Country Comfort - Waimanalo Blues

I stumbled across this and like it.  Not sure if it's Country or not, but if it's finger-pickin' then you're at least Country adjacent. 

Tatiana Eva-Marie & Avalon Jazz Band - La Mer

11 Million views can't be wrong. 

Borepatch, you magnificent Bastard! I read your blog!

So Donald Trump seems to be following the ravings here.  Consider this post from December: 

In general, mid-term elections favor the party out of power.  This is true so often that it is almost considered a law of nature, particularly during a President's second term.  What you don't ever see is anyone ask why do voters reject the party in power in the mid-terms? There's quite a simple answer.

Fatigue.

The voters have had some time to get used to the Administration and starts to tire of the typical amount of scandal, incompetence, and general dum-assery that any administration accumulates.

That's not at all what we see today.  The main focus of the Trump 47 administration has been border security, deporting criminal illegal aliens, economic growth, and lower inflation.  There are remarkable results for all of these, despite the legacy media's frantic efforts to hide them.

Each of these are 80% issues - i.e. the issues all get 80% support in polls.

I would go so far as to say that the voter fatigue is on the other foot.  It's the Democrats who spent the last four years stumbling through a morass of dumb-assery.  And who are all on the 20% end of the issues that voters care about.

And here comes DJT with the State of the Union Address.  Here's the TL;DR version:

Boy, those Democrats are crazy, aren't they? 

You're welcome.

Johnny Horton - Battle Of New Orleans

We are fresh off of President's Day, and this is one of the few country songs that name-checks a President. 

Don't buy TP-Link home firewalls

This is pretty skeevy:

TP-Link is facing legal action from the state of Texas for allegedly misleading consumers with "Made in Vietnam" claims despite China-dominated manufacturing and supply chains, and for marketing its devices as secure despite reported firmware vulnerabilities exploited by Chinese state-sponsored actors.

The Lone Star State's Attorney General, Ken Paxton, is filing the lawsuit against California-based TP-Link Systems Inc., which was originally founded in China, accusing it of deceptively marketing its networking devices and alleging that its security practices and China-based affiliations allowed Chinese state-sponsored actors to access devices in the homes of American consumers.

Anyone who has ever ordered something from Amazon that looked like a good deal, only to discover that the photos weren't exactly depicting what you got - you know that the People's Republic of Chine (a.k.s. PRD, a.k.a. Red China a.k.a. West Taiwan) has a very different (dare we say "predatory") concept of truth in advertising than we do on these shores.

Me, I wouldn't buy one of these things on a dare.  FYI, they are something like 60% of the market because they're cheap. 

 

Photo Editing - A Tale in Three Pictures

 In the great digitization of all my family photos I came across this image.

 The story is that the boy in the picture was mad one day and he tore, crumpled, and poked holes in the picture. It was saved anyway because there not many pictures and you could still see the image.

I worked on it in GIMP, because Photoshop costs too much for how often I would use it, and managed, despite my woeful lack of skills, to get it looking like this.

  

 

This is how I put it in the archive I created, alongside the original. 

 

Recently, I read an article on using AI to repair damaged photos and thought of this image, so I gave it a try. The image I uploaded was this second image, the one I had labored over for a couple of hours. What I got back in about 90 seconds was this.

 

 

 

 

There's valid concerns about where all of this is going, and so much of the AI generated stuff on FB and YouTube is terrible, but this is amazing. I have a handful of pictures I scanned and saved because they seemed important to the family story in some way but are damaged, faded, or in need of color balancing. I'm hoping for more results like this.
 

 

Hallucinations come to Mass.gov

Okay, okay - Mass.gov has been hallucinating for years and years.  But now they're automating things:

Today, Governor Maura Healey announced the launch of the ChatGPT-powered Artificial Intelligence (AI) Assistant for the state’s workforce, with the goal of making government work better and faster for people.  

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL." 

Louis Jordan - You Can't Get That No More

Is this plausibly the first rap song?  Probably not because it's actually a fun listen. 

Spotted by The Queen Of The World.

Secure Your Home Network: Why Mint Linux?

I've recommended Mint Linux before, but this is a great overview of why users new to Linux should consider Mint.

Tomorrow we'll talk about how a seasoned IT guy has moved from Windows to Linux.  Spoiler alert: it's less technical work to make Linux work right than it is to make Windows work. 

President's Day - Best and Worst Presidents

I've posted this each President's Day for quite some time but have found no reason to adjust the rankings.

It's not a real President's birthday (Lincoln's was the 12th, Washington's is the 22nd), but everyone wants a day off, so sorry Abe and George, but we're taking it today.  But in the spirit intended for the holiday, let me offer up Borepatch's bestest and worstest lists for Presidents.

Top Five:

#5: Calvin Coolidge

Nothing To Report is a fine epitaph for a President, in this day of unbridled expansion of Leviathan.

#4. Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson is perhaps the last (and first) President who exercised extra-Constitutional power in a manner that was unambiguously beneficial for the Republic (the Louisiana Purchase).  He repealed Adam's noxious Alien and Sedition Acts and pardoned those convicted under them.

#3. Grover Cleveland. 

He didn't like the pomp and circumstance of the office, and he hated the payoffs so common then and now.  He was so famously incorruptable that he continually vetoed pork spending (including for veterans of the War Between the States), so much so that he was defeated for re-election, but unusually won a second term later.  This quote is priceless (would that Latter Day Presidents rise so high), on vetoing a farm relief bill: "Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character."  I highly recommend his biography Man Of Iron.

#2. Ronald Reagan

He at least tried to slow down the growth of Leviathan, the first President to do so in over half a century (see entry #5, above).  He would have reduced it further, except that his opposition to the Soviet fascist state and determination to end it cost boatloads of cash.  It also caused outrage among the home grown fascists in the Media and Universities, but was wildly popular among the general population which was (and hopefully still remains) sane.

#1. George Washington

Could have been King.  Wasn't.  Q.E.D. 

Bottom Five:

#5. John Adams.

There's no way to read the Alien and Sedition Acts as anything other than a blatant violation of the First Amendment.  It's a sad statement that the first violation of a Presidential Oath of Office was with President #2. 

#4. Woodrow Wilson.

Not only did he revive the spirit of Adams' Sedition Acts, he caused a Presidential opponent to be imprisoned under the terms of his grotesque Sedition Act of 1918.  He was Progressivism incarnate: he lied us into war, he jailed the anti-war opposition, he instituted a draft, re-instituted segregation in the Civil Service, and he was entirely soft-headed when it came to foreign policy.  The fact that Progressives love him (and hate George W. Bush) says all you need to know about them.

#3 Lyndon Johnson.

An able legislator who was able to get bills passed without having any real idea what they would do once enacted, he is responsible for more Americans living in poverty and despair than any occupant of the White House, and that says a lot.

#2. Franklin Roosevelt.

America's Mussolini - ruling extra-Constitutionally fixing wages and prices, packing the Supreme Court, and transforming the country into a bunch of takers who would sell their votes for a trifle.  He also rounded up a bunch of Americans and sent them to Concentration Camps.  But they were nice Concentration Camps - well, we're told that by his admirers.  At least Mussolini met an honorable end.


#1. Abraham Lincoln.

There's no doubt that the Constitution never would have been ratified if the States hadn't thought they could leave if they needed to.  Lincoln saw to it that 5% of the military-age male population was killed or wounded preventing that in an extra-Constitutional debacle unequaled in the Republic's history.  Along the way, he suspended Habeas Corpus, instituted the first ever draft on these shores, and jailed political opponents as he saw fit.  Needless to say, Progressives adore him.

So happy President's Day.  Thankfully, the recent occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue haven't gotten this bad.  Yet. 

A Libertarian Valentine's Day

LOL.

LOLOLOLOL.