Reality Is What We Make of It

Reality is what we make of it. I feel this is true about everything. My opinions seem like the simple truth to me. Others have contrary opinions and seem to have great conviction that they, instead of me, are right. I am impressed by those with conviction, but also suspicious, because I wonder how quickly they arrived at their opinions, and whether they considered the other sides much at all. Perhaps their opinion was formed long ago on the basis of information that has since been discredited.

Marijuana has had reams of misinformation broadcast about it. So many lies have been cultivated about marijuana, it is a strange wonder that anyone at all likes it. Based upon the lies, you would think every human being on the planet would be actively engaged in eradicating the demon seed. Yet that is not the case. Instead, hundreds of millions of people adore marijuana, and great numbers have done so since ancient times. Why? Who is right? Is marijuana good or bad?

I like to call marijuana "weed," because it is, in fact, a weed, particularly in areas where it is illegal. It grows quickly and spreads on its own in the wild, and humans have declared war on it, for better or worse, ever since the 1930s, although before that time, Americans found marijuana useful. Abe Lincoln liked to smoke it.

Some have the modest and humble opinion that weed is, at the very least, better than alcohol. They are not saying it is good, but only that it is better than alcohol, which is not saying very much at all, because we know alcohol is bad. I have this opinion, and I think it is self-evident, requiring very little in the way of debate, that is, if both sides are being honest and objective. Many believe this based upon direct experimentation with both substances, individually and in combination. Their opinion is, therefore, grounded in direct experience, which is the best manner to form an opinion. Their reality is evidence-based. Bolstering their position is a pretty vast amount of scientific literature. To ignore the science surrounding marijuana is not dishonest, but it is lazy. In summary, alcohol is toxic to the human body, while weed is not. Twenty years of drinking will devastate the body and mind more surely than an entire lifetime of vaporizing. Emphasis must be placed on the verb, vaporizing. One does not smoke in 2016. Smoking is a relic of the past, and anyone who believes that weed is smoked is not living in the modern age. All of the arguments about the negative effects of smoking must be revisited to come to terms with modern methods and to come to terms with legal weed, a product that is pure, unadulterated, unsullied by crime and by criminals, and sold in well-lit and state-sanctioned retail stores.

A diminishing minority of Americans, less than fifty per cent, believe weed is worse than alcohol, and therefore should remain illegal. Within this group, some have never tried it. Their reality is based upon what others have told them. Other people have constructed reality for them, and they have accepted that version of reality, often without question, much as religious zealots do. Others within the group have tried weed, and for whatever reason, have concluded weed is worse. I heard from a man today who once smoked marijuana, but quit. He told me "Dope is wrong," and his reasoning was that weed makes people stupid. Well, it so happens that I agree. Inebriates tend to make people stupid. No one is arguing that weed makes anyone smarter. The effect, however, is short-lived and does not persist. He also said that when he used weed, it gave him the munchies, and he overate, resulting in his obesity. Well, weed varies. Some weed does trigger appetite. This is extremely useful in those suffering from nausea. For an obese person, abstinence may be best. But to conclude from all of that that people should go to jail for possessing weed is ridiculous. Nevertheless, he seemed to think that there is nothing wrong with locking people up for weed. I think that he simply likes the idea of locking people up, and it pleases him so, he does not stop to think about the rightness or wrongness of the law. What profit is there, after all, in debating the merit of things? Why not just accept everything as it is, however bad?

Lovecraft Bubblegum

I want to scrape the bubblegum off my shoe after reading Lovecraft. I'd describe him using a word he frequently deploys, queer. His main characters are always naive, feeble, pretentious intellectuals, and by a story's end, are screaming or fainting at the terrible, horrible horrors of the terrible terror, or whatever. And he really does describe his horrors using the word "horror" or "horrible", and his terrors are "terrors" that are "terrible." Lovecraft is not for subtlety. When Lovecraft struggles with the science of his time, the result is embarrassing. The planet Pluto, uh-huh, the Einstein space-continuum, uh-huh, the vibration rate of electrons, uh-huh. His aliens and gods are all meanies out to get the human race, leaving unexplained why titans would concern themselves with the affairs of fleas.

Looking for Problems Where There Are None

There are two types of troublemakers in the world.

The first are obvious, the ones that start trouble because they delight in it. They are also known as criminals, terrorists or nitwits.

The second are the ones that invent imaginary problems and then go make trouble to try to solve the imaginary problems. These folks don't like trouble and are trying to prevent trouble, and in so doing are targeting what they think is a source of trouble. The trouble with that is, it is just imaginary trouble.

Many problems are imaginary, rather than real. If a problem has not been analyzed exhaustively from every angle, in cold blood, without passion, then it may not be a problem at all, but just a symptom of one of H. Sapien's finer attributes, creativity. We love to create things, and one of the things we create is imaginary problems. Much of what is perceived as reality is in fact imagined, distorted, or misinterpreted. For the same reason, humans have difficulty beating computers at chess. Computers analyze exhaustively, from every angle, in cold blood, without passion. Should we wish to improve ourselves, we should emulate our wondrous machines, without abandoning our good quality of love.

Visitors to North Korea

Any American that visits North Korea has got to have something wrong with them. Their intelligence is clearly sub-par, and their allegiance to this country is at best questionable. The U.S. should not intervene when they are arrested, confess their crimes, talk about how bad the U.S. is and how great North Korea is, and generally play the traitor. Let them serve their sentences. This might put a cap on all the nitwits that decide for whatever reason to ignore the advice of the U.S. State Department and common sense and travel overseas to that blighted nightmare of a country.

If the world were run better, North Korea would not be the tragedy it is today. The only reason North Korea exists at all is because of China. And the only reason that China is a great world power today is because greedy Western businessmen took the jobs away from Westerners and gave them to the Chinese, to save money. Now we have a lot of people in the West without very much to do, and not many good jobs other than of the "Would you like an order of fries with that?" variety. China makes everything, including war material. In the not-so-distant future, Americans will have to learn Chinese just to make a decent living.

Lovecraft

Lovecraft betrayed his secrets with his writing, which mixes autobiography with the supernatural in a sublime way. I do not find his gods appealing, but I am not meant to. His gods are evil, after all, creations of a mind fascinated by evil, but an evil of an altogether higher magnitude than the usual. His gods are transcendental, not of this world and not intended for mankind.

The dark light is not without attraction, though it does not nourish.

Thoughts on Linux Mint Hack

I've always wondered whether somebody may have hacked any of the Linux distros I have used over the years. And now the day has come when I've been informed of precisely that. Well, Windows is not exactly the most secure OS in the world, either, so stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

Anyway, Clem, the founder of Linux Mint, informed everybody almost immediately of the hack, and in my opinion that's best practice. Some people are now saying, oh dear, Linux Mint is horribly insecure, go back to Debian or Ubuntu or Windows, etc. Anyone that uses this occasion to criticize is just a dirty bird. Not fair play. Was the United States government never hacked? If the State gets hacked, then who is safe? Get real, read the news, drink a cup of coffee, whatever it takes to return to the reality that the rest of us are living in. I honestly do not know what planet some of these naysayers live on. Oh, Wordpress is insecure, is it? Well, then how come my WP site never gets hacked? Learn about security, for one thing, and then talk.

The Internet is a Wild, Wild West, always has been, but nevertheless, much progress has been made on the security front. Things are better now, because fences and gates have been invented and refined, and backups, logs and site analysis tools are now routine, although definitely not everyone understands these things. Some shops don't have a proper web site admin, and they tend to be the shops that get hacked.

The downside to all of this is that Clem is being forced to worry over security, and less time will get devoted to the version 18. The other downside is that the forums look very primitive now. It is like a bomb went off on the web site, and it looks worse. As if Clem didn't have his hands full just coping with GNOME's peculiarities, trying to get it incorporated into Cinnamon.

Regets of an Older Person

I have grown old enough to remember times past. Now I regret several trends in the modern world.

First and foremost, I dislike that cold hard cash is going away. I think money is a good thing. It is hard to trace, which is both good and bad, depending on the situation. I like less information in the hands of governments, because I do not trust governments. The American government is one of the better ones, but I still do not trust it completely. That which is mortal is prone to failure--and to corruption. Money is good for human beings, because we evolved along with it for thousands of years, and it has a long history with us. When money is invisible, as in the case of a credit card, then it is hard to fathom. I see young people getting into debt all the time, and not idiots either, but extremely intelligent young people, who should know better, but they have been seduced by the siren call of easy credit and getting things now as opposed to saving up for them. Where is wisdom, forbearance, and delayed gratification? Young people are the ones that will suffer most, because they have been unschooled by money.

And money is a school. I know exactly how much I can spend at any given time, because of the money in my wallet. I can see it. I can feel it. It has a texture. It even has a smell. If it takes a little bit longer to make change at a cash register, then that delay allows time for reflection over my purchase. The easier and the faster that a purchase is, the more likely it will be made upon impulse and not grounded in reason. Credit cards are horrible tools devised by clever marketing specialists. They use psychology, mathematics, and statistics, just like casino owners, to overwhelm the feeble human defences against overspending and impulse purchases. Remember, it was not long ago that there existed no money, no market, no economy. We were hunter-gatherers. Money in itself is a recent and radical innovation. Before money, there was bartering. Credit cards have arisen just within the last hundred years, and the human race is far from ready for them.

I regret that America is less than what it once was, and that no-one seems capable of reversing its decline, while China rises. China will cause many problems in the world, because their leadership is ruthless. America appears to be ruled by crony capitalists who seem only interested in their own affairs rather than those of their country. There is too much corruption and too little efficiency. Much money and time is wasted upon pointless exercises, such as adventures in the Middle East. It would be better to attend to domestic problems than to meddle overseas. Improve infrastructure and invest in scientific research and education is the simple answer and the correct one. But people want to stretch for bloody glory against weak enemies, foes that die easily but reproduce their numbers continually, so that a never-ending quagmire of money-draining goes on. Meanwhile, China improves infrastructure and invests in scientific research. Can anyone read the writing on the wall? Perhaps I will be gone before the fate I see comes to pass.

I am neutral, rather than partisan, on the issue of books and newspapers. They were good and bad. There was a lot of bad. Some people don't remember. They think of Shakespeare when they think of books. I remember bad books, bad newspapers, bad magazines. So now the world derives information online. I do not think that is necessarily a bad thing. I think it may be good, but I reserve judgment. I do like books, too. But most books are probably bad. There are some authors that I really like to escape with and join them in their mental space for hours and days and months at a time. Their books are good. They can be formative, even life-changing. I think books will always be with us. Videos can be tedious, and they are hard to produce, but not only that, some people express themselves best through thought, rather than theatrics, and books are the most efficient medium for thought.

Health care is a big PITA in the U.S.A., and is only getting worse. Nurses and doctors are now expected to be accountants and programmers. Instead of studying medicine, they must study computer programs and insurance plans. Instead of paying attention to the patient, they pay attention to the computer. So health care is terrible. When you go to see a nurse, she has to stare at the computer screen instead of listening to you. Meanwhile, other countries like Canada have health care figured out. Unfortunately, in the USA we have something called the Republican party that opposes anything that might potentially improve the lot of the poor or minorities. If you have insurance, then you have to navigate a maze of different insurance companies, different insurance policies, updates to said policies, HSA debit cards, insurance cards, toll-free numbers with wait times in excess of one hour, and so on, ad nauseum. I am sick to death of insurance companies. I have four different insurance companies for different facets of my health care, four different usernames and passwords, four different phone numbers I need to call, and I had no choice in the matter but was given this by my employer. The Democrats are stupid because they want to make health care more complicated, rather than less. The Republicans are stupid because they don't even want people to have health care in the first place. Both of the stupidities intermingle and combine to create an ever bigger stupidity. And what we are left with is health care in the U.S., which is boneheaded stupid.

I will have to continue this post another time.

I am the Minority Opinion

Mine is always the minority opinion... until it isn't. I'm amused with the world. Oftentimes I've lamented I was the only one to think so-and-so, such as: gays are equal to straights and not worse (!disputed by everyone I knew!); or, marijuana is better than alcohol and should be legal (!disputed by every adult I knew!); or, religion is dangerous and harmful whenever it is dogmatic (disputed by most, though my father agreed). These, my opinions, stirred controversy. Sometimes, I felt alienated to be a member of what seemed, to me many years ago, only a tiny minority.

The succession of years and momentous events in the world proved me wrong, not in what I believed, but in believing that I was the only one. Indeed my ideas have gained mind-shares, and not through advertising or money or power, but because they are right and because their truth can be experienced by everyone. The merit of my opinions has been vindicated. How lucky that so much change should happen in my lifetime for me to witness it. I have been touched upon the forehead, I have been blessed. My wonder is great, because there was a time I wished to leave this world. I am glad that I opted to remain and would recommend a similar course to anyone.

Blogging and the Ban

What's the common denominator between NORML and Linux Mint? Neither site's blog posts comments from yours truly. I suspect it is due to the unwelcome baggage accompanying the innocuous comment, namely this url. The censoring editor, whoever that may have been, took a gander at this web site, grew afeared by the opinions, and decided the safest path was to ban the comment or the commenter. There is a prevalent trend now of avoiding controversy by not posting urls. Urls are distracting, first of all, and there is the danger a visitor could leave the site for the site of the url.

In time, I forget I'm censored, or suppose myself mistaken in my assumption, because I'm never sure about anything, unlike Donald Trump. I like to be fair and give second chances, and besides, there are technical reasons a comment could fail to post. With all of that in mind, I try again, months later, typing from one to three paragraphs in a comment, only to encounter the same result, which is the vaporization of my verbosity. I don't mind that I try and try again, wasted effort though it is, because I like confirmation of my assumptions. On each occasion when my comment fails to post, I perceive a door remaining shut, and that is a good reminder, if nothing else. Of course, as with everything, there are advantages and disadvantages. It is easier to move past a closed door than an open one, where one might feel curious enough to look in on occasion to see what is inside and offer assistance and advice. There are those that I can help and those that don't seem to need help. Through the years, I've gotten better at sorting the types and then moving on.

Dumbed Down OSes

Modern operating systems like Windows 10 and all smart phones have been dumbed down to the point where they work great if you're dumb and terrible if you're not.

My Chromebook won't let me do anything without installing and more likely buying some app from the app store. There is no GUI even for something as mundane as renaming a file. I regard ChromeOS as crippleware, with little more functionality than a browser. Forget about any utilities such as FileZilla that other desktops run. The Chromebook is basically a browser, period. Google has gone to great lengths to cripple their product and "protect the user from himself."

Windows 10 likes to hide things from the user. When I tried to shutdown Windows 10 today, it told me to Please wait and Do Not Turn Off the Computer. Doubtless it was uploading all the spyware-data it stole from me to Microsoft's marketing department, so that Microsoft can sell the data to advertising firms. But there wasn't enough bandwidth available, so the process got stuck and was still going on an hour later. I defied Microsoft and restarted the computer anyway, because I wanted to run Linux, which I like, as opposed to Windows 10, which I distrust and hate. All Windows 10 is, is Spam, Advertising, and Malware all rolled into one big, nasty ball and prettied up to look like a smartphone. However, we have to go with Windows 10, because it will continue to be supported in the future, whereas Windows 7 will not. My plan is to use Windows 10 about 1% of the time, and Linux 99% of the time, until such time that I can dispense with Windows altogether by replacing the few apps that only work on Windows.

The only reason I continue using Windows is ACDSee and Call Clerk. Once those applications support Linux, I'm done with Windows forever. Krita is starting to get pretty good as an image editor, and can do a lot of important things that ACDSee never got around to doing, so perhaps I will not buy any future versions of ACDSee. As for Call Clerk, I might have to discontinue my land line service in order to avoid needing to use it. I doubt Call Clerk will ever be ported to Linux, because landlines are on the wane, and with it the market for Call Clerk.

The Supreme Court

I feel curiously unmoved by reports of Scalia's passing. I have not really kept up with anything involving him in the news. His replacement could be better or worse. He certainly lived a long life.

I haven't followed Supreme Court cases much. Even the gay marriage case I am not adequately familiar with. As for Scalia, sometimes I agreed with him, but more often I think, not. He was a jurist, not a politician or philosopher. His merits can be debated among legal scholars. I do not think he was either the best or the worst. He was not consistent in his philosophy but seemed biased in his interpretations, giving a lot of bend to his principles when it suited his personal beliefs. I prefer other jurists.

I don't really like the idea of a Supreme Court with power to make or reinterpret law. Ideally, that is, in an imaginary perfect world that does not exist, law should be determined by the legislative branch. However, our legislative branch is conservative and slow to act, except in cases of war. They act fast where there is any chance of military action. It seems to me they are hungry for it, because that means lots of extra money for their rich clients. For other things, such as social reform, they are glacial. I think that many reforms should be passed to make our legislative branch better. Then the Supreme Court would not be asked to do those things the legislative branch is too ignorant to do.

However, a thing may be judged on its effects, rather than its appearance. The effects of some Supreme Court rulings have been good in some case, ill in others. On balance, perhaps, good?

There is something to be said for a law issuing forth, not from a group of politicians, but from the ultimate transcultural, material and spiritual symbol of justice and power in the world, the Judge, dressed in his robes, reigning in court, like an ancient king in his awesome dignity. Is it not right that we should do as the kings and queens bid of us, even as our ancestors did far back into time immemorial? Our docile submission is in our blood. Even the wise feel awed by a Supreme Court decision, grounded in reason and invested with all the authority that only a group of judges can give. Much is just show, but how many perceive that, and how many, even perceiving, feel awed all the same?

China

There are folks out there that think China is hunky-dory. I guess because they think General T'zo was a great military leader. Or they discovered green tea in the grocery store.

The reality is that China is a bad actor on the Internet, and here's just a recent example.

American companies that offshore jobs to China should pay a tax for each job they offshore, to reflect the hidden costs such as a more dangerous world, a more dangerous Internet, and a weakening of the U.S. economy. Some CEOs simply have no scruples, no sense of responsibility whatsoever to their country. It is too bad that they get rewarded by Wall Street for reducing the number of jobs in America. There needs to be some accounting for the costs of giving power, money, and jobs to a nation like China that has no ethics, abides by no law and respects only force. A thousand dollars per year per job sent overseas would be a good start on a new and just tax. Apple should be paying the U.S. debt down with all the billions of dollars in fines that they so richly deserve. Steve Jobs had the most ironic name in the history of American business. Apple should rebuild Detroit and other decayed American cities with all the wealth they gathered by short-changing the workers. If the elite do not take care of what is happening in this country and see to it that jobs are there for the workers, then in the not-so-distant future, the U.S. will cease to be a world power at all. There are too many people either unemployed or underemployed.

The Age-old Controversy over Abortion

I never saw a problem with the right to abortion. I'm for a lot of rights, and I think there is a high burden of proof on the side that wants to restrict liberty. "Why you wanna put people in jail?" is the question that comes to my mind. If you want to make something illegal, you had better have a darn good case for jail, or else you're the problem, not the solution.

I have gotten to know a fair number of conservatives and conservative Republicans in my day, and once I asked a friend why he liked the Republican party so much, seeing as how he wasn't rich and couldn't possibly invest that much feeling in the Republican party's fiscal agenda, which is to tax the poor, give welfare to the rich, and spend trillions on foreign wars against third-rate powers. The main issue for him, he said, was abortion. He saw it as wrong, because according to his religion, life began at conception, and therefore any human action to interfere with said life was murder. Drawing the line at conception seemed arbitrary to me, so I asked him how he felt about sperm and egg cells, which we waste on a regular basis, through intentional or biological processes. He was wholly uninterested in gametes, and said conception was different, that it was something spiritual ordained by God, even, he said, in cases of rape or incest.

To me, conception is certainly nothing special. I am not sure where one should draw the line on the sanctity of life, but certainly conception seems far too soon. Wombs abort their contents spontaneously, and clearly the body itself does not hold special what some sentimentalists do regarding the new tissue.

As for that anti-abortion black and white poster showing a fetus within a womb and a autobiography of its development, ending with "my mother murdered me," I always thought, "you fortunate thing, to avoid being mothered by a monster." If the mother would deal death unto her own, then what good is to come by compelling her to give birth? No good can come of that. Unwanted and unloved children remain a problem in the world. Abortion, then, may be a mercy, not a crime. The crime would be to sentence the unborn to being raised by a parent that did not want it.

Men who frown on abortion need to man up. The main reason abortion is needed is because men have done their women wrong through carelessness, incompetence or wickedness. There are men who either won't use or can't figure out a condom. If a woman evaluates the sire and determines the child is better not to be, then it is criminal arrogance and a grave Sin for anyone to countermand her choice, as though they know her situation and are wiser and better to decide for her. They do not know her situation. They are not wiser. They lie, they sin, and theirs is a criminal interference. Mother knows best, in this above all other things, for it is her body and her life. Her designated role is clear to anyone with eyes to see. The mother is the gatekeeper, the final arbiter, as was ordained long ago, from the very beginning. What is not needed are future generations of carelessness, incompetence or wickedness.

People who want to control other people are the main problem with the world today. The same rule we were taught in school applies to the world of adults: Keep your hands to yourself. Leave other people alone.

Yes, I Do Love Bernie

I will vote for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary.

And so will my elderly mother. She watched him on television in a Democratic debate. She was a Hillary supporter originally, but now she sides with Bernie, because he is well-spoken, bright, and passionate.

I don't care what his hair looks like.

It is true he is old, but Hillary is no spring chicken either at 68, and Bernie does not appear remiss in his intellectual faculties.

I do not care that he calls himself a Socialist. We are all socialists, whether we know it or not, because we use the interstate highway system, Social Security, and the police and fire department.

He is a good fellow and bright, and that is more than can be said for the others. I think he intends to serve the country and make something of his life through his deeds.

And I say that he will win against any of the Republican candidates and will be our next President, so get used to the hair and the aged face and the socialism.

I don't like that Hillary assumes she is the logical next President. I don't like that Hillary has taken so many short-cuts, wife of a President and all that, to get where she is at. I do not think that she belongs in her position, and I would not elevate her. Why must she continually generate tedious controversies through her mismanagement, thoughtlessness, cluelessness and incompetence?

Exile ISIS

Anybody connected with ISIS should have their citizenship revoked. Tens of thousands of their families and friends would also be good candidates for exile. Is there really a need for millions of angry Muslims in Europe? They are just going to tear Europe down to resemble what they came from, the Middle East. Repatriate these Muslims to Syria. I don't see paying for a ticket on a passenger airliner, however. That's a bit much to ask of hard-working taxpayers. They can be jettisoned out the sewage flap of a cargo plane, one by one, along with similar material unloaded by the crew. (Serve the crew lots of fibre bars.) These ISI-Sissies can learn about the gravity of their actions from ten thousand feet.

Writing

Most dead writers, resurrected into the modern age, would choose not to write, for the obvious reasons. I feel excused, therefore, for not devoting my hours to stories that I could craft. There's no reward, only time-wasting and potential derision. The best thing for a writer born into this world is to publish under a pseudonym. Those stories that just can't be kept down can be regurgitated in harmless anonymity. No one will pay any attention, and the verbose vomit won't excite any criticism, but gather dust in a cyber-dustbin, read by few or none.

Goals

My goals are simple and, I think, humble. I want to live the good life, with a minimum of drama. I had enough drama as a youngster. And when I reach the dregs of the cup of life, and this world please me no more, I wish to fade from it, or rather vanish from it, with silence and dignity, leaving no loose ends, nothing other than this mortal shell. Maybe I will find a way to dispose of that as well with dignity and decorum.

News from Africa is Always Bad

I'm of a generation that remembers the constant barrage of television commercials depicting starving children from Africa and guilting the viewer into signing up to donate money on a monthly basis. "Sponsor a child," they said. A lot of people fell for that. My geometry teacher sent a check for $25 a month to some kind of organization that bought cocaine and whores for the spokesman and every once in a while send a loaf of bread to some little church in Sudan. She used to show pictures of the child she was "saving", someone named Uhl or Og or Yumo. Later on Yumo grew up to be a Somali pirate and raped and killed a bunch of Westerners. Og went on Islamic jihad and burned down a church. Uhl had eleven children and all of them needed sponsoring too. Maybe teach should have stuck with the geometry. Geography didn't suit her at all.

News from Africa is always bad. I never hear anything good out of that region of the world. The reason is that Africa is the most ignorant continent in the world. Ignorance has a home, and it is in Africa. Africa takes all the ignorance of the world and holds onto it like a precious treasure. Africans prize ignorance. Either they are killing, torturing or arresting each other, or they are starving due to their own stupidity and ignorance and begging Western countries for more money on top of the billions already given. Either way, Africa is not a place I would want to live in or give money to. I think that Westerners that send money to Africa suffer from self-hate. These same Westerners shrink from giving charity to their family, neighborhood, city, state, or country. They do not give charity to people they know and love, and why? Because they do not love anyone. They hate everyone. If charity moves them at all, they send money over to a strange, barbaric, uncouth, alien place where the money will be siphoned off by corrupt criminals or at best, used to make future generations of unhappy, violent people.

Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon

I like Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon so much that I have replaced Linux Mint 17.2 XFCE with it. Cinnamon just seems a bit more up-to-date and not a throwback to an earlier era. It is prettier, which inspires confidence and promotes harmony. XFCE just seems crude, somehow, in its icons and layout. I also like the ease with which the look and feel of Cinnamon can be customized.

It is a pity that Linux Mint is about the only Linux distribution I have any use for, besides occasional forays into Xubuntu. The other distros just seem, well, primitive or lacking in some way to someone coming from the Ubuntu family of distributions. I wonder why the other distros don't improve their user interface in order to compete with Ubuntu. Perhaps they are bound by tradition and only serve a small group of veteran users or specialized applications. Perhaps Open Suse is the sandbox for Suse Enterprise, while Fedora is the sandbox for Red Hat. PCLinuxOS is missing a lot of software, and one has to make peace with giving up applications forever in order to use it. Debian seems geared for servers. Mageia may be promising but seems not to offer anything special over Ubuntu. I don't know that there is a really strong competitor to Ubuntu and its derivatives at this time. The best that can said about the other distributions is that they are almost as good or comparable with Ubuntu or Linux Mint in one way or another.

ArchLinux and moreover, the M- distro (I forget the name, but apparently it has its own separate repo's) seem tempting from time to time, but I really don't want to spend hours tweaking my OS to get things working, and I do not like the idea of a rolling distribution either, in which things can break. I like the idea of updates that trickle in slowly, after being vetted by the veterans, not updates that can break my printer or cause my computer not to boot at all. I also want access to the Debian world, which Ubuntu provides. It is important for me to have easy access to all available software applications. A distribution that cannot offer that is not one I would consider. I am afraid Open Suse and PCLinuxOS were missing some programs in their repositories during the times I evaluated them.

At this time, I don't know of any compelling reason not to use Ubuntu/Linux Mint. However, I certainly hope the MIR/Wayland brouhaha does not get out of hand, and that Ubuntu is wise enough to offer easy access to Wayland, so that everybody can just get along. What we do not need is a scenario where stuff breaks in Ubuntu because it was made for Wayland.

ArchLinux is a Gift

I don't use it, yet, but I have to say ArchLinux is a gift to the Linux world. The ArchLinux wiki offers far superior documentation on Linux than any other source on the Internet, bar none. If you are a Ubuntu user, you should read the ArchLinux wiki in preference to anything Canonical or any other Ubuntu web site offers. ArchLinux just knows. Whereas Ubuntu is kind of hit or miss and often miss and a lot of obfuscation. I read ArchLinux documentation and then I understand.