The Books of Bokonon

I will introduce a new series that I expect to be irregular. Or at least I hope will be irregular. I have used Pinterest to bookmark a lot of news articles and web pages of interest for quite a few years, and found it especially convenient to use for my own particular purposes. That has worked without incident for several years. I've maintained several boards which had been left publicly facing (in the hopes that something I pinned might be of use to others) until recently. This past summer, I started to get bombarded with alerts that several of my pins had been deactivated as inappropriate content or promoting violence. I do pin quite a few articles published in mainstream news sites dealing with dark topics such as fascism, genocide, torture, and the like. The articles I pin are ones opposed to each of those aforementioned topics.  My initial thought was that there was a MAGAt or two who had stumbled on to my boards and that I was suddenly in the middle of a harassment campaign. ...

I've written reflections about the war at each anniversary since I started this particular blog. I'll let those posts speak for themselves. Ukrainians continue to hold the line, and up until the last few weeks, a US-led alliance has been instrumental in providing material support as Ukrainians defend themselves from Russian invaders. The Russian army has continued to do the only thing it knows how to do, which is to send in waves of poorly trained troops to the front lines and otherwise drop enough bombs to level whole villages, towns, and cities in the Donbas region. Russia has seen degradation of its available equipment, and is definitely strained economically. This year also saw Russia pull in North Korean troops into its continued invasion.  Perhaps the most audacious event from the last year was Ukraine's invasion of Russia's Kursk oblast, which borders Ukraine's Sumy oblast. A lot of the drone attacks on the Sumy oblast originate from Kursk, so in a sense, I c...

I've been meaning to getting back to this video series. This lesson is very valuable:

You can download a WWII-era manual as a free pdf . As with anything written about eight decades ago, some info will undoubtedly be dated, but otherwise it covers enough basics to be worth your while. 

How to Ungoogle yourself is a handy website with alternatives for Google's products and actionable steps you can take.

If you remember the original Twilight Zone (it was on as reruns when I was a kid and as a teen), Rod Serling was adept at pointed social commentary using a sci-fi series as his vehicle. Each episode is a morality tale in its own right. This clip is from an episode that is very timely about now: As we stare into the abyss in this sad year of 2025, remember that we have all been warned, and that a number of us (me included) have been trying to warn you for ages. Speaking for myself, I never wanted to live through a repeat of the bad old days of fascism. I'd heard enough stories from survivors while they were still alive. What they went through was painful, and they were the lucky ones. I don't know if there is much time remaining to avert the US sliding into a fascist dictatorship, but I hope that those of us who care will fight like hell to stop it.

It's been a while since I did one of these. The last few weeks have been insane, and not in the good way. I mean, it has been, to say the very least, cray-cray. It's been insane in the membrane. These last few weeks have made the Insane Clown Posse look like Hanson. Alright, but first, let's give it up for Seth Meyers! Jimmy Kimmel's in tha house! And you know you are doing it wrong when Canadians boo you singing the US National Anthem:

It's not clear whether or not we will have a republic, known as the United States of America, for much longer. It's safe to say that Elon Musk, the billionaire overlord, is taking over more and more of the federal government with each passing day. Those government agencies only survive if people defend them. I think a lot of Democratic leaders and pundits, as well as Democratic or Democratic-leaning citizens were shell-shocked by the speed and ferocity with which the second Trump "presidency" (regime is a much more fitting descriptor). It's safe to say the shock has worn off and those who were stunned are now simply pissed off. The video you see is primarily directed at the closure of USAID. At the end, you see a number of Congressional representatives from the House and Senate enter the building housing USAID. It's not the only defense of our republic that I've seen, but it is noteworthy. I tend to be a bit jaded when it comes to actions that are more per...