Month: August 2021

What’s A Blogger to Do?

photog Current Events, OCF ,

OCF is my personal reaction to the reality that the Left owns the internet.  And when I bumped into that fact it was a lot less true than it is now.  I was revolting against the enforced leftist narrative that I found in every photography website and science fiction review blog.  I just couldn’t stand the atmosphere of delusional superiority and even worse the selective enforcement of website rules.  So, I built my own kingdom where my own version of delusional superiority and selective enforcement of website rules would be the rule.  But who’s to say what’s delusional?

Anyway, Over the years, the site has focused more and more on the political situation until now I’d say that politics is something like 99% of the content if it’s based on text.  Obviously, the photo of the day has very little text and the quote of the day is a sentence or so.  And that’s fine.  During the Trump presidency there was an enormous amount of political action to comment on.  And in this time of social and political turmoil there continues to be a raft of topics that need to be discussed, and in most cases, lamented.  I intend to continue doing just that.  After all, having my say is why I’m here.

But the reality is that there isn’t something to say about the political situation every day.  Well, there is but it’s not novel and interesting enough to seem worthwhile.  After all, how many times can I call Joe Biden a vegetable or a pervert before I start to seem like a vegetable myself?  And in the absence of any kind of actual progress on the Red State revolt front how often can I bang that drum before I start to drive my readers back into the arms of the Blue State matriarchy?

I just thought it would be a good idea if I start to introduce more features that don’t depend on the news cycle and the initiative of politicians.  From a practical perspective this will involve more culture topics; book, movie and tv reviews, essays on historical events and opinion pieces on cultural events and groups.

And another thing I’d like to get back to is fiction writing.  I’ve been working sporadically (very sporadically) on writing a science fiction novel.  Actually, it’s more like three different novels that haven’t really gelled the way I want them to.  I’m thinking of putting up installments of one of them as an ongoing feature of the site.  It’ll give the readers a taste of my writing style and eventually I’ll use it as a sample when I publish and start to market my work.

Now the thing about writing reviews and essays and fiction is that they take a lot more time to produce than my typical hit piece on Joe Biden.  Writing five hundred or a thousand words about how stupid cretins are isn’t that hard.  But writing a review means taking the time to read or watch something and then thinking carefully about saying something interesting about it.  And writing fiction is on a “ho nudda lebbel.”

What I’m saying is that the long-time readers might notice a change in the output here.  There may not be so many quick rant posts.  There may be fewer posts.  And the post lengths will probably increase significantly.  Maybe you could say that quality will replace quantity to some extent.  Hopefully that will suit most readers.  I suspect it will be an improvement.

Now I don’t want anyone to panic.  I’ll still keep a watchful eye out for worthwhile events that need my unique blend of political savvy and rapier sharp wit.  But I just don’t see a reason to say the same thing over and over again.  So, this is just an explanatory note so that the readers don’t think I’ve been taken hostage and replaced by a ringer from Antifa.  OCF continues.  OCF grows.  photog tries to improve his product.

A Series of articles on Red State Autonomy by Dave Reaboi

photog Current Events , , , ,

Substack is full of writers from our side Dave Reaboi has a site called Late Republic Nonsense.  He’s a friend of Michael Anton and he seems to know a bunch of interesting people.  He even sponsors some idiosyncratic content like haute cuisine cooking lessons from Michael Anton.  How’s that for unexpected.

Anyway I’ve been talking for a while about Red State Autonomy.  Reaboi calls it Red America autonomy.  Putaituh, putatuh, whatever.

Anyway here are the links.  So far it seems sort of introductory.  But I’ll bookmark his links and follow along to see what he comes up with.  After all he seems to know some movers and shakers.  And he has some interesting stuff on his site.

https://davereaboi.substack.com/p/autonomy-for-red-america-part-1

https://davereaboi.substack.com/p/autonomy-for-red-america-part-2

I’ll have to pass the Michael Anton cooking links onto Camera Girl.  This could be my way of bringing her over to the Right.  She’s not very political but her instincts are good.

 

 

 

 

The Supreme Court Gets Something Right. Reinstitute “Remain in Mexico” Policy

photog Current Events , ,

Hat tip tip to the Conservative Tree House for this headline.  I can’t believe SCOTUS did anything this good.  In the words of Vizzini, “Inconceivable!”

Well however it happened a small shot of very good news for us and another thumb in the eye for Dementia Joe.  This week just keeps getting better and better.  The latest approval poll on Joe has him under water 41% to 55%.  Pretty sweet.

Codevilla on Afghanistan

photog Current Events , , ,

Unsurprisingly, Anthony Codevilla has a very long history in the US involvement in Afghanistan.  In this essay he walks through its beginning in 1979 and through the Russian War and bin Laden’s appearance as an amateur warrior and the aftermath of 9-11 and the tragicomedies of Iraq and Afghanistan occupations.  He identifies the mindset that shapes the terms of these occupations and the utterly useless outcomes they produce.

 

 

 

24AUG2021 – What to Write About Today?

photog Current Events, Fake Science ,

Writing a blog means creating content.  But you can’t make something out of nothing.  Let’s look at current events.

Probably enough has been said about Afghanistan.  At this point the damage is done to Dementia Joe’s credibility not only as a US President but even as a cognitively competent human being.  The fallout from the train wreck that is Kabul has yet to sort itself out.  Once that happens, we’ll know if the damage to this administration is serious or fatal.

The COVID nightmare isn’t going to be allowed to end anytime soon.  The people running the blue states are trapped in their own faulty reasoning and it will take reality a while before even their sheep-like constituents are ready to stop pretending the plague is out there.  The Delta Variant August spike in Florida has already petered out.  Yesterday there was one COVID death there.  Once the people in the lockdown states see the folks in the open states living their lives normally, they’re probably going to start wondering why they aren’t allowed to do the same.  But as I said, that will take a while.  So, let’s let that sit for now.

Gavin Newsom’s recall vote happens in mid-September.  Until then it will be the same old, same old, “it’s too close to call” blah, blah, blah.  So I’m status quo on that.

Let’s not even bother talking about the infrastructure and reconciliation bills.  They will tease us for some more months about Senators Sinema and Manchin resisting the leadership because they want to do “the right thing” for their constituencies.  I would say that the chance that a raft of anti-constitutional measures like mandated voter fraud and illegal alien amnesty isn’t part of the reconciliation bill is one chance in a million.  So, I won’t waste any breath on that.

What is interesting to me is that Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott still look like they are willing to resist the COVID vaccine mandates and other coercive behavior that the feds are pushing.  The mid-terms and their own re-elections are coming up and then the 2024 presidential election is surely front and center in their minds.  Possibly we might see some moves by either or both of these men to raise their national profiles and even get something substantive done to resist the Biden administration’s efforts to suppress freedom everywhere in this country.  But right now, there’s not much new to talk about them either.

As far as the eye can see, current events are a boring mess.  So, what to talk about?

How about something fun?

Here’s an article describing only two of the many problems with Joe Biden’s immense fleet of electric cars.  Not only would the load on neighborhood power transformers require a trillion-dollar upgrade to the power grid but the available stockpile of nickel and rare earth metals doesn’t come anywhere near the total needed to produce that number of auto-batteries.  And since electric grids at night when cars charge don’t get any solar energy the power being used to charge car batteries would be fossil fuel generated.   But because the efficiency of transmitted electricity is something around 60% the electric cars produce more CO2 per mile than gasoline powered cars.  Isn’t that special?

This Guy Thinks the Afghan Rout Will Be the Deep State’s Undoing

photog Current Events ,

Interesting read.  Will it really spell the doom of our Cloud Elite?  It would be nice but I’m not sure I see it that way.  It’s definitely a blow to Joe Biden’s credibility.  It’s an object lesson to Iran, China, North Korea and Russia that the people in charge have grown feckless.  Maybe it’s a sign to us that our enemies are a lot stupider than we thought they were.

What Afghanistan told me was that we can’t trust any of the suits in Washington.  Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have our interests at heart.  They’re globalists and they believe in things that we abhor.  My take away is we need new leaders.  And we’d better be real careful choosing them.  We can’t afford to make these mistakes again.  They’ve already almost bled us dry.