Ironhold

I often write fiction on the side, with numerous "sandbox" projects to test out concepts and various projects seriously intended to be solicited. It frequently happens that I'll come up with something I think is unique and novel, only to later find out that I wasn't the first one. One of the more frustrating moments was naming a central character "James Longstreet" because I figured it would stand out, only to find a full month *after* developing everything out that there was a real-life Confederate general with that name. I basically scrapped everything entirely because I judged it too much work to come up with a new name for the character and redo all of my notes & paperwork accordingly.

MeTV is a digital side band station, and so check what TV networks you have in your area to see if any of them are broadcasting it. If so, you can get it through over-the-air antenna.

RetroCrush is another free service that specializes in anime, but you have to closely watch the age ratings in each movie's and show's individual descriptions as it's a rather random mix of kid-friendly and not-so-friendly (although anything they think to be truly TV-MA or equivalent is age-gated). Edit - Sinclair Broadcasting also maintains the STIRR app, which is a mix of live channels (including Sinclair's digital side band stations) and on-demand content. The last time I tuned in, this included content like "Joy of Painting with Bob Ross" and "The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson".

Earlier in the year a relative made a careless mistake, a mistake whose consequences simmered long enough that by the time anyone realized what had happened it'd boiled over into a huge honking mess. Every time it seems like we've resolved matters, a new twist or wrinkle comes up. It's not legal or anything else like that, but more a poor personal choice.

Each year, I try to do a Thanksgiving message in my weekly newspaper op/ed. Not only do I do this to encourage gratitude, it's also so that I myself can work on it (given everything I've been through in life, that's somewhat hard for me). I'm thinking of having this, the variety of content now available these days, be what I'll be talking about.

For those who don't know - A few years ago, the US government ordered all over-the-air television stations to transition from broadcasting their signal via analog to broadcasting their signal via digital. One side effect of this is the advent of the "digital sideband" channel or "diginet". What this means is that each individual over-the-air broadcast television station can have as many as eight additional stations broadcasting on allotted side frequencies. As an example: 6.1 local major network affiliate 6.2 diginet dedicated to classic programming from the 1950s - 1980s 6.3 diginet dedicated to regional sports programming 6.4 diginet dedicated to Spanish-language programming 6.5 diginet dedicated to crime dramas 6.6 diginet dedicated to Westerns 6.7 diginet dedicated to local, regional, and state news programming 6.8 diginet dedicated to home improvement and lifestyle content 6.9 diginet dedicated to travelogues and documentaries I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s. I remember that, even with cable television, there were times where we had only a handful of channels on television. ABC. CBS. NBC. Perhaps a local or regional independent station. A few cable channels like TBS, TNT, USA, Nickelodeon, The Family Channel, The Disney Channel and perhaps CNN, C-Span, ESPN, and The Weather Channel. I think it was well into the early 1990s before I lived in an area that had more than 20 or 30 channels available via cable aside from "premium" networks like HBO or Cinemax. Well, I got to looking at the various over-the-air television networks that broadcast in my media market and their assorted digital side band stations. If I was to put up a strong enough outdoor antenna (think a 1950s - style aerial) then I could potentially find myself with 30+ channels just coming in through the air for free... possibly more because I'm actually at the border of two media markets and so can sometimes pick up their signals as well. We're in a day and age where someone like me can - for just equipment and labor - pick up more total channels than I could have gotten with a cable television package 30+ years ago.

As I've mentioned earlier, I am on the autism spectrum. I am incredibly high-functioning, but still have some of the critical limitations. Among other things, this means that my threshold for stress is lower than that of a person with similar training and life experiences. It also means that once I get used to something being the way it is, it's more difficult than normal for me to make the requisite changes. I am, at present, going through a very stressful situation IRL that I'm not at liberty to discuss. Suffice to say that it's a very protracted situation, one that by all rights should have been resolved months ago but which is still dragging on. There are days where I am so worn out and at wit's end I find myself asking "How long, oh Lord?" as Jeremiah once did. All I can do is take matters one day at a time and trust that the appropriate outcome will transpire. But whenever I have a setback or when my next step doesn't seem clear, it can throw me for a while until I can center myself and move forward.

The issue is China's disastrous "One Child" policy. For several decades, China had a law in place stating that the vast majority of the populace could only have 1 child per couple unless they received special permission from the government. Many families responded by aborting or deliberately orphaning their girls because boys have a far higher place in society. This created the massive gender imbalance, to the point that many Chinese men have no hope of ever finding a wife. When situations like this happen, these men tend to get quite unruly and disgruntled. It's been speculated before that China might at some point deliberately start another war for the sole purpose of burning off their excess male population and bringing their numbers back into a rough parity.

On one hand, the Russian military has allegedly suffered such extreme casualties that they're offering prison inmates early parole if they agree to enlist. On the other hand, the war hasn't reached the average Russian citizen (that is, those citizens who do not have friends or family on the front lines) and the foreign companies pulling out represent a mere disruption as a number of Russian companies have moved in to fill the gaps, often with close knock-offs. It's going to come down to what collapses first: the Ukrainian military for lack of direct foreign reinforcements (those assorted mercenaries and whatnot don't count, as many are doing more harm than good), the Russian military for the high casualties, morale among the Ukrainian civilians, or the Russian economy.

Some months ago a would be "young radical" type was on social media talking about how farmers actually count as "petit bourgeoisies" rather than laborers because of how expensive tractors and other farm equipment are. Suffice to say that *he* very quickly became the butt of the joke as people tried to explain everything to him and gave up after the magnitude of his ignorance about how the world worked became clear.

For the record - As I've mentioned before, my dad was in the military. So for my first years of life I was on the move as he was assigned from duty station to duty station. While I did *technically* live in two major cities during this time, we actually lived in on-base housing. Being young, I rarely left the base itself aside from going to church; I did go with my parents to a few civilian shopping centers every now and then, but that was it. I finally came to settle in my current residence, a town near a military base in Texas, back in 1990 and have lived here since. This time, we were able to find off-base housing. The town itself is about 32,000 people, so it's not "small" by any means. However, we're on the edge of what could easily be considered a rural area... and yet we're not that far from a number of major cities either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copperas_Cove%2C_Texas Every so often, I'll encounter an individual from a major city who doesn't think too highly of smaller locales. Usually, this is a person who has never been outside of their major city, and so they don't understand what life is like for everyone else. In some instances, it'd be amusing if it didn't indicate the person's ignorance of the outside world. For example, several months ago an individual in the US comic book scene made a post on social media talking about how he didn't think he could live in a smaller town (he's from New York City) because he couldn't give up his favorite bodega. When people tried to explain to him that most mid-sized cities have convenience stores on par with the average bodega, he refused to believe it. In other instances, however, it's as if these individuals assume anyone who doesn't live in a major city is fundamentally flawed or damaged. For example, every so often I'll encounter a "green" type who tries to argue that people don't need cars when you can just walk or take public transportation everywhere. When I try to explain that the further you get outside of the dense urban centers the more spread out things are and the less likely you are to find effective and efficient mass transit, they generally develop an attitude and go off about how "If you can't walk there then you don't need to go there" or otherwise complain about the situation they perceive happening. Well, yesterday I was listening to a "Reddit Video" type of YouTube video, one in which people read stories they encounter on Reddit and other social media platforms. One of the stories came from a young woman from Nebraska. She was attending a large and respectable college that had people from many different places in attendance. However, whenever it came out that she was from Nebraska, the students from larger cities would inevitably treat her as an object of curiosity. They'd express their sympathies and then barrage her with questions, all of which were based on stereotypes. One day she lost her temper at a classmate from Chicago after a particularly juvenile round of interrogation, and responded by pointing out that many people see Chicago as a cesspool of crime and violence. She meant it as a lesson in how stereotypes can go both ways, but the classmate was moved to extreme emotion by this response. This has me wondering. Just how great of a divide is there between big cities and small towns, at least here in the United States? Is this divide a part of the larger reason why society seems to have such a hard time getting along with itself these days? Now, there is a perception that the divide is pretty bad in the comic book industry (see above), to the point I once proposed the prospect of "working vacations" in which publishers send select individuals to different cities to absorb some local flavor. But the more I hear and the more I speak with people, the more it seems like there's just a growing gulf in general.

Actually going up? Are you sure about that? I'm seeing red flags all across the horizon, and only *some* are being waved by college-age radicals. Japan's birth rate is so far below the replacement rate that the nation is literally in danger of being depopulated if they can't turn things around, and it's already destroying their economy. Many other First World nations are suffering from a critically low birth rate, and it's beginning to effect their economies as well. Meanwhile, a number of nations all over the world decided to take their nuclear reactors off-line before actually *ensuring* that they had alternative means of power generation in place, so they've just crippled large sectors of their economies. Canada is coming apart from the inside because Trudeau is showing how totalitarian he is and the populace is turning against him. Et cetra. We're in for some pretty bad times unless people start getting back to basics and comprehending how the world works.

Two words: Economic warfare. Just take a look at what's going on with Russia and Ukraine. These two countries by themselves account for well over half the global wheat harvest, while Russia's Gazprom is the number 1 oil and natural gas supplier for much of Eastern and Central Europe. By invading Ukraine, Russia is starving the world out because Ukrainian wheat can't get through and no "respectable" nation wants to buy Russian wheat. Russia is also threatening to leave several European nations literally out in the cold this winter by cutting off their supply of oil and natural gas if they don't let him do as he pleases. So even though Putin is only rolling tanks into one country, he's cowed dozens of others just by the prospect of making it hard, if not impossible, for them to live. McDonald's hopping a plane out of Russia looks pretty weak by comparison to what might well be one of the Four Horsemen getting ready to go.

According to the powers-that-be, a frail, mentally confused old man won the election over a loud, unpredictable, and business-savvy person who most other nations didn't want to risk messing with. Russia and China thought twice before trying anything because they didn't know how Trump would react. They don't have that same concerns with Biden.

Really, the entire round of Obama-era "reforms" was a giant mess. Among other things, schools were made to implement these new programs without any guidance or resources for how to teach children that the newer foods were better for them, so the schools were left on their own. Not only that, many of the healthier options were also more expensive, and so a lot of schools were left with tight budgets. For example, suppose it's an extra $0.25 / each for a whole wheat bread roll compared to a standard bread roll. If a school expects to serve 2000 students for lunch (yes, my high school was that overcrowded), then that's an extra $500 just for that lunch that has to be budgeted for. Wealthier school districts can just soak it up, but not poorer districts.

Basically, the entire chain of everything from the decision to make the raid to the actual conduct of the raid itself needs to be investigated by neutral third parties in order to determine if it was legal and done properly. The longer it takes for this to happen, the more time conspiracy theories have to circulate and the more potential they have to cause unrest.

Schools began offering lunches (and in many jurisdictions, breakfast) as a way to deal with malnutrition and poverty. Study after study showed that children who went hungry not only suffered physically but had trouble keeping up academically. Many school districts now offer meals for free (it's generally a nominal fee per meal unless a family is receiving state or federal financial assistance, in which case the government entity in question pays for it), with a few even *mandating* that children have to eat the school's lunches as a societal equalizer. This is why Michelle Obama's school lunch "reforms" were so disastrous, as the nutritional guidelines failed to account for the fact that student athletes and students on financial assistance *need* extra calories and nutrients in their meals, and so there were plenty of reports in various newspapers concerning kids either passing out from hunger or having to eat cheap snacks to compensate.

Basically, we can discuss matters so long as things don't get heated and we generally keep the conversation within the overall posting and content guidelines. For example, you can talk about a politician getting caught on film doing something illegal but likely not go into specifics about what those illegal things were.

The issue is that your average school district is so under-funded (or suffers from such disproportionate allocation of funding) that they can't provide a basic level of school supplies for everyone, or if they do attempt to provide these supplies it's the cheapest brands they can get their hands on. Thus it's on the parents, and by extension various charities as necessary, to pick up the slack. That being said, when I was in 5th and 6th grade, the school I went to would put together a limited number of pre-assembled supply kids (binder, paper, folders, pencils, et cetra) and sell them to parents for $30 a kit.

Nutshell: Joseph received revelation that over the centuries a number of theological truths and principles had been lost from the manuscripts that comprised what we today know as the Bible. The JST was him attempting a spiritually-based re-translation whose goal was to seek out these lost truths and re-insert them. However, he was murdered before he completed it, which is a big part of why we put the JST in footnotes and a special section at the end instead of incorporating it all into the text.

Nutshell: In 1858 a corrupt federal judge was run out of Utah on a rail. In response, he told President Buchanan that Utah was in rebellion. For reasons that have never been explained, Buchanan took the report at face value and ordered 1,000 soldiers to Utah. As he didn't send notice of intent, word was brought back by mail riders, and this caused a panic. A wagon train from Missouri was trapped in Iron County because of poor planning on their part, such that they were out of supplies. With a possible war on, no one wanted to sell them anything. That they were from Missouri, land of the Extermination Order, an official state-sanctioned pogrom against the church, didn't help matters any. Several people down in Iron County still remembered the anti-Mormon massacre at Haun's Mill all too well, and when the members of the wagon train started talking smack in an effort to intimidate the locals into just giving them supplies the local militia decided to wax them all and blame the local Native Americans. Brigham Young was so busy trying to tend to the overall effort of keeping the peace that he didn't investigate personally, assuming his order that the church was to leave the wagon train alone would do the job. He knew several top officials in Iron County, so initially took their word as to what happened. The commander of the army was so incompetent that he was quickly herded into a corner and a third party was able to conduct an official investigation, but by then it was already too late.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Remember, though, that Milo was the one who broke the infamous "gamejournalpros" mailing list, where writers at several video game websites & publications had a mailing list going which they used to unethically coordinate coverage of various events so as to establish and enforce a party line. In the wake of his breaking this, someone purportedly mailed him an unmarked syringe filled with liquid. The mailing list was determined to have been very much real, and played a big part in retroactively justifying the Gamergate movement's demands for investigations into the behavior of various entertainment writers (et al).

Think for a moment. You read what... two paragraphs of my post? The thesis was at the very end of it with the conclusion. I say this because "reading the first two paragraphs and just moving on" is how a lot of misinformation keeps getting circulated: people just skim what's put in front of them rather than attempting to study it out for themselves. That's a big part of how conspiracy theories continue to circulate. Not only that, you can have situations where a person's sense of reality does in fact become impaired in some fashion. They might not be able to tell truth from fiction anymore, or have the cognitive ability to question if something they're being told is real.

I was a *massive* political firebrand in the mid 1990s through to the late 2000s. I've since found myself involved with more than a few consumer revolts and other such movements. Believe me when I say that there is *so much* going on in the world which is just *that* astounding and confounding that it can potentially make a person question the very nature of the world we live in. For example, what would you do if I told you that during the 2004 elections the brand of ketchup a person bought was taken as an indicator of one's political views? That's right. John Kerry's wife was a widow, her previous husband having been a member of the Heinz family, the same family known for producing condiments. During the latter part of the 2004 elections, she allegedly declared that if her husband didn't win the election then she would personally ensure that America's supply of ketchup was cut off. Even if we assume she did indeed make such a foolish statement, she had no power to actually make it happen and Heinz likely wouldn't have complied anyway because of how disastrous it would be financially for them to do so. Despite this, Dubya's supporters boycotted Heinz-brand condiments in retaliation, and several opportunists successfully launched "boutique" brands of ketchup with various political themes and product names. So yeah... in 2004, the brand of ketchup a person bought was indeed often used as an indicator of a person's political views. Now imagine someone like Alex Jones who deals with this kind of insanity 24/7/365 because it's his stock in trade. Shocking & controversial news. Purported information leaks about various government and political entities. Conspiracy theories of a wide variety. Some are true. Some aren't. But most, if not all, are incredible in nature. Past a certain point, one has to wonder if the constant exposure did indeed cause truth and fiction to start blurring for him.