I Can’t Believe

Posted on 27/03/2023 by Grumpa Joe

When it comes to kids wanting to change their gender while still in grammar school, I cannot, nor will I, ever believe it is possible. It’s been a long time since I was that young, but it never occurred to me that I might want to be a girl. The subject never came up in our house. My brother is a boy, I am a boy, and my sister is a girl. We were satisfied with life as it happened. What I could believe is that kids who want to change their gender at age five or six have been brainwashed. Perhaps by parents who wanted a girl instead of a boy or vice versa. Kids just don’t think that way. They are too young to really understand the difference. Another thing I don’t understand nor believe is the medical industry that is growing up around gender change. There must be a lot of sick doctors who believe they can become famousl by supporting the physical surgery they implement to change a boy into a girl.

There has to be something in the food or water these people drink to make them believe in what they do. There is no other explanation. What is scarier to me are the laws that politicians are implementing to allow six year olds to undergo major body transformations without parental approval. Instead of giving parents the responsibility they have for bringing up their progeny the law pushes the right on to elementary school teachers. That is totally insane. In fact nothing about gender change is sane.

One of my theories is that the brains of these children have been infiltrated with garbled messages and the young brain just soaks it all in, and messes up the intricate linkages between mind and body. One way that occurs is by the constant repetition of thought processes that may occur during electronic games. All kids love playing computer games and parents use the games as a way to keep their child occupied and out of their hair. The games allow characters to morph from one person to another, they can change personalities with button pushes in instants. I know from my own addictions to electronic games that the desire to win and play is strong. One game I play is two deck solitaire. The stats kept by my computer show my win rate to be 16.2%. That is a losing statistic, but the desire to beat this game of chance continues. The same meter tells me that I have spent a total of 122 days, 23 hrs, and 25 minutes playing a game that I cannot beat. Yet, whenever I get near my laptop, I play another round. If that isn’t conditioning I don’t know what is. It is hard for me to realize that I have spent four months of my life playing solitaire, but it is a fact.

Statistics of populations world wide show that the number of people who are transgender varies between 1-5 percent. My math calculates that to be as many as 80 million people who have been born with their wires crossed. Is it our responsibility to convert these souls into their proper gender? I say no. We are still far away from having the smarts and the techniques required to make gender reassignment safely feasible. At this point we are merely performing experiments on kids to uncross their wiring. That puts us in the NAZI class of experimenting on humans because it is fun to do.

One day, soon I hope, these people who believe they can alter nature and revise gender will wake up and reverse the process. By that time we will be flooded with generations of kids who have been bodily re designed to think they are something other than what they are. The problem is they will have no way to reset to what is normal.

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PSA-230130-Useless Information on Canada

Posted on 30/01/2023 by Grumpa Joe

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Racy Recall

Posted on 28/12/2022 by Grumpa Joe

The most famous artist for this type of saucy postcards was Donald McGill.

He was nearly 80 years old when he was put on trial (1954) under the Obscene Publications Act, found guilty and fined. Today the postcards are worth a fortune.

I recall scanning postcard racks while on vacation and buying several of these to send to friends.

Filed under: Cartoons, Humor, Seniors, Society | Tagged: , | Leave a comment »

Influencers & Monetization

Posted on 16/09/2022 by Grumpa Joe

Too many times I wonder how it is that people can make money using social media. Maybe because it is my age that puts me at a disadvantage, but I really am interested in how it works. Whenever I find something like a book, or a video that will explain the simple dynamics of using Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc I devour it.

I just finished reading a book titled “City of Like” by author Jenny Mollen. Jenny has crafted a fictional story which involves the life of of a simple New York mom who wants to raise her kids and have a job too. I won’t get into the plot any further because I would be a spoiler. In this story the characters are very different people who live for building their audience on social media. All that matters to them is getting “liked, friended, subscribed to, or followed.” The numbers become the game. The more followers one has the better the chances are the content producer will be monetized. Monetized, now thats an interesting word which has risen from obscurity in the business world to one of everyday usage by the masses of social media users. It means that that the content being presented by someone of Facebook derives revenue from the content. Companies like Youtube (Google) have learned that profit can be had by using the content of the masses. It doesn’t matter what the content is but rather depends on how many viewers see the work. It is not much different than selling newspapers.

The social media companies get all of the content free from their users. It costs very little to store the content digitally, and their computers can track viewership easily. Then it becomes a matter of deciding how to make money, and how to reward content producers for their creative efforts.

I had not heard the term “influencer” used before reading this book. An influencer is one who builds an audience of tens of thousands of viewers and pitches products and services to this audience. The influencer is rewarded with free samples of the products they pitch. Some of them are in such demand that they hire agents to agents to negotiate for them. That is when the big money begins to flow.

Recently, I watched a Youtube video of a young man in his twenties explain the mathematics of building audience for the purpose of achieving monetization. He went through the process from the ground up and explained how a blogger, vlogger, etc. will have to produce several posts daily in order to succeed. I get people clicking to follow my blog and when someone does I get an email notification. I then visit the persons blog to see what he/she is about. Most times the follower is someone who sells a product on his blog. One reason I check them out is to decide if they are genuine or in business. If they are real bloggers and are just interested in writing stories I will befriend them and continue a dialog. Some of my best friends are people I have never met in person, but with whom I communicate almost daily.

Nevertheless, with inflation eating away at my fixed income I am becoming more interested in a developing a new income stream to help me along. I have resolved that I can do it, but will wind up giving up the freedom of retirement by making my blog into a job. The formula for success requires producing several content posts daily, reading, commenting, and following hundreds of other bloggers daily. It makes sense to me now as to why so many bloggers have people on their payroll who submit content daily.

At this point in life, I feel that my sciatic nerve will allow me only a couple of hours a day to sit at a computer before my toes begin to tingle, my right hip is on fire, and the nerve between the head and shoulder is screaming for help.

Filed under: Aging, Biography, Seniors, Society | Tagged: , , | 4 Comments »

Free, Free, Free, I Am Free!

Posted on 11/09/2022 by Grumpa Joe

There is a burgeoning fad sweeping across America, and possibly the world. I can’t call it new because this way of life was at one time just that, the way of life. I am speaking of native people who lived as nomads. Early inhabitants of North America were nomadic mainly because they chased a food supply. The new nomads are comprised of rather young people who consider working for a company a waste of their talent. They live to be free from constraints, rules, superiors, and labor on demand. Instead they mysteriously find income by working under their own rules. The number one rule is to work in a place you choose, at a time you choose, and at a pace that you choose. Second rule is to make money from several income streams. A popular income stream comes from Youtube or any of it’s competitors. The term for making money by this method is “monetization” of your content. The content is most often a video that you make. Another income stream comes from sponsors who send you money to keep your videos coming, and the Vlogger spends a few seconds giving a commercial for the sponsors product or service.. Neither of these streams yields enough to support a nomadic lifestyle. Most likely the nomad has a third stream consisting of contract work performing some service related to a field of expertise.

Regretlyss

I have struck upon several of these nomads producing videos of their solitary lifestyles. One is called “Regretlyss” which is a Vlog (Video Log) produced by a twenty-eight year old who lives in a school bus that she designed and had built for her. The term used to describe this type of motor home is a “Schoolie.” Her’s is a short wheel-base bus usually used for taking special needs kids to school. These vehicles are often named and have the name emblazoned upon the vehicle similar to that done on a boat. Nomads prefer diesel engine vehicles because they are more reliable and get better miles per gallon. One of the most popular vehicles being converted to nomadic living is a Mercedes Benz Sprinter van. Again, probably because Mercedes vehicles are consider very rugged, reliable, are available, and relatively inexpensive to buy used. The challenge is to do the conversion by yourself and make a video while doing it.

One reason I am fascinated by these people is their youthful enthusiasm as they go to places that peak my interest as well. Among the most popular regions of the country to live alone is in the western states among mountains. The photography is outstanding and they bring scenery into my living room from places that I also have traveled to and wake up neurons from travels past.

Very often, the video the Vlogger is narrating some limited wisdom of life, and their search to overcome some traumatic life lesson that occurred during childhood. In some cases they have been reared by single parent who dumped an abusive spouse. Or, they them self encountered an abusive relationship. I tend not to understand what is being proclaimed because the speaker uses flowery language that sounds poetic, but doesn’t make any sense. I never did understand poetry and to this day I shy away from the classics of Shakespeare, Yeats, Bronte, Burns, and Frost, but am amused by the “Mary had a little lamb” type of prose.

When I was very young my dream was to convert a van into a camper and I did a limited conversion on my very first van. The idea of moving across the country into remote regions to experience the hardships of the early settlers crossing the wilds of North America to find a place they could call home appealed to my sense of adventure. I believe we (my wife, and three kids) successfully accomplished that goal as we embraced camping as a vacation lifestyle. My wife often boasted to her girlfriends that she would rather see the world by camping than to dream about taking lavish unaffordable trips staying in hotels, and eating in restaurants. In later years, we switched to the hotel route when we took trips abroad.

A few years ago I read a book titled Nomadland, Surviving America In The Twenty-First Century, by Jessica Bruder in which she tells her story about a different class of nomads. Her story is not about twenty somethings looking for the meaning of life, but about people who have been forced to live in their cars, and move about the country from job to job in places where the climate is livable. The nomads I speak of in this post are college grads that choose not to accept the commercial world, and prefer to live a life style based on complete freedom using personal talents to make a living.

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