Our society is doomed. We will soon no longer be able to talk to each other.
There was a live chat this morning sponsored by Adobe featuring a graphic artist making up a bingo card with different cartoon characters in each square. Which reminded me of this project which I did last year.
I said in chat that I did something similar last year and entitled it, “Women are a puzzle.” He looked at my text for a long time and said, “That sounds funny but I won’t read the title.” Really?
Well, men are a puzzle too, but without even seeing this image, he is too scared or politically correct to say the words “Women are a puzzle.”
In the past, artists could be revolutionaries and fight against the establishment. After all, art is about free expression. Not any more; this pathetic self-censorship is akin to someone working at a university. Very depressing. And don’t tell me this is the way it is. I know that it is. And it is _wrong_.
Maybe this device will help some people, maybe not. But it should be better known. Problem is, your posts go nowhere unless you pay to advertise them. Or, pay in another way with your time. That means spending every day promoting on every social media platforms. There isn’t any other way.
NB: My psychiatrists (and all of the medical people I have dealt with) our obsessed with knowing how much sleep I am getting. How many hours? It doesn’t matter! Not if you go to sleep three or four times a day and have rotten, disturbing sleep each time. Never refreshing, never feel good sleep. The quality of sleep is what’s most important but they don’t want to assess that because there is nothing they can do about it and because they don’t want to admit that.
Hi, this is Thomas Farley again about talking about the new NightWare™ system. This is the third video — we are at November 10, 2021. I’m I am seeing less visual disturbances, less crippling, violent imagery.
[00:00:26.390]
It’s difficult for me to tell because if this is a reduction because sometimes I’ll have two or three nightmares in a night, sometimes only two or three in a week, and then they disappear for a while. They always come back. I’m still waking up scared, though, from things I can’t recall. I check my heart rate. It doesn’t register as anything but normal.
[00:00:52.970]
I continue to get sound offs that are from either going to the bathroom, moving around in bed or actually just lying in bed, staring ahead, thinking about things. I’m still getting alerting. I think it’s not learning yet on many things, and for all I know, some of this is spontaneous remission or whatever they call it. I continue to go forward. On Friday, I have a psychiatrist meeting.
[00:01:21.950]
She’s going to try to go through the data. I’m averaging 6.4 hours of sleep, so at least it’s keeping track of that. So I will continue with this. I’m just disturbed that it’s not learning.
[00:01:40.850]
It shows these interventions on a graph, but with the number of false alerts, I don’t have the confidence to say what is happening right now.
[00:01:56.130]
So we’ll proceed and at least I’m working on something right. And if you’re having sufferers again, this is my send off to you. I really hope that you have a good night and that you sleep well. I really hope that for you and that you find some peace. Good luck.
Yesterday, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, turned 88 years old. We take this opportunity to join Tibetans, Buddhists and Tibet supporters around the world in wishing him good health and celebrating his contributions to promoting peace, dialogue between different faiths and the rights of the Tibetan people for freedom.
His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama celebrating with Tibetans in Dharamsala, HP, India.
We also remember those who could not join these celebrations: those Tibetans still living in Tibet, where any image or any mention of the Dalai Lama is banned and where celebrating his birthday results in arrest.
Last week we shared the testimony of one Tibetan who, much like the 14th Dalai Lama, was forced to flee Tibet. His experience has helped to shed light on the situation inside Tibet, from restrictions on Tibetan cultural and religious practices to arrests, detentions, and torture.
Today we share another of these stories.
The interviewee from Kham, eastern Tibet, explained to us how the Tibetan language is being eradicated from public life in favour of Mandarin Chinese. Through the CCP’s education policies and employment discrimination, the Tibetan language is gradually being forced into the background as a second language.
Read Here (external link)
The decision to leave one’s home and seek safety in exile is one of the most difficult choices to make. As with the first interview that we published, we strongly encourage you to hear their own words and share them widely.
If you have not already done so, we also encourage you to help us push back against the CCP’s campaign against the Tibetan language. We are demanding that governments confront the Chinese government on these policies at the G20 meeting in September. Please sign our petition to add your voice to the call!
I don’t expect anyone to read this except for search. And I don’t expect anyone to sympathize with my complaints, either, because this is the way the world is arranged. I’ve was raised to be a nice person but there are too many mean people to overcome. This is not something I can win. And, given my constant nightmares since 1988, not something I can cope with.
[00:00:03.650]
This weekend at a community picnic, I was introduced to an old cowboy who asked me what I did for work. I told him that I work part time online, at which point the conversation quickly drifted south because of him. He told me that the greatest computer was between our two ears, the human brain. And I said, I agree with that.
[00:00:39.770]
He then went on with a whole series of statements and questions that were aggressively going after. I think I think when I start talking about computers and what I do online, it’s so far out of reach of most people that they think that I’m trying to be smarter than them, or somehow they feel inferior. I think that’s a great deal of it. They have an inferiority complex to anybody that’s working with computers. They act as if I’m trying to prove that I’m smarter than them, when in fact, I usually don’t start the conversation at all because I’m so far out of reach with what I’m doing, with what most other people do that it’s not even worth bothering to talk about.
[00:01:31.860]
Like all of the work that I’m doing with AI and Chat right now. And it’s very discouraging because I had a friend say to me recently that it was possibly economic, because not everybody can afford a computer or the resources that I have, and that’s not really the case at all. I should probably stop at this point and refresh everyone’s memory that early on, before the Internet went commercial, back in about 94, 95, with the advent of Mosaic. Mosaic was the first graphical based Internet browser that you could see images with that became relatable to people. Images provided a boost to advertising, but librarians had been on computerizing, their catalog, card catalogs, for years before.
[00:02:42.790]
And so when personal computers came out, they started populating libraries with them. Especially, really around 84, when IBM came out with its own personal computer for the masses. There was this Charlie Chaplin advertising campaign that was hugely successful. But years before, Apple had been trying really, really hard to place computers in the school to get these lucrative contracts, and they did a good job. They started about 1980 with the Apple II.
[00:03:18.270]
So by the end of the 80s, computers were basically in every library and school. And so everyone’s had an opportunity since then to use computers in one way or another. Night school classes, adult education classes since really the late 80s, early ninety s. And I’ve actually been on computers since 1978. Over 40 years.
[00:03:46.230]
Everybody’s had a chance. But an idiot like this that I was talking to, he doesn’t want to go to the library. I’m sure he hasn’t been to the library in decades. He probably can’t remember when he checked out a library book last. I have many computers.
[00:04:02.350]
I think I have two desktops, two laptops, two tablets. I also have a library card from Pahrump. A library card from Goldfield and a library card from Tonopah. And I am in those libraries, actively. I’m checking out books.
[00:04:22.130]
All of those libraries have a computer. I think it’s just laziness on most people’s part and not having an interest. It’s easier to put down somebody for what they do than to ask about it or just say simply nothing at all. These are the people that drive me crazy. There’s so much amazing stuff going on and I don’t mind if they’re not interested, but it’s the librarians that I’m infuriated with.
[00:04:53.090]
They’re the gatekeepers in education and they don’t want to know about Chat or AI. So it’s not really economic. It is a deliberate decision on many people’s part not to engage, not to learn, to let the things go by. And people that are actually interested, that are burning to create, that are trying new things, that are experimenting with new things, those are people that are something to be put down on because I think it might remind them of how little they want to know, how content they are with their own little world. And that’s fine as long as you don’t go out and bully people or put people down.
[00:05:38.570]
This is the way I can make some money. I can make this money part time. I’m doing a good service and yet I have people people commenting who don’t even know the basics of writing and business writing.
[00:05:55.970]
Self-sustaining freelance writers are maybe four or 5% of the population. That’s it. Everybody else is doing a second 3rd, 4th job to enable their hobby or their passion the and as far as nonfiction writing goes, nobody understands that. As far as business SEO, there’s nobody that I know, haven’t known for a couple of decades that has any idea of what I’m doing. But if they ask, if I try to explain, it’s just an immediate putting down of what I do.
[00:06:40.750]
It’s just this prejudice against the unknown, which is really the root cause. If you don’t know something, if somebody knows something you don’t, you don’t want to hear it. Instead of asking questions about it or letting it go, they want to put it down because they’re bullies. That’s all they can do. They’re trolls.
[00:06:59.990]
And maybe it reminds them of the fact that they’re dead to the world, that they have no interest in inquiry.
[00:07:10.170]
Anyway, I just wanted to put down what I have to deal with almost every day in my effort to be creative. I really have to keep it hidden. Can’t discuss it because it’s like we’re going back to the Dark Ages. One idiot, in fact, who’s in charge of something historical, he was talking about computer literacy, computer literacy in such a way that I asked him this:
[00:07:43.400]
You’re not holding out computer illiteracy as a point of pride, are you? And this guy’s a former engineer and he thought about it and said, that’s a good question, actually. I am. This is a living, breathing, talking luddite. He doesn’t want to learn.
[00:08:02.380]
He wants to put down people for learning. We’re going to go back 300 years into the Dark Ages when people were prosecuted and killed for trying to learn things, for trying to advance science. We’re going to try to discredit them. Or Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in which anybody with higher learning or higher ambition was killed. That’s what we’re going to get.
[00:08:29.090]
We’re going to go back to the Dark Ages and then we’re going to take 300 years to come back again. At the end of the Dark Ages, they had to reinvent all the math that the Greeks had done, what, 1500 or 2000 years before, because people were criticized and killed for trying to learn new things. And now we have people writing about chat and AI who don’t actually use it, haven’t experimented with it, but don’t want to learn. They just want to put it down. So it’s frustrating, but that’s the world we live in.
A beautiful girl eating breakfast while sitting at a corner view window and dressed in a man’s shirt. San Francisco transitioning from the Beats to the unwashed Hippies, who introduced their grime and the acceptance of same to that magical set of streets and hills.
I vividly remember as a young child how suddenly everything changed. One summer, undoubtedly 1967, the playground equipment at Golden Gate Park near the start of Haight-Ashbury was no longer occupied with children but taken over by filthy young people dressed in rags and stumbling about in a daze. One guy wore what looked like a World War I aviator helmet with spectacles, the kind Snoopy had on when he battled the Red Baron in Peanuts. What was going on?
After that it was anything goes. North Beach sleaze branched out of its accepted borders, the bath houses came in, AIDS, Golden Gate Park filled with the homeless camping, used needles everywhere. I spent a lot of time in The City around Y2K when a friend lived a few blocks from the Park. Now, I only go back to visit a certain dentist and I no longer know the skyline.
Herb Caen once said that he felt sorry for any child growing up in San Francisco. They’d go out in the world expecting every city to be as beautiful.
We used to dress up before going into The City. Now, you’d just be a mark.
I’m a serious person so I have a serious tone. That is now a problem.
We have today an enormous amount of people who can’t support their argument with facts so they focus instead on the way the other person is delivering theirs.
Ben Shapiro is a great example.
Rarely wrong on the facts, people instead attack his tone. Tone? Really? That’s all you have?
Since Ben is a public figure, no one can accuse him of threatening the other person. But since most conversations are private, these poor, limited, and feeble minded people are now fighting back against strong argument by calling law enforcement. “His remarks are troubling, his tone threatening. Please come out and talk to him.”
The wrong tone means you are confrontational, confrontational means violence, violence means guns, guns means killing people.
The wrong tone will get you put in jail. In California and Nevada, a police officer at his or her discretion can put you into a hospital for a 72 hour psychiatric hold without ever having to arrest or charge you. Just because you have the wrong tone.
What they will say with a wink and a smile is this, “We think you are so upset about this matter (name the problem that some idiot who can’t argue called you out on) that we worry you will kill yourself. For your own safety, we are getting you committed.” And that’s it. It’s the ideal way to punish someone whose acts don’t rise to criminality but which the police officer and that snowflake finds offensive.
As for me, personally, I am sixty-four years old and have never been arrested and have absolutely no police record. My last traffic ticket was over twenty years ago. I have never owned a gun and I don’t own one now. I am not a registered gun owner. But none of that matters. It’s easier to lock a person up than to try to understand them.
Watch what you say these days. It doesn’t matter what is right or what the facts are. You have to have the right tone.
This needs to be said again. And again. Before free speech and accurate histories are regarded as only important to white racists.
Updated September 22, 2021
As Long As a Free Man Breathes There Will Always Be a Rhodesia
When I was growing up I admired plucky little Rhodesia from afar. It is now called Zimbabwe. Like the Weimar Republic or perhaps Camelot, it lives only in memory and myth.
Rhodesia was a colony of the United Kingdom in the 1960s until it broke away to form an independent nation. It became a pariah state like Chile under Allende or Israel under Golda Meir or Ariel Sharon or anyone else.
Everybody hated Rhodesia. Why?
It had white supremacists. Racial injustice. Continuation of colonial rule. Blah, blah, blah.
Rhodesia’s origins go back as far as the 1650s with the establishment of Cape Town to the south by the Dutch. And the subsequent settling of southeast Africa by these people and other Europeans.
The native people of this thinly populated land were nomadic and for the most part hunters and gatherers. They built little in keeping with their constant hunt for food. All sub-Saharan Africa was this way, with no buildings of note in pre-Colonial times until you reached north to Giza and the Pyramids.
Rhodesians turned tractless scrub and veldt into a modern civilization which superpowers and future despots coveted for their own.
In the 1970’s two thugs named Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo led armies against Ian Smith’s government. Mugabe had money and munitions supplied by China and Nkomo was financed by the Soviet Union.
Everyone knew that both men would fight each other to control Rhodesia once whites were thrown out of power.
This racial injustice stuff was all nonsense and fraud.
The fighting was a power grab, a money grab. It was all about winning a nation possessing valuable natural resources and a vibrant, profitable economy. Mugabe and Nkomo claimed to be freedom fighters. Hardly.
Africa consistently produces oppressive and brutal strongmen who destroy any built up economy through corruption and in so doing plunge that country back into poverty. A nation’s treasury winds up in a Swiss bank account and the dictator goes to live abroad in a foreign country that he pays to protect him.
Critics charged that the black man did not fairly share in the wealth of Rhodesia that they helped create. Rhodesia was indeed largely built on the labor of the black man because they were the local work force. Would critics have preferred a Philippine or Malaysian workforce like the Saudis employ?
Besides enjoying regular employment, blacks were paid better than any other Africans except those in the R.S.A. Another country run by white folk.
But it’s not just labor. A country must be expertly managed and led. The administrators of all British Empire colonies, for example, had a low tolerance for bribes and corruption and an innate skill for running things. The Rhodesians also had these qualities which are essential to building up a country and going forward.
After the Roman Empire fell, villagers in every part of the former holdings tore down Roman walls and and buildings for stones to make their houses. They didn’t construct aqueducts or hot spring heated swimming pools or infrastructure to bring in water or take out sewage. No vision and no discipline existed to carry out the future and Europe plunged into the Dark Ages. But I digress.
The world agreed regime change was fine as long as blacks came into power. This was reverse racism endorsed and agreed upon by the entire world and the United Nations. Black man good, white man bad. All based on skin color.
China and Russia acted for their own strategic reasons. Rhodesia was just another piece in a giant cold-war game of chess. China still has their eyes on Africa. They may eventually control the continent with blacks in government just for show.
The Rhodesian Army gallantly fought against the world in a bush war of legend but the outcome was always certain.
Many foreigners enlisted in the Rhodesian army. Like the pilots who volunteered to help Great Britain before the United States entered World War II. Or like Orwell and others who fought with Spaniards against Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
End of Days found civilians taking automatic weapons with them before going to play golf or tennis. It was that bad.
And so The Great Experiment failed and another despot was installed. Another dictator who ruined everything positive that the former colonial power had brought about. Rhodesia is now a basket case and another welfare child nation of too many in Africa. Worse, it enslaves people and subjects its own countrymen to conditions never seen under white man rule.
“Current situation: Zimbabwe is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking; Zimbabwean women and girls from towns bordering South Africa, Mozambique, and Zambia are subjected to forced labor, including domestic servitude, and prostitution catering to long-distance truck drivers; Zimbabwean men, women, and children experience forced labor in agriculture and domestic servitude in rural areas; family members may recruit children and other relatives from rural areas with promises of work or education in cities and towns where they end up in domestic servitude and sex trafficking; Zimbabwean women and men are lured into exploitative labor situations in South Africa and other neighboring countries.”
It didn’t have to be this way.
Europeans were criticized for carving Africa into colonies whose country boundaries did not reflect tribal boundaries, thus causing chaos and inciting misery. Well, white governance is long gone and the murderous thugs who control many parts of Africa don’t care about boundaries.
The World Factbook quotation above shows how freely human trafficking goes on between Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique, and Zambia. These slave traders go anywhere they want to loot and pillage and war. Against other blacks.
Black on black violence has dramatically increased in all forms since white governance ended on the African continent. Blacks enslaving blacks, blacks killing blacks, blacks warring against other blacks. This isn’t racist invective, these are just the plain facts.
Rhodesia was making progress toward a more equal society but that is not discussed today. History is always written by the victors. (And their politically correct sympathizers.)
Gandhi’s nonviolence movement achieved independence for India because, ultimately, the British were a civilized people and would listen to reason. It wasn’t the power of Gandhi’s convictions. Forget that. After too many stupid and tragic mistakes to keep India within the Empire, Britain listened. Mountbatten could be talked to. Negotiations could happen because the British allowed them to happen.
Not so the Taliban, the Chinese communists or the illiterate and ultra-violent butchers that now control Rhodesia. Working toward equality could have been possible under Smith’s government but that was all thrown away in favor of people who would kill you for your wrist watch. After they force you to watch your wife being raped.
Is the black community in America and around the world happy now?
Cecil Rhodes was scurrilous and a white supremacist but he was also an empire builder. Note the word ‘build.” He left behind cities and roads and power plants and telephones in the wake of his never ending greed.
Nothing is getting built anew or maintained in Africa anymore. Leaders instead prey on their own people and existing resources. Burn down the Amazon rain forest for easy money. With no revegetation except a few pitiful replanting schemes financed by kind hearted people outside of Africa.
White rule was unacceptable to the world but it’s always good with the bad. Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) once asked how many Central and South Americans would renounce Roman Catholicism in favor of going back to the religions practiced before the Spanish introduced them to Christ and the Pope. I’m not seeing many hands going up.
Soldier of Fortune Magazine presented the only accurate reporting at the time and most of that writing is still available on eBay. Colonel Brown’s Paladin Press produced SOF and without it the memories of a gallant people fighting for their homeland would be completely lost.
As a final note, I had to look up how to spell Zimbabwe for this post. I don’t use it.
As long as a free man breathes there will always be a Rhodesia.
The New York Times still cannot condone war under any conditions, even with the complete justification that Ukraine has to defend itself.
“All across the United States, small groups of military veterans are gathering, planning and getting passports in order. Many are hungry for what they see as a fight to defend freedom against an autocratic aggressor with a conventional and target-rich army.”
What they see? What does the NYT see? The New York Times does not want to approve any kind of war under any kind of circumstance. Even when a country defends itself.
There’s a point at which one’s own moral preferences must end. Any predilection for non-violence must die when you start endangering the world by that belief.
“I don’t believe in killing.” Well, it’s not all about you, sister. There’s some other people involved.
You don’t reason or try to reform a rabid dog which is running down the street biting people. You take out a gun and shoot it.
Similarly, no tolerance can be shown for anyone who starts an unprovoked war which displaces millions, lays waste to cities, and kills still uncounted numbers of soldiers and civilians.
Jesus may hold to his beliefs and remain true. We can’t. We’re human and not a god. No matter what the NYT believes in their heart, for the good of the world, they need to clear their conscience and then help in hunting down that running dog.
