The come back Pen and paper

[FlickerOfLight]

I have chosen this forum for this thought because I believe one day we will come back to the pen and paper being a widely used form of communication. 

We are entering a new phase. A phase of total control through the digital world. Every word we type at this point is monitored, saved, all used for counterintelligence and all fed to AI for the future punishments to come. Everything we do now is digital, and soon even our money will be digital. They will have total control when this happens.

Since most of us do not have the tech knowledge to cover tracks and "go dark" I see a future where the pen and paper, as well as the "messenger" making a come back.

Pen and paper will be impossible to monitor on any affective level.

I see a future where we will communicate through the old fashioned  handwritten letter. 

It will end up being the only way for "sensitive and private" information to be passed.

The pen and paper will make a comeback. 

Watch how they'll make it "illegal."

Our future...¿

[Ninurta]

Already happening here. Local underground cells use handwritten comms and dead-drops. Couriers for known contacts. I've seen their "flags" hanging for when a message is in a dead-drop, although I have no idea of where the dead-drops are..

I reckon they're getting ahead of the curve to be ready for when the balloon goes up.

.

[Bally002]

I'm Prode of me, my, reddin and writtin. I tuk the e v e l i n woodenhead sped reddin corse.

Bally)

[FlickerOfLight]

Already happening here. Local underground cells use handwritten comms and dead-drops. Couriers for known contacts. I've seen their "flags" hanging for when a message is in a dead-drop, although I have no idea of where the dead-drops are..

I reckon they're getting ahead of the curve to be ready for when the balloon goes up.

.

Damn, brother, what kind of cells you talking about? Sounds like something that needs to be reported.   And as always, it you can tell you've worked in ci. Most people would never pick up on those suttle markings used.

---

I'm Prode of me, my, reddin and writtin. I tuk the e v e l i n woodenhead sped reddin corse.

Bally)

I'll be honest, I'm not 100% sure how to interpret this. I mean, I get it. I can read what you were shooting for. Just not sure how it fits into the OP thought. My first thought about it was, was that a personal jab of some sort; maybe at my southern dialect. lol 

If so, no worries. If it's an internet joke I would be unaware. I do admit to being a little puzzled to what your meaning is here.

Kind regards 

[Ninurta]

I'm Prode of me, my, reddin and writtin. I tuk the e v e l i n woodenhead sped reddin corse.

Bally)

I used to have that album




.

[Ninurta]

Already happening here. Local underground cells use handwritten comms and dead-drops. Couriers for known contacts. I've seen their "flags" hanging for when a message is in a dead-drop, although I have no idea of where the dead-drops are..

I reckon they're getting ahead of the curve to be ready for when the balloon goes up.

.

Damn, brother, what kind of cells you talking about? Sounds like something that needs to be reported.   And as always, it you can tell you've worked in ci. Most people would never pick up on those suttle markings used.

American Underground is the generic term. There are different factions, but so far as I know, this area has not been infiltrated to any great extent by Leftist undergrounds. Some small cells of them, but they mostly stay quiet. The only activity I've seen out of the Left is posting a couple of signs    (anti-police during the "defund" mania that struck the Left) near the railroad crossing here, which funnily enough were shortly riddled with buckshot.

Underground cells have been organized here since at least the mid-1970's. There may be a few white supremacists die-hards still around, and maybe some very few John Birchers left, but for the most part I think they're more of the MAGA strain. Time moves on, and people - and the organizations they organize - change.

Mostly what they are doing at this stage is watching folks, taking notes, and collecting intel on persons of interest... whatever that interest might be. That's the mode they've been in for at least the last 40 years or so. Their objective is to be ready to spring whenever the fuse is lit, not to take any sort of action now. They just sit, and wait, and watch. They just have the philosophy of "if anybody gets hurt here, I ain't gonna be the last one", and to that end, they gather information on potential threats, and potential allies, and folks that might need a bit of hurting - or helping - when the balloon goes up.

They just don't want to be surprised - surprises are for birthday parties, not life and death, y'know? - and want to be ready on that account to be able to "hit the ground running" so to speak when attacks do come. They don't want to get caught flat-footed, they want to be pre-organized and trained.

We don't generally report much of anything out here. We clean up our own messes if we can, and take an honest ass-whoopin' if we can't. When I was growing up, I saw the law about twice a year on average, and then they were just passing by. If we got into any kind of ruckus, it would take the law at least 40 minutes to get to our location, and that would have been 40 minutes too late if it were anything serious, so we just handled it ourselves.

---

I'm Prode of me, my, reddin and writtin. I tuk the e v e l i n woodenhead sped reddin corse.

Bally)

I'll be honest, I'm not 100% sure how to interpret this. I mean, I get it. I can read what you were shooting for. Just not sure how it fits into the OP thought. My first thought about it was, was that a personal jab of some sort; maybe at my southern dialect. lol 

If so, no worries. If it's an internet joke I would be unaware. I do admit to being a little puzzled to what your meaning is here.

Kind regards 

I think he was taking a dig at the modern education system. The subject of the thread is taking to reading and writing again in preference over electronic communications, and kids these days are no longer being taught that. They might be able to fly across a keyboard, but give 'em a pencil and paper... or a clock with hands instead of numbers... and they just stare at you like you suddenly grew a second head.

When was the last time you saw an actual typewriter, like an old Underwood, rather than a word processing program on an electronic gadget? See, all those electrons fly all around the world, and all of them fly through intel services (like Ft. Meade, Like ATT Atlanta, Like ATT Memphis, like ATT New York, etc) To get gobbled up and analyzed, but the WRITTEN word - either handwritten or typed on a good old air-gapped Underwood - is an alien concept to today's young-uns.

So, us older farts will be able to communicate via the written (rather than electronically typed) word, but kids? No such luck. They will be at a disadvantage.

The gag he employed to make that point is from an old Cheech and Chong skit parodying the quality of inner city "learning" back then, which I posted above. Probably gotta be one of us old farts to get that, too!

.

[FlickerOfLight]

Already happening here. Local underground cells use handwritten comms and dead-drops. Couriers for known contacts. I've seen their "flags" hanging for when a message is in a dead-drop, although I have no idea of where the dead-drops are..

I reckon they're getting ahead of the curve to be ready for when the balloon goes up.

.

Damn, brother, what kind of cells you talking about? Sounds like something that needs to be reported.   And as always, it you can tell you've worked in ci. Most people would never pick up on those suttle markings used.

American Underground is the generic term. There are different factions, but so far as I know, this area has not been infiltrated to any great extent by Leftist undergrounds. Some small cells of them, but they mostly stay quiet. The only activity I've seen out of the Left is posting a couple of signs near the railroad crossing here, which funnily enough were shortly riddled with buckshot.

Underground cells have been organized here since at least the mid-1970's. There may be a few white supremacists die-hards still around, and maybe some very few John Birchers left, but for the most part I think they're more of the MAGA strain. Time moves on, and people - and the organizations they organize - change.

Mostly what they are doing at this stage is watching folks, taking notes, and collecting intel on persons of interest... whatever that interest might be. That's the mode they've been in for at least the last 40 years or so. Their objective is to be ready to spring whenever the fuse is lit, not to take any sort of action now. They just sit, and wait, and watch. They just have the philosophy of "if anybody gets hurt here, I ain't gonna be the last one", and to that end, they gather information on potential threats, and potential allies, and folks that might need a bit of hurting when the balloon goes up.

We don't generally report much of anything out here. We clean up our own messes if we can, and take an honest ass-whoopin' if we can't. When I was growing up, I saw the law about twice a year on average, and then they were just passing by. If we got into any kind of ruckus, it would take the law at least 40 minutes to get to our location, and that would have been 40 minutes too late if it were anything serious, so we just handled it ourselves.

---

I'm Prode of me, my, reddin and writtin. I tuk the e v e l i n woodenhead sped reddin corse.

Bally)

I'll be honest, I'm not 100% sure how to interpret this. I mean, I get it. I can read what you were shooting for. Just not sure how it fits into the OP thought. My first thought about it was, was that a personal jab of some sort; maybe at my southern dialect. lol 

If so, no worries. If it's an internet joke I would be unaware. I do admit to being a little puzzled to what your meaning is here.

Kind regards 

I think he was taking a dig at the modern education system. The subject of the thread is taking to reading and writing again in preference over electronic communications, and kids these days are no longer being taught that. They might be able to fly across a keyboard, but give 'em a pencil and paper... or a clock with hands instead of numbers... and they just stare at you like you suddenly grew a second head.

So, us older farts will be able to communicate via the written (rather than typed) word, but kids? No such luck. They will be at a disadvantage.

The gag he employed to make that point is from an old Cheech and Chong skit parodying the quality of inner city "learning" back then, which I posted above. Probably gotta be one of us old farts to get that, too!

.

Ahh, I should have picked up on a Cheech and Chong reference. Damn I'm slipping in my own old  age. (47 lol) 


Good joke BTW,  now that I get it.

Sadly, it was part of their plan in not teaching our youth the necessity of handwriting. I actually find handwriting much much much easier than this typing crap. Dyslexia, these forums' set ups, and typing do not mix. I trained myself to catch my mistakes as I was writing by hand. Not so much in typing. I grew up in the 80/90s graduated in 95. So we had computers as a part of our education, but they were still rarely used, and so therefore everything was still hand written in school. I would welcome handwriting again. I actually sort of miss it, now that I thinking about it.

With this thought in mind, and now that I got the joke conundrum squared away, I have a another thought to add. I can even see it being illegal to teach someone to write, in the future. "Passing notes" will be a punishable offense.....just like it was in school.


As far as those lefty cells you mentioned-----yeah, they're of no real threat (for now). I was thinking cartel action, or something along those lines.


I sure am glad I live in a place that is mainly untouched by the outside world. Far far away, and deep, very deep in the woods. We don't even have internet/wifi out here. I used to hate it here. "The land that time forgot," is what I called it.

Now, I am thankful I ended up here, in the literal middle of nowhere. 

Old fashioned "neighborhood/community justice" like you mentioned. (We don't see the police much around here either) 

It's going to end up being a "God send" that I ended up where I'm at. Very difficult to find. Unless you know these woods. And very few do.

[Bally002]

Already happening here. Local underground cells use handwritten comms and dead-drops. Couriers for known contacts. I've seen their "flags" hanging for when a message is in a dead-drop, although I have no idea of where the dead-drops are..

I reckon they're getting ahead of the curve to be ready for when the balloon goes up.

.

Damn, brother, what kind of cells you talking about? Sounds like something that needs to be reported.   And as always, it you can tell you've worked in ci. Most people would never pick up on those suttle markings used.

American Underground is the generic term. There are different factions, but so far as I know, this area has not been infiltrated to any great extent by Leftist undergrounds. Some small cells of them, but they mostly stay quiet. The only activity I've seen out of the Left is posting a couple of signs near the railroad crossing here, which funnily enough were shortly riddled with buckshot.

Underground cells have been organized here since at least the mid-1970's. There may be a few white supremacists die-hards still around, and maybe some very few John Birchers left, but for the most part I think they're more of the MAGA strain. Time moves on, and people - and the organizations they organize - change.

Mostly what they are doing at this stage is watching folks, taking notes, and collecting intel on persons of interest... whatever that interest might be. That's the mode they've been in for at least the last 40 years or so. Their objective is to be ready to spring whenever the fuse is lit, not to take any sort of action now. They just sit, and wait, and watch. They just have the philosophy of "if anybody gets hurt here, I ain't gonna be the last one", and to that end, they gather information on potential threats, and potential allies, and folks that might need a bit of hurting when the balloon goes up.

They just don't want to be surprised - surprises are for birthday parties, not life and death, y'know? - and want to be ready on that account to be able to "hit the ground running" so to speak when attacks do come. They don't want to get caught flat-footed, they want to be pre-organized and trained.

We don't generally report much of anything out here. We clean up our own messes if we can, and take an honest ass-whoopin' if we can't. When I was growing up, I saw the law about twice a year on average, and then they were just passing by. If we got into any kind of ruckus, it would take the law at least 40 minutes to get to our location, and that would have been 40 minutes too late if it were anything serious, so we just handled it ourselves.

---

I'm Prode of me, my, reddin and writtin. I tuk the e v e l i n woodenhead sped reddin corse.

Bally)

I'll be honest, I'm not 100% sure how to interpret this. I mean, I get it. I can read what you were shooting for. Just not sure how it fits into the OP thought. My first thought about it was, was that a personal jab of some sort; maybe at my southern dialect. lol 

If so, no worries. If it's an internet joke I would be unaware. I do admit to being a little puzzled to what your meaning is here.

Kind regards 

I think he was taking a dig at the modern education system. The subject of the thread is taking to reading and writing again in preference over electronic communications, and kids these days are no longer being taught that. They might be able to fly across a keyboard, but give 'em a pencil and paper... or a clock with hands instead of numbers... and they just stare at you like you suddenly grew a second head.

When was the last time you saw an actual typewriter, like an old Underwood, rather than a word processing program on an electronic gadget? See, all those electrons fly all around the world, and all of them fly through intel services (like Ft. Meade, Like ATT Atlanta, Like ATT Memphis, like ATT New York, etc) To get gobbled up and analyzed, but the WRITTEN word - either handwritten or typed on a good old air-gapped Underwood - is an alien concept to today's young-uns.

So, us older farts will be able to communicate via the written (rather than electronically typed) word, but kids? No such luck. They will be at a disadvantage.

The gag he employed to make that point is from an old Cheech and Chong skit parodying the quality of inner city "learning" back then, which I posted above. Probably gotta be one of us old farts to get that, too!

.

Yeah, that's right @"FlickerOfLight"#259 .  It is my interpretation of todays young folk who don't write anymore and may have to read a screen or Cue words sorta like I see Biden doing.
@"Ninurta"#2 Yes it was in jest off the Cheech and Chong album which this old fart here has really never forgotten.  I often enough cite it when I hear someone attempting to read and I get that 'look'.

An  you  kin  tellem,,,yer, you heerd it here fir, firrrst on "RollerDerby".

Kind regards and in jest,

Bally.

[Ninurta]

Ahh, I should have picked up on a Cheech and Chong reference. Damn I'm slipping in my own old  age. (47 lol) 


Good joke BTW,  now that I get it.

Sadly, it was part of their plan in not teaching our youth the necessity of handwriting. I actually find handwriting much much much easier than this typing crap. Dyslexia, these forums' set ups, and typing do not mix. I trained myself to catch my mistakes as I was writing by hand. Not so much in typing. I grew up in the 80/90s graduated in 95. So we had computers as a part of our education, but they were still rarely used, and so therefore everything was still hand written in school. I would welcome handwriting again. I actually sort of miss it, now that I thinking about it.

With this thought in mind, and now that I got the joke conundrum squared away, I have a another thought to add. I can even see it being illegal to teach someone to write, in the future. "Passing notes" will be a punishable offense.....just like it was in school.


As far as those lefty cells you mentioned-----yeah, they're of no real threat (for now). I was thinking cartel action, or something along those lines.


I sure am glad I live in a place that is mainly untouched by the outside world. Far far away, and deep, very deep in the woods. We don't even have internet/wifi out here. I used to hate it here. "The land that time forgot," is what I called it.

Now, I am thankful I ended up here, in the literal middle of nowhere. 

Old fashioned "neighborhood/community justice" like you mentioned. (We don't see the police much around here either) 

It's going to end up being a "God send" that I ended up where I'm at. Very difficult to find. Unless you know these woods. And very few do.

I grew up in the 60's and 70's. My world was essentially computer-less as well. In 1973 or 74, I took a trip to the University of Akron to visit their computer. It was a monster. I don't know the specs, but there were 25 terminals in a room. The computer itself took up an entire air conditioned building on the other side of the campus. Nowadays, that much computer power fits in a wristwatch.



In the summer of 1977 I learned to program in BASIC at the University of Virginia. That was back when programs still had line numbers in them so that you could make sense of the program flow. To this day I can't write code without line numbers in it.



The first "personal" computer I ever saw was in around 1982. I think it was a Radio Shack TRS-80. The radio station I was working at bought it for the secretary to keep the books on. I think they gave around 8 grand for it back then. Dinky little screen, maybe 7 or 8 inches diagonal, and only spat out green glowing letters. It had two 5 1/4 floppy drives - remember those?



The first personal computer I had at home was a Commodore 64, in around 1986. A whopping 64 K of ram, no hard drive, and the floppy drive was external, connected with a cable... but it had a great big 320 x 240 pixel, 16 color monitor! The floppies were still 5 1/4" floppies, and they held a whopping 180k each of storage.





Then up to a Tandy 1000 EX in around 1988. Still no hard drive, but the 5 1/4" floppy drive was internal at least, and it was double sided so it held 360K of storage per disk. That computer quadrupled the ram up to a whopping 256K of ram!. The CPU was switchable, could run at 7mHz, or at a blazing 14 mHz. Not gigahertz. Megahertz. 1000 times slower than a gigahertz. The monitor was doubled - 640 x 480 resolution, 256 colors. It was in the tall cotton then!



In 1993, at the University of North Carolina, I learned to program in FORTRAN. Still using line numbers, but they were falling by the wayside about that time.



Still, with all those computers around, it was a comparatively computerless society when compared against today. The VAX that I programmed in FORTRAN on probably had less power than the average cell phone of today. You could escape computers just by walking out the door. The internet wasn't even really a thing until I got to the University of NC, and it was a novelty even then. The world was not connected and watching your every move 24/7. If anyone wanted to eyeball you across the internet, they had to connect to something near you across a phone line via a 56 baud modem, and information traveled at a snail's pace even if they could do that, unlike today.



But at least those modems would cheerfully sing to you while you connected!



Now, here, I can still walk out the door to get away from computers and the internet - but I have to walk east. If I walk west, I come to my car... and another computer. If I'm in a clear place with no tree cover overhead, when I look up, I never know who may be looking down.



When I first started talking to Grace, all of our telephone conversations were routed through Fort Meade, MD. That was when I realized that every word you type on a computer that isn't air-gapped from the internet, and every conversation you have on a phone, is being listened to and analyzed... and recorded for posterity by Big Brother. You either have to air gap your computer from the internet, OR hand write your messages, to escape the gaze that is always watching.



Even encryption is coming under attack. For years now, the government has had a wet dream that all encryption software will eventuially either have a back door built in that they can walk through, or else encryption keys will be escrowed with the government. There are ways around those of course, but for how long? The encryption these days is pretty good. The government can't crack it, so they want magic keys to decrypt it... or else they want to outlaw it. Doesn't matter, though - where there is a will, there is a way, and laws are made for those inclined to obey them.



They should think twice before trying to outlaw teaching writing. The south did that years ago, made it illegal to teach slaves to read and write. There was a big war over actions like that. A lot of people died. A lot of stuff got torn up.

=====================================================

The cartels are here, of course. I live on the boundary between two different ones - Jalisco to the east, and another to the west, in Kentucky. They keep a pretty low profile, though. They're in it for the money, and too much turmoil here is bad for business. This ain't Mexico. They had a house about a mile from here, in this same holler, but it only lasted for around 3 months before they just one day mysteriously disappeared. I guess they got to feeling unloved and left or something.

They do their runs up I-81. Delivery, cutting, and repackaging in little out of the way places out in the boonies, then shipped up to Winchester VA for distribution. There was a big ruckus a few years ago in some small podunk out of the way crossroads place in Southside VA, Axton I think the name of the town was, where a bunch of them and their American cohorts got rolled up. So, to avoid getting rolled up, they try to keep a pretty low profile. They may have small armies, but the key there is "small". If they went up against a bunch of pissd off and armed hillbillies, they likely wouldn't fare too well - and we've got a LOT of pissed off and armed hillbillies around here. Things are different in Mexico, which is why they can light the whole country up. Weapons are illegal in Mexico, so only the criminal have them. Shooting civilians when they are unarmed is like shooting fish in a barrel, so they do. Here it's different - there aren't very many unarmed civilians around here to shoot. Most of them will shoot right back.

Weapons are so illegal in Mexico that you can get 5 years in prison just for being in possession of ONE cartridge, even if you don't have a gun to shoot it out of. When that day arrives in America, all hell is going to break loose that very day. We don't care to get shot up by criminals like we were ducks in a shooting gallery - nothing to be done but fall down - so the day they try to disarm us, well, that's going to be a pretty interesting day.

.

[FlickerOfLight]

Ahh, I should have picked up on a Cheech and Chong reference. Damn I'm slipping in my own old  age. (47 lol) 


Good joke BTW,  now that I get it.

Sadly, it was part of their plan in not teaching our youth the necessity of handwriting. I actually find handwriting much much much easier than this typing crap. Dyslexia, these forums' set ups, and typing do not mix. I trained myself to catch my mistakes as I was writing by hand. Not so much in typing. I grew up in the 80/90s graduated in 95. So we had computers as a part of our education, but they were still rarely used, and so therefore everything was still hand written in school. I would welcome handwriting again. I actually sort of miss it, now that I thinking about it.

With this thought in mind, and now that I got the joke conundrum squared away, I have a another thought to add. I can even see it being illegal to teach someone to write, in the future. "Passing notes" will be a punishable offense.....just like it was in school.


As far as those lefty cells you mentioned-----yeah, they're of no real threat (for now). I was thinking cartel action, or something along those lines.


I sure am glad I live in a place that is mainly untouched by the outside world. Far far away, and deep, very deep in the woods. We don't even have internet/wifi out here. I used to hate it here. "The land that time forgot," is what I called it.

Now, I am thankful I ended up here, in the literal middle of nowhere. 

Old fashioned "neighborhood/community justice" like you mentioned. (We don't see the police much around here either) 

It's going to end up being a "God send" that I ended up where I'm at. Very difficult to find. Unless you know these woods. And very few do.

I grew up in the 60's and 70's. My world was essentially computer-less as well. In 1973 or 74, I took a trip to the University of Akron to visit their computer. It was a monster. I don't know the specs, but there were 25 terminals in a room. The computer itself took up an entire air conditioned building on the other side of the campus. Nowadays, that much computer power fits in a wristwatch.



In the summer of 1977 I learned to program in BASIC at the University of Virginia. That was back when programs still had line numbers in them so that you could make sense of the program flow. To this day I can't write code without line numbers in it.



The first "personal" computer I ever saw was in around 1982. I think it was a Radio Shack TRS-80. The radio station I was working at bought it for the secretary to keep the books on. I think they gave around 8 grand for it back then. Dinky little screen, maybe 7 or 8 inches diagonal, and only spat out green glowing letters. It had two 5 1/4 floppy drives - remember those?



The first personal computer I had at home was a Commodore 64, in around 1986. A whopping 64 K of ram, no hard drive, and the floppy drive was external, connected with a cable... but it had a great big 320 x 240 pixel, 16 color monitor! The floppies were still 5 1/4" floppies, and they held a whopping 180k each of storage.





Then up to a Tandy 1000 EX in around 1988. Still no hard drive, but the 5 1/4" floppy drive was internal at least, and it was double sided so it held 360K of storage per disk. That computer quadrupled the ram up to a whopping 256K of ram!. The CPU was switchable, could run at 7mHz, or at a blazing 14 mHz. Not gigahertz. Megahertz. 1000 times slower than a gigahertz. The monitor was doubled - 640 x 480 resolution, 256 colors. It was in the tall cotton then!



In 1993, at the University of North Carolina, I learned to program in FORTRAN. Still using line numbers, but they were falling by the wayside about that time.



Still, with all those computers around, it was a comparatively computerless society when compared against today. The VAX that I programmed in FORTRAN on probably had less power than the average cell phone of today. You could escape computers just by walking out the door. The internet wasn't even really a thing until I got to the University of NC, and it was a novelty even then. The world was not connected and watching your every move 24/7. If anyone wanted to eyeball you across the internet, they had to connect to something near you across a phone line via a 56 baud modem, and information traveled at a snail's pace even if they could do that, unlike today.



But at least those modems would cheerfully sing to you while you connected!



Now, here, I can still walk out the door to get away from computers and the internet - but I have to walk east. If I walk west, I come to my car... and another computer. If I'm in a clear place with no tree cover overhead, when I look up, I never know who may be looking down.



When I first started talking to Grace, all of our telephone conversations were routed through Fort Meade, MD. That was when I realized that every word you type on a computer that isn't air-gapped from the internet, and every conversation you have on a phone, is being listened to and analyzed... and recorded for posterity by Big Brother. You either have to air gap your computer from the internet, OR hand write your messages, to escape the gaze that is always watching.



Even encryption is coming under attack. For years now, the government has had a wet dream that all encryption software will eventuially either have a back door built in that they can walk through, or else encryption keys will be escrowed with the government. There are ways around those of course, but for how long? The encryption these days is pretty good. The government can't crack it, so they want magic keys to decrypt it... or else they want to outlaw it. Doesn't matter, though - where there is a will, there is a way, and laws are made for those inclined to obey them.



They should think twice before trying to outlaw teaching writing. The south did that years ago, made it illegal to teach slaves to read and write. There was a big war over actions like that. A lot of people died. A lot of stuff got torn up.

=====================================================

The cartels are here, of course. I live on the boundary between two different ones - Jalisco to the east, and another to the west, in Kentucky. They keep a pretty low profile, though. They're in it for the money, and too much turmoil here is bad for business. This ain't Mexico. They had a house about a mile from here, in this same holler, but it only lasted for around 3 months before they just one day mysteriously disappeared. I guess they got to feeling unloved and left or something.

They do their runs up I-81. Delivery, utting, and repackaging in little out of the way places out in the boonies, then shipped up to Winchester VA for distribution. There was a big ruckus a few years ago in some small podunk out of the way crossroads place in Southside VA, Axton I think the name of the town was, where a bunch of them and their American cohorts got rolled up. So, to avoid getting rolled up, they try to keep a pretty low profile. They may have small armies, but the key there is "small". If they went up against a bunch of pissd off and armed hillbillies, they likely wouldn't fare too well - and we've got a LOT of pissed off and armed hillbillies around here. Things are different in Mexico, which is why they can light the whole country up. Weapons are illegal in Mexico, so only the criminal have them. Shooting civilians when they are unarmed is like shooting fish in a barrel, so they do. Here it's different - there aren't very many unarmed civilians around here to shoot. Most of them will shoot right back.

Weapons are so illegal in Mexico that you can get 5 years in prison just for being in possession of ONE cartridge, even if you don't have a gun to shoot it out of. When that day arrives in America, all hell is going to break loose that very day. We don't care to get shot up by criminals like we were ducks in a shooting gallery - nothing to be done but fall down - so the day they try to disarm us, well, that's going to be a pretty interesting day.

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It's mind boggling to think how fast computer tech both grew and shrank all the same time.


If I remember correctly, in the book 1984, wasn't it illegal to write anything down that wasn't already scripted; or anything that was from your own imagination, if written down, or even voiced it was deemed illegal?

It's been a little while since I read that book, but it seems like that was a part of the narrative. 

Maybe I'm thinking of Fahrenheit 451? 

Maybe both.

I can absolutely see where, in the not so distant future things like hand written letters being illegal. As well as teaching the "slaves." That's what we are to them anyways. They still see us as that. Slaves. Cogs in a machine. 

Just like how the rise of computers how things grew and shrank in conjunction, we are both progressing as well as falling backwards at the same time. We are both evolving and devolving as a people.

If they are going to achieve total control, as we have all been seeing it and theorizing about it, then the pen and paper hand written stuff will have to be deemed as "illicit illegal material."

I predict within gen alphas lifetime. Maybe not in any of ours reading this today in 2024. But with the speed of progression and regression I can see this in their future. Possibly my own.