Vin Crosbie's Personal Blog

For his business blog, visit http://www.digitaldeliverance.com

Esoterica

Welcome to the 21st Century: the Bulletproof Volvo

Vin

Stuck in traffic? Worried about those other drivers or pedestrians? For decades, Volvos has been renowned for automotive safety in case of collisions. Yet why not purchase a Volvo armored against terrorists, MAGA cultists (i.e., we know they don’t purchase Volvos), and psychopathic citizens? Yes, to fit your modern lifestyle, you too can purchase a large family SUVs XC60 and XC90 with bulletproof protective armoring. These vehicles, now available from any Volvo dealers, are ballistically certified to NIJ IIIA standards in combination with VPAM 2009, the extensive 360° armoring can help protect all occupants in the event of a security threat. Available in both electric and hybrid gasoline/electric versions, these cars are available both to private and corporate customers.

America Ranks Behind 20 Other Nations in its Citizens’ Inability to Pay for a Healthy Diet

Vin

So, why has the United States government, led by a convicted multiple felon, reduced the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the country’s largest nutrition assistance program? More than 42 million Americans use the SNAP program, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. According to that department , more than 62% of SNAP participants are in families with children, and more than 38% are in working families. The State of New Mexico has the largest share participating in SNAP, with some 21% of the population helped by the program. The program provides crucial support for families with low-paying jobs, low-income older adults, people with disabilities and others. The answer is Republican politicians’ evil disregard for struggling citizens. Lack of healthy nutrition for those citizens is an actual problem. Yet that problem isn’t as important as are continuing cuts to the wealthiest citizens’ taxes. It more important to Republican politicians that the small minority (i.e., fewer than 5 percent of the population) of citizens, who can easily afford adequate nutrition, pay ever smaller taxes, then are the actual struggles of a larger number of citizens in need of adequate nutrition. After all, didn’t doomed Queen Marie Antoinette say to her to struggling French families with low-paying jobs and low-income French senior citizens who couldn’t afford bread, “Let them eat cake!” Today’s MAGA Republican party would be proud of her!

Find a Great Deal via GulagAdvisor!

Vin

Perhaps it will be like the ‘Hotel California’ in that eponymous song by the Eagles: ‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” North Korean murderous dictator Kim Jong-Un and his family open his nation’s Wonsan-Kalma seaside tourist resort town. Where might tourism come from to fill the resort town’s 20,000 hotel beds? Russia seems to be the likely answer. Western economic sanctions against Russia for its disastrous invasion of the Ukraine has greatly limited the nations in which Russians can vacation (Egypt, Dubai, and Thailand are among the nations that still allow them). Frequent flyer Ben Schlappig offers some thoughts at Wonsan-Kalma.

All But Tut (Tutankhamun, That Is)

Vin

The long-delayed Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), originally scheduled to open in 2013 and house more than 100,00 artifacts from Ancient Egypt, including the complete collection from the tomb of Pharoah Tutankhamun, finally opened on October 16th — except for the complete Tutankhamun collection. That, for the time being, remains at the old Egyptian Museum downtown at Cairo’s Tahir Square. Last year at this time, Emma and I and our Saudi friend Tariq, who resides in Cairo, were given a private tour of the GEM’s central atrium, a tour that the GEM operated as a trial run before its grand opening. It was wonderful, whetted our desire to see the GEM’s thousands of artifacts. With 81,000 square meters (872,000 square feet) of floor space, GEM is the world’s largest archeological museum and is located adjacent to the Great Pyramids of Giza. So, Emma and I have now decided to return to Egypt next month and see it. We’ll invite our friend Tariq. We’ve now renewed our visas. This will be our fourth trip to Egypt since 2022. We are gradually becoming old Cairo hands.

Why to Unfriend and Alienate Some People

Vin

I avidly and sincerely plan to lose some social media Friend’s and acquaintances this month: I expect that perhaps 30 or 40 of my current 944 Facebook ‘Friend’s and maybe another 50 or so on X (‘Twitter’), Instagram, Threads, and other social media platforms, will ‘Unfriend’ or ‘Block’ me Most of these people will be upset by me or, at best, feel alienated. Some of these are people who I have known since my childhood. I don’t mind political differences and discussions about contentious issues. I grew up with a father who was a Boston Democrat and a mother who was from a Connecticut Republican family. Each of their votes cancelled out the other’s. Moreover, they owned and operated a 140-year-old daily newspaper whose editorial pages [had] to take stands on issues of public controversies. And a fundamental factor was that anything their daily newspaper printed had to be verifiably true lest someone sue them for libel and, if such a lawsuit were successful, my parents lose their business and livelihood. That legal requirement to be truthful is a factor that the average person doesn’t face when expressing his opinion about controversial issues. But it shaped me. Why in the world would I endeavor to lose friends, angering or alienating anyone? So, why should I endeavor to lose any social media ‘Friend’ or follower? Because people who intentionally or knowingly lie recklessly or evilly erode their communities, be it a physical or an online community. In other words, I have a fundamental problem with three categories of deceivers: Why do I endeavor to lose social media ‘Friend’s and acquaintances who are racists? I’ve no difficulty answering that. Racists are liars because they condemn entire races or religions or nationalities, despite knowing what anyone who has walked more than a thousand paces beyond their crib learns: that there are good people, as well as bad people, among every race, religion, or nation and that the good significantly, often extraordinarily, outnumber the bad. A particularly evil dynamic of racism, in person or online, is that the most prolific racists are otherwise affable, rather than irascible, people. That’s because irascible or cranky people make few friends, yet affable racists tend to make many more friends (particularly at times when they aren’t being racist) than irascible racists do. Why do I endeavor to lose social media ‘Friend’s and acquaintances who knowingly lie or knowingly […]

The Fetid Stench of America’s Newest Racism

Vin

The words in red above, bookending someone’s racist posting on Facebook, are mine. Only if they donned white cotton robes and matching conical hats, then set life-sized crucifixes afire, could the fecal scum who concocted, posted, and ‘Like’d this despicable posting on Facebook be more satanically racist. If you find what I write here to be blunt, Known that its bluntness is justified. I won’t tolerate racism. The October 7, 2024, terrorist attack on Israel by the political party Hamas of the Gaza Strip, an atrocity that killed 1,139 Israeli citizens, absolutely was a Crime Against Humanity (as were the Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on the United States during 2001) and Hamas must be eradicated (like Al Qaeda was). No, all those statements are demonstrably racist. As clearly are the scantily-educated white men (gee, isn’t it always?) who concocted, posted, ‘Share’d, or ‘Like’d, this excremental graphic on Facebook. Do these rabidly racist mental runts believe that all 2.2 million Palestinians who live in Gaza attacked Israel on October 7th last year? Including the 1.4 million Palestinian women and children in Gaza? Do they know that in 2006 the Hamas political party of terrorism violently overthrew the Gaza’s previous government? And that, much like the Russian-occupied eastern European nations during the Soviet Era, all subsequent Gaza ‘elections’ under Hamas terrorist have been staged by Hamas?  Were the people of Armenia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and the Ukraine, themselves responsible for the crimes of Lenin’s and Stalin’s Soviet Communist Party?  Do the human shits who posted this graphic think that the German people themselves were, rather than the NAZIs, were culpable for the Holocaust? Yet the diarrhea these racists spew blames all of the world’s 1.9 billion Muslims, 25 percent of the world’s population, for what a the estimated 60,000 Hamas party members (that’s Israel’s estimate of their number) among the 2.2 million Palestinians living in Gaza. That’s only 2.6-percent of the Gaza’s population, a percentage probably not coincidentally similar to the 3 million to 6 million Protestant-Americans who were members of the Ku Klux Klan (that’ the FBI’s estimate, which was 2.5-percent of the United States’ population of 123 million then) during mid-1920s; Klansmen who killed thousands of African-American citizens. The execrable racists who concocted, posted, ‘Share’d, or ‘Like’d this monstrous posting on Facebook, probably consider themselves good or devout Christians–much like so many of the white […]