Merry Christmas to All !

English: A Christmas Tree at Home (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Merry Christmas to everyone !

Hope everyone enjoys the time with their families.

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Original Kindle first gen still alive and kicking.......................

English: Third generation Amazon Kindle (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I still have an Amazon Kindle first generation that works just fine.  It has taken unbelievable abuse from me.  I have dropped it, frozen it by leaving it in the garage and stepped on it.  I even still use it garage reading and for listening to the live rebroadcast on the internet of the Washington County emergency band while I am in the garage.  I hook it up to some ancient Bose speakers and it fills my garage with police, fire and emergency internet broadcasts.  Police can really have some good dry humor in their voices when they get the strange calls from dispatch and I have enjoyed a few chuckles from listening.  Its nice to know what is happening in real time around you.  Its almost as good as having a police band scanner.  In fact, its better because the price is right.

I also have a better later model Kindle Fire that I use in the house for my main tablet enjoyment.  Amazon Prime really adds a lot of free content to the Kindle Fires.  Fortunately I got three years of Amazon Prime for free when we signed up for our cell phones long ago.  Its too bad the older models I have can't be made to directly access the Google Play store like the latest models but Amazon has a pretty good App store.  The Amazon Underground is also a good deal because it offers a lot of actually free apps if you catch them while they are free.

True story and unrelated attempt at religious humor:

I was in a gas station on Center street in Milwaukee paying my bill to a nice middle age Hindu lady. Three missionaries of another religious persuasion were trying to get her to read their literature and display it in the store.  They were being very pushy and were not allowing her to provide me with service by accepting my payment.  I could tell they had been there for some time and they just weren't letting me pay.  She winked at me and then told them them that she couldn't display their literature without reading it first.  They handed her a copy to look at and she said "I am sorry but I can only read Hindi" then she handed it back to them. This really upset them and I heard them making phone calls as I left trying to get a Hindi translation of their magazine but it sounded like an up hill battle. That lady became one of my heroes that day.

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Fun time with relatives at Ponderosa.................

My wife's relatives took us to Ponderosa restaurant.  We all had a great time.  Good food and great people.  

Does anyone really believe Fake News?

CNN breaking the news of a plane crash at the World Trade Center (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Facebook is going to save us from Fake News? That should just about eliminate CNN and the other major news networks when it comes to political polls. They are untrustworthy because they have a left wing bias and can't even be professional and accurately report on elections.  Thats too bad because I often enjoyed reading their lefty nonsense for a good chuckle.  The expressions on reporters faces during the election night results gave me a good belly laugh and I rarely have any fun.

There is obviously Fake News on facebook. The average person should be able to figure out what is fake because it is pretty flaky.  There is some fake news that is more subtle and some limited review by facebook would not necessarily be that bad of an idea. The problem is that no one will police these thought police as they review our news.  I hope that facebook will not add a politically correct slant to its news reviews but it is a powerful force with no oversight.  I greatly prefer a wild west environment instead of having a thought sheriff feeding everyone some politically correct ideology.

Hatred of the Trump win is not a good reason to enforce censorship of the news by someone that may have ulterior motives.

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Cyber Warfare: Get Ready!

Barack Obama & Vladimir Putin at Putin's dacha 2009-07-07 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am the only person in the world that realizes that its incredibly counterproductive to announce your cyber war in advance to your opponent?  If it really is necessary to fight a cyber war, it would be far more effective to strike hard and quietly without warning. This political stunt against Russia is asinine and may even escalate into a war in the real flesh and blood world if our leaders continue down this stupid path. Russia has pride and will not tolerate being openly humiliated by U.S. threats.  The technologically dependent USA is vulnerable to Russian retaliation. Our goal should have been avoiding a cyber war in the first place by keeping our mouth shut and taking counter measures as needed.

Obama talks tough but suppose things get ugly on the brave new cyber front and Russia decides to cause a few accidents using cyber warfare.  U.S. power plants, chemical industries, air traffic communication, water supply and food safety all seem very vulnerable to cyber attack in my opinion. I believe Russia is capable of escalating the situation to a point that the U.S. would give anything to avoid.  I do not believe that Putin is intimidated by Obama's big talk.  We should instead "speak softly, and carry a big stick".

There is already constant low key cyber warfare between the U.S., Russia, China and other countries.  Escalating to all out cyber warfare against Russia may not be as pretty and antiseptic as Obama is proposing in his public statements.  War of any kind can be messy.

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No more automatic ads on Glenn's View...................................

I have decided to experiment and eliminate ads on this blog. The ads are mildly distracting and they will take approximately fifty years at this rate to produce an actual profit of any kind.

If I ever get back to creating bottle planters with succulents, I may sell them on the blog.  Anyone out there who wants to run a clean ad on this blog for a very small fee please contact me by leaving a comment. Some of the automatic ads on the blog seem a little off color to me. The blog has reached about 60,000 people and I can give you a whole blogger page with a lead in on the main page for $5 per month. Its worth a try anyways. Would pay for all my meagerly gardening supplies every year.

Merry Christmas !

English: S98-01951 --- Senator John H. Glenn Jr. (D., Ohio), with assistance from Boeing suit technician Lloyd Armintor, applies final touches during suit donning at the flight equipment processing lab for the Johnson Space Center (JSC). This was Glenn's first interface with the partial pressure launch and entry suit since being named to fly aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery on the STS-95 mission. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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Russia can out-hack the USA?

Is this still the United States of America or is it some kind of backward third world country?  Why do we pay the NSA, CIA, FBI and Pentagon big money if they can't even handle a cyber attack from Russia?  Taxpayers are definitely not getting their moneys worth of service from these agencies.  A more likely scenario is that all the hullaballoo about Russia hacking the election in favor of Trump is politically motivated by the Obama administration and that these agencies are just playing the political game until a new administration takes over.

If Hillary Clinton had won this election there would be no news about Russian hacking of the election.  Anyone suggesting any such thing would simply be laughed away as a conspiracy theory believer. Snide remarks on the old lame news media about Trump would imply that this is another one of his ridiculous pipe dreams being vented on twitter.

English: The Seal of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. For more information, see here. Español: El escudo del Buró Federal de Investigaciones (FBI). Para obtener más información, véase aquí (Inglés). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Guess what? Trump clearly won and attempts to delegitimize his future presidency will only serve to make it obvious that the old left wing biased news media is out of touch with the majority of voting Americans. It is no longer possible to brain wash enough people with left wing propaganda to elect an extreme progressive in every presidential election.  This type of obvious manipulation will serve to keep Trump in office for a full eight years because the bulk of the voters in the USA can recognize that there is some level of collusion between the democratic party and the left leaning news media.  No one likes to be manipulated and told lies.

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Why is there 10" of snow in my driveway?

I didn't order any snow and yet I need to spend the rest of this day trying to dig a path to the road for my car.  Snow would be fine if it only fell on snowmobile trails and ski slopes but my driveway is just not the place for it. My younger son was clearing it for me in the past but he hurt his neck and back on the job so I don't want to take a chance on him aggravating it further because he needs to work. Running to the rest room every 10 minutes while shoveling/blowing snow because of Crohns is a less than ideal way to get this lovely job done.

Why did I buy an electric Ryobi snowblower with a cord when I have a giant drive way you may ask?  One look at my pitiful bank account provides an obvious answer. Actually the Ryobi is not as bad as you might think after you get used to it as long as you get to the snow before it gets above 10".  Shoveling is the backup system.  Just have to avoid a heart attack.  Thank God for rock salt and halite!

Snow blower in Rocky Mountain National Park, 1933 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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