050121 • Sapphire

041721 • Military History Magazine
Picked up a stack of these magazines at the ARC Thrift Store in Arvada; I’ve found other military/history magazines here before, although it isn’t often. This post contains my recent find as well as my previous magazines. I have a subscription to this, which is an expensive choice but one never knows when, or if, that subscriptions’ editions will ever be found at a thrift in the future, and how many years would that take to find, if ever? It is very nice to have one show up in the mail. Back in the day, I would look forward to Newsweek and National Geographic, car and video game magazines; now it’s history magazines which is far more interesting. Most car magazines are super-thin, don’t contain much news and have more and more cars and issues I don’t care about (electric, save-the-world green cars and such). However, when they have cool cars, the photography is amazing and almost worth the subscription price.
Time changes things, and car magazines don’t deliver much car news anymore aside from reviews and comparisons, so much has moved online that the print versions are lacking.
I do believe, and I think it is Road & Track that either moved, or added a big, four-times-a-year publication that is really neat. That’s probably the way print needs to go.
Newsweek has been and became unbelievably more partisan, so much so that it hasn’t been in print form in years. Not sure if it’s even online. It’s eye-opening to read an old one and observe how often they would predict or promote something that didn’t happen or turned out badly. This is an age-old epidemic in media.
National Geographic, while it still has excellent photos and some great articles, is clearly nothing more than a vehicle for social politics today. It is also much thinner than it used to be. They’ve had entire issues dedicated to topics that they wouldn’t have touched not so long ago; so much that I have actually tossed a few issues into the trash, something unthinkable for me to do. It’s not scientific anymore, very one-sided and always pushing agendas as opposed to just delivering on the Society’s mission statement. So even at only thirteen dollars a year with access to the entire archive that covers more than 100 years, I let this go. Their History magazine, however, is pretty good and I still subscribe to that.
Video game magazines, I haven’t had a subscription since the late 1990’s. At one point I let almost all of my copies go as I had no room and didn’t play games anymore, but they were fun reading for years.
In any case, finding a stack of old history magazines is good fun!
My favorite cellist…

The new iMac is thinner than the original iPhone!
Body language analyst reacts to Joker interrogation scene
Finally figured out why Facebook moderated me…

I’ve heard about this, but it didn’t register until now; I used the word “Covid”.
That was my transgression. It was automatically picked up for an admin or moderator to approve.
Facebook censors people with views they don’t like, while they themselves publish whatever they want on the topic of Covid.
So, if I’m not buying into the group-think on this, if I’m not ‘thinking correctly’ on this issue, I’ll be blocked from posting, while they can voice whatever they want.
I have been on Facebook for eleven years, all without a single out-of-the-blue moderation such as this. I never posted anything political. Then this happened when I mentioned the very political and contentious topic of Covid in a joke.
Also, by sheer coincidence, this happened the same week Trump and others were banned from social media outlets, the same week Parlor was shut down.
This is not okay. This is not a good direction for us to be going in.
This is exactly the kind of thing that happens in authoritarianism; control over thoughts and minds, control over all information. No other opinions or data are allowed. Hitler, Stalin, and all of the other regimes did this kind of thing; promote the one, ‘correct’ view; all others are to be suppressed.
If you disagree, by all means let’s have a conversation about it. I’d love to hear how I’m wrong about this. I won’t ‘moderate’ your views.
Covid is something we should all be discussing and looking at from all angles; Facebook only wants one single view with no thought process involved.
Just believe everything they feed you without thinking, and you can post whatever you want.
031127 • Thrift Store Finds
These are actually my buys from April 4th and 11th.
I was in line at the 88th & Sheridan ARC when a mother with her husband and young kid asked me to step back six feet, and informed me about the markings on the floor. That was a total invitation for a nice conversation that wouldn’t go well. I just stepped back, being the peacemaker and also knowing that people being this righteous, bossy and afraid aren’t going to be open to other thoughts on this topic.











































