of two ways, as we see it.
The US accepts the facts and sits back comfortably in the new role, much like the UK did after WWII. Britannia ruled the waves, but it was the power in the air that counted by 1945. Britain more or less understood this and played along.
Fight tooth and claw to not lose that position. Heighten tensions in hotspots across the globe. Pump trillions into defect dictatorships and damn the torpedoes.
Alternative #1 works. Alternative #2 ends with the same final results but with incomprehensible suffering along the way. $10 a gallon? Never say never. 90% of the world sit and wait as the remaining 10%, that 'north Atlantic' bunch, play their Nero fiddles.