So, I make jokes about "What is happening to the South" about not being able to buy real grits, or find butter beans in the grocery store.
But, in all seriousness, when the hell did so many white, Southern men become bootlickers?
I'm not talking about just being racist - I'm well aware of that history. I mean the idea that cops can do no wrong.
I remember a family doing fireworks for some event for our church youth group. At the time fireworks like that were illegal in Georgia. Cops came out, asked the guy for ID, he said "no get off my land." At a Southern Baptist Church event.
Miners shooting at scabs. Rent strikes. Sharecroppers fighting land owners. On and on.
But now? I literally just read someone comment "If ICE arrested them they're not here legally." Seriously?
Far be it from me to put forward "The Dukes of Hazzard" as quality role models. But they were just good ol boys, never meaning no harm.
"Been in trouble with the law since the day they was born..."
"Someday the mountain might get 'em, but the law never will."
Yes, I know, they had a traitor's flag on their damn "General Lee" car, but the cops were lazy, corrupt, laughable, and not to be bothered with.
Uncle Jessie wasn't no damn lickspittle looking to rat out the Duke Boys.
Hank Williams, Sr. sang how "I got a shotgun, a rifle, and a 4-wheel drive, and a country boy can survive." His friend was killed by a mugger, so he wants to shoot him with his "old .45."
Grow our own food, make our own wine, even have our own tobacco. "And we can skin a buck; we can run a trotline."
Yes, macho - again, not holding it as an ideal. Just, WTF happened?
Some time after my dad died, my mom was telling me that she wasn't even sure if my dad's rifle was loaded. I went to the house, got it out of the case, confirmed it was unloaded. I knew it would be - Dad never would have put it away loaded. But best to be safe.
I remember mom saying, "I didn't know you knew how to check it." Yeah, Mom, I learned as a kid. I grew up around guns, I know how to safely handle them. It was just part of life, so natural to us my mother didn't even see it.
Same as cleaning a fish. Dad never really hunted as an adult, so I never did any of that, either. But I can build a house, quite literally.
I was taught to work hard, and be a good person, and that Southerners take care of their own. You help people who need help.
And cops... well, I wasn't taught to exactly avoid them, but neither was I told they were necessarily heroes, either.
So yes, it's sad and a bit sickening to me. People so far removed from their own heritage, from their own history, and from the experiences of our ancestors that they just bow down to billionaires and turn own their own.
If you had told me in my childhood that, one day, most Southern men would worship a rich man from New York, I would have laughed.
Someone on here earlier was talking about how AI could be used to help people with their mental health. Quoting a study saying about how 60% of people in a survey asked a chatbot for help with their mental health. The conclusion drawn was that, while admitting we need to remove barriers, we should figure out how to make AI safe for this task.
And I mean, sure. Look at the success of the "Let's Make Crack Safe" campaigns of the 80s and 90s.
Did you see the story recently about people using Meta's AI chatbot to hack into accounts? They did it by the super tricky method of asking the bot to pretty please change the email associated with the account, and then reset the password.
So when a person is thinking really dark thoughts at 2 a.m., maybe we should invest in mental health experts?
From a quick internet search, let's put the cost of a psychiatry degree at $250,000. If Meta paid for 500 new psychiatrists, that would be $125 million dollars. Then let's say they then paid each of those knew psychiatriests $250,000 per year, for the next 20 years. That would cost $2.5 billion dollars over 20 years.
Meta plans to spend, on the low side, $135 billion dollars for AI just this year. It could take 2.1% of that and pay for for the education and salaries of 500 new psychiatrists.
According to the same article, the expected expenditures by Meta, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft is expected to be in the $700 billion range. Take a 2.1% cut of that, and that's 2,800 new psychiatrists out in the world.
That would be much more useful than chat bots that can be "hacked" by saying "pretty please."
Look at it another way: In 2025, Meta paid an effective tax rate of 3.6% for $79 billion income. Raise their tax rate by 2%, you pay for 300 psychiatrists. Raise it to the regular 21% federal tax rate and we the people have $13.7 billion for social services.
There's $220,000,000,000 in medical debt in the US. It gets sold for 1-3 cents on the dollar . You could buy it all, at 3 cents per dollar, and pay it off with $6.6 billion. Less than half the taxes Meta did not pay last year would wipe out medical debt.
That's just one company, funding billionaires and doing so on the backs of the working people.
"But you'll eat into their profits!" Yeah, so? I pay my taxes and no one feels bad for me. Nor should you. It benefits me, and my community, and I'm fine with it.
But more than that: If Zuck has $135 BILLION to pay for AI he has the money to pay his taxes. And if he does not, well, then he should cut out the lattes and data centers like the rest of us are always told.
Several months ago I decided to (once again) change the software that powers this little site. There was no real reason for this beyond me just wanting to. So I decided to write everything from scratch.
To be clear, I can't think of many good reasons to do this. There are a bazillion ways to publish a webpage. Funnily enough, it's a touch harder to find a framework that does as little as I want: No JavaScript, no cookies, no tracking, no bloated CSS framework. But again, still a number of options.
It really just comes down to, why not? The answer to that, is, well, bugs in the code, lack of features, you can add any new sections without creating the code to support it, just to start.
But the thing is, it's my mess. My site, running in the server with just my code. Static pages, no tracking. And for an aging hacker like me, it's a lot of fun.
But even more than that, there's a craft to writing code that gets missed a lot. Especially in these days of vibe coding and AI slop. It's not just typing. And this is the problem so many people miss.
This isn't an issue around just software, of course. I'm used to hearing people who think of construction work as "just manual labor." My usually response is, "Ok, let's see you do it."
Everything looks easy when you don't know what actually goes into it. Building a house is just swinging a hammer. Software engineering is just generating lines of code.
Some of us, though, we actually enjoy the creating part, the creative part. And I know, most people don't think of "software" and "creativity" in the same breath. Most people are wrong.
So, that's most of the reason why I've written yet another bespoke blog system.