I’ve just finished breakfast. I enjoy breakfast. All that lovely tea, and toast dripping with butter. Well, it’s actually margarine but today’s chemicals can really make it taste butter-like.
I always feel a bit disappointed that it’s over for another day. The last swallow of tea washing down that final crumb of toast leaves one wishing there might just be one more mouthful. But there never is.
I suppose dying is a bit like that: a sense of disappointment in those moments before the final snuff-out, a desire for just a few moments longer before the eternal darkness, or Heaven, or Hell, reaches out and grabs one. It all depends on one’s beliefs, of course. Well, actually, it doesn’t. Belief has nothing to do with it. What will be, will be. My brother-in-law lives with eternal disappointment. He’s an ardent Christian but is permanently sad that his sister and I (equally ardent non-Christians) won’t be allowed into the family party in Heaven, consigned as we will be in his belief to the Eternal Fiery Lake.
Frankly, I can’t resist a slight sense of relief. While the Eternal Fiery Lake has its drawbacks it just may be preferable to eternity in the company of my brother-in-law and his family. Not that I consider Hell an option. These days I’m firmly of the opinion that when you’re gone, that’s it. And while I know I’ll likely feel a momentary sense of disappointment that my life’s all over, it’ll at least be my final sense of disappointment and hopefully brief.
The same cannot be said of breakfast. I wonder if I might sneak another slice of toast?
Where would we be without today’s technology? It’s a wonderful thing this digital age. Everything’s going digital. Without computers the world economy would collapse. There’d be no electricity, planes couldn’t fly straight, the whole world would come to a grinding halt.
There’d be no Twitter or Facebook. I’d have to get out of my chair to change the channel on the TV, and -oh, my God – no Amazon!
I just love technology. Years ago I had a DVD player. I’d go to the button and open the tray, place the disc thereon and press the button again to close it. While there, I’d turn on the TV and select the right channel, adjust the volume and brightness, before returning to my chair to watch the film.
Recently my wife and I purchased a Blu-ray player. It was expensive, but the very latest in modern technology. A few nights back we decided to watch a film. I had to get out of my chair to select the right disc. I knelt down on the floor and pressed the player’s on/off button, to be rewarded with the glow of a small green LED. Then I tried to open the tray, but it wouldn’t budge. Getting up off the floor, I went back to my chair, collected the remote and tried to open it with that. Nothing. The little green LED glowed balefully. I got up again, went back over to the player and tried again. Still nothing. In desperation, I pressed the ‘OFF’ button but the darned thing refused to shut down. That blasted little green LED just carried on glowing.
My wife, aware of her husband’s rapidly increasing pulse rate, suggested we just watch some TV for a while. OK, so I returned to my chair, and pressed the TV remote ‘On/Off’. The TV came on – and the Blu-ray player’s tray opened.
It’s a wonderful thing technology. Our Blu-ray player won’t open its tray unless the TV’s on because it obviously thinks to itself, “No point in opening up. They can’t view what I’d be playing because they’ve not turned on the TV. So I’ll just sit here and save my energy till they eventually realise and do something about it.”
Meanwhile I’ve made two trips from my chair to the player, twice knelt down on the floor and sworn bitterly under my breath, then had to make a third trip when the darned device finally decided to cooperate.
No doubt the next time I have to buy the latest Blu-ray player, technology will enable it to simply yell at me, “Turn on the TV first, dumb-cluck!”
Okay, so then I’ll be taking orders from my entertainment centre.
Remember maps? You know, those large sheets that enveloped you every time you tried to find the quickest route home. Then they invented map books. No more fighting yards of undisciplined, quick-to-rip, paper that insisted on turning into a tent before being flung in a crumpled heap on the back seat of the car. Map books made driving so much simpler – provided, that is, you could fathom where D42 on page 57 ended and C16 on page 65 began.
Then came the ‘Satellite Navigation System’.
“Turn right at the next junction!”
Now I’m taking orders from a digital women inside a screen in my car. But, what the hell! No more map tents or ‘D42’s on page 256’, just enter the destination and enjoy the ride. Well, most of the time. My wife named our digital woman, “Suri.” We’ve become quite attached to her. We’ve had lots of nice adventures with Suri. There was the fun time we got bogged down in mud when she took a ‘short-cut’ across a farmer’s field. Or, the twenty-five mile detour down those pretty country lanes to get to the airport, when it would have taken ten minutes on the motorway.
Then, of course, there’s the odd occasion – usually in the middle of a busy city at rush hour – when she decides to take a nap, puts up the shutters and retires, leaving a nice little note on the screen saying, “Recalculating,” over and over again. Once you’ve finally negotiated the ring roads, skimmed past the forty-ton truck, driven six times round the same roundabout, “I do think we’ve been past this supermarket before, dear!”, narrowly avoided flattening the old lady where they should never have put that zebra crossing, and escaped onto a recognisable motorway that you know will eventually take you within a mile of your home, she’ll wake-up again and chime, “In five hundred yards take the next exit on the right. Then turn left onto Dingle Brook Lane.”
Russia says it’s tired of America’s ‘hacking witch-hunt’:
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Moscow was tired of the accusations.
He said a report released by US intelligence agencies detailing the allegations was groundless.
It is the first official reaction from Russia since President-elect Donald Trump received the report on Friday.
The unclassified report contains allegations that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered the hacking of Democratic Party emails to damage Donald Trump’s Democrat rival, Hillary Clinton, and influence the election…[1]
Well, have I got news for you, Dmitri. We’re all tired of this played-out story line. It’s been kept on the boil by Western media for weeks now with no clear evidence emerging, from any source, that it’s anything more than supposition and mythology:
…In his comments on Monday, Mr Peskov said Russia “categorically denied that Moscow had been involved in any hacking attacks”.
“Groundless accusations which are not supported by anything are being rehearsed in an amateurish, unprofessional way. We don’t know what information they are actually relying on.”
The claims amounted to a “witch-hunt”, he added.
According to the BBC the unclassified report stated:
Kremlin had “clear preference” for Mr Trump to win US election, with goal to “undermine public faith in US democratic process and “denigrate” Hillary Clinton.
Russian military intelligence hacked into the email accounts of the Democratic National Committee and top Democrats.
They used intermediaries such as WikiLeaks, DCLeaks.com and Guccifer 2.0 persona to release the information acquired from the hackings.
They also used state-funded propaganda and paid social media users or “trolls” to make nasty comments.
Vote tallies were not affected by Russian interference.
I don’t think the Kremlin had to work too hard either to ‘denigrate’ Hilary Clinton, or ‘undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process’. The public had, in the main, already lost faith in the system, and Clinton was despised by most voters long before any “Russian interference” took place – if, indeed, there was any.
Certainly someone hacked the D.N.C. email accounts, making known to Americans the dirty tactics used to bring down Bernie Sanders, and Clinton’s less-than-acceptable behavior over her own email servers.
If it hadn’t been for WikiLeaks and Co the public would never have been made aware of these issues.
It’s doubtful the Russians, or any other ‘evil entity’ had to pay “trolls” to make nasty comments. Twitter’s awash with sick individuals only too happy to spread nasty comments around the internet, all free of charge.
And if vote tallies weren’t affected by this hacking, what’s all the fuss about?
Let’s be frank here: we all know that the 2016 U.S. presidential election was the contest from Hell. Neither of the candidates was fit to run a piss up in a brewery, least of all the most militarily powerful nation on earth. Two Hell-hawks scrapping for the greatest power-prize on earth was a competition with no winner the public could ever aspire to respect, and when it was all over, bar the swearing, the losers licked their wounds and blamed their favourite adversary – Vladimir Putin.
Are we truly expected to believe that America’s vast military industrial complex isn’t hacking into every darned nation’s security systems for all it’s worth? We know it is. Remember Angela Merkel’s cell phone calls? Remember America’s invention: Stuxnet?
The hypocrisy stinks.
“Undermining public faith in the U.S. democratic process?”
