“All life is problem solving.”
Karl Popper
All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
“All life is problem solving.”
Karl Popper
This guy was molested as a child and because of his confusion convinced himself he was transgender but when he realized that he wasn’t a woman, the courts allowed him to be “non-binary.” And eventually he realized he was just a screwed up man. But he tells how the LGBTQ movement and the medical and court groups push this stuff along even when it means screwing up and even mutilating kids.
I Was America’s First ‘Nonbinary’ Person. It Was All a Sham.
He just lays it right out there. Nothing that hasn’t been said a million times on the Dissident Right but when do you ever see this stuff on the big cable networks. Spot on.
Tucker Carlson Tears Into Media Matters, CNN, Calls Brian Stelter a ‘Eunuch’ in Fiery Monologue

Cliff Robertson plays a character named Chris Horn. Horn is a member of a wagon train that had crossed the prairie and deserts between Ohio and the New Mexico to start a new life in California. Now the rest of the wagon train were despairing of finding water ahead and were talking of turning back. His wife is heartbroken because their son Christian is terribly ill with a fever and thought near death. One of the other heads of family, Charlie (played by John Astin) tries to reason with Chris about how futile it is. Although practically hopeless himself Chris is very reluctant to give up after coming so far. He tells Charlie he’ll go over the sand ridge to the side of their trail to see if he can find water and what’s on the other side.
When Chris crests the top of the ridge, he is met with a scene he cannot comprehend. There are tall metal towers connected by rope-like lines that extend to the horizon in both directions and there is a black road that also extends in both directions as far as he can see. Walking down to the road he touches it and finds that it is very warm. Suddenly a huge machine comes flying down the road making a loud frightening noise and he runs for his life off the road. While scurrying away his rifle accidentally discharges and the bullet nicks his arm. Now thoroughly disoriented he walks along the road to see where it goes.
He shows up at a small 1960s vintage general store with a dining area and a gas pump out front. The friendly married couple who own the store try to help Chris and answer his questions. They give him water and the wife cleans his gunshot wound and gives him some penicillin to avoid infection. They tell him about the area where they are (New Mexico) and that there is considerable water and game in the area. When talking about the penicillin Chris realizes it may help his sick child and so he takes the container of pills. Finally, when they ask him where he got the antique rifle, he takes offense declaring that it is a brand new 1846 rifle. They inform him that it’s 1961. He disbelieves them until he sees the date on the calendar on the wall. He looks through their books and finds an encyclopedia that has an article on someone with his son’s name that went on to be a doctor in California in the late 1800s. Now Chris is encouraged to think that not only will he make it to California but that his son will live. A doctor that the couple had called checks on Chris’s wound and finds it to be satisfactory but after examining him he notes that he has fillings in his teeth that could not have been used after the middle of the nineteenth century. Because of the gunshot wound and also because he has begun doubting Chris’s sanity, the doctor called the town sheriff to come and pick Chris up. When Chris realizes what is going on, he makes a run for it. As he nears the ridge he first climbed to get to this strange world, the police cruiser approaches. Running to stay ahead of the sheriff he drops his rifle and sprints over the top of the ridge. And there he finds his own wagon. When he cautiously looks back over the ridge the twentieth century is nowhere to be seen. No powerlines, no asphalt road and no sheriff on his heels.
He goes back to the wagon train and tells Charlie that they will find water and game very soon and that they will certainly get to California. Then he tells his wife to give some of the pills to their son and that the boy will live and get better soon. Chris Horn is an awestruck man but much more confident of the future for himself and his family.
Back in 1961, the sheriff and the store owner go over the crest of the hill and see no sign of Chris. They pick up his rifle and return to the store. But when they return to the store, they realize the rifle is now an antique and in terrible shape from a century of exposure.
I think Cliff Robertson did a very good job with this role. The story is entertaining and there is plenty of human interest with the various sympathetic characters. The story is another unexplainable time travel story but it is well done.
B+
“If you can’t say it simply and clearly, keep quiet, and keep working on it till you can.”
Karl Popper
Beautifully done. Tucker says Fox News is behind him I hope they truly are.
This man is my hero.
Grandma Bayles lives with her son Chris and his family, his wife Sylvia and their six-year old son Billy. Grandma is very old and very sick and she knows she hasn’t long to live but she says to anyone who’ll listen that having Billy around has given her the only joy she has in life. On his birthday she gives Billy a toy telephone and tells him that wherever she goes he can always talk to her using the toy phone. The parents take this as a harmless game between an old lady and her very young grandson. But almost immediately after the party Grandma is at death’s door and the family is assembled at her bed. While trying to console her she reveals that she no longer considers any of them family except Billy and that she wishes he could go with her to the other side.
After she dies Billy’s parents notice him talking into the toy phone whenever they happen upon him in his room but he always stops talking as soon as he sees them. When they ask him who he’s talking to he says Grandma. Finally, one day his Mother sneaks up on him and grabs the phone away from him unexpectedly and she tells her husband afterward that she could hear breathing in the receiver. Phil tells her that she must have been imagining it. The phone after all is just a toy.
One day when Sylvia returns from the store the baby-sitter is in a panic and a man is sitting in the living room in an agitated state. He tells her that he was driving down their street when completely out of nowhere Billy dashed directly in front of his wheel. He said if he hadn’t been completely alert and swerved the boy would have been killed. But most disturbingly when he asked Billy why he had run into the street he told him that someone told him to do it. And of course, the baby-sitter swore she would never such a crazy thing but that Billy had been talking on his phone just before the incident.
Now the parents are convinced that Billy has been influenced in a terrible way by the phone and his grandmother’s feelings about having him join her. They tell Billy that they are taking the phone away from him to prevent the problem from recurring. Billy runs away distraught and a few moments later we found out that he threw himself into the ornamental fish pond and wasn’t breathing.
A rescue team of firemen work feverishly with oxygen and respiration gear on Billy but one of them says to the parents that it didn’t look good.
Now Phil Bayles takes his son’s toy phone in his hands and starts making an impassioned plea to his dead mother to let Billy go and let him live to grow up. He says it’s not fair to take away all the good things in life that growing child gets to enjoy. As her son and Billy’s father he pleads with her with a sob in his voice.
And as he finishes, we hear from the emergency crew the news that miraculously Billy has revived and seems to have escaped the risk of permanent damage from his scrape with death.
This episode has always made me very angry. Unless that phone was a line to Hell, what kind of Heaven would allow in a grandmother who was capable of telling six-year-old grandson to run into traffic or drown himself in a pond. Either way I have such contempt for her that I can’t enjoy the happy conclusion. But I do recognize that it is a story with powerful imagery and Billy Mumy is a very convincing little boy actor, as usual.
Let’s say A-.
“It is as absurd to expect members of philosophy departments to be philosophers as it is to expect members of art departments to be artists.”
Leo Strauss
A week ago I went to the local butterfly conservatory. I’d been there before but now I was allowed to use a monopod because it was off hours. Same butterflies but more fun. I’ll be sprinkling in the shots between other stuff for the next few months.
