Month: August 2021

A Voice Out of the Past – Part 1

photog Current Events, OCF, photog's Corner ,

Today I was taking care of some paperwork and a phone call came through.  Now we only have a land line.  No smartphone paraphernalia so I have to go over to the phone to see who’s there.  Well, the phone number was from the New York City area and was unfamiliar so I let it go to voicemail.  When the caller started leaving a message, I immediately recognized the voice and as he started leaving his name, I found out I was right.  It was a guy I worked with back in 1987.  I left the City in 1988 and I guess I never expected to hear from him again.

I immediately picked up the call and we started catching up.  Apparently, he retired last year and was cleaning up some old letters and photos from the time period and he decided to try and look me up.  We did the usual back and forth talking about the people we worked with back then and it was amazing how many details were at our fingertips even after thirty-four years.  As it turned out both of us left the field we were in at the time.  Which is not surprising.  He and I had separately drifted into the securities industry by getting our Series 7 license to work in Manhattan’s Wall Street district during the bull market of the 1980’s.  The fact that we both left after the 1987 crash is hardly surprising but it is gratifying to know that he also found a safe haven in the economy of the time.

Well, we swapped stories about what had happened to us since that time and then we asked each other if we knew of any of the other people we worked with.  But mostly we had lost touch with a former life.  And then we reflected on that life.  We agreed it wasn’t a place you would want to stay in for long but that it taught you a lot about people and a lot about yourself.  We exchanged info and we plan on getting together for a reunion.

But it’s got me thinking about some of the things that went on back then.  And some of them are pretty good stories.  I think they’re worth relating.

I got involved with Wall Street when I ran out of money to complete the last few credits of my engineering degree.  I had a wife and three young kids and bills and things that needed buying.  So, I decided to become a “stock broker” and make my fortune or at least get enough money to finish my degree.

That was a different world.  You see the retail brokers of back then were being replaced by the “discount brokers.”  And shortly both would be replaced by electronic trading that would sweep away the old Wall Street completely.  But back then we still had accounts and clients and commissions and had to wear suits and ties.  We had to know the floor brokers and know how to deal with the various options exchanges and we had to at least hint to the customer that we could do magical things with his order.  There was a definite P.T. Barnum aspect to the customer relations side of the job.

And this bull market was a magnet for people looking to live in the New York City area and wanted to “get rich.”  Almost all of the brokers traded their own accounts and many of them dreamed of building up a stake and making a living day-trading.  And it was this powerful force that ensured that the entrants were a motley crew.  We had all kinds.  And some of them were quite colorful.  Some were actually crazy.  This was partly due to the drug culture of the time.  Several of the people I worked with had a cocaine problem.  One fellow in particular named Joe eventually was forced out when he started having real problems.  Joe was a colorful character.  He was always using small exercise devices to strengthen his hands and wrists and he was constantly throwing karate punches and blocks in the air around his desk.  He was quite a sight.  On Halloween he brought in a black velvet bag that had what looked like an actual human skull.  And one evening when his supervisor Rich was berating him for not handling his fair share of the work load Joe picked this little man up by the forearms and walked him over to one of the windows and asked him if he’d like to be thrown out.  Joe was a pretty big guy and we were on the 15th floor of an old building that had old style windows that could be opened.  Nobody thought Joe would throw Rich out the window, except maybe Rich, but it was a serious breach of office etiquette to say the least.  Luckily for Joe, Rich never said anything about it and afterwards gave Joe a wide berth.

Later on, I was Joe’s supervisor and he came to me to complain that people were talking about him.  You can imagine I wasn’t particularly surprised to hear this.  So, I took him into a conference room and asked him to tell me about it.  He said that he heard them talking about him in the lunch room.  He was sitting next to the soda machine so he was sort of hidden from the rest of the room.  He heard some comments about himself that were very insulting.  They made him pretty mad but rather than start a fight he came to me.  I complimented him on his restraint and then asked him who made the comments.  He said, “The soda machine.”

Well, that slowed me down.  I said, “Joe, I’m going to have to kick this upstairs to Bill.”   Bill was the senior manager for the brokers.  I said, “Bill deals directly with all vending machine related issues.”  Then I told Joe that he looked a little tired and considering what he had been through I thought he should take the rest of the day off and get some rest.  He thanked me and went home.  When I passed this along to Bill his eyes bugged out and he told me to leave this to him and not mention it to anyone.  Joe never came back to the office.  But about three months later he called me at home and told me that the company had helped him find a good rehab program to get off the cocaine.  And he had left Wall Street behind and was working for his uncle who had a printing business in Brooklyn.  He sounded as happy as I’d ever heard him.  Joe may not have been the craziest guy I worked with on Wall Street but he was surely one of the most colorful.  And he had one of the happiest endings to his story there.

Here’s an Honest Scientist Who is Talking sense About COVID

photog Current Events, Fake Science ,

David Livermore is a professor of medical microbiology at the University of East Anglia and in this essay he tries to use scientific logic to address the current COVID reality.

Here I paraphrase his arguments:

  1. Coronaviruses cannot be vaccinated against permanently.
  2. Because the vaccinated can catch COVID pretty soon the number of infected vaccinated patients will far exceed infected unvaccinated patients so pretending that the unvaccinated are some kind of problem is just stupid.
  3. COVID is never going away so pretending we’ll eliminate it is stupid.
  4. Locking down the population and masking up every time a new variant emerges is stupid.
  5. We’ll end up with COVID being the fifth common corona virus that gives us a cold every year or so.  And like the flu old people will sometimes die of it.

Seems like an honest scientist.  I’m sure he’ll be jailed for speaking the truth.

Larry Correia’s Got a Book Up for a Dragon Award

photog Book Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews , ,

Larry’s got a mil-sf book in the running for a Dragon Award and he talks a little about the nominees that he’s familiar with.  If you’re voting in the Dragon Awards take a look at his comments.  And Larry’s a good guy so if you’re looking for good sf&f books I’d give authors he likes a look see.

 

 

 

If Biden is President is This Still America?

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When Caligula declared his horse Incitatus a Roman Senator did that give pause to some proportion of the Roman citizenry.  Did they think, “Is this still Rome?”

I have to say that is how I currently feel, “Is this still America?”  Just look around at the madness that has enveloped almost every facet of life.  I won’t bother naming them again.  It’s too repetitive and depressing.  You can fill in the blanks.  But concisely, if someone like Joe Biden is the President then ask yourself, “Is this Still America?”

A lifelong political grifter whose drug addled son acts as a bag man to shake down foreign governments for kickbacks.  A man who can no longer make a coherent speech about the simplest things.  A man who has been lying about himself and his motives for decades and someone who can’t keep his hands off of women and even young girls even when the cameras are rolling.  If this man is the President of the United States is this still the same country we knew?

The answer is no, it’s not.  In the same way that the Roman Empire wasn’t the Roman Republic.  It was a gangster state, an oligarchy that used a once free people as conscript troops to rule a continental empire.  And that’s where we are now.  An oligarchy rules over us and you and I have about as much say over it as some plebian would have telling Caligula to leave his daughter alone.  We are a despised and unwelcome people.  The only thing we’re needed for is an army.  Soon foreign conscripts will be installed in the army and then they can disarm and enslave us at their leisure.  We are strangers in our own land and we are being dealt with as quickly as possible.

The only question worth asking at this point is whether it’s already too late to do anything other than leave.  And even leaving is questionable.  For this empire isn’t continental, it’s global.  Sure, Russia and China are on the outside, sort of, and the really backward nations are client states that only supply sweatshops and immigrants.  But the places you can go to escape this mess aren’t certain to last.  How many places can’t be pressured or bribed to bend the knee.  Recently we found out one of those places is Afghanistan.  But imagine living there?  That’s how far you would have to go to escape the Empire.

The hopeful thing is that the Empire seems to have skipped several stages in the familiar evolution.  We seem to be progressing rather quickly from Late Republic to Visigothic sack all in a day.  After all Joe Biden isn’t Augustus.  He’s not even Tiberius.  Dementia Joe is more like a 4th century emperor who has to dodge marauding armies of barbarians while avoiding assassination by his successor.  The only question is whether there is enough left in the treasure chamber to pay off the Huns for a few more years.

After that we’ll be looking at a new world.  And that will be an exciting and frightening thing.  Looking for a stable and safe refuge will be an important and difficult task.  Eastern Europe?  East Asia?  South America?  Maybe even a rump America somewhere in the red states?  It’s impossible to say.

I guess there’s some consolation in knowing that the traitors who destroyed our country have slit their own throats at the same time.  No groundswell of brave volunteers will enlist and save Creepy Uncle Joe when he bungles his way into a war with Iran or North Korea.  All he’ll have at his back will be the praetorian guard, or in his case the FBI.  But when the going really gets rough they’ll sell him out to the highest bidder.  Then Jeff Bezos can be emperor for a few weeks until a real general comes along and makes mincemeat of the Amazon Kid.

So, get ready to enjoy the ride it’s bound to be bumpy but I’m beginning to think it might be more interesting than some assumed.  One thing that might be worth considering, when the marauders overrun the country, it might be worthwhile finding out what their terms of service look like.  It might give you an opportunity for some payback.  Who knows, you could end up as the warlord of Silicon Valley.  They definitely wouldn’t be de-platforming you anymore.

12AUG2021 – OCF Update – Work, Work, Work

photog Current Events, OCF

Camera Girl had me in the garage setting mouse traps in anticipation of the fall return of Mouse Man.  Why mice in a garage is a big deal I don’t know but women fear rodents.  So Mouse Man must die!

I’ll be out this morning stalking the elusive hummingbird and I can already tell the heat is gonna be something.  But we all must suffer for our art so high ho, high ho.

I’ll return later to see what’s brewing.  Apparently Joe Biden wants the King of Saudi Arabia to lower the price of oil.  Yeah, right.  Maybe he can make Andrew Cuomo the ambassador to Saudi Arabia and they can chase the Saudi king’s various dancing girls around the pool.  But I think the price of oil is only going one way.

To be continued.

Man’s Prerogatives and the Naming of Names – The Power of Words

photog Current Events, Reclaiming the Family ,

And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. 19And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. 20And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. 21And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; 22And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. 23And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

The naming of things is our first prerogative.  Adam was given that job.  On a personal level the men of my family have always had a knack for naming things.  My paternal grandfather was very skilled at providing apt nicknames for his friends, relatives and acquaintances.  Not all of the names were complimentary or even friendly but the odd thing is they were accepted and they stuck.  Sometimes they became the only name that was used for the poor afflicted recipient.  There was a man who lived next door to my grandfather and to this day no one knows the man’s name except as Jimmie Goo.  And, so help me, when you looked at him you thought, “He looks like a Jimmie Goo!”  My father was pretty good at this also.  I have several brothers who specialize in nicknames.  And my grandson has shown a natural affinity for the job too.  Dogs and even brothers with perfectly serviceable names find themselves renamed by him and in a short time the new name becomes established.  It’s a strange gift but its existence seems undeniable to me.  We inherit it from our first father, Adam, and we do it naturally like a baby breathes air.

So that’s why women want to get rid of our legacy.  You even hear idiots like one of those morons in Congress who thought the word “amen” was a patriarchal insult.  Here were people too stupid to know that the syllable men does not refer to male human beings in every language.  A word that goes back to biblical Hebrew is confused with a word in a language that didn’t even exist during Old Testament times.  But this is what the power of stupid has brought us to.  Gibbering imbeciles get to decide how our language will be spoken because we’ve lost the courage to tell idiots to shut up.  And so it goes.  Sexual deviants with strange delusions about their bodies are making up “pronouns” out of collections of consonants that have never existed in English and couldn’t be pronounced if anyone bothered to try.  Cities, buildings, even mountains are being renamed so that women or favored grievance groups won’t take offense at history.

Well, I don’t go along.  If someone is mentioned in a spoken or written account, I say he or she, her or him.  Not they.  I can count.  One isn’t two or three.  It’s one.  One isn’t they.  The royal plural doesn’t apply to Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib.  They’re just meatheads whose existence barely deserves a singular human description.  I’d accept it to describe them because they are a thing.  A very weird unhealthy thing.

Words are powerful things.  Used constructively they convey meaning and provide context for understanding the underlying things.  Pennsylvania meant William Penn’s woods.  New England meant the English had found a new home.  The Confederate flag represented the states that fought a war to maintain their independence.  The District of Columbia was named after the man who discovered the Western Hemisphere.  Washington state is named after the man who led our armies to victory over King George III and refused to be a king.  People who pretend to be outraged that we honor these men and symbols are evil people or idiots.  Neither is acceptable.

Men will name the things they find and invent.  Eve knew better than to get involved in Adam’s work.  The one time she got involved in making a decision she listened to the devil and got the two of them thrown out of the Garden of Eden.  Women should stick to raising children and being sympathetic, the two things they do well.  And the rest of these idiots belong somewhere far away from America.