The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — On a cold, dreary winter day in the nation’s capital, I’m thinking maybe I’ve finally hit the old man codger wall.

When you live for nearly three-quarters of a century, they say, there are some things you don’t recognize about this world anymore; also some things that don’t interest you anymore.

The sensational two-sided “fair and balanced” news is back this year — after taking a much needed break on every channel except Fox, where they still claim to live by that slogan. In the sense that fake conservative news IS the other side, since Rush Limbaugh made it so. Everybody was going after the rat king criminal former president Benedict Arnold there for awhile, like a watchdog press should.

But even the two remaining big newspapers seem to have shifted their focus of late. Maybe its because morale is bad at The New York Times since the staff is thinking about going on strike, but there’s not much “there” there these days. And what’s there seems to have shifted to the right. Morale is also bad at The Washington Post after layoffs were announced. Maybe people are not paying anymore now that Trump is not as much of a threat, and Google and Facebook are still getting all the advertising money.

Big Tech’s Advertising Monopoly is Destroying the American Press and Damaging Democracy

And since the U.S. Department of Justice seems to be in the business of trying to protect its own blind reputation rather than using its considerable power to help us save democracy, dragging its feet on the investigations of Trump, what are the talking heads on TeeVee supposed to read to the people to fill the air time every day?

It seems to me we are squandering the momentum we had built up to do the right thing.

Attorney General Merrick Garland Should Bring the Hammer of Justice Down on Trump — Or Step Aside and Let Biden Appoint Someone Who Will

With the House Republicans now setting the national political agenda, and as a result the national press agenda, politics is just not very interesting to me right now.

Covering the state of the environment is also getting old. Should I write another story about another “new” study showing that climate change is happening due to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels for energy and transportation?

Why?

Do we not all know about that already? I’ve been covering global warming since 1989. If we don’t know enough about that yet, and do not have the will to act and only continue to politicize it, why should I keep throwing wet noodles at a stone wall to see if something sticks?

One thing is clear. In spite of what some people like to say about themselves on Facebook, human beings are clearly not as smart as they seem to think they are. At least half the population might as well go out in their back yards right now and start digging their own graves. The mass hopelessness is manifesting itself in all the drug addiction, the rise in suicides, mass shootings, mass migrations of people, and political unrest across the lands.

It’s pretty clear we are doomed as a species anyway. We can’t get together on much of anything. Take your pick of the dystopian science fiction scenarios. That’s where we seem to be headed.

You would think a guy like Elon Musk might be smart enough to realize this and help get us to some exoplanet somewhere, or save the planet we have with electric cars. Instead, he’s hanging out in the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco snorting cocaine and thinking he can fix a social media platform by letting the MAGA morons and speed freaks run the show, while his Tesla stock tanks. He’s now the first mega billionaire to lose $200 billion in history.

Does that look smart to you? Not me.

Yeah, this is not going to end well.

All the Big Tech giants are laying people off now, including Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Meta already fired a bunch of hackers at Facebook, which by the way is more boring than ever these days. Are people not yet tired of sharing the same old partisan memes and cat pics? What if we end up in a recession, and the Republicans manage to cut Social Security and Medicare?

Some people must be leaving Facebook. The platform finally peaked. Now the kids are turning to TikTok, spending their time watching more stupid video clips they could have seen on “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”

Is that show still on TV? People are still entertained by that?

It’s true. The movie “Idiocracy” seems prophetic.

And since Congress as usual is a disappointment and can’t get it together to pass some new regulations on Big Tech, it’s not going to get better anytime soon — if ever.

Bipartisan Support for Regulation of Big Tech Means It’s Coming in 2023

Thank Dog for Netflix

About the only thing keeping me going these days is a tiny bit of the green stuff, an occasional IPA, time outside in nature — and the shows and movies on Netflix.

I finished the first two seasons of Vikings: Valhalla, a heroic historical dramatic series created by Jeb Stuart. It’s supposed to be a sequel of sorts to “History’s Vikings,” filmed in County Wicklow, Ireland. The series chronicles the beginning of the end of the Viking Age, marked by the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066. Valhalla was the Pagan Viking word for Heaven.

The thing that struck me about it right from the start was how people have been fighting stupid wars over idiotic religious beliefs for thousands of years. Why are we still doing it?

At the same time, there’s also a Norwegian comedy television series showing on Netflix called “Norsemen“, about a group of Vikings living in the village of Norheim around the year 790. I have a feeling this is closer to the truth.

It originally premiered in Norway under the name Vikingane (The Vikings) on NRK1 in October 2016. It is produced for NRK by Viafilm. The series is written and directed by Jon Iver Helgaker and Jonas Torgersen, but has now been canceled.

The Viking Age (793–1066 CE) was the period during the Middle Ages when Norsemen known as Vikings undertook large-scale raiding, colonizing, conquest, and trading throughout Europe and actually reached North America. It followed the Migration Period and the Germanic Iron Age. The Viking Age applies not only to their homeland of Scandinavia but also to any place significantly settled by Scandinavians during the period. The Scandinavians of the Viking Age are often referred to as Vikings as well as Norsemen, although few of them were Vikings in sense of engaging in piracy.

My own genealogy based on DNA shows I’m supposedly about 10 percent Scandinavian, as well as mostly English, some Irish, Scotch and Welsh, along with just a dot of African and Native American.

Voyaging by sea from their homelands in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, the Norse people settled in the British Isles, Ireland, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, Normandy, and the Baltic coast and along the Dnieper and Volga trade routes in eastern Europe, where they were also known as Varangians.

They also briefly settled in Newfoundland, becoming the first Europeans to reach North America. In 1021, the Vikings achieved the feat of reaching North America — the date of which was not specified until a millennium later. The Norse-Gaels, Normans, Rus’ people, Faroese, and Icelanders emerged from these Norse colonies.

The Vikings founded several kingdoms and earldoms in Europe: the kingdom of the Isles (Suðreyjar), Orkney (Norðreyjar), York (Jórvík) and the Danelaw (Danalǫg), Dublin (Dyflin), Normandy, and Kievan Rus’ (Garðaríki). The Norse homelands were also unified into larger kingdoms during the Viking Age, and the short-lived North Sea Empire included large swathes of Scandinavia and Britain.

Historians say several things drove this expansion. The Vikings were drawn by the growth of wealthy towns and monasteries overseas, and weak kingdoms they could defeat in battle. They may also have been pushed to leave their homeland by overpopulation, lack of good farmland, and political strife arising from the unification of Norway. The aggressive expansion of the Carolingian Empire and forced conversion of the neighboring Saxons to Christianity may also have been a factor.

In the Valhalla series, some of the Vikings are depicted as Pagans, while others had been converted to Christianity. This set the two tribes against each other in a never ending power struggle. Sometimes I must admit I identify more with the Pagans than the damn blood-thirsty Christians. It seems they were hell-bent to slaughter anybody who didn’t agree with their belief in “the one true god.”

That also seems to be driving these white nationalists who support Trump and are willing to destroy our experiment in democracy for the sake of protecting their race and religious beliefs. It even inspired union workers to vote for Trump in 2016, even though the Republicans have been trying for decades to destroy the unions. Go figure.

Like Forest Gump said, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

Anyway, sailing innovations also allowed the Vikings to sail further and longer than before. Information about the Viking Age is drawn largely from primary sources written by those the Vikings encountered, as well as archaeology, supplemented with secondary sources such as the Icelandic Sagas.

Leif Erikson, Leiv Eiriksson, or Leif Ericson, also known as “Leif the Lucky” (c. 970 – c. 1019 to 1025), was a Norse explorer who is thought to have been the first European to have set foot on continental North America, approximately half a millennium before Christopher Columbus made it to Cuba from Spain. Erikson is a central heroic character in the Valhalla series.

According to the sagas of Icelanders, he established a Norse settlement at Vinland, which is usually interpreted as being in coastal North America. There is ongoing speculation that the settlement made by Leif and his crew corresponds to the remains of a Norse settlement found in Newfoundland, Canada, called L’Anse aux Meadows, which was occupied 1,000 years ago (carbon dating estimates 990–1050 CE).

Leif was the son of Erik the Red, the founder of the first Norse settlement in Greenland, and Thjodhild (Þjóðhildur) of Iceland. His place of birth is not known, but he is assumed to have been born in Iceland, which had recently been colonized by Norsemen mainly from Norway. He grew up in the family estate Brattahlíð in the Eastern Settlement in Greenland. Leif had two known sons: Thorgils, born to noblewoman Thorgunna in the Hebrides; and Thorkell, who succeeded him as chieftain of the Greenland settlement.

Apparently the Christian avengers succeeded in killing most of the Pagan Vikings, so they seem to have disappeared after that as the Anglo-Saxons took over large swaths of Europe. The Catholic monarchies dominated for centuries, until a bunch of pilgrims of all kinds escaped political and religious persecution and poverty and found the Americas, and began pushing out and Christianizing the native populations here.

If you know anything about how evolution works, the diversity that populated North America should be the last great hope for the survival of humanity. Unfortunately, our failing education and media systems leave the future of this experiment in grave doubt.

Anyway, “Food for thought,” from Mr. Franklin, Jefferson, Paine, Wilson and Leif the Lucky. I like that title. I’ve always believed more in luck than fate, and destiney as sort of where you end up.

Leif the Lucky is depicted as a smart man, not just strong and brave. Apparently he got himself educated along the way.

For edification, the phrase “food for thought” is contemporary in nature. The idea dates back to the time of the French Revolution and the Era of Reason. This was the time when people shed the beliefs that were passed down by religious sects and governments of kings and queens, when “the people” started to question things. This also brought about increasing improvements in the standard of living for “the people.”

Hence, the phrase is also almost always used in a positive way, that is, to think about something in order to improve it. That’s me. News to me is not just about making money, Capitalism. It should be leading the charge to find the good guys and defeat the bad guys — and on the cutting edge of promoting all food for thought.

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