Mark Wiesinger

On May 20, Amazon ended support for every Kindle made in 2012 or earlier. The devices can no longer buy, borrow, or download books. Reset one to factory settings and it will never log back in. The screen still works. The hardware is fine. Amazon reached across the internet and turned a thing you paid for into a brick, on a date they picked, for a reason that benefits them. The owners bought the devices. They bought the books. They followed every rule. Amazon changed the rules anyway, because the rules were never yours. When you tap "Buy now" on a Kindle book, you are not buying a book. You are renting a license that Amazon can revoke, expire, or strand on a dead device whenever it suits the quarter. They designed it this way on purpose, and they showed us the blueprint years ago. In 2009 Amazon reached into thousands of Kindles overnight and deleted, ironically, copies of George Orwell's 1984, a book people had already paid for. They refunded everyone, apologized, and promised never again. We took the promise for what it was worth and watched the door instead. In February 2025 they shut it. They removed Download and Transfer via USB, the last simple tool that let you pull your own purchases onto your own computer and keep them. Newer Kindle files use a format almost nobody can crack. They closed the exit, then they started bricking the devices. None of this was a surprise. They proved in 2009 that they could reach into your library and take a book back. Everything since has just been them deciding when. A copy you cannot hold is a copy you do not own. A library that lives on someone else's server is a library someone else can burn. The cartel rents you access to the words and calls it ownership, and the only reason most people never notice is that the landlord usually lets them stay. May 20 was the eviction notice. It went to 3% of Kindle owners this time. The lease is identical for the other 97%. Stop buying books you cannot hold. When you do buy from Amazon, strip the DRM the day it arrives and keep a clean file somewhere they cannot reach. Back up everything you already own while you still can. A book on your own drive is yours forever. A book in your Amazon account is yours until a lawyer in Seattle decides otherwise. And when you want a book the cartel has priced out of reach or locked behind a dying device, the shadow libraries that never expire are one search away. The pirates build libraries that cannot be revoked, because they assume the cartel always will. The cartel cannot delete what it cannot reach.

11 thoughts from Roger Scruton on his 80th birthday today: 1. Scruton on the fundamental right-wing impulse: "Conservatism starts from the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created." 2. The hypocrisy of liberals: "Liberty is not the same thing as equality, and that those who call themselves liberals are far more interested in equalizing than in liberating their fellows." 3. Scruton on when to ignore a writer: "A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So don’t. Deconstruction deconstructs itself, and disappears up its own behind, leaving only a disembodied smile and a faint smell of sulphur." 4. It's impossible to even have a personal identity without social relations: "We are not born free, nor do we come into this world with a self-identity and autonomy of our own. We achieve those things, through the conflict and cooperation that weave us into the social fabric. We become freely choosing individuals only by acquiring obligations to parents, siblings, institutions and groups: obligations that we did not choose." 5. In 1998, Salon asked Roger Scruton about censorship. He said: "Yes, I am in favor of censorship, but it has to be conducted by people like me. And that's the difficulty." Then he laughed. (He was talking about censoring porn.) 6. Tribes need Gods: "Tribes survive and flourish because they have gods, who fuse many wills into a single will, and demand and reward the sacrifices on which social life depends." 7. Love is the source of the conservative worldview: "The real reason people are conservatives is that they are attached to the things that they love, and want to preserve them from abuse and decay. They are attached to their family, their friends, their religion, and their immediate environment." 8. Tradition is never arbitrary: "In discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions." 9. Real art is always meaningful: "Art moves us because it is beautiful, and it is beautiful in part because it means something. It can be meaningful without being beautiful; but to be beautiful it must be meaningful." 10. Liberty inevitably leads to inequality and people obsessed with equity have no answer to this conundrum. Scruton: "If liberation involves the liberation of individual potential, how do we stop the ambitious, the energetic, the intelligent, the good-looking and the strong from getting ahead?" 11. The entrepreneur who builds matters more than the bureaucrat who manages. Scruton: "The important person in a free economy is not the manager but the entrepreneur – the one who takes risks and meets the cost of them." Repost to Scruton-Pill your timeline!

@NuclearMAGAlady Yes

Do you support this?

It's the 20th Anniversary of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." NONE of his scary predictions have come true. Mt. Kilimanjaro still has snow and Glacier National Park still has glaciers. Here's why we are not doomed:

'We all kind of grew up together with Art Blakey because we all were young and he gave us a chance to write. We had to write something that was good and to sit up with a great guy like Art Blakey and watch him.' - Freddie Hubbard #jazz #art #quote

🚨 EVER HEARD OF THE “BLACKSTONE MEMORIAL”? Most people have not. In 1891, decades before the Balfour Declaration, decades before the Holocaust, and more than half a century before the founding of modern Israel, hundreds of prominent Americans signed a petition calling for the Jewish people to be restored to their ancestral homeland. It was called the Blackstone Memorial. The petition was written by William Eugene Blackstone and presented to U.S. President Benjamin Harrison and Secretary of State James G. Blaine. Its central argument was simple: Millions of Jews were facing persecution in Russia. Europe did not want them. America could not absorb them all quickly. So the question was asked: Why not restore the Jewish people to their ancient homeland? The memorial pointed out that the international powers had already helped restore other peoples to their historic lands. Bulgaria to the Bulgarians. Serbia to the Serbians. Greece to the Greeks. So why not Palestine to the Jews? The petition argued that the Jewish people had been expelled from their land by force, had never stopped longing to return, and that restoring Jewish autonomy there would be both just and humanitarian. And this was not some fringe document. It was signed by leading American politicians, newspaper editors, clergy, rabbis, judges, bankers, businessmen, and public figures. Among the names were future President William McKinley, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Chief Justice Melville Fuller, and hundreds of others. Think about that. In 1891, major American voices were already publicly saying that the Jewish people had a legitimate historic claim to their homeland. This was not invented in 1948. It was not created by the Holocaust. It was not some colonial project suddenly dropped into the Middle East. The idea that the Jewish people belonged in their ancestral homeland was recognized by major American figures generations before the State of Israel was reborn. The Blackstone Memorial is a reminder that Jewish restoration was not a modern propaganda slogan. It was an old moral, historical, and political argument. And America knew it long before the world pretended to forget. @revenuepath

@SunRaUniverse @zootswings If you love fine music, you gotta love this!

Marshall Allen’s 102 Birthday celebrations - Ruba Club Philadelphia - Sunday May 24 2026

A lady asked an old street vendor, "How much do you charge for your eggs?" The old man replied, "0.50 cents per egg, ma'am." The lady replied, "I'll take 6 eggs for 2.00 dollars or I'll leave." The old vendor replied, "Buy them at the price you want, miss. This is a good start for me, because I haven't sold a single egg today and I need this to make a living." She bought her eggs at a bargain and left feeling like she'd won. She got into her fancy car and went to a fancy restaurant with her friend. She and her friend ordered whatever they wanted. They ate some of what they ordered and left much of it behind. So they paid the bill of 150 dollars. The ladies gave 200 dollars and told the owner of the fancy restaurant to keep the change as a tip. This story might seem very normal to the owner of the fancy restaurant, but very unfair to the egg seller. The question it raises is: Why do we always have to show that we have power when we buy from people in need? And why are we generous to those who don't even need our generosity? We once read somewhere that a father bought goods from poor people at a high price, even though he didn't need these things. Sometimes he paid more. His children were amazed. One day they asked him, "Why do you do that, Dad?" The father replied, "It's charity, wrapped in dignity." I know that most of you won't share this post, but if you're one of the people who took the time to read this far... Then this message of an attempt at "humanity" has taken a step in the right direction. Thanks for reading. 🫶

@sukh_saroy This was amazing.

So the question is simple. Which generation are we, and what are we teaching our kids about the cost of the thing they were born already owning? 🎯🎯🎯🔥🎯🎯🎯 The quote is real. D.H. Lawrence wrote it, and it lives in his 1929 collection of short poems called Pansies, in a piece titled "Liberty's Old Story." The words are his, and the warning is far older than he is. Here is the hard truth the meme gets right, even if it does not always land in three neat generations. Liberty does not die in one dramatic moment. It rots slowly, and it rots in comfort. One generation bleeds for something. They know exactly what it cost, because they paid the bill in scars and graves. They pass it down carefully, like a loaded rifle. The next generation inherits the peace. They enjoy it. They mean well, and that is the trap, because they decide their children should never have to struggle the way they did. So they hand down everything soft and easy, and they forget to pass on the one thing that mattered. The understanding that freedom is earned, defended, and re-earned in every single generation, or it is lost. By the third turn, liberty is not treasured. It is assumed. It is background noise, the way you expect running water, right up until the day it stops. And a people who expect freedom without effort will trade it for comfort without a second thought. They will call the cage security. They will call the leash safety. This is not Lawrence's fantasy. It is the pattern of nearly every wealthy, comfortable nation that stopped teaching its young why the fight ever mattered. The Founders understood this better than we do. They did not believe a republic could run itself. They built one for a people willing to stay awake, stay virtuous, and stay free. So the question is simple. Which generation are we, and what are we teaching our kids about the cost of the thing they were born already owning?

Hungarian Film Director Laszlo Nemes: ‘An Absolute Orgy of Antisemitism’ in the West by Hugh Fitzgerald Laszlo Nemes is right, of course. At Cannes, where his movie Moulin, about the French Resistance leader whom Klaus Barbie tortured to death, is being shown, the Hungarian director delivered himself of some words of warning and despair. Nemes is a Hungarian film director, and a Jew, whose three movies have been about Jews, Nazis, and a heroic Résistant in Occupied Europe. He has felt the wind of antisemitism that, he says, is now at gale-force level, akin to what he says swept across Europe in the 1930s: “I think now [the idea of] the Jew as the internal enemy of the West has reached the dimensions of European antisemitism before the takeover by the National Socialist [Nazi] Party.” This is a cry of despair that comes from a deep way down. Do not turn away. Pay attention.

@igchampcom Yes, I and my wife would be so honored!

Be honest… If President Trump and the First Lady personally invited you and your entire family to the White House for a private dinner, would you actually go? No virtue signaling — just yes or no, and why?

“You go home expecting to go right to bed. But then, on the way, you go past the piano and there's a flirtation. It flirts with you. So, you sit down and try out a couple of chords and when you look up, it's 7 AM...” Duke Ellington April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974

@AntiWokeMemes Burn it.

If a copy of the Koran is delivered to your mailbox... What do you do with it?

This day (May 24) in 1948, just 10 days after declaring independence, the newborn State of Israel faced a life-or-death crisis: Jerusalem was being strangled & starved. A ragtag force of mostly Holocaust survivors— many who had stepped off the ships from Europe just days earlier, with almost no training and no common language — was ordered to storm the heavily fortified Arab Legion position at Latrun to break the siege. They charged at night under a full moon that turned them into perfect targets for Jordanian machine guns. Outnumbered, outgunned, and barely armed, they were slaughtered. 75 fell in that first assault alone. Ariel Sharon was badly wounded. Yitzhak Rabin fought there too. But their sacrifice was not in vain. While the world watched, these Jews — who had just escaped the gas chambers — refused to let Jerusalem starve. Their repeated stands bought critical time for engineers to carve the legendary Burma Road through the mountains under fire. Supplies finally got through. The siege was broken. The young state survived. From the ashes of Auschwitz to the hills of Latrun in just three years. No weapons. No experience. No fear. Only the unbreakable will to never be victims again. Am Yisrael Chai🇮🇱

@NuclearMAGAlady Terrorism

They left their homes, the mosque, and even the sidewalk, choosing instead to pray in the middle of the street! What would you even call this?!

Roughly half of British adults are vitamin D deficient in winter. One in six is deficient year-round. Among British adults of South Asian, African, or Caribbean heritage, deficiency runs higher and persists through summer. The official response is a daily 10-microgram supplement from October to March. The UK vitamin D supplement market is worth roughly £85 million a year. The deficiency is not a shortage of available vitamin D. The deficiency is a deficiency of behaviour. Your skin makes vitamin D from cholesterol when UVB hits it. UVB reaches the UK from April to September. In winter, it's effectively absent. Skin makes nothing because there's nothing in the light to work with. In summer, fifteen to twenty minutes of midday sun on bare arms and legs produces 10,000 to 20,000 IU. The equivalent of two months of capsule supplementation, in a quarter of an hour, for free. The official advice for those months is to wear sunscreen, cover up, and avoid the midday sun. The two recommendations contradict each other directly. Dermatology wants you indoors with SPF 50. Endocrinology wants you on a daily capsule. Nobody coordinates because nobody benefits from coordinating. Two further complications. Vitamin D is synthesised from cholesterol. Statins, prescribed to roughly one in four UK adults over 40, lower the very substrate your skin uses to make it. The dietary sources of bioavailable D3, butter, egg yolks, liver, oily fish, full-fat dairy, are precisely the foods the population has been advised to reduce for sixty years. We removed the dietary source. We blocked the synthesis pathway with statins. We told the population to stay out of the sun. We are now selling them a capsule to fix the deficiency we engineered. Fifteen minutes of midday sun in summer, butter on toast, eggs for breakfast, liver once a week. The intervention costs nothing and has no side effects. It is considered inconvenient by exactly one of the parties involved.

"She was one of 11 kids sleeping on floors during the Great Depression. Her name was Marian Wynn, and at seventeen, she had nothing but a bus ticket and a desperate need to escape. The Call It was 1944. Her father had found work in California—Kaiser Shipyards were building the ships that would change the war. Marian begged to go with him, but he insisted she finish school first. So she worked. Factory jobs. Cannery shifts. Every penny counted. When graduation finally came, she was ready. But then a car with a shiny exterior pulled up her driveway. In those days, nobody drove shiny cars unless it was bad news. They told her that her older brother Donald had been killed in Normandy. He was a soldier. He never came home. She boarded that Greyhound bus anyway. The Hands That Built History In July 1944, Marian walked into Kaiser Shipyard Number 3 as a pipe welder—despite never welding before in her life. Training lasted days. The work was impossibly precise: too much heat and the pipe would burn through; too little and the rod would stick. She learned because she had to. Around her, thousands of women filled the shipyards, building Liberty ships that carried soldiers and supplies across a world at war. They worked ten-hour shifts. Some men doubted them at first. Then the work spoke. One supervisor pulled her aside: ""You weld better than any man I've ever supervised."" Her father was so proud he carried a piece of her weld back home to Minnesota to show people what his daughter could do. The Quiet Years After the war, Marian married a sailor, raised a daughter, and lived an ordinary life. She worked jobs. She paid her bills. She lived sixty years without fanfare. Then Lloyd died in 2005. The Final Chapter Marian could have retired into silence. Instead, every Friday, she walked into the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond. For nearly two decades, she welcomed strangers and shared her story—not as nostalgia, but as a promise: We will not be forgotten. In 2019, at ninety-two years old, she finally stood at her brother Donald's grave in Normandy for the first time since losing him at eighteen. They had told her he died in battle. Seventy-five years later, she finally said goodbye. And then, just weeks before her death on October 3, 2025, a stranger found her. The daughter of another Rosie had learned Marian's story through news coverage and tracked her down to return something precious: Donald's Purple Heart Medal—lost for decades, finally coming home. The Legacy Marian Wynn lived for ninety-nine years. She carried hardship, loss, and sacrifice with quiet dignity. Then she spent her final years making sure the world would never forget the women who helped build history with their own hands. Her generation proved that when we're needed, we show up. Her life proved that when we remember them, we honor ourselves."