Posts Tagged ‘NG36B’

Honey bees and communism

Posted: June 18, 2022 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Uncategorized
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The author checking on one of his hives. These bees were removed from the third story of a home, hence the odd-looking comb.

A honey bee colony is composed of thousands of individual bees. Almost all of these bees are female workers. The workers spend their whole life working on behalf of the colony. Newly hatched workers take care of the inside of the colony, cleaning out honey cells, taking care of the young, and tending to the queen bee. As these workers get older, they begin flying out to gather nectar (which they use to make honey) and pollen (which is used to raise young bees).

Like all good little communist workers, the worker bees continue to work until they literally burn out. During the year, a worker bee lifespan is about 42 days. Some workers will get eaten by a variety of animals or other insects, while others fall victim to pesticides or bad weather. If she manages to survive all of these dangers, an old worker bee that can no longer contribute to the hive faces a dilemma. If she tries to retire to work a less intensive job, her sisters will pull her out of the hive and throw her off the landing board. Most spent workers instead commit a sort of bee-suicide, simply flying away and dying alone.

Life for the male bees, called drones, is not much better. Drones are larger and have better eyesight, but gather no nectar or pollen. Instead, they simply eat off the stores that their sisters build up. Drones fly out during the day looking for a virgin queen to mate with. If they succeed in this endeavor they die, as certain…body parts…break off during copulation. If drones don’t mate by the end of the year, before the onset of winter, the other worker bees will throw them off the landing board and keep them out of the hive, since they aren’t needed for the winter and take up space. I imagine this is a sort of “This is SPARTA!” moment for the worker bees, freeing themselves of the loafers that sat around guzzling their gathered honey all year.

Even the queen, who can live up to five years, doesn’t live the glorious lifestyle we would associate with her title. She lays anywhere between 800 to 3,000 eggs a day in the hive, allowing the hive to grow and stay strong. But as a queen ages and struggles to maintain this level of activity, the hive will begin building a queen cell, where it will raise a new queen. Once that new queen returns after mating, the honey bees will ball up around the old queen and smother her to death.

Honey bee society almost perfectly mirrors communism. No bee owns anything. The honey cells are open to all bees. Everyone does their job for the good of the hive. This model can be amazingly productive. Some honeybee hives can produce over a hundred pounds of honey in a year. Considering that a gallon of honey takes around 55,000 “bee miles” of flight to produce, the bees certainly prove that a communist society can produce good results when everyone is dedicated to the cause.

But bees also show the dark side of communism. Once a bee is no longer useful to the hive, its cast out to die without thought or mercy. Whether it is workers that are used up, drones that never mated with a virgin queen, or a queen that can’t lay enough eggs, the hive is fast to discard any bee deemed no longer useful. There is no bee retirement. Heck, bees can’t even live alone, as experiments have shown they die if not in the hive despite having plenty of food and water.

Honey bees give us a glimpse into what communist perfection looks like, a world that can be both amazingly productive and savagely dehumanizing at the same time. While not everything translates from bee to man, the similarities do exist. I wonder if bees were placed on this earth by God to teach lessons about ourselves. Wisdom is often described as learning from the mistakes and successes of others. Perhaps we would be wise to learn from the honey bee before attempting to model our society after a hive.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. If you liked this article, consider purchasing a book from the author or donating to Da Tech Guy.

Opioids are no joke

Posted: June 11, 2022 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Uncategorized
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The opioid addiction crisis in America has been in the news for quite a few years now. It tends to elicit the same politically-motivated responses from each side. The Left seems to ignore it mostly (since it hits a large portion of rural America that doesn’t vote for them), but occasionally someone uses it to argue for more lenient drug laws and better rehab options. The Right uses it to argue for more money for rural areas and occasionally rails about Big Pharma.

It’s hard to really understand what motivates someone addicted to opioids if you’re a regular person like me that doesn’t use illicit drugs. But I got a taste of it this past week. I had surgery last Friday on my shoulder to repair the over 18 years of damage the Navy has done to me, shoving me in submarines, airplanes and other small spaces that I was probably never meant to fit into. It all caught up, so I spent over two hours with a surgeon poking around my shoulder and repairing the various tears and installing a lot of anchors. When it was all finished, my brother-in-law drove me home with a large pack of medications, one of which was oxycodone.

Now, I’ve never had any narcotics, so I was careful to take the oxycodone on the prescribed schedule. By Sunday, I felt awesome. Sure, my arm was still in a sling and I was slowly working it back into a full range of motion, but I still felt great. I was walking around the house just fine, enjoyed being outside in my garden showing my kids what vegetable to pick, and I did plenty of “Netflix and chill.”

The chill dropped off on Tuesday. My prescription ran out, and that morning I had physical therapy. I would describe the crash of my mood like the drop as sudden, awful and gut wrenching. The last case was definitely true, since I threw up after the physical therapist had tortured me for 30 minutes. I spent most of Tuesday on the couch with some sort of ice pack on my shoulder, wondering what pain the next 10 minutes will bring.

Wednesday was better, and I learned to work through my pain, and by Thursday I was back to a much happier place. That brief glimpse of how effective oxycodone was, and how my whole world changed just after going off it from a weekend of use, gave me a far better understanding of just how powerful addiction is and the difficulty in breaking it. I have a lot more sympathy for someone that is in constant pain and just wants to feel normal, and if you can take a tiny pill (my oxycodone was the size of my thumbnail) to make it all go away, why wouldn’t you?

I can’t say I know what the answer to the opioid crisis is, but I can say some of our assumptions are flawed. I don’t think most people want to be addicted. I knew that while it was easy to take that tiny pill to feel better, long term it was a bad idea. Thankfully I have a family that can support me sitting on a couch for a while. What about senior citizens that don’t have family? What about the many single people who don’t have adult kids or even neighbors to check in on them? Thrusting these people into a bucket labeled “deplorable addicts” denies them humanity and makes it too easy and convenient to ignore their plight.

We need some actual solutions to opioid addiction that preserve our use of these drugs to manage pain while recognizing the power they have to destroy our lives if we aren’t careful.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. If you liked this article, why not donate to Da Tech Guy or purchase one of the author’s books on Amazon?

Tragedy of the Commons: HOAs

Posted: June 4, 2022 by navygrade36bureaucrat in local issues, local stuff, Uncomfortable Truths
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Homeowner Associations, or HOAs, are a sneaky way that fascism crept into our daily lives. HOAs are ubiquitus in most residential neighborhoods, and unless you buy an older home or build from scratch, its hard to escape them, since around 80% of new homes are built into an HOA.

The original idea behind an HOA seems to be a way for cities to dump the responsibility for maintaining small residential parks. Rather than have the city maintain it, an HOA would collect fees and do the dirty work. Even better, HOAs could enforce codes on everything from mulch color to weeds in your lawn, which would keep home values up as well as property taxes. From the government’s perspective, its a win-win.

For homeowners, its a total loss. HOAs have taken on a mind of their own, going so far as to foreclose on people’s homes and sell them at auction. We’re not talking just one or two homes. In Colorado, one HOA had filed 2,400 foreclosure cases against homeowners. Many of these followed a similar pattern: a homeowner gets fined for some stupud nonsense like weeds, and if they don’t pay up, the HOA tacks on legal fees and late fees. Once you reach into the thousands of dollars, it becomes almost impossible for a homeowner to pay it, so the HOA files a foreclosure case and attempts to kick the homeowner out and sell their house at auction.

Kicking someone out of their house for weeds in the front lawn and selling the house at auction. Read that sentence out loud and ask yourself how any person could stoop that low.

HOAs try to rip out perfectly good trees, beat people up for free speech, and even punish someone for having the gall to put out a dog treat dispenser. By far the worst problem is that the HOA tries to regulate your life while you’re in your own home. It’s bad enough dealing with morons at work, but at home? HOAs were one of the main reasons I built a custom home not in a community (which you can read about here).

HOAs don’t often get national media attention, but your HOA probably controls your well being a lot more than most national politics do (except for Biden-flation). These monstrosities need to be dismantled and destroyed. Some people are doing just that through legal means, like the Colorado legislature that is limiting fees and foreclosure cases. Many people are pushing back. When one HOA tried to stop a thin-blue-line flag, multiple neighbors began flying the same flag. As Stu Scheller likes to say “We can’t all be wrong.”

If you’re in an HOA now, I recommend getting onto the board and dismantling it on the inside. That’s what one of my neighbors has done. He has approved and expedited nearly every neighbor request for their property, making sure people can do whatever they want to their property. If you can’t do that, you should bring up HOA reform with your state representative, so that instead of debating what person to name the next highway after, they might actually make your life better. It’s a fight worth fighting, and unlike national politics, your voice can really make a difference.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. If you enjoyed this article, please consider donating to Da Tech Guy and purchasing one of the author’s books.

Stop pretending that Star Wars hates Black People

Posted: May 28, 2022 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Uncategorized
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I watched the first episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi last night, and I’d say it was pretty good. I’ve been warned by a few people its a “bait and switch” and we’ll get less Obi-Wan and more Sith Inquisitor Reva, but that remains to be seen. Her character so far is decent: dark, conniving, and ruthless, if a bit hot-headed, but certainly not dumb.

What is dumb is this article about LucasFilm prepping Moses Ingram (who plays Reva) for the coming racist backlash about her character. Two quotes stand out:

In her interview with the Independent, the “Obi-Wan” actress tackles diversity issues in the franchise. “To me, it’s long overdue. If you’ve got talking droids and aliens, but no people of colour, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s 2022, you know. So we’re just at the beginning of that change. But I think to start that change is better than never having started it.”

The Post Millenial.com

No people of colour?

So this guy is white?

Lando Calrissian, from Wikipedia

And this guy?

Finn from StarWars.com

And this guy?

Ahmed Best, from IMDb

(No, seriously, Jar Jar was played by Ahmed Best)

And who can forget this guy, the MOST iconic voice in Star Wars?

James Earl Jones, from IMDb

Star Wars has always had people of all races. It’s Science Fiction, which gives you the license to bring in darn near anyone with any background. Almost all of the portrayals have been good, and when they aren’t, its normally the studios fault. Lando Calrissian plays an awesome character in The Empire Strikes Back, and fans love him. James Earl Jones will never be forgotten for voicing Darth Vader.

Finn would have been a cool chracter had Rian Johnson not gutted his backstory to prop up Rey. I and many fans thought it was cool to see the man behind the stormtrooper helmet, but then Rian Johnson sacrificed him to become the butt of jokes in The Last Jedi. Remember when he uncovered that the Resistance was buying weapons on the black market illegally while on Canto Bight? That cool side story lasted for all of 30 seconds, so you could be forgiven for missing it. Wouldn’t it have been cool if Finn spent the films coming to grips with the Resistance using similar methods to the First Order? What if he had come from a crappy backwater planet that the First Order had rescued? The fact that Finn was a mediocre character had nothing to do with fans and everything to do with crappy directing, crappy plots and a box-ticking thinking when it comes to putting diversity on screen.

But the article doesn’t stop, because it has this gem:

John Boyega of the “Star Wars” sequel trilogy has said that their experience with the franchise has included a racial component to it. In order to comply with Chinese authorities, Disney shrunk Boyega’s character on the “The Force Awakens” poster in December 2015.

The Post Millenial

So where’s the outrage over this? Please actors and actresses, jump all over this one like you do with every single social issue here in the United States. But we know you won’t, because that sweet, sweet cash will keep your mouth shut.

To recap: there have always been people of color in Star Wars. Always. Some get great characters, some don’t. When the character is well acted and well developed, people love it. When that doesn’t happen, fans don’t like it. That goes for every character in Star Wars. Americans love good Star Wars characters, but the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t like black people.

Now, I’m sure some dumbass on Reddit will claim to be a Star Wars fan and make a bunch of racists remarks on black characters. To which I say…so what? I’m sure some racist loser wishes Lando Calrissian was white. Nobody takes that guy or gal seriously. Heck, one could say that when fans fall in love with good, well developed characters that are portrayed by black people, it helps breakdown any racist tendencies they might have had.

I hope Disney gives us some good characters in the Obi-Wan series, and I hope they make Reva an intriguing, cool anatagonist. Because perhaps what we need is a new hope.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. If you liked this article, why not buy one of the authors books? You can even get the audible version to distract you on your drive to work about the high cost of fuel these days.

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