Some years ago, BIAD and I were involved in a collaborative writing project, a Space Opera, at TOS. One Christmas, I think it was around 2012 or 2013 - but I could be misremembering that - the story took a turn towards Christmas at around Christmas time. What follows is a rescention of that segment of the story.

This version is a re-working of the original by BIAD, and a further re-working (purely for formatting) by myself.

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Part the First:


'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse; that's how Clement Clark Moore's poem begins. But have any of you ever pondered on what really happened on that unique evening before the advent of the Christ?

Throughout the ages, theologians and scholars have attempted to piece together the logistics of how the scene we call 'The Nativity' came about and what forces were available to create such a singular circumstance.

Here on Rogue Nation, we not only have the answers, we actually have the characters who witnessed the delivery and those attended a small incident that changed the world forever.

But I think you'll need a little background information to explain how these people ended-up spectating the birth and may I add, creatures did stir and it was a dilapidated barn, not a house.

Boy In A Dress told me most of it and any gaps were kindly filled-in by Ninurta. This was convenient considering both are the main characters in this story. Someone called 'Tibbs' is also referenced and from what I could understand, he was the brains-of-the-outfit. Not such a lofty position in view of the company considering Ninurta's fondness for violence and Boy In A Dress' weakness to wander from 'on-the-ground' reality.

Tibbs is a small humanoid who -dressed in a hooded robe and sporting thick-lens spectacles, travelled the many universes with an agenda based on jurisdiction and an agreed historical timeline. Apparently, certain civilisations were supposed to do this and other worlds were supposed to do that, I'd suppose one would wager all this would be written down somewhere.

Multiple variables are taken into consideration and I was given the impression that particular futures were mapped out by… well someone, to make sure a plan for a cosmos arrived at a specific point in time that was universally beneficial to all involved. Whatever that means!

Tibbs' tasks were to keep order and drive development for the betterment of these complex and ever-changing macrocosms. Which may explain why -when Ninurta and the Man-Girl first met the almost-three-foot tall, always-serious control-freak, the little male had just finished constructing a weapon to shoot God!

But I'm getting off track and I've just remembered something else that may be important. Tibbs is also known as a 'Vithian' and after many hours on the internet, I'm still at a loss to relate more on what that means. Maybe he comes from the planet Vith...? I dunno.

But what I do know -after some research, is that the three of them were in a craft traversing space and this was where Tibbs' scrutiny of some device caused the trio to slip back in time. Oh... there was a ship cat too, but that green-furred animal remained on the vessel called 'The Sprint'.

I think that's it for now... so let's get on with the tale. This story means no offence to anyone with a religious bent and should be taken in a entertaining aspect with its only goal to lighten one's day. Thank you to Ninurta who helped in creating the account and I suppose, thank you to the lunatic we call 'BIAD'.

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The First Christmas.

"Oops" said Tibbs and attempted to quickly crank the amulet's outer edging clock-wise. But it was too late. Ninurta had time to turn his head and BIAD looked up from picking at his dress hem as the device sounded it's singular click. The ship's cat managed to get under the pilot's seat just as the white-blue flash occurred.

They were gone.

The Sprint continued it's programmed course, but now without any human occupants. Sasquatch's green fur rippled from under the seat with a confused fear at the sudden disappearance and as the craft's mechanisms ticked and flashed their coloured bulbs, the eyes of the feline named after a legendary Earth-ape, gave nothing away of what it was thinking.
...........................................


"It's snowing" chirped Boy In A Dress and looked around in the cold darkness, Ninurta panned the barrel of his pistol around and during the scanning of the surrounding gloom, his hand grabbed Tibbs's shoulder and jerked him close.

"Okay little man, what did you do?" the grizzled Gunslinger hissed and lifted the Vithian up onto his tip-toes, the gunman's eyes flitting from right to left. The bare-legged hermaphrodite who announced the state of the weather moved to cover his compadre's rear and the unusual group stood in a survey position of a North-South-East posture, they were ready for whatever was going to happen.

Tibbs struggled with the robe's collar digging into his throat, so it was only a choking rasp that answered Ninurta. "Amulet... damaged tracer... time-slip" Tibbs coughed out and theorizing that the little man's cheeks above the snow-flecked beard were turning bright scarlet due to his stranglehold, Ninurta unceremoniously dumped Tibbs into the foot-deep whiteness. The Gunman's attention went back to the blackness of the situation and what crazy shit they were involved with this time.

BIAD shook his head dog-like to cause a sprinkle of snow to add to the half-hearted flurry that loomed from the night sky. Accepting his fate in his usual manner, the Man-Girl also stuck his tongue out to catch an icy flake. If he was wondering what to do next -just like the verdant cat back on The Sprint, there was no indication.

The prone Tibbs swept snow from his robes and tried to do it with some dignity, Ninurta's appetite for rough discourse was something he'd been warned about long ago and something he'd learned to endure. The irony of having the power to assist civilization and fail miserably when it came to the six-foot-tall man of the woods wasn't lost on him as he wiped his spectacles clean.

Peering up towards the subject of his musings, the Vithian realised something had caught Ninurta's attention and so, followed the pistol-pointing Gunman's gaze to a faint glow that winked from far off.

"It was an anomaly with the Tracer Ring..." Tibbs snipped and moaned softly as he got to his feet. "... the bauble must have taken some damage during one of your destructive treks". Tibbs fished about in his pocket and brought the shiny object out into the frosty air.

Ignoring the small man's sarcastic comments and the revealed-instrument of their current dilemma, the creature with the flimsy red attire and matching footwear leaned slightly forward as he also noticed the faint light. As Tibbs explained how the band of three odd people had probably passed through something he named a 'time-mesh', BIAD whispered to Ninurta "You think it's a torch?"

The hunter-eyes of the tall man slitted against the wind-driven flurry of snow and his lips became thin lines as he responded with "a lantern... maybe".

The small bearded man -realising his elucidation was being wasted to the blizzard and his less-academic partners, sighed and squinted down at the amulet. Producing a small object from his other pocket, Tibbs shone a tight beam of light onto the face of the broach and pondered where he and his friends were in time. It took only a minute.

"You can put the gun away -Mr. Ninurta... you have nothing to fear tonight" Tibbs offered with confidence. Putting the jewelry away, he suddenly turned to shuffle off towards the blinking light. BIAD looked up at his taller friend and tilted his head to show his confusion.
Ninurta offered a toothy grin and shrugged his shoulders. "Come on Boy, let's see what craziness lies ahead" he whispered with the nearest the Gunslinger could muster as enthusiasm.

Three sets of tracks showed their passage, a small shoe with a dragging coat, a large footprint with a long stride and odd-looking high-heel mark that occasionally indicated that the owner was hopping and possibly being silly in the snow.

...........................................
(To Be Continued)

Living the dream...

Quote:When David Glasheen lost his fortune in the 1980s stock crash, he packed a small suitcase and moved to a remote island. He’s been there ever since.



The first thing I learned about the ex-millionaire castaway is that he loves to talk politics.

For the first 30 minutes of our recent three-hour conversation — made possible by satellite phone — I was flooded with meandering ruminations on Ukraine, Elon Musk, and the global economy. I was speaking to a man who had many opinions, but nobody to share them with.

That’s because David Glasheen, 78, has, by his own choice, been marooned on a remote island in northern Australia for 25 years.

Before Glasheen moved to this island, he was a successful entrepreneur worth nearly $30m on paper. He says he had two yachts, owned multiple waterfront properties, and caroused with titans of Australian commerce.

Today, he lives alone for long stretches at a time, seldomly returning to the mainland. He sports a sea-swept white beard and forages for oysters barefoot and shirtless. His only permanent companions are two mannequins named Miranda and Phyllis.
What compelled a one-time multimillionaire to trade in luxury and comfort for a life of seclusion?

From riches to rags

Forty years ago, David Glasheen was at the peak of a successful career in business.
The son of a lawyer and a dietician, he grew up on the Sydney Harbor and enjoyed an idyllic childhood. After notching degrees in commerce and management, he went on to work in the tobacco industry, then launched an ice cream brand for an Australian dairy manufacturer.

“After some years doing that,” he said, “I was itching to ditch the corporate shackles and do my own thing.”


Glasheen in his late 20s, with his then-wife

Glasheen was approached by a friend with a map that supposedly charted the location of a gold mine in Papua New Guinea. Selling the promise of riches, he raised $2m in capital and launched a mining exploration firm that later went public on the Australian Securities Exchange.

In the speculative boom of the 1980s, the shares in his newly formed company soared from 25 cents to $1.40.
On paper, Glasheen’s net worth ballooned into the millions.

By conventional measures, life was a dream: He was happily married with two daughters, owned multiple beachfront properties in Sydney, and went on skiing excursions at lavish American resorts.

But the high times wouldn’t last.

The crash

On Monday, Oct. 19, 1987, Wall Street crashed, wiping out more than $500B in capital in 24 hours. The next day, the Australian market followed suit — and over two days, many stocks dipped 40%. 

Glasheen faced a serious predicament: Nearly his entire net worth was tied up in his shares.

As the chairman, he couldn’t pull out for fear of stoking even more panic among investors. High-risk investments like his mining firm were hit especially hard. He sat helplessly, watching his holdings sink in real-time, from $1.40 to $0.28, then eventually $0.02.

And things got worse.

Glasheen had been borrowing heavily on his properties to purchase more stock. “I’d put all of my chips in one basket,” he says, “and I was basically going fishing with others’ bait.”

The banks came knocking. And by 1991, he was evicted from his home, rendering him “homeless and penniless.”
The financial ruin decimated his marriage and fractured his family life. He started drinking. He grew irritable and distant.



Glasheen went through a period of “intense turmoil.” For several years, he slept on friends’ couches while cobbling together cash by brokering relationships in the mining sector.

Eventually, he moved in with a beauty salon owner named Denika and attempted to settle back into domestic life.
Soon, he found himself yearning for some kind of escape.

Restoration Island

As a child, Glasheen had been an avid beachcomber. He’d spent his days collecting shells, catching flathead and bream, and dozing off in the sand under the stars.

So when an old-friend-turned-real-estate-agent told him about a remote island for lease, it sparked a light buried in his soul.

The land in question — Maʼalpiku Island National Park, or Restoration Island — was perched near the northern tip of Queensland, a good 2k miles from Sydney. It could only be accessed via several flights in twin-propeller planes, a 25-mile drive over bumpy dirt roads, and a 15-minute boat ride from the mainland.

Glasheen first visited “Resto” in 1993, and he was at once enchanted and distraught.

It was like an island out of a cartoon of paradise: white sands, palm trees, turquoise waters. It was also in a state of disrepair, strewn with trash and crumbling structures.

A consortium of businessmen had purchased a 30-year lease on the island in 1979 for $156k. In 1989, they’d negotiated an extension to 50 years, in exchange for giving back the two-thirds of the island that was uninhabitable to the nearby native Kuuku Ya’u people.

Now, these businessmen were looking to sell their one-third stake for the sum of $1.2m.

Glasheen didn’t have that kind of cash. But he was able to convince a few investor friends to put up enough to sublease the habitable third of Resto. Eventually, he secured one of eight shares in the island, under the agreement that he and his partners would develop the land.


Glasheen’s abode, Restoration Island, sits at the northern tip of Australia, not far from Papua New Guinea (Google Maps)


His fellow shareholders had grandiose plans for Resto: a 60-bed eco-resort for vacationing Aussies. But the Kuuku Ya’u people — and Glasheen — found the idea to be repulsive. Eventually, the project got ensnared in a title claim and was halted.

For several years, the island sat empty and neglected.

Then, in 1997, Glasheen packed a small suitcase with a few shirts, some board shorts, a torch, and toiletries, and decided to move there on his own.

He never truly came back.

Life on the island

When he first moved to Resto, Glasheen was 60 pounds overweight and battling alcoholism. Now nearly 80, he says he’s in the best shape of his life.

With aqua eyes, a flowing white beard, and sun-dappled skin, he looks a bit like Santa Claus on vacation.


Glasheen perched atop Restoration Island several years ago

In the city, Glasheen was never a handy person. On Resto, he’s become a resourceful survivalist.

With the help of friends and visitors, he’s built a number of structures, including a main residence with a beached log foundation, a sheet metal roof, crates for seats, and a sleeping quarters that looks out over the sea. He stuffs his pillow with cottonlike fluff from local kapok trees
.

“On the island, even the smallest thing has a purpose,” says Glasheen. “Nothing goes to waste.”

Glasheen doesn’t consider himself to be retired; there is a lot to be done on an island. Once littered with trash, Resto’s shores are now tidy and kempt. He’s planted hundreds of trees — palms, poinciana, casuarina — and takes pride in trimming his home’s small patches of grass.

He does enjoy several modern amenities:

• A makeshift shower utilizes water sourced from four storage tanks and pipes that are heated by bamboo chips.
  
• A gas-powered freezer, powered by a generator, houses perishables.
  
• A satellite dish provides phone service and internet — though the latter is extremely slow.
  
• A small boat, which he uses to venture back to civilization for supplies several times per year.
  

There are more than 30 sources of food on the island. Glasheen forages for beach almonds, wongai plums, and bush cherries. He gathers fresh oysters for lunch, and catches fish for dinner. 

He also brews his own beer, which he occasionally barters with passing fishermen in exchange for crayfish and prawns. He takes pride in these negotiations, and says he once traded 12 bottles of grog (~$10 worth) for $400 worth of fish.

“It’s basic supply and demand,” says the ex-businessman. “If the fishos look tired and parched, I might charge a little more.”


Glasheen lives in a hut he constructed on the island (screenshots via ICI Explora)


“People romance the idea of paradise,” Glasheen says. But on the island, there are myriad things that can go wrong.

On land, he has to contend with mosquitoes, acid-spraying ants, and deadly snakes and spiders. He’s kept a succession of dogs on the island, two of which have been killed by venomous bites.

The water is infested with sharks and saltwater crocodiles, which often watch him as he goes about his day. “If you get chased by a croc,” he says, “it’s best to run in zigzags to throw them off.”

Glasheen’s routine is dictated by the weather.

During the wet season (November through April), frequent torrential downpours threaten his life. He’s survived at least three cyclones, the most recent of which (Trevor, in 2019) left the island in shambles.

Living this lifestyle has completely rejiggered his decision-making process.

“As a corporate bloke, you plan out every little decision months in advance,” he says. “On the island, you don’t have time to react. You must act quickly.”

Once tethered to schedules, Glasheen now only looks at the clock when he needs to know the times of the tides.


Several years ago, Glasheen fell, broke his hip, and had to get medevaced off the island

On occasion, Glasheen will host curious visitors and WWOOFers (roving farm volunteers).

Some, like the Austrian tourist who demanded 10 showers a day, had trouble adjusting to the castaway lifestyle and irked Glasheen. Others, like the marketing director who dropped everything to become a holistic healer, inspired him.

“I’ve met lots of young people who don’t know what they want in life,” he says. “They’re under pressure — racing around in circles and going nowhere — and they want some sort of dramatic change.”

He’s also enjoyed some famous company over the years:

• Fred Turner, the onetime CEO of McDonald’s, visited several times with a cadre of executives for bonding retreats. (Glasheen claims to have advised him on healthier menu options.)
  
• Russell Crowe stopped by on his honeymoon in 2003, while on a yacht tour of the Great Barrier Reef. (“He asked me for a picture, but I turned him down,” says Glasheen.)
  

Though Glasheen insists that he’s “secluded, not isolated,” he also admits that companionship has been a big sacrifice.

In the early years, his one-time partner Denika tried to share the island life with him. They had a son together, and she eventually left with the child. At the behest of a WOOFer, he tried online dating sites like Zoosk and PlentyOfFish. He didn’t get many bites.

He jokes that his “girlfriends” are two mannequins: Phyllis and Miranda. The latter, his main squeeze, was sourced from a junkyard for $10 and named after a character in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.”

They reside in his main residence, but the relationship is strictly platonic (“I do not have sexual relations with them,” he clarified in a book he co-wrote in 2019).

The most painful toll of island life, though, has been a fractured relationship with family. His son, now a 22-year-old DJ, seldom visits. A decade ago, one of his daughters took her life. It nearly destroyed him. 


Glasheen in his home, with Miranda and Phyllis looking on


For the past 25 years, Glasheen has essentially been squatting on this little contested piece of paradise.

In 2012, the island’s majority leaseholder, a fellow Aussie businessman, took Glasheen to court and won the right to evict him. But Glasheen, who has since gained the support of local police and the trust of the nearby native Kuuku Ya’u people, has managed to stave off forceful removal.

For years, he has tried to buy out the leaseholder so that he can build a healing retreat and gift the lease back to the Kuuku Ya’u. He reckons it’ll take somewhere between $500k and $1m to make that happen.

During his time on the island, he’s come to see money as a “false god.” But he’s taken on several side hustles in a bid to raise capital.

He’s hosted corporate retreats at $1k per head and offered real-life castaway experiences to men in mid-life crises. More recently, he’s dabbled in cryptocurrency and launched a GoFundMe campaign.

But like the beached wood that peppers Resto’s shores, the cash has dried up. And for now, his tenancy situation is a cyclone of uncertainty.

“Legally,” he says, “I’m a trespasser.”

A castaway by choice

Glasheen isn’t the only person to voluntarily maroon on an island:

• Masafumi Nagasaki, dubbed “the naked hermit,” lived alone for 29 years on a remote island east of Taiwan. In 2018, at the age of 82, Japanese authorities forced him to move back to the mainland due to health issues.
  
• Gerald Kingsland, a British journalist, and his companion Lucy Irvine lived on an island near Papua New Guinea in 1981 with few provisions and no water supply. They had to be rescued by local Badu islanders.
  
• Edward Banfield, an author and naturalist, moved to a secluded Australian island with his wife in 1900. They built a home and lived there for 23 years.
  

Glasheen surveying the seas


There’s a name for this phenomenon: Inverted Crusoesim.

The term is a reference to Daniel Defoe’s famous 1719 novel, Robinson Crusoe, which chronicles the fictional tale of a man who woke up from a shipwreck on a remote island, where he remained for two decades. (Crusoe’s plight was unintentional, hence the “inverted” part.)

Modern society has long been enchanted by tales of island isolation.

This obsession has spawned a whole Robinsonade genre (“Cast Away,” “Survivor,” “LOST”), which grapples with the themes of natural rejuvenation, escapism, self-reliance, and rugged individualism.

Most fictional castaways not only accept their fate, but also learn to bask in it: What begins as a prison becomes a sanctuary.
For Glasheen, the prison is now the world outside of the island.

The things he once valued — money, prestige, power — seem so distant and insignificant. What matters now is watching sea turtles hatch under a full moon, falling asleep to the waves lapping on the shore, and waking up not thinking about tomorrow.

“What would I do out there?” he asks, to nobody in particular. “Live in a tiny apartment? Trade the sea breeze for a ceiling fan? Not for me.”

Just throwing this out there.

If extraterrestrials have been visiting our planet for centuries and are among us, why would this information have to be kept hidden?

I can't think of any really good excuse for hiding that information. If suddenly the whole world was told, and it was proven that extraterrestrials exist and own this planet, how would that stop the Earth from turning?

Yes, very old conspiracy subject and I knew Leonard Cohen was part of the McGill University sensory deprivation experiments, but I had no idea well renown deep state, JFK researcher PETER DALE SCOTT was too (and hallucinated during it)...



One thing I found interesting about the sensory deprivation experiments wasn’t just the mental breakdowns, but also the hallucination of having “two bodies.” Again, you break someone down to the point of them thinking they are two bodies, what could you do with that?






Excerpts from the book:


It’s a fantastical link between mind control research and how it’s been utilized in modern day.

So, in Cohen's song "Anthem", the line about how "there's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in" now makes more sense.



I was a chosen volunteer in a sleep deprivation experiment while in the Navy, specifically during one of my "schools" though not placed in an isolation chamber. It'll be fun they told us and you'll get head of the line meal privileges. Awesome!! We were forced to stay awake while doing various mental puzzles with men in white lab coats, interrogations by men in suits & physical activity by hardened drill instructors for 72+ hours. When the program finally ended I fell into a coma for 36 hours. Out of a group of 12, I was the ONLY one who went into a deep sleep coma while being monitored by nurses the whole time. (or so that is what I was later told and I have to believe it because both my arms had IV syringe hole marks) When I awoke I had absolutely no idea where I was or how I got there, did not know my middle name and was unable to recite my SS# nor did I know the names of my dorm room mates. It all came back several hours later, but my big takeaway was I felt totally refreshed & invincible. Brain got a reset. Literally everything looked & felt different, in a good way or at least that was what my mind was having me see & believe. From fragmented memories I did have one of those "out of body experiences" where I seen my room mates and nurses hovering over my fast asleep body wondering if I was ever going to wake up! I could hear them talking but unable or don't remember what exactly was being said. I could see them playing cards while periodically checking my pulse, which I was later told was at a shallow, but steady 55 beats. My military medical record has an annotation of this experiment with a control file number. Years later out of curiosity I attempted to correlate this number to something with details but got the standard Navy runaround of being passed from office to office. Perhaps some things are better left buried.


Notably for the next several weeks I ace'd all my weekly exams, vaulting me to #2 in my class behind a whiz-kid female; which for me proved highly beneficial as upon graduation I got to choose my duty station command and how I got to live in the Pineapple fleet in Hawaii for 6 years. Interestingly, the smell of pineapple brings back those fragmented memories and nameless faces. True sea story, believe it or not.

With the threat of China controlling the high ground I for one have wondered how long it would be before the MIC and the politicians got together and showed some vision about mankind's future. Yes it is a long video but for me it was interesting and worth my time.

Neom (smart) City in Saudi Arabia - The Line Actually Begins Construction of the $1 Trillion Skyscraper.




HIGHLY recommended to watch this video:

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There is a tyranny looming, powered by technology. It's amorphous - you can't just point to a government or a company and order them to stop, it is a blobby, shapeless, ever-changing, landscape that is inexorably funneling us into control.

Social Media outlets are under the microscope currently, but the funnel is not limited to just them, or indeed anything. It is pervasively inserting tendrils into all aspects of society, much like an out of control ivy.

You don't like social media? You refuse to partake of it? That's good, but it's not enough. Not by a long shot. Do you have a phone? A computer? Do you shop or pay bills on the internet? Do you find your debit card a more convenient form of payment than cash? Maybe believe it to be more secure and resistant to theft? Think again. All of the above, and more, constitute the tendrils of insecurity and spycraft burrowing into your life.

We are all currently aware of the countless examples provided by social media, so let's take a look at a few other tendrils incessantly burrowing into your life, your very psyche.

Do you use "web-based services" like Gmail or "the cloud"? First, THERE IS NO CLOUD - it's really just other folks' computers, under THEIR control. It gives them defacto ownership of YOUR data, which is why "the cloud" and "cloud computing" is being pushed so hard. Have you ever noticed something funny about Gmail? I use it, and have noticed that if I sign into Gmail, I automatically get signed in the YouTube and several other web-based services under Google control... and they are gathering data, and correlating it together, from every single one of those places you get signed into.

Have you ever wondered about the option to "sign in with Google" or "sign in with facebook" that is increasingly becoming an option at many, many sites across the internet? It's being presented as "more secure" or "more convenient", but in reality it is there to give even more control over your data, to add to that ever growing profile on you.

Your phone. Most folks carry around a "smart phone" of one sort or another these days to avoid being tethered to a land-line, one particular location. Instead, they carry these "smart phones" that can go anywhere they go. Great, but look a little deeper... not only is that phone going everywhere with you, it is recording everywhere it - and you - goes, and phoning home that information for sale to the highest bidder.

AND - that information on you is stored on their servers... forevermore. It is constantly being correlated with other bits of information on you coming in from myriad sources, building a "profile" on you as if you are on the FBI "Most Wanted" list. You are being tracked, traced, and profiled like any common criminal.

It gets worse from there.

Think that YOU own your cell phone just because you paid for it? Think again. Whomever "owns" the operating system of it, whether Android, IOS, or what have you, is the actual owner of YOUR phone, and they will do with it as they damned well please regardless of your preferences. While Android is a variant of Linux, it is a PROPRIETARY variant of it, proprietary to Google. Same for iOS, with respect to Apple. They are locking down the apps you are able to install on YOUR phone to THEIR choices. The choke-hold tightens a bit more every day.

"Chromebooks" and the Chrome browser. They were all the rage for a while, and the browser still has a choke-hold on the browser markets. Both of them report all of your information to Google, which then factors that in to the above mentioned profile being constantly built and updated on you, your "digital self". I personally used a Chromebook for about 3 days one time before throwing it away in disgust. That was back in 2015, and even then the Chrome OS had taken almost all of the user control away from the user. It was good for surfing the net (so long as you didn't try to download anything or have any expectation of ever being able to retrieve what you downloaded), and phoning home with all your information gathered by the operating system and browser... and not much good for anything else at all.

Microsoft has, for years and years now, been trying to monopolize the operating system market. They've done pretty good at that, with most computers worldwide using Windows of some form or another - about 95% to 97% of ALL computers, worldwide. Now they are taking that a step farther, and trying to monopolize YOUR computers, the hardware YOU paid for, so that Microsoft owns it in reality, and will dictate what can - and cannot - be done with it.

This all started way back when. I became aware of it in 2002, 20 years ago, with the then fractious debate over "TPM chips". TPM stands for Trusted Platform Module, and the implication was that it made your computer more secure, more "trustable" for you to use, safe in the knowledge that you hadn't been hacked... but that was just the public-facing propaganda of it. The private, Microsoft facing meaning of "TPM" was that they could trust YOU to use YOUR computer in a Microsoft controllable and approved manner.

It hasn't gotten any better since those days.

Today's lesson is in how Microsoft is trying to lock all other operating systems out of the market, squeezing that last 3% to 5% into submission and eliminating them from the competitive marketplace. The video is around 55 minutes long, but if you have the time, well worth the watching to give you insight into what is going on, and how, with YOUR computers but THEIR operating systems:



I'm also well aware of how Apple is currently in dispute with the FBI over their encryption schema, refusing to hand over encryption keys to the FBI "without a warrant". Apple claims they are fighting for your right to privacy, but consider this: the fight itself confirms the suspicion that Apple is stealing your stuff. How could they possibly be expected to hand YOUR encryption keys to the FBI if THEY DIDN"T HAVE THE KEYS TO YOUR CASTLE TO BEGIN WITH? Apple is NOT "fighting for your right to privacy", they are instead fighting to maintain THEIR monopoly on YOUR data, pure and simple.

This thread is not specific to computers, cell phones, the internet of things, or any other single abuse of your data. Instead, it is a place to post ANY tendrils of techological, tyrannical control that you find are insinuating themselves into society, attempting to shape it into what The Oligarchs in charge want to see it become... a society of serfs and slaves. They don't want to control just your data, or even just your mind. In the final analysis, they want to control that AND your body and soul as well.

In order to do that, they intend to shape not just what you think and do, but even your ABILITY to think and do until it is finally restricted to corporate-approved Groupthink.

This is the thread to blow your whistles in when you see the tendrils coming, wherever you see them coming from.



.

I started a thread over at RN3 about Darlene a newly hatched duckling, back in June.

Darlene is doing just great. She is feisty and holds her own. She is smart enough to eat away from the group, because she is blind, and she finds it frustrating. I think she thinks that they are eating up all the food from her, but we make sure she gets her share and more.

I saw this video that reminded me so much of Darlene, I decided to share. Just more proof that perfection is not necessary be happy and to spread joy.

With the current manner that history is presented, it may be interesting to some that the border between
England & Scotland wasn't quite what the bland Historians of today say it was. Humans takings sides in a
particular quarrel isn't always black-and-white, there are grey areas where fellowship can be cultivated
and the realisation that blood is thicker than water becomes a credo.







Awaiting a fourth video!