Month: January 2021
Reclaiming the Family – Part 6 – The Miracle of a Traditional Wife
I never tire of reminding Camera Girl that in my mind she and I are very close in behavior to the married couple in W. C. Fields two classic movies, “It’s A Gift” and “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.” In both movies Field’s hen-pecked character has a wife played by Kathleen Howard a tall, stout woman who affects the character of a cultured, histrionic scold who constantly hectors and nags at Fields’ character. And Fields’ answer to almost every utterance of his wife is a meek, “yes dear.” And I tell her this not because there is any resemblance physically or temperamentally between her and this shrewish character but because this reminds me of the natural antagonism that husband and wife experience in the course of their wedded bliss. Well, also because I am sort of a jerk.
A few weeks ago, we were sitting down to dinner and she had cooked a soup using the leftovers from a ham we had for the holidays. It was a ham and lentil soup and she decided to make it so thick that we call it a stoup, meaning stew/soup. As I started eating dinner it occurred to me that being married to a woman like my wife is probably the greatest good that a man can have in his life.
A traditional wife makes your house into a home and raises a family. And a family is the only true wealth that any man ever actually possesses. And if she’s also pretty and a good cook like mine then it’s as close to heaven as any man can hope to see on this side of the great divide. That’s the information I can provide to the young guys around today.
But where can you find such a woman today? All the American girls have been sold on the idea that they have to have a career to be fulfilled in the modern world. That is the root of the problem. There are only two solutions, either convince some woman that there is a better option or go outside of the local pool of women.
As far as convincing women to move away from careers I think a man has to have the wherewithal to convince a woman that he can support a stay-at-home wife. Probably that means owning your own home and having a stable income. It would be best if you are up front about your plans and expectations so that you can eliminate the girls that will never work out. I’m too old to know anything about on-line dating services but I would imagine a primary function would be trying to line up marital expectations. Correct me if I’m mistaken that they must have a profile that corresponds to a traditional homemaker.
One thing that might be a starting point is avoid any girl who is planning on going to some very expensive college. Unless her parents have funded her entire education, she is going to have to pay back those student loans and that will make it doubly difficult for you to afford a one income lifestyle. So maybe you should be looking at women who go to the local community college or even better ones working in local jobs that do not require high powered college credentials.
But however you find one, if she has all the qualifications I mentioned in my intro then marry her and never let her work a day of her life outside of the home. Have a passel of kids and enjoy every day of it for as long as you both shall live. Raising a family is a challenging and sometimes a confusing task but as you get older, you’ll find that it really is the only meaningful thing that most human beings ever accomplish. Ray Bradbury wrote a story called the Happiness Machine. In it an inventor tried to make a machine that would make a person happy if he sat in it. It had all the sights and sounds that he imagined could make a person happy. Music, exotic vistas, delicious aromas, everything he thought he would want. But by the end of the story, he discovers the truth when he looks into the window of his own house and sees his family, his wife and his children, performing their routine daily activities together in his own home. That is the true happiness machine. And if a man can’t find happiness in that then maybe he never will.
23JAN2021 – Quote of the Day
When young, one is confident to be able to build palaces for mankind, but when the time comes one has one’s hands full just to be able to remove their trash.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
23JAN2021 – Photo of the Day
Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 23 – The Omega Glory
In the highest circles of the Shatner-Khan hierarchy there is no more sacred text than “Eed plebnista” and “norkon forden perfectunun.” One of my oldest acquaintances has been heard to spontaneously break out into this phrase with no visible rationale. Because of these tendencies I tackle this review with great trepidation. If I get it wrong there could be serious blowback.
The Enterprise is sent to planet blah,blah,blah to find out what has become of the Starship Exeter. It’s found circling the planet and Kirk, McCoy, Spock and a redshirt fully primed for certain death beam over to the Exeter. There they find a bunch of empty uniforms dribbling rock salt from the sleeves and pant cuffs. Surprise, surprise, everybody’s dead and a video clip tells them that a disease brought up from the planet was the cause. Being warned to beam down to the planet immediately they do so and find out that the lone survivor is Captain Tracey of the Exeter and he is engaged in Prime Directive defying aid to the Kohms in their war with the savage Yangs. And unsurprisingly the Yangs are the descendants of the defeated white Yankees and the Kohms are the victorious Chinese Communists who won a biological weapons war and occupied the Yangs homeland.
But the Yangs are finishing off a long reconquest of their homeland and even with Captain Tracey’s fire boxes (phasers) the Kohms are in big trouble. Tracey captures the Enterprise party and demands that Kirk provide him with ten more phasers with three extra power packs for each. When the redshirt reaches for his phaser Tracey disintegrates him. We also find out tha the disease that killed off the Exeter would have been harmless if the crew members had stayed just a short time longer on planet blah,blah,blah and now all of them could return to the Enterprise without risk to the ship or themselves. But Tracey has discovered that the inhabitants live to be over a thousand years old and he is convinced that the secret to this amazing longevity can be discovered by McCoy and then sold by Tracey to the highest bidder once he’s beaten of the Yangs. McCoy debunks the theory and says the longevity is just a natural byproduct of the survival after the bioweapon ordeal.
Meanwhile there is all this tuh-doing between Kirk and Tracey and a Yang prisoner who we find out is the Yang Chief Cloud Williams and his wife. Finally Spock and Kirk escape from jail. But eventually the Yangs attack the Kohms and we get to hear Tracey makes his horrified report of the battle, “They sacrificed hundreds just to draw us out in the open and then they came and they came. We drained four of our phasers and they still came. We killed thousands and they still came!” Good times, good times.
So the Yangs capture all of the Federation personnel. When the Yangs break out an antique American flag and Cloud Williams starts reciting a really garbled version of the Pledge of Allegiance Kirk completes the pledge and now Cloud wants Kirk to explain how he knows their sacred words. But whereas Kirk wants to explain that they are from another world Tracey claims that Kirk and his crew are devils. He uses as proof the fact that Spock has pointed ears and no heart. Cloud Williams is unclear who to believe and asks if Kirk can complete the most sacred of their texts which only a chief would know. He starts it with “Eed plebnista.” But Kirk can’t figure out what it is. So instead he claims trial by combat against Tracey to the death. Spock uses Vulcan mind games to get one of the Yang women to trigger a communicator and an armed landing party arrives with Sulu in command just as Kirk defeats Tracey but refuses to kill him.
Now hearing a few more of the words, “norkon forden perfectunun,” Kirk figures out that it’s the preamble to the Constitution and recites it and then gives Cloud and his tribal circle a civics lesson. And then somehow they head back to the Enterprise, even though Sulu and the others are now infected with a disease that will dehydrate them down to bath salts within minutes. The End.
“Eed plebnista” indeed. There’s just so much to love about this episode. Tracey beats up Kirk several times in the episode. Shatner’s overacting while giving the Yangs their civics lesson. And Tracey is so great in his angry intensity. He wants that immortality drug and the power it will give him. He comes up with that great “He has no hearrrrt!” line about Spock and finally he has his great narration of the Yang attack.
This gets a 10 // 7.
22JAN2021 – OCF Update – Glass Half Full Kind of Day
I feel disgustingly cheerful today. It’s a very bright sunny day here in the gulag. Because of the bitter cold, the furnace is roaring away on fuel oil and the forced hot water is merrily exchanging heat with the air in my living room here at the Compound. Camera Girl has sallied forth in Old Car to Wally World to bring me flesh, and bring me wine, and bring me pine logs hither, sort of. Old dog and not so old dog are lazing near the radiators and I have just finished listening to the ZMan’s Friday Power Hour, his weekly podcast, and despite the predictions of crime waves and government malfeasance it was surprisingly upbeat, I thought.
And I find myself almost ebullient. In the last four days I think four of my posts were linked over at Whatfinger and several thousand extra pageviews were registered and new subscribers joined and new voices appeared in the comments and an interesting opportunity for the site has appeared that may bring still more traffic here. So, a big shout out to Sergeant Pat and the other guys over at Whatfinger.
But in addition, recent events have led me to believe that the result of the fraudulent election will spark changes in this country that are all for the good. The spell is broken. Everyone is paying attention to the man behind the curtain. And he is definitely not the great and powerful anything. He’s just a cheap grifter with a very powerful organization pulling the strings. The problem for him is that, us being able to see the strings takes away a good deal of the effectiveness of his grift. If the suckers figure out that the three-card monte game is really there as a distraction to help the pickpockets in the crowd then it becomes a lot harder to pick pockets. If the Eloi figure out that the Morlocks are cannibals then they’ll stop walking into the frying pan and that will make it a lot harder on the poor Morlocks trying to make an honest living eating Eloi.
And the other part of this whole thing is that I actually feel happier not having to make believe I’m in any way associated with people who either believe or publicly pretend to believe that Dementia Joe is their leader. I want to be in a separate grouping from them. I’m ecstatic if they shun me. I look forward to having different social media platforms, payment processors, crowdfunding sites, even retailers and banks. All those things will be immeasurably better if leftists shun them completely. We should make a point of emblazoning on everything we own some triggering slogan that will send the SJW’s into paroxysms of rage and assure that they will never patronize that site. If I thought it would do any good, I’d emblazon the header of my site with “All Lives Matter!!!!” or something equally scandalous.
Of course, an enormous amount of work is ahead of us to build these new platforms and the Left will do everything they can to torture and attack us every step of the way. But we are still infinitely better off now that the lights are on and we can see the threats. Blundering around in the dark is not only dangerous but it’s also demoralizing. An unseen danger is much more frightening and confusing. For tens of millions of people, the knowledge of who is and isn’t your friend will make avoiding harm a lot easier. Thinking that Mitch McConnell and John Roberts will ride to our rescue is now obvious lunacy. It’s Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown for the millionth time. It’s done for all but the terminally stupid.
We are at last moving on from the grifters.
22JAN2021 – Quote of the Day
An artist’s touches are sometimes no more articulate than the barking of a dog who would call attention to something without exactly knowing what. This is as it should be, and he is a great artist who can be depended on not to bark at nothing.
Samuel Butler
22JAN2021 – Photo of the Day
Organizing Free America
As I’ve mentioned previously there’s no reason to wait for a superhero to start organizing our people into a new tribe. I want to do my part and provide the foundation for an organization that provides a network to local communities to share information and socialize. Eventually when things really get going that superhero is going to need a sophisticated network with all kinds of capability that the geniuses in Silicon Valley have invented in the last decade but for now Orion’s Cold Fire (OCF) and my primitive internet will have to do.
And in the underground you don’t take names and publish a membership list. Pseudonyms and anonymity make a lot of sense when Dementia Joe is starting to act like another Uncle Joe of gulag fame. I just finished Solzhenitsyn’s “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch” and the idea of snitches pervading the society of a captive nation seems a lot more real now that the Left is adopting the idea of re-education camps and purging non-Leftists from all aspects of public and private life.
Well, all that’s fine with me. The internet is a vast web of people who look for what they need. And maybe what they need is hope. And believe it or not I feel more hopeful in the last few weeks than I have in several years. The endless delays by Bill Barr and the endless betrayals by judges and legislators was so frustrating that I often despaired of ever making any headway. But in the midst of the political collapse after the fraudulent elections I see truth shining through and revealing our enemies for who they are and the eyes of the people finally opening to that truth. That is what gives me hope and it sweeps away the false paths and points to the correct road. We must abandon all the institutions that have proven themselves corrupt and build from the ground up. And part of building up these new institutions is smashing the old ones. It’s not enough to build a new political party. We must destroy the Republican party to do it. Primarying all but the loyal GOP office holders. And any of the disloyal who get through the primaries need to be beaten by their Democrat opponents even in safe red states. Mitch McConnell needs to be powerless and abandoned by his paymasters as a warning to those in our new party that might think of betraying us.
And just to be clear I’m no political mastermind. I’m just a humble scribbler of stories who would like nothing better than to get back to writing stories and playing with my grandchildren. But if those kids are going to have a country half as good as the one my parents gave to me then I’m going to have to try and wake up the sleepers and get them doing something in their local communities and talking together about doing something on a national level.
So here’s my sermon for the day. Go out and talk with five or ten or twenty good men and come back and tell us what they think. Build up a club and accomplish some small thing that feels like a small piece of freedom from the repulsive tyranny spreading out of Washington. And come here and brag about it. No names, no places, just ideas and tips on what works and what doesn’t.
Fox News Attempts to Make Amends for Stabbing President Trump in the Back
This made me laugh:
“As ratings tank amid hostile coverage of former President Donald Trump, Fox News is purging its newsroom in an attempt to salvage the network’s fading brand. Political editor Chris Stirewalt, a NeverTrumper, and several digital editors were fired Tuesday.”
https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/20/fox-news-purge-begins/
What’s the expression? Too little, too late. In fact way too late. Even if they threw Chris Wallace, Martha MacCallum, Bret Baier and Sandra Smith into a volcano I don’t think they’ll get back the right wing audience they had. Their last chance was election night. Now I wouldn’t watch their trash if they had the news read by their bimbos naked. Sorry Tucker, you really should find a better home.