NC Renegades

THE GRAY RADIANCE AMAZON LINK

The Gray Radiance is the second of a three-book, multigenerational story about the Durand family. However, it is not at all necessary to have read The Golden Pinnacle to fully enjoy The Gray Radiance. There is a short note at the beginning of the book explaining the limited overlap. The Gray Radiance is available as a paperback and Kindle ebook. The cover image does not show up on the Kindle description. I’m working with Amazon to get that fixed, but the Kindle version is available. Here’s the back cover description:

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Mr. Gore told me earlier that he had written the second book of this trilogy and would be sending me a signed copy when he received his books. I could not wait and ordered the paperback from Amazon. I have written a review of his first book in this trilogy The Golden Pinnacle in 2016. I did not know that this was the first book and was very pleasantly surprised when he told about the new installment.

I recommend reading The Golden Pinnacle as it is in my top ten list of books. I have no doubt that this second installment will be great reading and will write a review after I finish it. Christmas came a little early this year.

David DeGerolamo

From Vox Popoli

It’s never very hard to notice when people are defensive about the choices they have made concerning the way they live their lives. They overreact, usually in an angry and hostile manner, and more often than not, in response to their own actions.

You can usually judge whether or not a lifestyle choice is wrong by how angry and defensive its practitioners become when you say that they’re making a bad choice.

Here’s an example, and it wasn’t even a judgment, but an assumption I’d made on Facebook about a couple with a child not being the parents because they weren’t wearing wedding rings.

So I figured the woman was the parent and the guy was a boyfriend.

Some woman I went to high school with went totally berserk in my comments. How dare I make that assumption! Oh, I must think I’m perfect! What a judgmental asshole! You don’t have to be married to raise a child you both created!

On and on, stalking every post Id made that month alerting everyone to what an asshole bigot I am up on my high horse.

I just laughed and deleted it all, didn’t even respond. She was living with some guy she’d had a kid with and I think he had kids from another woman. I guess I hit a sore spot.

But if she was comfortable with her choices, my simple generalization wouldn’t have made her raging mad. At most she would’ve felt a little annoyed.

People often think the anger comes from others judging them, but it’s not that they’re being judged. It’s that deep down they KNOW they’ve made the wrong choice. That’s why the real or perceived judgment stings.

Spacebunny has noticed this, particularly with regards to parents who don’t homeschool their children. They know the option is suboptimal for their children, and when it isn’t a matter of necessity, the mere fact of someone else making a different choice makes them proactively defensive:

This is one hundred percent true.

Another example is homeschooling – when I started homeschooling I would get asked why I chose that path – honesty would get them immediately defensive of their choice and then, instead of listening to me, they would start telling why they would/could never do it and blah, blah, blah. To which I generally responded “I don’t care, I didn’t ask you, you asked me.”

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) on Monday dug into Sen. JD Vance’s (R-Ohio) recent remarks against sending further aid to Ukraine, calling the Ohio Republican’s comments “total and unmitigated bull‑‑‑‑.”

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Tillis is a stain on North Carolina: power is his only motivation. At least Burr is gone.

David DeGerolamo

I borrowed a friends Netflix Account to watch this movie this weekend.

It is well worth the watch.

They always reveal their evil plans ahead of time.

Wes

Grow up!

The lessons many of us took from playgrounds are helpful in analyzing war, although war, being humanity’s stupidest activity, is less excusable and less interesting than playground dynamics. Grownups, after all, are supposed to be wiser and more mature than kids. Realizing that most aren’t is one of those rites of passage into adulthood.

On the playground you’ll find one or more bullies, who terrorize the weaker, smaller kids. The bullies tend to form their own clique. Their victims try to stay out of their way, but bullies gotta bully. The victims quickly learn that appealing to adult authority is guaranteed trouble. While bullies may be reprimanded or otherwise punished, they have ways of dealing with upstarts and snitches, and their revenge is always disproportionate.

Once in a too great while the oppressed band together and take revenge on their oppressors, or a bully misjudges a kid as a potential victim and finds out the hard way that the kid knows how to take care of him or herself. Often in such circumstances, bullies will make their own ludicrous appeal to authority, complaining that they’re being picked on.

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An open letter to Elon Musk.

Mr. Musk,

I see that you have reinstated Alex Jones to X. I also saw that you believe only people who are guilty of an egregious act should be permanently banned. You stated that you did not think Mr. Jones’ banishment was warranted but you put his fate in the hands of the people to decide. I have two questions:

1. Why use a poll? If you did not think his permanent ban was warranted, why did you not just reinstate him?
2. If you did think his ban was warranted, would you have reinstated him if the majority of people who voted in the poll said to?

Although I was permanently banned from Twitter for one statement, I wonder how many other people have been banned? Can you run a query and post on X how many people are permanently banned on X? Can you also run a second query to show how many were permanently banned after you bought X? My account was banned after you bought X. I did file an appeal but never heard back. I submitted a request to see the status of my appeal which resulted in the complete elimination of my account.

I was wondering who is still making decisions regarding permanent bans and why there is no concerted effort to review accounts that have been banned. We see the reversal of some high profile account bans but what about the rest? Reinstating people based on polls may be good optics but banning people with no recourse to appeal is not free speech.

David DeGerolamo

The American empire lives. Leading Republicans and Democrats alike support a proxy war in Europe, back murderous conflict in the Middle East, and threaten catastrophic war in Asia. Fervent critics of “isolationism,” like Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, seem determined to defend everyone except Americans. The bulk of military outlays go either to protect prosperous and populous allies that can’t be bothered to defend themselves or to punish states not inclined to follow Washington’s dictates.

There’s always more money for arms, even though the United States is racing toward insolvency. Federal debt owed to the public is roughly 100 percent of GDP, near the record set at the close of World War II. Without dramatic change, the debt ratio will be twice as high by mid-century. Yet the bloated military budget continues to jump skyward. 

The bipartisan congressional War Party risks running out of an even more important resource, manpower. Wrote Newsweek’s Alex Phillips: “A majority of American adults would not be willing to serve in the military were the U.S. to enter into a major war, recent polling has found, while public confidence in the armed forces appears to be waning.”

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