Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Report from Louisiana: Office Space

Posted: May 3, 2021 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
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By: Pat Austin

I have been thinking a lot lately about workspaces. As I transition into retirement, leaving my classroom of twenty-five years, I have been moving some things home and setting up a new workspace in my house.

When I wrote my first book, I did it on my laptop sitting at an antique oak desk in front of a big picture window in my living room where I can look out at the neighborhood, watch the rain, and cars speeding down my residential street.  The desk belonged to my grandfather in a railroad office and the top is scarred and marked with various scratches, dents, and ink spills. I have never had the least interest in refinishing it; I love its character.

Working on my second book now, I feel like I want to do this one in a different space. I know, that makes no sense whatsoever, but the opportunity has just sort of developed organically. I’ve inherited a powerful desktop computer from my gamer-son, so I bought a nice, new monitor and have set up a new space.  This time my “desk” is a marble topped wrought iron table that used to be my breakfast table. My chair is an old classroom teacher chair that I brought home and covered in pages from To Kill a Mockingbird, slathered with ModPodge, and finished with several coats of polyurethane. The result is pretty cool.

Speaking of cool office spaces, there is a guy I follow on Instagram only for his beautiful shots of his writing space. I don’t know him, never met him, but I feel like we would be friends based on his workspace.  The sepia tints, the browns and earth tones create a casual, moody vibe. Most of his photographs have a cup of coffee in them; that’s his schtick, I guess. The pictures are cropped in a minimalist fashion, drawing your focus to one specific item in the picture. The focus might be his turntable with an album cover of a cool jazz recording sitting on top or a neat stack of music biographies. It just looks cool, and I enjoy checking out his feed each day.

I like my space where I write to be clear of clutter, except of course for my research. While writing Cane River Bohemia, I had stacks of books piled on the floor, piles of primary source material, letters, photocopies, my index card file, and a stack of USB drives, but it was all put away and organized at the end of the day.  But with my desk in the front, main room of the house, it was extremely difficult to concentrate. My family, as much as I love them, always walked by with a question about dinner, someone expressing their own boredom, my husband’s frequent “aww look at the cat!” statements, and the incessant television carrying on. I feel the need for a quieter space this time. In fact, I wrote all of Cane River Bohemia with headphones and my Writing playlist now that I think about it.

My new workspace isn’t perfect, and it isn’t complete. All I really want is a quiet space that is mine, and that is relatively free from clutter.  Will it help my writing? Probably not, but I’m having fun creating it, and isn’t that the point? It’s the journey, not the destination.

Pat Austin blogs at And So it Goes in Shreveport, at Medium, and is the author of Cane River Bohemia: Cammie Henry and her Circle at Melrose Plantation. Follow her on Instagram @patbecker25 and Twitter @paustin110.

I was just thinking…

Posted: May 3, 2021 by datechguy in Uncategorized

How is it possible that the same people who have a horror of genetically modified foods think it’s OK to pump hormones into kids to block puberty?

Why would people who tell us they’ve won an election fair and square be taking such efforts even four months after courts have ruled to keep people from auditing ballots to verify this supposed fact?

Why are some of the people who are loudest in their opposition to the police ones who have regular police protection?

How is it that business are not afraid of those that the media insist are dangerous because they insist on their second amendment rights but are terrified of group who march who are opposed to them?

Why is the Cardinal who warns members of his flock about sins which can carry eternal damnation in order to save them from it considered hateful while one who ignores or dismisses such sins without warning of their consequences considered loving?

My Response to a Rather racist screed His right of speech and Mine of Association

Posted: May 2, 2021 by datechguy in Uncategorized

One of the great advantages of Gab is that people are free to say what they want and you the reader have the option to accept or reject, ignore or engage , block or allow opinions in your timeline.

The disadvantage of course is that occasionally you get stuff that is beyond the pale. I saw such a thing in my timeline which I won’t repeat here but will link if you want to read it.

My first instinct was to block the person and the one who reposted it but I thought the argument that skin color is an indication of all sorts of undesirable qualities merited a response. My reply follows between the separators (you’ll note that gab allows a longer response in a single gab than twitter does in a tweet)

May I point out that the increase in crime rates among Black Americans have nothing to do with race and skin color and everything to do with the great society disincentives for two parent families within said communities, creating generations of absent fathers which is a statistical recipe for criminal behavior in any population. I submit and suggest that without this the history of the last 50 years in general and in the black community in particular would have been very different.


Furthermore you also have the component of the unnatural selection of slaveholders who treated their black slaves as cattle encouraging the physically strongest to breed while discouraging the most intelligent (and thus the most likely to revolt or escape) from doing so.. Given that said slaveholder saw slaves as property rather than people it is understandable but no less horrific.

It was a rather ghastly exercise in eugenics that only began to be reversed after slavery and can easily be spotted when you contrast black African immigrants whose families were not subjected to it.


This was the best argument for affirmative action when it was first proposed to give American blacks a few generations to catch up but now it’s become a source of power and advantage and as a rule no group will willingly give us power or advantage.


Human beings having a soul and the divine God given spark always have the potential to overcome such things, either by a change in circumstance, environment or by education (an actual education not the slop that’s taught today) however the Democrat left has an incentive to keep American blacks in such a state as it is a source of power and wealth for them in terms of the graft they syphon from government “solutions”.


That’s the real irony the party of slavery is still gaining wealth and power by exploiting the black community, but has managed to market this exploitation to that community as a desired feature rather than a bug.

If the Democrats had been this successful in marketing this crap 160 years ago to the black community as they have been today you’d not only still have slavery as an institution but you’d have black slaves telling abolitionists to get lost.

It’s worth noting that until the black community decides to revolt against this exploitation by the media/political and academic left that they’ve been sold and insist on being the makers of their own destiny and taking the responsibly and risks of such a move this condition won’t change.

Till then you will continue to have the spectacle of people who have never been slaves determined to punish people who have never been slaveholders for actions that neither they nor their parents over trauma they never experienced generated by wrongs that they never suffered.

In fairness it’s a whole lot easier to do the later than the former.

Oh and for the record the person in question took exception to my response threw some insults my way to go along with it and insisted that I not put such things in his timeline which is odd because I didn’t complain when someone put his words in mine.

He has a perfect right to this opinion and the beauty of Gab is that it protects that right of his. There is no “bigot” or “idiot” exception to the 1st amendment or to the principle of free speech. There is however also a right to free association and fortunately Gab protects my right to choose not to associate with such idiots and bigots who throw insults. Even better rather than making the decision for me as if I was not competent to do so they allow me to exercise that right myself and I was happy to do so right after his response.

As scripture says don’t bother throwing pearls before swine.

Dumb Expectations, Draft Misinformation, Narratives, Unexpected Future Traffic Stops, and Michael Corleone on the Deep State Under the Fedora

Posted: May 1, 2021 by datechguy in Uncategorized

There is an article at the Washington Examiner about Catholics calling the 1st 100 days of the Biden Administration: “100 days of Disappointment”.

I can’t see how this can be the case for any informed person. To be disappointed requires expectation and anyone Catholic who has followed Joe Biden for the 50 years he has been on the public teat would not expect him to make any decision that was governed by the faith, even if he was actually in charge in DC.

If you actually had expectation of it being otherwise then I’m disappointed in you.

There is a lot of talk that the wokeness and sloppiness of the MSM has bled into the sport media but I actually think it’s the other way around and the best example of this has been the NFL draft.

For the last several months we have seen disinformation, speculation treated as credible evidence up for discussion and wholesale nonsense pushed on the public. Why here in New England today on a radio station that has spent the last three months insisting that Bill Belichick MUST trade up and pay any price to get one of the five elite QB’s available in this draft when he managed to get one of them (Mack Jones) with his 15th pick without you actually had a host complaining that Jones wasn’t a good pick because he he HAD been one they would have traded up for him.

Remember unless you are watching or listening to an actual play by play it’s just about winding you up to keep you there or if you have an “insider” advancing a particular front office’s narrative in exchange for access.

Yup just like regular media.

I found the whole “Cruz asleep during the Biden speech” story ironic because it remined me of the time Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal show approached me at CPAC to bring up solitaire on my new laptop so they could have an image to claim people weren’t listening to his speech and I called them out on it publicly that day.

It shows the double standard, if I had done what they asked they would have painted it as Trump’s fault for being boring rather than my fault for not paying attention in the press pool. With Ted Cruz the narrative is it’s his fault for closing his eyes rather than the fault of the Biden administration to make a boring presentation that means nothing.

Saw the same thing during campaign 2012 when I was covering the Santorum campaign, young reporters weren’t interested in reporting what was said but were dying to get a sound bite they could spin.

I bet the lot of them never got over being unpopular in highschool.

I keep reading about student government members anxious to hit police from their temporary pulpits.

The fact that employment managers will be googling them seems to be completely lost on them and that for all the woke positioning of major companies public most of these folks given the choice of someone who stirs controversy vs someone who will help sell their product or service will take the later every time.

I also have an odd feeling that these folks will find it odd that the moment they go over the speed limit, or fail to signal or violate various ordinances they will find themselves pulled over and or caught and somehow not escape with a warning.

Unexpectedly of course

I’m old enough to remember when the Giuliani story would have shocked me in terms of the abuse of power by the government/deep state.

These days the revelation that they’ve been going after him secretly since 2019 while President Trump was still in office elicits a yawn as I don’t expect better.

Michael Corleone had these guys pegged the year Biden got into office

Trump’s superpower was making these vermin come out into the open.

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