Think Technology Just Saves Time? Think Again!

Lara Logan’s warning on “X” yesterday:

Contact tracing is surveillance. Your phone, ipad, laptop etc – all surveillance devices. Your cameras, Alexa, Google Nest – surveillance devices. The computers in your car? Surveillance devices. Smart dishwasher, smart thermostat, smart fridge etc? Surveillance devices. If you use technology to lock and unlock your front door….do you realize you can be locked out of your home by whoever controls that technology? Anytime they want. If you think you’re doing nothing wrong so it does not matter that you are being surveilled, then it is possible you literally do not have a brain. Wait until you are surveilled 24/7 by AI, every move, every thought, every wish, everything. AI will control the power, water, transport, education, information, entertainment, access to food – all of it. You will no longer be giving commands to Alexa – Alexa will do whatever those behind the technology want. Your needs & wants & your current ability to direct technology will be a thing of the past. If you did not write the program, you have no power. If you do not own the cables, software & physical infrastructure that moves data, you have no power. Unless you stop the techno power grab while we still can. It’s only inevitable if you surrender while there is still time to protect humanity from the humans driving this threat. Lara Logan on “X”

An Updated SITREP

SITREP means “Situation Report” and here’s an update of just how bad things are under this administration. It’s in the form of a simple list of things we’ve all heard about. There’s just so much, however, that it’s a fog of acidic filth and it’s difficult to keep tabs on everything. That’s of course exactly how the Left wants it…create so much chaos that as more and more people give up fighting, government will step in to take everyone under wing and “save us.”

See if any of these things have fallen off your radar:

Fundamental Transformation
The Laptop
Obamacare
Energy Dependence
Tech spying and intrusion
Afghanistan
China
Military Wokeness
Police Resignations
California’s demise
Chicago’s demise
The 1619 Project
Critical Race Theory
LGBTQ++
The Open Border
Stolen/Rigged Elections – You honestly believe Biden got 81 million LEGITIMATE VOTES???
Judicial Activism – Soros’ prosecutors and judges unhinged
Persecution of Christians and Jews
Radical Envirofascism
Snowflakes
COVIDIOCY
Tech Censorship
Social Media Addiction
Government Unions
The World is Laughing at Us
FBI abuse of power – 51 Signers, they won’t tell us who brought the cocaine into the White House???
Biden’s Dementia and physical incapacity
Kamala Harris – Border and now AI Czar! “AI is two letters that mean artificial intelligence…” So profound!
AOC
The Squad
Joy Behar, Adam Schiff, Anthony Fauci, Stacy Abrams, Louis Farrakhan, Greta Thunberg, Al Sharpton, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and so many other grifters, incompetents, liars and anti-American idiots I can’t even list them all!
CBDC (that’s Central Bank Digital Currency)
The war on the suburbs
Biden’s forgiveness of student debt despite the Supreme Court Ruling
Transgenderism/Child Mutilation
Assault on Conservatives (Rand Paul, Justice Thomas, etc.)
BLM
ANTIFA

Need I go on?

God help us!

Blackout

The attack on the electricity substation in Moore County, North Carolina this past Saturday evening is precisely what I’ve been warning about for years. Conventional arms were used to blast away at transformers and other equipment at the site resulting in a blackout that persists three days later for thousands of North Carolinians.

If you take the probability and likelihood of a disastrous event and multiply it by the impact it would have you get what I call the “Disaster Index”. It’s a measure of just how bad a disaster could be. In arithmetic terms DI=I x P. So while the impact, and forgive the pun, of a meteor hitting the earth amounts to the highest imaginable I (an extinction event most likely), the probability or likelihood of such an event is PDS (pretty damn small). The Disaster Index is thus extremely small.

On the other hand, the impact of a Katrina-like hurricane is both high AND likely, thus the DI is many times greater than the meteor strike.

I have long stated that the event with the highest DI is not an EMP, Coronal Mass Ejection, Reversal of the Earth’s magnetic poles…all potentially catastrophic in terms of impact but, unlikely. Rather, it is a terrorist attack on the nine electrical grid substations in the country that, were they to fail or be knocked out simultaneously, would plunge the entire nation into darkness for upwards of three months. The knock-on effects of such an outage would create a chaos and “Walking Dead” scenario only Hollywood could dream up.

The attack in Moore County is being investigated as “vandalism”. Irrespective of whether the attack was that, or a deliberate vulnerability “test”, you can bet the many terror cells already existing in the United States took a very special interest in it.

Study after study have warned of the vulnerability of our power grid. Blackouts have already occurred that should have been wake-up calls that this kind of disaster could happen. But no, our government would rather…you fill in the rest.

God help us!

“We’re Fed Up”!

I came across this speech by Harriet Hageman, Wyoming Republican candidate to upset Liz Cheney and couldn’t find a transcript. It was so good that I transcribed the “we’re fed up” part of it myself from a Rumble video available here. It enumerates just about everything that stinks about the Biden presidency and the current state of affairs in our country.


“We’re fed up with federal government that doesn’t seem to work for us anymore.
We’re fed up with out of control spending.
We’re fed up with the radical Biden agenda.
We’re fed up with seeing young mothers and fathers who can’t find baby formula for their newborns.
We’re fed up with $6.00 gasoline, and $6.00 diesel
We’re fed up with a shortage of fertilizer for our farmers and the supply chain that has been broken by the incompetence of our federal agencies.
In short we’re fed up with inflation and all of the related monetary policies that have threatened to turn the greatest country on earth into a third world failure.
We’re fed up with the Green New Deal and the socialists who created it.
We’re fed up with the attacks on our fossil fuel and energy industries, the good paying jobs that they support, the incredible standard of living that they provide and the clean an abundant energy that they produce.
We’re fed up with an open border, with human trafficking, with fentanyl flooding our country, and illegal immigration.
We’re fed up with people, countries and organizations who believe that we are responsible for protecting the integrity of the border of every country on earth but not our own.
We’re fed up with Critical Race Theory, with boys competing in girls’ sports, with the radical abortion industry and those extremists who are willing to destroy the Supreme Court to prevent us from being able to protect life.
We’re fed up with the liberal media, Twitter, Facebook, Google, YouTube for blocking conservative speech because they know the democrats cannot debate the merits of the important issues we are facing including Covid 19, law and order, the 2020 election, and even the history of this country.
We’re fed up with people who refuse to recognize that socialism, wherever practiced, has resulted in the deaths of millions of people, abject misery and the destruction of everything good.
We’re fed up with our government and universities censoring conservative thought, cancelling debate and rewriting history.
We’re fed up with the corruption in the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA the NSA and the FISA court.
We’re fed up with mask mandates, vaccine mandates, the CDC, the NIH, the WHO and the misinformation campaign surrounding Covid 19.
And we’re fed up with Anthony Fauci.
We’re fed up with the politicians and elitists in D.C. who are getting rich while the middle class falls further behind every year.
We’re fed up with Joe Biden, with Nancy Pelosi, with Chuck Schumer.
We’re fed up with the democrats who want to destroy our country and take away our God-given rights as guaranteed to us by our constitution.
We’re fed up with the January 6th Commission and those people who think they can gaslight us. We’re fed up with those types of republicans who work harder to deflect the failures of the current administration than they work to protect us from it.And we’re fed up with Liz Cheney.”

GrumpsReport Now On GETTR

Dear Readers. Things are moving so fast (still downhill I’m afraid) that to comment and remain current on breaking news and the vast array of insanity infecting society, we have elected to (gulp) dip our toe into the mayhem of social media by establishing an account and presence on the relatively new platform called GETTR. (https://gettr.com/). Enroll and look up Grumps and/or @GrumpsActual. There you’ll see all our commentary.

As our blood pressure rises and corpuscles boil, we’re able to respond/comment/rail quickly using this medium. The jury is still out as to whether we’ll stay on this platform, or any of the others for that matter: GAB, TruthSocial, Rumble, Parler, etc. but we’ll give it a try for a while.

Let us know what you think!

And hang in there!

Grumps

Misinformation, Disinformation, No Information

Chaos is, well, chaotic. Let’s face it, the Left has succeeded in screwing things up so royally that their strategy of creating chaos so as to make the most people dependent on them as possible is working. While some are just getting back to some sense of normalcy after the “pandemic”, getting used to responding to an alarm clock and heading back to on-site work, others are still cowering in kitchens and walking around in masks. There are still virtue signaling “Hate hath no home here” and “We Believe” signs on some lawns but they’re now cockeyed (Occasionally I see a Biden-Harris sticker although it’s usually on a Prius driven by a recycled hippie.) For the moment, gas is available though getting more and more expensive by the day. The truck convoy has been moved to the back pages of the media, and cat food is still hard to come by in the stores. Few at this moment are dutifully counting the number of illegal aliens slipping across our southern border. News channels compete for how “breaking”, how bloody their coverage is. Never has the slogan, “follow the money” been more apt. Even philanthropies are trying to exploit the chaos by flooding us with an unprecedented number of phone calls, text messages, snail and email. Selfishness and self-centeredness, “looking out for number one” have taken over.

It’s a mess.

With instant communication via the internet and social media, ANYONE can shape perception, thus reality. But how much more adept at “creating” reality are the pros in politics, government, Hollywood and the media than the average snowflake photoshopping an image to create a meme?

No matter how erudite the source, not one institution, organization or entity has a grasp of the totality of what’s going on. Politicians still pontificate, with even greater breathlessness and ever more shallow and poll-tested, made-for-the-cameras commentary. Never has the slogan “if it bleeds it leads” been more apt. And never before has information been so colored, absent or FAKE as it is right now. 

What’s happening in Ukraine is overshadowing everything at the moment. It may not tomorrow, when Ebola is announced in Santa Barbara or murder hornets are found in Barrington, but this morning it’s Ukraine Ukraine Ukraine.

We all can absorb and assimilate only so much input, so fast. Trying to sort out what’s real, what’s relevant, what’s actionable and what’s just entertainment takes too much time, time we might spend more usefully doing things that will give us greater growth, prosperity, security and meaning.

In 1931 the president of Columbia University voiced the categorization that “The vast population of this earth, and indeed nations themselves, may readily be divided into three groups. There are the few who make things happen, the many more who watch things happen, and the overwhelming majority who have no notion of what happens.” Doomsday Preppers are stocking their shelves for the Apocalypse. Snowflakes are creating “apps” to hold and collectively wring their hands. Others bitch and moan and drink and return to their old routines.

So, what to make of all this?

Our recommendation is to stop, take a breath and re-dedicate yourself to the tried and true principle of critical thinking. Rather than define this principle myself, I’ll borrow from the description found here.

“Critical thinking is an approach to gathering data and making inferences about the world. It advocates an approach of data acquisition and rational assessment. When applying critical thinking, the goal is to collect as much relevant data as possible, assess that data for accuracy, and finally use the data to arrive at the most justified conclusions possible.

Critical thinking is an ongoing process, and even ideas that one feels are well supported need to be occasionally reevaluated to see if new information might change one’s mind. For example, critical thinking eventually showed that Copernicus was correct in claiming that the Sun was the center of the solar system, even though many people believed this to be false at the time. However, this didn’t make him completely correct either, since more critical thinking showed that he was wrong on other things (he also thought that the Sun was the center of the universe).

Critical thinking uses many aspects of formal logic and informal logic. It also focuses on discovering bias, propaganda, delusion and deception (more generally, logical fallacies) both in the sources of one’s information and one’s own views and approaches to reasoning problems out.

Leftists conflate critical thinking with critical race theory and postmodernism, the latter by using verbiage that implies one needs to look out for meanings behind words and determining for oneself what occurs, while at the same time advocating that all reality is fictional and that one can create their own ideas and reality.”

In short, be a skeptic of EVERYTHING. Remember Grumps’ First Law of Experts:

“On any subject one can find a minimum of twelve, world-renowned experts who can cite documented, empirical, irrefutable evidence to support arguments that are diametrically opposed to one another.” Translation: “Use critical thinking, form and trust your own judgment.”

2022 Will Be Crazier Than The Last Two Years

What more needs to be said about how bad things were, not just in 2021 but in 2020 as well? On a positive note, the Silent Majority of grounded, traditionalist Americans started to speak up and speak out, throwing the BS flag, as it were, on the field. The Left so overreached, their stupid and destructive ideology was so exposed, we could remain silent no more! Previously quiet citizens and formerly reserved pundits took off the gloves and began to call out the idiocy and treason for what it truly was and, going into 2022, still is. Even some, albeit still a minority, of Trump-hating, head-in-the-clouds Democrats took down their Biden-Harris and Black Lives Matter virtue-signaling, lawn litter signs.

A rehash of all the moronic policies, actions and lies that saturated our lives isn’t needed here. It will be said many years from now that if in retrospect you didn’t remember 2020 and 2021, “you weren’t there”.

We must look forward and not just bemoan all that has transpired to “fundamentally transform” our country, but paint a new picture of what “could be”. The reason the Right in 1994 was successful in taking back the House after 40 years in the wilderness was The Contract With America. Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey’s positive message is what carried the day, not a continued condemnation of the destructiveness of the Left.

We need to give people one-liners and mental images of What Could Be in America. And while an old timer like me would suggest a return to what was, for my kids and grandkids the vision has to be one which takes into account the changes (some would say advances, but I question whether they were!) that have occurred over the last ten to fifteen years.

Technology, for better or for worse, has marched inexorably on, invading every aspect of our/their lives. In my opinion its impact has done more to transform our society than all the Leftist nonsense. However, it gave the Left an unprecedented platform from which to manipulate the increasingly addled minds of what have become known as “The Sheep”.

We must show how fundamental principles of honesty, self-reliance, meritocracy, thrift, traditional families, uncensored history, the Golden Rule and all the rest of the traditional norms and values that made America the greatest country the world has ever known, can and will create a more prosperous, peaceful and equitable society. Slowly, but increasingly evident, this is happening.

We need new heroes. I’ve said this many times before, but the reality is that peoples’ attitudes are shaped by pop-culture and celebrity figures. We need to draw clear distinctions between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys. Pull heart strings and create gut reactions that reinforce traditional values, not seek to destroy them. The Good Guys need to expose all that’s wrong with the utopian fantasy and triumph over the encroachment of Evil represented by Leftist tyrrany. They need to be the kind of heroes who Gen Z’rs can tweet about, establish memes about, get excited about, align behind.

These heroes should NOT be politicans. Nor should they be reality show celebrities, pundits, Hollywood actors or flamethrowers. They will be more like Edward Durr, the 62 year old union truck driver who last November toppled the longest-serving Democrat Senate president in New Jersey history after spending pennies on his campaign. Or they will be like the eminently brilliant and sober Condoleeza Rice, a patriotic American woman who cannot be pigdeon-holed as a political operative. They will be John Wayne for the New Millennium. While Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz and similar outspoken Republicans will still bevvery much needed to draw headlines and bring attention to the failures of the Left, a new breed of leader is needed.

They need to be worthy of celebrity status but not because they seek it. They need to be attractive, articulate, positive, strong, quick-witted, exceptionally knowledgeable, tireless, patriotic, plain-spoken…a tall order to be sure.

I’m not sure what will happen this coming November. I fear the Right is being far too cocky already – a recipe for disaster. And speaking of disasters. It’s clear the Left/Democrats will do ANYTHING for power, American values, traditions and proven successes be damned. Just wait. Perhaps it will be “The Fungus”, or something external like an actual invasion of Ukraine or Taiwan, the Iranians testing a nuke or some other crisis. The Democrats will exploit it mercilessly and without reservation. And since the ends justify the means to them, they will lie, cheat, steal, and use every vicious and deceitful tactic in their arsenal to fight for their malicious agenda.

Gird your loins traditionalists.

2022 is going to be one hell of a ride as well but if we can use technology and social media to create that positive agenda, we’ll prevail in taking our country back!

We Get It – You CAN’T Speak Up!

Your livelihoods demand your silence. Speak out and you don’t just face ostracization but the potential loss of your employment. You see what’s going on in the country, but your employer, be it a public or private one, will overtly fire you or surreptitiously label and mark you if you don’t tow the leftist party line. The cancer has spread so far that iconic American companies have gone woke.

Why have they done that? Marketing. Some years back it was environmentalism. Companies had to demonstrate how ‘green’ they could be. That was yesterday’s woke. Today it’s jumping on the defund the police or LGBTQ+ bandwagon. Speak up and tell your employer how you REALLY feel about these topics and you do so at your own peril.

What’s so insidious about all this silencing is that the Damocles sword hanging over your head allows the evil to spread – silence equals tacit approval. But aside from an extremely small number of individuals who are so repulsed by the leftist agenda they’d rather suffer the consequences of quitting their jobs instead of putting up with the constant diet of idiocy, the majority of us keep quiet, bite our tongues and draw our paychecks.

The frustration I hear of teachers who are forced to deliver a curriculum they know is toxic for the children they teach, that of police officers I know who are forced to work with both hands tied behind their backs, the productive rank and file who are being told they can’t come to work unless they get the vaccine…all have muzzles on their faces, unable to say what they really think.

One of the things the Left is so good at is setting up a demagogue who can fill the heads of a critical mass of gullible, brain-addled sheep to believe their lies and drivel. These become acolytes and because they gravitate towards others who nod and go along to join the crowd and feed their other-directed egos by joining the team, they clump together and speak the dogma and talking points to create memes. These are then amplified by the media and whoosh, the Leftist drivel becomes gospel. It’s because of their collectivist hivemind that the weak losers of the Left become lemmings and don’t even know they’re headed to the sea and certain destruction. They just play follow the leader.

But it’s effective, because the demagogues thus have numbers on their side. In elections, that’s what matters. Millions of unthinking, weak-minded sheep follow the shepherds and in the aggregate, the Left prevails. That demagogue Jonathan Gruber, so-called architect of Obamacare, famously revealed the truth when he said “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage…And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass.”  

The last thing the Democrats want is for people to question their diktats. Through lies, deceit and manipulation, not to mention high production values, clever slogans and memes, the Left pushes and pushes, screams louder and louder, uses its tech power to silence/cancel opposition, essentially saturates and carpet bombs the airwaves, billboards, cocktail party speech to petulantly, obstinately get their way.

So the Left, a.k.a. Democrats, prevail.

On the Right, because of individualism, self-reliance, critical thought, justified skepticism, we deliberate before acting, we consider others and the nation as a whole, we don’t clump and recite the canon. Thus it’s a lot harder to organize and control the masses. This hurts during an election.

But wait. Look at what’s happening in school board meetings around the country. Pushed over the edge, parents who would ordinarily never speak up have coalesced and with one voice thrown the bullshit flag onto the field. The Southwest pilots, in another display of solidarity, were able to send a strong message to the airline’s management by walking out en masse. Street cops and firemen in New York are together defying the vaccine mandate.

In other words, if the Right sets its mind to it, or gets pushed too far, the Left will get a taste of their own medicine.

This coming Tuesday’s election for governor in Virginia will be a real harbinger. First, it will be a test as to whether sufficient pressure has been generated by the outcry from November 2020 to ensure the vote is honest and fair. Second, if Youngkin, the GOP candidate, prevails, decisively, it will be another example of the repudiation of Leftist authoritarianism and nonsense, and perhaps represent a push of the pendulum to the Right. Third, it will demonstrate how the Right can succeed in vanquishing the Leftist behemoth.

We can only hope.

Act Now Or Forever Hold Your Peace

Some of my readers have asked recently why my posts come in bursts and why they seem to have tapered off in recent months. The answer is simple. Actions speak louder than words. I have markedly stepped up my activities that, for lack of a simpler description, consist of championing the “Let’s Go Brandon” movement. And if you don’t know what that slogan means, you have your head in the sand and should pull it out and look it up. It’s not just an anti-administration motivation that drives me. It’s the recognition that despite my reservations, despite the impingement on my time and energy, I must actually DO something, not just talk about it.

So I have. I have worked to expand my network of like-minded people also disgusted by what they see transpiring before their eyes. We meet regularly and discuss the atrocities of the day and what our extended networks are telling us about leftist overreach and right-minded push back. We talk about contingency plans. We speak in public settings (e.g. in bars, restaurants, at the grocery store) openly and unabashedly about the toxic drivel coming out of the Biden administration, the lies, deceit, misinformation of the main stream media, and we openly applaud those who sport patriotic tee shirts and hats.

And here’s something I’ve learned. As angry as I am about the Democrat daily atrocities, I’ve found that the Democrats who surround me respond better to subtle encouragement rather than overt condemnation. As much as I’d like to grab them by the neck and rub their noses in the excrement they’ve left all over the ground, I’ve found a better formula, one that doesn’t corner and confront them, but that gives them an escape route.

For example, the other day I was deployed as a member of our community emergency response team and as we worked on setting up our equipment I overheard one of the members say something about attending a Democrat meeting of one sort or another. As the conversation ended and the Democrat and I came in close proximity to one another, I said to him, “Wow Bob, I would have never pegged you for a Democrat.” His expression was priceless. It was clear he was embarrassed to have been outed!

My statement was, of course, both a compliment as well as a dig. I acknowledged he was a good guy, with smarts and skills and organizational ability, while also pointing out my surprise that anyone possessing these attributes could be a Democrat!

I’m encouraged by the fact that there are more and more traditionalist/conservative blogs, videos and other forms of media published every day. As I’ve often stated, there are many who’s ability to articulate the outrage we all feel far surpasses my own, and it’s clear, reading or viewing their work, that we all have similar sentiments. Thus, I’ve frequently begun a post only to find that someone has already covered what I want to say, and far better than I could.

I’m tempted, and may in fact act on this, to add a curation feature to GrumpsReport. Curation, by the way, is one of those terms, usually applied to the selection of displays in a museum, that the tech world has co-opted and abused. But its apt. What I’m suggesting is the establishment of a section with links to specific articles, videos, tweets, etc. that are particularly intriguing, thought-provoking or bile-inducing. Thus, my readers will have a sense of what I’m made up of.  As we all know, “we are what we consume”, and that goes for what we read, watch and listen to as well.

In the meantime, please understand that the fewer hours I spend writing the more I spend actually doing something about the stuff I’m so pissed off about!

I hope you’ll join me in DOING SOMETHING. Speak up, act out, join with, and by all means, help the unfortunate (I’m being extremely generous) Democrats and independents who think that everything’s just swell to wake up, open their eyes, filter out the bs they’re consuming and start thinking with their heads instead of other parts of their anatomies.