Wednesday, March 13, 2024

THE ORIGIN OF THE MAGA MOVEMENT

 

 

MAGA people aren’t bad.   They represent about thirty percent of the country.  They have worked hard and raised and supported families on meager incomes, their pleasures are simple, and they are likely religious fundamentalists who have always voted Republican because of the party's stand on God, guns, and gays. 

   

But they are low information. They don’t read newspapers, they get their limited news from Facebook or one or two entertainment-propaganda channels disguised as news networks.


For years they have been the drones that were almost invisible to the world of finance and politics.

   

This all changed when a black man (Obama) ran for President and found a large following. 

 

The mega-wealthy Koch brothers, big movers and shakers in the Republican party, decided to raise protests against the election of the first black president.   The Koch organized the Tea Party rallies, even chartering busses to carry in protesters. People who had been invisible grabbed the opportunity for fifteen minutes of fame, to yell and shout and prance in front of a camera: they hung tea bags from their hats, dressed in funny costumes, and paraded with signs of protest that were provided.  





Without realizing it, the Koch had formed a network, and soon the inmates took over the asylum; ten years later the Tea Party became MAGA.






After the election, MAGA proclaims the election was stolen:


HOWEVER


·       The governors and Secretary of States of the five contested states confirm Joe Biden won the election.

·       Multiple recounts in each state confirm Joe Biden won the election.

·       A special council appointed by Trump’s Attorney General investigated the election claims of interference and confirmed Joe Biden won the election.

·       61 lawsuits were filed by Trump Attorneys and 60 were dismissed because of lack of evidence of any interference - One allowed on a technicality.

·       Joe Biden won the popular count by seven million.


BUT MAGA PROCLAIMED:

·       Trump says the election was stolen and that he won by a landslide, so it must be true.

·       Heating thermostats controlled by the Chinese switched voters from Trump to Biden.

·       Jewish satellites used lasers to switch votes at voting sites from Trump to Biden

·       Vietnamese printed up absentee ballots for Joe Biden on paper made from bamboo and stuffed absentee voting boxes.

·       Mules stuffed ballot boxes with fake ballots of dead people for Joe Biden.

·       Venezuela’s dead President Chavez rigged voting machines to elect Joe Biden.

·       Everybody on Facebook says the election was stolen and Trump won.

·       Trump says the election was stolen and that he won by a landslide.



FROM THIS



TO THIS
 



TO THIS




Trump may win the 24 election.  If he does, Dems wont like it, but they will accept the results;

But you have got to admit: the fucking MAGA movement is retarded. 








Tuesday, March 12, 2024

REMINISCENCE

 


I don’t sleep well, usually about six hours a night.   The cat gets me up early to feed her – sometimes I go back to bed, but more often I stay up.


Usually, I am semi-awake for about an hour before I get up, and my mind tends to reminisce.


I am not thinking about my childhood in a narrative, like Truman Capotes in To Kill A Mocking Bird. 





 I tend to reminisce about the drastic differences in the world of yesterday - compared to today.


I don’t think the young people today have any knowledge, or even care about life before cell phones.




My youngest years were in Kentucky.   My grandmother raised me, and I was preschool age during the Second World War.   Times were hard.  Basic staples like sugar, coffee, and certain food groups were rationed.   You had to have ration stickers to buy automobile tires and other items that were deemed necessary to the war effort (Of course, we didn’t have a car.)  People hung small flags in their windows with stars to represent family members in the war – a gold star meant the family member had been killed.




 When I started school we lived in a house that had no heat except for fireplaces.   My grandmother would start a fire in the hearth by pouring kerosene on coal to light it.   She dressed me in front of the fire.     When I was eight we moved to a small town in the Mississippi Delta..


If you did not own a car the mode of travel during the 1940’s was by train or bus.   We took a Greyhound bus from Kentucky to Mississippi.




We moved into a two rooms apartment between the train tracks and a Chinese grocery store.   The place was clean, but run down – a low-rent type of apartment.   The front room was the bedroom with one bed a wooden chair and a dresser, a small bathroom was attached, and the small back room was the kitchen.   The Kitchen had an ice box.   The top door opened to a metal box to contain ice and the bottom door had one shelf for food that required cooling. We could use an ice pick to chip off ice for cold drinks.  There was an ice house in town and they delivered ice once a week: they offered a twenty-five-cent block and a fifty-cent block – probably ( I am not sure) a penny-a-pound. 





There was also a kerosene cook stove that had a one-gallon glass jar of kerosene inverted into the fuel catch.   I believe there was probably a pilot light but it was turned off because of the summer heat, so my grandmother had to light the burner with a rolled-up piece of paper.    




 The train came through twice a day, once around mid-morning and again just before dark.  The house shook as the train went by. 


We only stayed there one month and then moved across town (three blocks) into one half of a shotgun house owned by an older couple. 

  

A hall ran from the front door to the back door and on each side of the hall were three rooms. Each room had a door.  The house faced north and we had the three rooms on the east side.   The front two rooms were our bedrooms, I slept in the front room and my grandmother in the middle room.   The back room was a kitchen. The ceilings were high, and a cloth-covered electric cord hung down about three feet from the center ceiling in each room with a bare lightbulb on the end.   The lights were turned on by a push button switch by each door.  The top button was white and the bottom button was black. 




 

The bathroom was off the back kitchen.  It was barely large enough for a hot water tank, a toilet, a sink, and a tub – probably about eight feet by eight feet.   Town water was from an artesian well, located beside a creek which ran through the center of town. When you filled the tub the water was yellow, sometimes nearly brown.


Each room had a gas radiant stove for heat.  The ceramic squares above the gas jets would heat up and glow red and transfer heat into the rooms.   In the winter we only heated the center room and the kitchen.  Temperatures rarely dropped below freezing in the Delta, so keeping water pipes from freezing was not a problem.



There was a screen porch across the front of the house and we were across the street from the Baptist Church, so on Sunday mornings we could sit on the porch and hear the preacher yelling hell and brimstone at his congregation.


The greatest thing about the apartment was the large Philco radio in the front room. 



School was released at four o'clock each day and I would rush home to be in front of the Radio at five for the children’s hour.   I would listen to Sky King, Wild Bill Hickok, or Sargent Preston of the Yukon and his wonder dog King.   On Saturday mornings from nine to eleven, I listened to Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders, Straight Arrow, The Adventures of Superman, or Buck Rogers.     Straight Arrow was my favorite.   Nabisco Shredded Wheat offered Straight Arrow Indian cards in their box - I didn't like Shredded Wheat but I ate the cereal to get the cards.        





Sunday nights were programs for adults, but I would listen to Amos and Andy, The Saint, The Fat Man,  Inner Sanctum, or The Shadow.   My early childhood revolved around the radio shows.  Listening to the radio required imagination.  


Children today do not have imagination. I wonder what Darwinian DNA modification is taking place as young children play video games and watch videos on their cell phones.





 Instead of videos, we had comic books.  GI Joe, Battle Brady, Superman, and Captain Marvel were my favorites.





For young boys, porn was the women’s panty and bra section of the Sears Robuck catalog – it was a more innocent time. 






We had a telephone on a party line and our number was 26 ring two.    As a child, I had no reason to use the telephone, but sometimes I would ask the operator for the correct time to check our clock. 




In the summertime, our windows were always open.  We used a window fan and an oscillating fan to keep cool.  Of course, cool was a relative thing, as the summer temperatures were always around ninety, often moving into the low one-hundreds.  Air conditioning did not exist. 




To communicate with people far away we wrote letters.  A postcard was a penny and a stamp was three cents.   It would take a week for a letter to arrive at a destination and a week for a return letter.   Life was slower. 


There was no TV.  People walked in the evenings and visited neighbors.   Houses were hot and people sat on their front porches, smoked, and talked until bedtime.


I spent much of my time in the summer at the town swimming pool.  It was across the street and no more than fifty yards from the creek.  The water in the pool looked like dark tea and you could not see the bottom of the pool past the four-foot level.   A black man cleaned the restrooms each morning and made sure there were no snakes in the pool.  Of course, the pool was for whites only – this was Mississippi during segregation.


The world I was raised in has no resemblance to today.


Today, everyone is stressed and in a hurry to get nowhere.   Gun violence is an accepted norm.  People are psychologically grafted to their smartphones.  Technology is doubling every eighteen months.  AI has increasing control over our lives. Innocence is gone.   Children can watch explicit porn on their computers or cell phones.  Climate change has reached a point of no return.   Our country has not been this divided since the Civil War and our democratic government which has existed for two hundred and fifty years may be on the cusp of imploding.


UFologists are always looking for aliens visiting Earth.  The truth is that people my age are aliens.  We come from another planet in spacetime.

 

the Ol'Buzzard

 

 

 

 

 


Monday, March 11, 2024

IF YOU ARE GOING TO VOTE FOR TRUMP AGAIN IN 2024

 




It is what it is what it is..

Disclaimer: I live in a trailer park.

the Ol'Buzzard

Thursday, February 22, 2024

SASQUATCH

 





 

Aliens, the New Jersey Devil, Big Foot, Angels, Satin, Nessie, Gods, Ghost, Monsters, Shape Shifters…

 

A Scottish Prayer

From goulies and ghosties

And long leggedy beasties

And things that go bump in the night

Good Lord deliver us

 

Human beings are not rational animals.  We are capable of rational thought, applying logic, and accepting beliefs based on facts, but it is much easier to believe that truth is what we wish it to be.

 

The credulity of our nature makes us receptive to accepting beliefs without questioning glaring inconsistencies.    Sometimes we believe implausible premises because we have been indoctrinated by our parents or our community, and sometimes we accept a popular belief simply because the idea appeals to us.




Often the more outlandish the premise of our belief, the more fundamentalist we can become and dogmatically defend the indefensible.

 

In other cases, it is just fun to buy into long leggedy beasties – a wish to believe that there are things beyond our discernable norm.




I have to admit, for years I wanted to believe in sasquatch, the skunk ape, or bigfoot – all the same creature but existing in different areas of North America.  I had no proof of Big Foot, but I wanted to believe that a mystery existed, and my justification was eyewitness accounts of sightings or encounters.

 

In the scientific world, human eyewitness accounts are considered unreliable (I swear I saw a ninety-foot-necked alien woman step out of a UFO that landed in my backyard – and my buddy saw it too!).


The Big Foot craze began in 1958. 

 

 In 1952 the SciFi movie The Abominable Snow Man was released to theaters.  This was followed in 1954 by the movie The Snow Creature.   These sparked an interest in the reported Yeti sightings in the Himalayas.




 

In 1958  Andrew Genzoli, a reporter at The Humbolt Times in Eureka, California printed a story about loggers finding a large footprint.   Genzoli joked that maybe we have a relative of the Abominable Snow Man of the Himalayas






 

That set the seed.

 

There is a minuscule possibility that a large, undiscovered, humanoid animal could exist in remote forested areas, but there is no proof.

 

My skepticism is that in 66 years no creature has been found.  No Big Foot has ever been hit by a car.  No corpse has ever been discovered as the result of natural or accidental death, by hunters or hikers.   No Big Foot has been captured.   We have some fuzzy photographs, some dubious plaster cast of footprints, and hundreds of – Me and my buddy saw Big Foot.





 

I will readily accept the existence of Big Foot: when you show me the body.

the Ol’Buzzard

 

 


Saturday, February 10, 2024

ARE THERE ALIENS AMONG US?

 



 

Yes, so says QAnon; but over two hundred of them hung around Dallas, Texas for two months waiting for President Kennedy to come back to life to run as Donald Trump’s Vice President.

Reptilian aliens disguised as humans running the deep state… 




Enough of the Q-crazy section of the MAGA crowd.

 

Life surely exists elsewhere in the universe.   Our Milky Way galaxy is estimated to contain over one hundred billion stars (100,000,000,000).

 




  The latest estimate of the number of galaxies in our observable universe exceeds two trillion (2,000,000,000,000).




 

Our Milky Way galaxy is dwarfed by some of the megagalaxies.   But just to establish a number possible to work with, to estimate the number of stars in our observable universe,  let us presume all galaxies as relative to the Milky Way containing one hundred billion stars (100,000,000,000 stars).

 

Using these numbers as a reference, the number of stars in our observable universe would be at least two sextillion stars – that is two with twenty-one zeroes: 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

 

Not all stars have planets, and only a small percentage are within the Goldilocks zone where temperatures are not too hot, not too cold, and are just right to sustain life as we know it. But when we consider a number as large as two sextillion, the number of stars containing planets that could develop life is enormous.




 

One of the problems when we talk about alien life is our egocentric view that we as humans are the standard reference.  We invent gods in our image and we do the same with aliens: arms, legs, heads, eyes, and the ability to communicate at our level of understanding.




  

If we were to back up and rerun evolution on Earth to the very beginning, it is unlikely that we would even exist.

 

 The world operates in chaos, and the events that caused five extinctions and allowed human development could not be counted on to happen in the same sequence or any sequence.   If any one of the gargantuan number of random natural choices that led to our development didn’t happen we would not be the alpha life form on this planet, and most likely not exist.




 

That homo-sapiens exist on the earth at all is strictly the result of a random number of events – uncontrolled chaos.

 

We should not be searching for alien life, because that uses us, humans, as the standard. Instead, we should be looking for extraterrestrial life.

 

I find it ludicrous that we constantly search for intelligent life.   Who the hell are we to use our human intellect as a standard for intelligence?  We still have people claiming that the Earth is flat, that the Earth is six thousand years old, and that a six hundred-year-old man loaded two of every animal on Earth in a boat and repopulated the world after an extinction flood. 

 

Life on other planets might be plant-based, aquatic-based, microscopic, avian, insect, or even some form of non-carbon-based life not yet imagined.




 

 There are certainly other random lifeforms in this universe than us.

 

Are there aliens among us?  Yes.   Many of us look at humanity and feel we don’t belong. 

the Ol’Buzzard

 

 

 


Wednesday, February 7, 2024

UFO SIGHTINGS

 






Beliefs are different than facts.   Often things or events that people would like to be true, they choose to believe are true, with no factually authenticated proof to substantiate the belief.

 

Since 1947 a good proportion of our population has lined up in a belief that UFOs from outer space have systematically been visiting our planet.

 




Sightings of unexplained aerial phenomena have been offered as proof, while the lunatic fringe has often made preposterous claims of alien contact and even alien abduction.

 

 George Adamski  wrote numerous books and had a large following


 in 1952 George Adamski claimed to have met a "Nordic Alien" named Orthon (shown in the picture).

Later he met two more aliens named Firkon and Ramu who invited him aboard their ship for a

 philosophical discussion.

   


Let’s do a beginning dive into one aspect of space travel required for an advanced civilization to visit the planet Earth.

Light travels at 186,000 miles per second (x 60)

11,160,000 miles in one minute (x 60)

669,600,000 miles in one hour (x 24)

16,070,400,000 miles in one day (x 365)

5,865,696,000,000 miles in one year (one lightyear)

 

The fastest spacecraft launched from Earth travels 429,000 miles per hour.

One lightyear miles divided by the spacecraft’s speed

5,865,696,000,000 / 429,000 = 13,672,951 years for our spacecraft to travel one lightyear distance. 


Our nearest star is Proxima Centauri at 4.2 lightyears away from Earth. 

13,672,951 x 4.2 = 57,426,394.   The number of years for our spacecraft, at our current technology, to fly to our closest star.

 

Astrophysicists are particularly interested in stars in the Goldilocks Zone: a planet with similar temperatures to Earth; not too hot, not too cold, but just right, that could sustain life as we know it.

 

Astronomers have located five planets about the same size as Earth (similar gravity) circling the star Trappist 1.   Three of these planets are in the Goldilocks zone.  




Trappist 1 is 40 lightyears from Earth.

13,672,951 x 40 = 546,981,040 years.

With our current technology, it would take our spacecraft five hundred and forty-six million, nine hundred and eighty-one thousand and forty years to travel to a planet of Trappist 1.

 

That’s a fucking long way away (for Yellowdog Granny).

 

Einstein spoke of wormholes and bending time.  And if an alien lifeform had that kind of technology, why would they bother spending seventy-five years observing earthlings?  

They would surely see the human race as a destructive virus destroying its own habitat.  

They would more than likely wish to make contact with whales that have larger brains than humans and live a peaceful existence. 





Suggested reading: UFO by Garrett M. Graff




 

Alien life next

the Ol'Buzzard

 

 

 

 


Tuesday, February 6, 2024

I'VE BEEN AWA

 

I’M BACK.   I think!



 

Every blogger eventually burns out for a spell.   Over the past year, I have posted just enough to keep the blog active.  

I had some medical problems; but the real cause was that I was so tired of constantly seeing Trump’s face on the news, on blogs, and occupying my post, that I needed a break.   

I long for a time when a person runs for President, is elected, and then forgotten about for four years until the next election season. 

In the few years I have left I do not need aggravation over something which I have no control. 

Am I a cynic?   Yeah, I fucking am.

I served in Viet Nam where over 58,000 military men and women lost their lives over nothing.   Hundreds of thousands more carried injuries and mental trauma from the killing that took place on both sides – then we retreated in shame.   What did those deaths accomplish?   Absolutely nothing; because we went right back to wars. 

The propensity of young men wishing to be warriors feeds the death mill of wars in the name of patriotism, while politicians collect their salaries and go home each night.   

Human beings are a dangerous and destructive species. We populate the earth at an unsustainable rate.  We are one of the few animal species that actively kill our kind.  At the start of the industrial revolution, we began the systematic march toward the destruction of the world’s climate.    We are the only species with the ability to press a button and cause a catastrophic extinction event. 

In the time I have left, I will attempt to enjoy my wife, my cat, my books, and the simple pleasures.   Life is too important to squander on patriotism, politics, religion, …

But like the frog carrying the scorpion across the river, it is our nature.

 

 



the Ol’Buzzard