Author: wwducat

About: Writer, Technology guy, Photographer, Possibly EX-Software QA Engineer, Worker Bee. Interests: SCUBA, Working out, Friends, New Views, New Vistas, Photography
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Its Baaaack…

Hunter Biden’s laptop is back in the news.

Apparently, The New York Times walked back its claims that Hunter’s laptop was a Russian hoax. The Times is now saying the laptop and the information it contained is authentic.

Politico also ran a similar story that the laptop in question was part of a disinformation campaign. I don’t think they have retracted their stories yet.

NewsGuard claimed that there was no way the information could be verified. They, however were talking about the New York Times original article.

I’ll admit, there are intelligence organizations that could have spent the time to put together something as intricate as the email chains contained on that laptop. They could have put together a bunch of the videos and pictures too. They could have forged the text messages easily.

The question I always asked about it was why? Why would Russia expend such significant resources to paint a known drug addict, even if he was the son of a presidential candidate, in a negative light?

If the Russians were behind Trump then it would make sense that they’d try to keep Trump in office. That being said, the general thought pre-election was that Trump was going to win.

Unless the Russians knew something that the general public didn’t. Was it that the Russians were worried Biden was going to win?

That makes no sense. If the Russians were interfering in our election process, and they were backing Trump then it would have been pretty much a “Lock” Trump would win.

On the other hand, If the Russians were not significantly involved with Trump but instead wanted to return to the Obama/Biden era where they could engage in their expansionistic goals, then again it makes no sense for them to have expended the resources. Had the laptop been taken seriously pre-election it could have derailed the Biden campaign and undermined the Russian expansionism.

Then there’s the data on the laptop itself. The email threads I was able to read before the data disappeared were boringly routine. Yes, the emails were talking about the business of making connections with the “Movers & Shakers” of various governments but once you get past the shock of that, it was boring routine scheduling and money transfers.

The videos were shocking, but the male in the videos (whether it was Hunter or not,) was very consistent in his voice patterns. His speech had the proper accent for someone from the northeast. Moreover, the sounds he made during sex were consistent.

Let’s be frank, we all know that during sex, we make sounds that are pretty unique to us. Ask your spouse, and you’ll find that there’s a certain pattern to your breathing, a slight guttural vocalization, a particular sound that you only make pre-orgasm. If your spouse is paying attention, they’ll use those cues to get you there, or back off so that the fun continues.

The male in the videos that I saw demonstrated the same patterns over and over again. This doesn’t prove it was Hunter, but it does suggest that it was the same guy. I can’t say too much about the women in the videos, there were many, and rarely did two videos have the same woman or girl.

If you want an example, watch some porn. Choose one particular performer, watch several movies they’re in, and listen. You’ll see what I mean. It’s more prominent with males in porn because “The Money Shot” is often repeated from different angles.

All of this led me to believe that the laptop was in fact authentic. It’s no one thing, it’s the intricacy and consistency.

On my laptop, I do things the same way. I have habits and patterns that are like a fingerprint. The way data is laid out is recognizable to me. I can grab an unlabeled data storage device and know it’s mine just by the way information is stored.

It’s my opinion the volume of information on the laptop, and its associated consistency couldn’t have been created by a hundred Russian agents. It looked more like one person over time.

I’m not saying that a disinformation campaign is impossible, I suggest that it is unlikely.

If we believe that the laptop is in fact Hunter’s. Then it opens a nasty can of worms. Was Hunter brokering access to his father, The Vice President, during the Obama years? If this is true then do we have a Sitting President who is compromised?

That was the fear during the Trump administration. Isn’t that possibility what triggered the first impeachment proceeding? Do we have a smoking gun so to speak that points to graft, corruption, pay for play, and all the things of which Trump was accused?

Is it possible that Congress had all the “right” crimes but the wrong man?

It’s unlikely that anything will be done about it at this point. Biden is one year into his term, Congress took almost three years to impeach Trump and. they were fast walking the process. Congress will no doubt drag their feet in any impeachment proceedings for Biden. I’d bet that we won’t know the full impact of Hunter’s laptop for at least 8 years.

By then the laptop will just be a minor footnote in history.

The question is this;

If this laptop had belonged to Eric Trump would it have been swept under the carpet?

The question is rhetorical. We all know that it would have been front page world wide.

The larger question is;

Why? Why do we allow this difference? A crime is a crime. That is supposed to be absolute, not money, leader, or party dependent. The FBI has had the laptop for almost 2 years, yet there have been no arrests and very few subpoenas.

Lady Justice is blindfolded for a reason. She’s supposed to represent the best of equal justice under the law. She’s not supposed to see race, or wealth, or power, or anything at all, except was the law broken.

Our Justice system is supposed to enforce the law absolutely. Exceptions may be made in extreme circumstances, (such as self defense), but exceptions should never become the rule.

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Have you noticed?

It hit me this morning over my coffee, that I wasn’t being inundated with COVID news. Anthony Fauci hasn’t been doing the chat TV interview circuit.

I guess all we needed was a war, rising gas prices, and the threat of inflation to break the fear mongering of the national media. Or did these things simply cure COVID?

Even CNN’s front web page has only 1 covid related item. Since I haven’t watched CNN in over a year, I’d bet there’s still the crawler at the bottom of the screen giving COVID statistics.

To be sure, COVID is not gone. It’s still out there doing what viruses do. It’s mutating. There are other variants appearing and at this point those variants appears to be following the normal viral lifecycle. Greater infectiousness, lower fatality.

Gee, all it took was the threat of a nuclear war and upcoming midterm elections to stop COVID doom in the United States.

Humans! What a species.

I call this better, because like most people I was sick and tired of the “DOOM ON YOU” messaging of the media about COVID.

“COVID is gonna kill you,” To which I said, “Okay, but when? I wished it would just get on with it.”

Now I find myself thinking along the lines I used to think about during the Cold War.

Several media outlets have spoken about a nuclear exchange and again, I’m like, “Fine. Whatever!”

This is perhaps a fatalistic view but with Nukes, at least it’s likely to be quick. I live within 10 miles of a military base.

I suppose I’ve grown tired of the constant doom. We’re all going to die sometime. I’d prefer to just go about my day without being reminded of it every 10 minutes. Which is why I don’t watch the news, I’ll read about the latest threat to all life of the planet in my own time.

If you’d really like to get your panties in a bunch, Look up gamma ray bursts. Somewhere in the universe a long time ago, a star collapsed or blew up. As its core ceased to exist, the star emitted an intense focused burst of gamma rays. Those gamma rays are at this moment blazing across the universe at the speed of light. We can’t see them because the universe is too big for us to have instruments trained on the entire sky.

A gamma extinction event could come at any time from any direction. It’s only luck that it hasn’t happened yet. But the day is still young! Why don’t we have constant interviews from pundits and wags telling us how to build shelters, or suicide booths?

Here’s why, Gamma rays tend to blast through anything and unless they’re absorbed by immense distance, or something with sufficient mass between their point of origin and us. A Gamma burst could sterilize the entire planet. Everything burns.

There’s a complete sense of powerlessness. It’s too big, too beyond our petty concerns. It’s unthinkable, instead we maintain our beliefs that we are special, and some deity will protect us. We can’t begin to process the enormity of something like this, the unfairness, the annihilation of our “special” species, and so we ignore it.

Our own sun could do us with an intense solar flare at any moment. That, our scientists would see coming and we’d have 30 minutes or so to say goodbye.

The sky changes color, the Aurora Borealis is, for a brief instant visible across the entire planet as the high energy particles interact with the shield created by the magnetic field of our planet. There are pretty colors and the sentient population of the planet stands in amazement. Then the shield is overwhelmed and poof! Everything burns.

The next day, the sun still rises and Earth spins on.

A million years later, some weird bacteria rises up from some protected cavern in the deepest part of what used to be an ocean, or falls to Earth aboard an icy comet and life starts again.

There is nothing we can do about it, just as we couldn’t stop a pandemic. Pandemics happen almost like clockwork. So do extinction events.

Mars, had all the elements for life. Until a huge asteroid smacked the planet. Some scientists think that the impact disrupted that planet’s core enough to cause the magnetic shielding to fail permanently. Then it was just a matter of time, the solar wind carrying off the atmosphere atom by atom, just so much dust in the wind so to speak. Solar radiation increased and well, the results are obvious. A cold, dry, desolate, dead world.

Another couple million years and the remaining atmosphere of Mars will be gone. 5 or 6 billion years later, our sun expands and the inner solar system is recycled. Who knows, a hundred billion years later, maybe all those atoms will coalesce forming a new planetary system. Then again, maybe not. It’s the luck of the draw.

Because in the back of my mind I try to see the whole of creation, (Not just Earth, but the universe,) I guess I have a slightly different view. It’s tough to maintain that view with all the constant noise from daily events. But my view gives me comfort.

It also tends to make me willing to discard things that I cannot control. I prefer instead to focus on what I can speak of, or directly change, or control.

I couldn’t prevent the COVID pandemic, but I could speak facts and try to remind people that it wasn’t a complete death sentence. Measles decimated the native people of Hawaii. Smallpox decimated the native peoples of North America. The Black Plague killed 1/4 of Europe. The 1914 influenza and subsequent waves killed 50 million people.

And the world spun on. Humanity continued. There are no guarantees. Dance in the light while you can, don’t worry about a guaranteed tomorrow. Live now, in this time and place and make the best of it.

We can prevent a nuclear war. We can choose to live in peace with each other. We can choose to be kind. We can choose not to be petty, or hateful, we can step into each new day as a gift, fearless of what may happen and joyful in choosing to live, love, learn, and become our best selves.

I guess, I believe that the echos of us reverberate throughout the universe. The infinitesimally small transmissions of electrical activity in our brains scatter out in all directions across space and time. Perhaps, those transmissions spark inspiration, or recognition of beauty, or a moment of kindness in an unimaginable species 100 billion years from now. Or, a moment of cruelty, destruction, or harm.

My choice is to stumble toward the light, to be better than I was yesterday. I choose to believe that a decent act, a kind act, or my dancing in the sunlight in joy, will at some point stay the hand of a tyrant on a distant world, or cause a child to smile seeing beauty in something commonplace.

That’s my immortality.

Even if that doesn’t actually work across billions of years. It may make a difference here, now.

Oh I’ll still rail against things that bug me. I’m human and our focus is so easily narrowed to things that annoy. I forgive myself for that.

I just have to remember to reach for being a citizen of the Universe instead of just the Earth.

Look up at the night sky, be awed at the majesty and beauty.

Be at peace with yourself and others. Create and experience all the joy you can.

The choice is yours.

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I was glad to see Halyna Hutchins family file their lawsuit against Alec Baldwin

I personally hope that a jury cleans his clock. The only reason he’s not sitting in a jail cell is because he’s famous.

If this were an average person, they’d be incarcerated.

Look at what was done to Kyle Rittenhouse. He was defending his life. His parents aren’t wealthy, and yet he was considered a flight risk. GoFundMe shut down donations to Rittenhouse in what can only be described as a blatant attempt to strangle his defense.

Baldwin on the other hand, has a ton of money and could leave the country at anytime to flee the justice he has coming to him.

If you ever needed an example of two tiered mob biased justice here’s a prime one. Baldwin is working on another movie for god’s sake. Hopefully this one doesn’t involve any firearms.

The saddest part is that Baldwin will not suffer any criminal consequences for his actions. He’ll get off, if he goes to trial. I’d bet that even if he is found guilty, he’ll get away with community service in the form of anti-gun rhetoric PSA commercials. Then he’ll complain that he had to do the PSA’s for free. I’m sure there will be whining for years about how difficult it was for him to sit in front of a camera to preach some anti-gun message.

Real punishment would be prison, and him being forced to attend mandatory NRA training classes. I might even add that he never be allowed to appear in any movie that had a gun in it.

Let’s see how good an actor he really is, when he has to actually act like the great actors of yesteryear. You know, those actors who told a story without foul language, special effects, and violence.

It’s not that I dislike Baldwin. It’s that I dislike a justice system that treats people unequally.

Alec Baldwin is today and always has been an arrogant self absorbed asshole. That much about his personality hasn’t changed.

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Happy Spring forward

I’m sure there’s at least one or two clocks I’ve missed.

Those will be screwing me up for days to come.

Even some of the electronic are still trying to catch up. I’m with them, what time is it?

They require precision… I only require that it’s barely daylight.

I’m in the crowd that says we need to stop messing with the clocks. Day is day and night is night, let’s just leave it at that.

This year I had the sense to go to bed early. The problem is it takes my body a week to reset. The spring time change is always worse than the fall one for me. I’ve never figured out why that is.

Anyway, happy time changing, have a good day.

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I was soooo excited to hear the SOTU Address

I could hardly wait to hear the pearls of wisdom from His Royal Majesty, The Imperial President Biden.

I wanted to see who would tear up their copy of the SOTU speech this year. I was hoping it would be a Republican and then we could see the dirty traitorous racist bastard roughed up and hauled away by The Nobel, Efficient, Capital Police.

I was hoping that we’d see angry “peasants” throwing themselves against the fence and razor wire surrounding the Capital. We might have seen The National Guard opening fire on them ensuring the majesty of our democracy.

The whole world would then see how strong our leaders were, as bulldozers scooped up the bodies and dumped them in a mass grave.

I was hoping for there to at least be some random arrests on the streets outside the Capital were the arrestees were detained without charge, denied their right to counsel, and imprisoned without due process.

After examples like that, the world would know that our leaders are fearless, behind guards, fences and walls, and they know how to control undesirable elements in our society.

Alas, it didn’t happen.

I suppose The Most Glorious Biden’s government is spread thin chasing down all the people who visited Washington DC during Jan 2021.

Happily, many of those racist, white supremacist, bastards, are rotting in prison. Perhaps there wasn’t enough room for more criminal scum?

Please pardon my venomous sarcasm!

I’ve always hated politics! I hate even more that I feel like I’ve been watching a 50 car pile up in slow motion for the past 20 years, and can’t look away.

By now, even the most ardent lover of Joe Biden must be having some buyer’s remorse. His polling numbers would seem to support that assertion.

Yeah, I’ve been aware of a creeping problem in politics for at least the past 20 years.

I voted my conscience, not my party for all of that time. I voted for the candidate, Local, Statewide, and National, that I thought would do the best job. Party be damned.

Ultimately, I thought that the individual candidate and their purported beliefs and history mattered more than their party affiliation. I naively believed that common sense and the inherent decency of the human being would prevail.

I was apparently wrong.

As an American, I understood that we would sometimes have hard times, and sometimes we’d be riding high. I didn’t have a problem tightening my belt for the betterment of my fellow Americans. It wasn’t easy, but it was a duty I shouldered right along with the rest of society because I saw that the government was taking action to correct the problem(s) and those corrections took time. After all, you can’t instantly turn an aircraft carrier, or a cruise ship. I still believed in the system.

However, unlike the frog in a slowly heating pot of water. I’m aware that we’re being boiled alive.

None of my core beliefs fit anymore.

I really wanted to believe The Biden Administration would address the raging issues facing Americans. I wanted to believe that they’d heard the people.

President Joe Biden delivers his first State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress at the Capitol, Tuesday, March 1, 2022, in Washington as Vice President Kamala Harris and House speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., look on. (Jim Lo Scalzo/Pool via AP)

Instead all we got from the SOTU address was what they thought we wanted to hear. Not an actual concrete plan to change course.

I’ll leave the fact checking to the political analysts, (Or Twitter).

A few things did pop out at me. Just a few days ago, there was an article, (I think from CNN) that said Biden admitted that sanctions against Russia wouldn’t help.

Now, in the SOTU, we’re being told that sanctions are hurting Russia? But we and the EU are still buying oil from Russia?

Part of Biden’s speech sounded like it came from the Republican platform. “Buy American”, “Open Schools”, “Build the economy from the bottom up”, “Immigration Reform”, “Rework the Tax System”, “ReFund the Police”. That last one was probably the most astounding.

Biden did mention that our divisiveness needed to end. He said we are all Americans and need to unify. I agree wholeheartedly with that sentiment. He followed up with more rhetoric about gun control.

He went on to conflate voter integrity laws with voter suppression. Again that was expected.

Most of the speech felt like pandering.

It felt like Biden was saying words but there was no intent behind them. Once again we heard about Beau Biden. It seems like every time Joe Biden speaks, he invokes Saint Beau.

For all his screwups, I feel kinda bad for Hunter. His Dad always speaks about Beau with a sense of deep loss, when Joe Biden speaks about Hunter it’s almost as an afterthought. Hunter must feel like, “Dad wishes I’d died and Beau lived,” perhaps that is why Hunter appears to be so self destructive.

At some point I tuned out. Biden’s SOTU address was exactly what I’d expected. A whole lot of rhetoric and hyperbole but not a lot of substance.

I’d hoped that he (or his handlers) would have addressed a few very specific points and then provided specific corrective actions.

Something like;

“Fuel prices are high and that’s hurting Americans across the board. High fuel prices affect people at the pumps and increase the cost of goods being moved to market, adding to inflation.

To address this:
First I’m releasing our strategic reserves. That won’t last forever but will buy us time.
Second I’m authorizing a ramp up of domestic oil production. Fuel prices won’t fall instantly but as our production goes up and we replenish the strategic oil reserves I expect the prices to start dropping.
Third We will reduce our oil purchases from Russia. This will move us toward energy independence and simultaneously apply more pressure to Russia to stop their war in Ukraine.

This is not a short term fix, I ask all America to be patient. I call upon those companies with workers who can work remotely to delay bringing workers back into the office. That will help offset fuel demand and possibly reduce carbon emissions during this transition. If we work together, we’ll come through just fine.”

A simple statement like that would have been commanding and shown leadership. It would have shown there was a plan and even if that plan didn’t work, Americans would have accepted it, and tried to make it work.

Similar statements on just a few key issues would have made all the difference to me, and my opinion of Biden’s leadership.

There was no need for Biden to make anything more than a passing statement about the Ukraine conflict. He could acknowledge it and move on. After all, this speech was about the state of our union not necessarily world events. That’s what speeches at the UN are for.

I’ve included a transcript of the speech from Yahoo News, here.

Re-reading the SOTU. I felt like the Biden Administration was going down a laundry list, not of issues, but of special interest groups.

One item I warmed up to was making the VA work toward linking Toxic exposure from burn pits to disease ravaging our troops after they return from war. This is a problem that the VA has swept under the rug for a very long time. It’s not right that our troops should return home only to be driven into poverty by medical bills because the VA denies the problem is related to our improper disposal of known toxic materials.

Generally, this SOTU left me cold and disheartened.