We have freezing rain and sleet today. When we got up early this morning, it was 68°F (20C) — almost sweltering. By mid-morning a cold front blew in and the temperatures plunged. It’s below freezing now.
And I’m fidgeting just a bit. It’s almost mid-afternoon and our mail carrier hasn’t shown up yet. I’m waiting on a new video card for the tower. The old one works until it has to actually do some work; it’s heat sensitive. It uses passive cooling, whereas the new one has a very large fan built into it, and it’s own exhaust vent on the end.
One of my tech support clients, a well-meaning older lady, gave me a little newsletter in the shape of a small magazine. It’s Zionist propaganda, but at least they use some of their funds for actual mission work. It’s just that they do so under the cover of Zionism. It does no good to tell ladies like that that I don’t favor her brand of “Judeo-Christianity.” For them, favoring the modern State of Israel is part of the definition of Christianity. It’s all I can do to point out that I’m not at all interested in politics, including her right-wing keyboard activism. But every time I make a house call to her place, I get a dose of Rush Limbaugh.
It depends on your own sense of calling, but I try to take the measure of who is ready to listen to what I might have to say. In most cases, I’m doing good just to warn them of genuine threats to computer security. It takes a bit of doing to explain why Windows does the crazy things it does.
Have you noticed the extremist rhetoric coming from the lefties, lately? Major figures are suggesting it’s time to start murdering those they condemn as fascists and racists. Most of them don’t have the guts to actually do any of that, but they wouldn’t hesitate to turn the police into left-wing death squads. I’m wondering if/when the rhetoric will stir some of the more violent activists, though. The problem for the left is that this is pretty new to their culture, so there are very few trained to actually carry out serious violence beyond just basic thuggery. It’s the right-wingers who train and carry guns. As for the police: 30 states have proposed or enacted some 50+ new laws restricting protests and such. Never mind basic left-right orientations, state and local governments tend to act right-wing when it comes to turmoil.
For those of us outside of that whole dispute, it’s hard to watch the hatred and violence. This stuff isn’t likely to just break out suddenly one day; this time of tribulation and wrath on the US will take several years yet. That’s the hardest thing to get across to most people: how slow it’s going to move. We get so conditioned to what we see in movies and other forms of entertainment that we expect things to happen in a matter of a few days. You might get that locally in a few places, but the overall picture is one of slow decline.
Update: I pulled out the original video card and it stinks of overheated plastic. It was just barely functional. The new one is an entirely different type of card, but the same brand. For the computer hardware geeks: I had a Quadro NVS 290; now I have a GeForce GT 730. It’s working fine with the proprietary driver from nVidia.
Leftoids have always relied on the state, Machiavelli-like, as legitimate forms of power and control. Violence is sanctified through them. They suddenly turn libertarian in scenarios when the state isn’t on their side.
Righties are like this too, so I suppose the Machiavellianism is part of representative democracy, but the state at the national level has been inching left for decades, so righties are mostly outsiders.