Month: August 2020

05AUG2020 OCF Update – Marooned in the Dead Zone

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Tropical Storm “Whatever the Hell it Was Called” blew through here yesterday and I’ve been without power, phone, cable and internet for about thirty hours.  One point of clarification, Camera Girl and I only have a land line.  I am the last adult male in North America without any sort of cellular phone.  Because of this I haven’t seen news, read a blog or even been able to get on OCS since early afternoon on Tuesday.  I took a car ride to visit family today and had to make four detours to get through all the downed power lines in my heavily wooded part of the country.  But my visit was practical.  I wanted to make sure they had running water in the house and were able to keep their refrigerated food cold.  I didn’t ask them whether the country was still called America or whether the White House had been repainted black to show sensitivity for hurt feelings.  I wasn’t even sure exactly how many people in the Northeast were without power.  I knew there were a lot locally but how far it extended was completely unknown to me.

It’s kind of a weird feeling.  I couldn’t even get on line to do my day job.  Luckily the dvd player doesn’t require the internet and so I was able to watch the next episode of Star Trek tonight.  It’s the one where Kirk, Spock, Scotty and McCoy go down to a planet and then start aging 30 years per day and Spock convenes a competency hearing and has Kirk declared too senile to captain the Enterprise.  It’s wonderful.  I’ll write it up soon but what struck me was that I was so grateful for a diversion from the quiet.  Well, not exactly quiet.  If the air conditioner is off, I can hear the generator cranking away.  It’s about as loud as a lawn tractor but hour after hour it really begins to get annoying as a background sound.  And it’s not exactly cabin fever.  After all the car still runs.  I mean, it’s not as if I’m going all Jack Torrance or anything but if Camera Girl starts pulling a Shelley Duvall act around here it won’t be good.  In a lot of ways, I’ve always been the caretaker here and nobody better forget it.

Well anyway, I’ve been thinking about all the bizarre things that have happened in the last six months and I’ve decided we have officially entered into a permanent state of madness.  Basically nothing is unthinkable and the odds of the whole human race descending into an irrevocable death spiral seems just as likely as not.  And at this point I think I might be willing to take my chances in the new setup.  With enough ammunition and gasoline, I could see myself as the next Lord Humungous.  I’ve always wanted to be able to threaten to unleash my dogs of war.  The only thing is I’ll have to lose some weight. Humungous was pretty fit.

So that’s where we are.  Forced to huddle in our homes afraid to go to the grocery store without a mask because the thought police will turn me in.  Working from home because our corporate masters are afraid of being sued for killing us with COVID and now we don’t have electricity, running water, refrigeration or access to mass communication.  At this rate pretty soon we’ll be envying the peasants during the black plague because at least they had that guy with the cart collecting the dead.  We’ll probably be forced to stockpile our dead until someone figures out a safe way for the garbagemen to collect them.

 

Update: 6AUG2020 I travelled to a wifi area to post this.  I’m not sure when my access will be restored so bear with my sparse commenting for the next day or so.

An Open Letter of Thanks from a Deplorable to Antifa and BLM

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I don’t typically give the devil his due but these are not normal circumstances and I think I must.

In our hyperpolarized 50/50 America the economic and social disruption caused by the Wuhan flu should have been a very serious obstacle to an incumbent president’s re-election prospects.  Not that it would have made it impossible for the incumbent but rather that it would have given the challenger a great point of attack.  The loss of many jobs and businesses can easily be politicized during a campaign to the challenger’s advantage.  And that is why the President was so invested in restarting the economy as soon as possible.  This would allow enough time for the economic picture to be on the rebound by the November election.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the campaign.  When it became apparent that Bernie Sanders was not going to be the Democrat candidate for president, his most radical followers seemed to have pulled out Plan B.  And based on actual circumstances Plan B seems to have been a race war.  Unfortunately for their plans, the blue states, instead of quelling the riots, have instead embraced the radical racialist philosophy of BLM and have begun the process of demonizing the white population, dismantling their police departments and eventually setting up a network of warlord drug fiefdoms where their inner-city ghettos are currently situated.  Once these free-fire zones have been in place for a few years all the honest people will be forced to flee the cities and these former metropolises will join Detroit and Baltimore as third world hellholes and cautionary tales for Democrats who think they know how not to waste a crisis.

The upshot of all this is that the Bernie Bros have managed to unleash a Democrat mediated nightmare that almost certainly assures not only the President’s re-election but provides a scenario where down ticket Republicans get a serious boost in their election prospects too.  That is if they are smart enough to take advantage of it.  And being Republicans that is a big if.

But how did this happen?  If I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d hypothesize that false flag agents of the far right infiltrated Antifa and instigated the George Floyd rebellion in Minneapolis and then helped set up separate franchises in all the other blue cities.  It’s of course a ridiculous idea, but the outcome of the rioting is almost ideal as an object lesson for suburbanites who want to see what it would be like if Democrats are allowed to set racial policy across the country.  Not only do they now have to avoid the no-man’s land in their own city but they have to endure corporate training about their white privilege and unconscious bias.  Their kids will be endlessly propagandized at school and encouraged to denigrate their parents, heritage and history.

However, it happened, it truly is a miracle of biblical proportion.  It’s like that scene in the movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life” where the angel gives George Bailey a chance to see what life would be like if he had never been born.  Instead what has happened is the country has been given the chance to see what the Democrat’s 1619 policy will look like ahead of time.  Under their leadership rioting, looting and arson are now spectator sports for Antifa, BLM and the thugs who follow them around.  The protection that you have come to expect from the police will be gone and guns will be plentiful for criminals but still forbidden for you.  Economic growth will disappear for you, but slavery reparations will still have to be paid for, so expect your paycheck to get a lot smaller.  All in all, you’ll be reminded that you really did have a pretty wonderful life last year before the Wuhan flu and BLM took it all away.  And you’ll have a chance in November to put the Democrats in charge and make this nightmare a permanent situation or re-elect President Trump and let him end their reign of terror.  Tough choice.

So, thanks again Antifa, thanks BLM and thanks to all the Democrat mayors and governors who stood idly by while the mob looted, burned, beat and murdered everything in their path.  You’ve done in real life what a thousand commercials could not have done.  You have shown America the future.  Anyone with an IQ higher than the outside temperature in Minneapolis in January should now know exactly what to expect under a Democrat regime, an Orwellian dystopia involving racial violence, the end of free speech and economic serfdom.  Well done.

And if between now and November you get bored, feel free to burn down the cities again just for old times sake and to keep in practice.  If I might offer a suggestion, this time burn down the universities.  Start with Harvard.  I hear they have plenty of statues that need toppling.

Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 11 – Friday’s Child

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This is the quintessential second season episode.  It has so many kitschy tics going on that it’s a little overwhelming.  So first the plot.

The Enterprise is attempting to get a treaty with a tribal world that has some make-believe mineral that’s really important.  The natives are allegedly seven-foot-tall Visigoths that are very honest but very combative and warlike.  McCoy has spent time on the planet and is an expert on their customs.  He, Kirk and Spock beam down along with a redshirt who is immediately killed by the natives when he draws his phaser at an unexpected Klingon with the natives.  Scotty is left in charge of the Enterprise and has been warned that the Klingons may be lurking around.

The Klingon plots with one of the natives and eventually this tribesman kills the tribal leader and takes over the task of deciding whether the Federation or the Klingons will get the mining treaty.

Now the deceased tribal leader’s pregnant wife (played by tv’s Cat woman Julie Newmar) is about to be slaughtered by the new leader but Kirk intervenes and the Enterprise landing party and the woman are placed under armed guard until it is decided how they are to be killed.

Meanwhile the Enterprise is decoyed out of orbit by a Klingon ship masquerading as a Federation freighter in distress.  So, while the landing party is unable to call for help in their peril.  By means of a subterfuge Kirk and Spock manage to overpower the guards and headed for the Los Angeles hills where they find a cave where McCoy can deliver the woman’s unwanted child.  As the widow of the leader she is honor bound to kill herself and the child with her.  McCoy convinces her to want the child but somehow, she decides the child is now McCoy’s.

Kirk and Spock make bows and arrows and cause an avalanche in the cliffs of southern California and hold the tribesman at bay while the baby is delivered but eventually the Klingon kills the new chief for no apparent reason and then is killed by the tribe.  Just then Scotty and a landing party arrives and the Cat woman is made the regent for her son who will be the next tribal leader.  Back on the ship we find out the baby is named Leonard James Akaar after McCoy and Kirk and Spock acts annoyed.  Hilarity ensues.

Okay, now let’s review the horror.  The supposedly seven-foot-tall natives are barely average height.  The uniforms of the warriors look like they were designed for Liberace or Elton John.  Next, we have the classic McCoyism.  When he is trying to drag the Cat woman up an arroyo he complains “I’m a doctor not an escalator.”  And while Scotty is commanding the Enterprise he comes up with such gems as, “Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me!” and, “Let’s charge right at him and see if he has the belly for a fight!”  Kirk and Spock up in the hills with their bows and arrows was pretty ridiculous looking.

All the little mannerisms have been built up over the season and a half are now in place.  Kirk has an established manner with each of the cast members.  You can almost predict what he will say to Spock, McCoy, Scotty or Uhura.  Even Spock and McCoy have their little routines that they banter at each other.  So, from the point of view of a second season Star Trek episode this is average.  Average in every way.  I’ll give it an average rating 7 with a low Shatner mockery rating so let’s call it a 7 // 4.

The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem – A Science Fiction Book Review

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Many years ago, I read some short stories by the Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem.  I remember they had futuristic elements like interstellar travel but they also included a certain amount of communist doublespeak about socialist this and soviet that.  And that seemed really odd.

But recently War Dog mentioned favorably the “The Cyberiad” collection of stories and its mathematical love poem so I decided to give Lem another whirl.

The stories in this book are the adventures of two robot inventors, or as they are called in their world Constructors, named Trurl and Klapaucius.  And when I say robot inventors I mean to say that they are inventors who are themselves robots.  They are friends and rivals and from time to time enemies.  They go on assignments together or separately taking on contracts to build just about anything imaginable.  And sometimes they build things for themselves that don’t always seem to be very sensible.  For instance, one- time Trurl constructed a machine that could create anything starting with the letter n.  It could make needles, negligees, nepenthe, narcotics, nimbuses, noodles, nuclei, neutrons, naphtha, noses, nymphs, naiads but not natrium.  And why not?  Because natrium is Latin for sodium and in English sodium starts with s!  Later on, being told to make nothing almost puts an end to the universe but luckily Trurl stops the machine just in time.

So as you can see this is comic science fiction. It’s something sort of in the same vein as Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” but what it also reminds me of is Lewis Carroll and his Wonderland stories.  There is an enormous amount of wordplay and punning going on in the stories.  The interesting thing is that a lot of the word play is specific to English and these stories were written in Polish which makes me wonder if the translator had to find English equivalents for Polish puns.

The Constructors become involved in adventures that take them all through the cosmos fulfilling contracts for kings and emperors and pirates and sometimes for common people who just really need help.  They build monsters and demons and story telling machines and even machines that know everything about the whole universe.  Interestingly it seems most of the universe is populated by robots and other cybernetic beings.  Organic beings exist and seem to be pretty generally looked down upon by the robots.  But the robots are very human in their foibles and behavior and none more so than our heroes Trurl and Klapaucius.

Mixed in with the zaniness of each of their adventures is a good dose of irony about the human condition.  The selfishness and cruelty of many of their employers and the vanity and greed of the Constructors themselves is often the point of the stories and the fantasy setting is there to add humor and interest to the tale.  And also Lem is enjoying the poetic aspect of the words.  Sure, we can’t hear the Polish words to know it’s poetical but based on the English words you can see that Stanislaw Lem is like a “drunken lord of language” always using twenty words for effect where one is needed for meaning.  Here’s an example:

“Multitudinous are you?”

“We are!”  they shouted, bursting with pride.  “We are innumerable.”

And others cried:

“We are like fish in the sea.”

“Like pebbles on the beach.”

“Like stars in the sky.  Like atoms!”

You get the idea.  Lem is a poet.  And his stories are parables.  And because of this I find that it needs to be broken up and digested in small chunks.  Each of the chapters is a separate story and should be approached as such.  With all of the word play and digressions you can lose track of the nub of the story if you’re tired and not paying attention so I wouldn’t suggest reading them at night before going to bed.  This happened to me once or twice and I realized this wasn’t the kind of material that can be enjoyed at high speed like an adventure novel.  But if you give each story some time and attention it will reward you with a smile and a chuckle.  I’m glad now I was made aware of The Cyberiad.  I will enjoy returning to the adventures of the two intrepid Constructors Trurl and Klapaucius on some cold night in January when my world needs something lighthearted and clever to get me through the short days and long nights of winter.  But if you don’t like an airy, poetical style of writing this might not be for you.