“My people and I,” he said, “have come to an agreement which satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please.”
Frederick II of Prussia (Frederick the Great)
Month: September 2021
01OCT2021 – Photo of the Day
The ZMan Discusses Supply Chain Disruption
Back when the COVID nonsense first started happening the ZMan warned that shutting down a tremendously complex system like the US economy was unbelievably dangerous. Now he’s been born out by the shortages, price increases and general instability in the American economy. His discussion is very worthwhile reading in my opinion. On a personal note, Camera Girl returned today from the supermarket visibly upset by the empty shelves and runaway price increases. For that alone I could see Dementia Joe tried for treason.
Greetings to September Thirtieth, Anno Domini MMXXI
Another beautiful, if chilly morning here in the land of Wokish Puritans. I have done my due diligence and looked over the headlines. What I see is that both the Left and the Right see Joe Biden as a disaster, but for different reasons. The Left sees him as a doddering idiot who keeps tripping over his own feet and fouling up the beautiful set-up he was handed by the Deep State and friends. The Right sees him as a doddering idiot who keeps tripping over his own feet as he presides over the dismantling of what is left of the “land of the free and the home of the brave.”
Joe’s approval rating is under water but so what? Will that change anything? I guess the hope is that if Biden is construed as a failed president, then maybe Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema will refuse to sign onto the 3.5 trillion Dollar reconciliation bill and we might be spared the illegal alien amnesty bill and whatever other atrocities Pelosi and Schumer have teed up for us. I guess we’re about to find out. I seriously doubt we’re going to get lucky. The Dems sense they have a short window before the 2022 primary season and will be going for broke this fall. But who knows? Miracles have happened.
But I guess it’s at least amusing to watch the consensus grow across Left and Right that Dementia Joe is a creepy loser who’s in way over his head. I suspect history will be particularly cruel to Biden and Harris. But I need to remind myself that history is written by the winners and even without an effective White House the Left has an overwhelmingly strong hand to play.
In other news there were a bunch of in-depth reports discovering again that if you remove the police from a city like Minneapolis then the black neighborhoods will descend into crime, drug addiction and murder. Children will be killed during gun play between the gang bangers, white people will flee the city in droves and the loss of revenues will cause the problem to spiral out of control. The only differences in these reports depend on the ideological stripe of the writer. The lefties decry the violence but claim that the police cannot use the tactics previously available to them. In other words, they want magical police. The writers on the right notice that nobody is lining up to take the vacant police jobs currently available and conclude that runaway crime in Minneapolis will be an ongoing phenomenon for the foreseeable future.
Well, my answer to all this is, don’t complain when you get what you say you wanted. The progressives and their followers in Minneapolis put the city in the hands of ideologues that allowed and even encouraged a mob of antifa and BLM rioters to burn down a police precinct while looting and burning their neighbors’ businesses and assaulting and even killing some of these same people. I take no pleasure in seeing poor people living in a hellscape where law and order have been eliminated. But there is no other way for these imbeciles to learn just how delusional their viewpoint on urban policing really is. Once all the affluent white progressives move away from their dangerous Minneapolis homes the people who are left can begin to figure out how to deal with reality. The only shame is that these progressives won’t have a chance to see their own homes and businesses looted and burned. That would be too much to ask.
I saw a couple of reports about the upcoming Supreme Court docket. There are a bunch of important cases that have impact on our sorely mistreated constitutional rights. And for once I’m slightly optimistic that some good things may happen in this session. And if the decisions occur late enough in the year it may be too late for the Democrats to pack the Court. It’s assumed they will lose the House in 2022 and that would curtail at least temporarily their ability to change the Court’s size. If the new justices continue to buck John Robert’s liberal agenda, we could see some honest judicial decisions that would have a positive effect on our lives. It’s at least worth watching and I’ll be interested to see which way they go. I don’t want to be too much of a pessimist. Even I get bored of that.
So that’s what’s in the news. In my own world I’ve been busy with writing and repairing all the stuff that breaks down around here. Carpentry, plumbing, auto repairs and landscaping are high on the list of stuff that needs doing. Luckily the auto repair is covered by an insurance policy so I’ll leave that to the professionals. I guess I’ll take a first stab at the others but something tells me the plumber will be getting a call soon. Ah, who am I kidding? I better get a carpenter too.
But it’s a good day and I feel cheerful. Camera Girl is making delicious soups and I’m dedicated to watching the world collapse into a heap of stress fractured fragments. There is an ancient legacy in my family around bartering in rubble and scraps. I think my ancestors in the Fifth Century probably sold off the marble that originally covered the Colosseum to Visigoth chieftains to adorn their medieval castles. It’s a cinch I’ll flourish amid the ruins of Biden’s America. There will be plenty of rubble to barter.
30SEP2021 – Quote of the Day
Truth to tell, treaties are only oaths of deception and faithlessness. The jurisprudence of sovereigns is customarily the law of the strongest.
Frederick II of Prussia (Frederick the Great)
30SEP2021 – Photo of the Day
Jeff Bezos Plans to Kill Shatner in Space
Hat Tip to One of the ShatnerKhan founders for passing this along to me. Apparently Jeff Bezos wants to turn Bill Shatner into an actual Rocket Man. But I have to assume he also intends to turn the fat, bald, 90 year old Shatner into a corpse. Could his corpse be ejected in low Earth orbit and allowed to crash back into Earth? Imagine the surprise of some family if Shatner crashes through their roof and is deposited in their living room, maybe as they are actually watching an episode of Star Trek! This truly is an age of miracles and wonder.
Hat Tip to the Conservative Treehouse – DeSantis Fighting Back Against Biden Immigrant Dumping
This guy DeSantis is really stepping up his game. He’s going after the feds who are transporting illegals from the Mexican border and dumping them in Florida. He’s going to criminalize what they are doing and confiscate the vehicles they are using. And he’s suing the Feds over the dumping which is being called illegal human trafficking. Here’s the Conservative Treehouse link. I think DeSantis is serious about fighting back against the Feds. In my estimation this is huge. I wonder if he has found some allies even in the Courts to help him make this stick.
I hate to have too much hope but I have to say I’m starting to feel optimistic. If he wins this fight he is starting to look a very important national figure. If this works hopefully the other red states will copy this and use it to stem the tide of illegals.
Howard Beale Was Right. But We Still Don’t Know What to Do.
In the 1976 movie Network, Peter Finch plays network news anchor Howard Beale. And after a late-night voice in his head orders him to preach a revelation to his tv audience he makes the following speech on air.
I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!’ So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’
The audience responds in untold myriads by doing exactly what he says. They stick their heads out the window and start screaming ‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’
This scene in the movie is viscerally inspiring. It struck a nerve in 1976 and it strikes maybe a more painful nerve today. Everything that Howard Beale said in 1976 is even worse today. Things are not just bad or crazy. They’re demonic. The government and the media and industry are actively conspiring, not just to ruin us but to exterminate us.
But in the next line Beale says, ’Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis.’
But guess what? They never figured out what to do. In the real world it had to wait until 1980 when America kicked Jimmy Carter out of the White House and Ronald Reagan began to address some of those things. And we tried to do something similar in 2016 when we elected Donald Trump.
But guess what? The Left got mad as hell and burned down America in the George Floyd riots and locked us in our shrinking homes during the COVID scamdemic. Then they rigged the 2020 elections and we’re worse off than we were in 2016.
Maybe the only value in doing what Beale said to do is finding out we’re not alone. Maybe that’s what the internet is, a giant street where everybody can stick their heads out the window and shout into the air. But it doesn’t solve the real problem. And that problem is that we’ve been dispossessed. In the last forty-five years they took the country away from us. All the levers of power are in their hands. Fake news, fake elections, fake presidents, fake laws, fake government, fake religion, fake law, fake justice.
What it will take is someone, somewhere calling together a convention of whatever’s left of the Americans who don’t want to be harvested and deciding once and for all if we have what it takes to make a stand. They will have to figure out what they can do that can’t be undone. Then they’ll have to stick by their guns when the Left in all its manifestations comes for them. If they’ve figured it correctly, they’ll have come up with a winning strategy that won’t be rolled back and use that as a foundation on which to increase their scope of control. Suppose all the red states from South Carolina to Texas and north to Montana put together a platform of laws that will solve illegal immigration in all their states. Think of the impact of that alone. And what if they enact real welfare reform. And how about ending urban gang violence? With a united effort they could build their own law enforcement network like the FBI was supposed to be and make us free and put the bad guys away.
But before any of that happens someone with more guts and more power than anyone we’ve seen so far is going to have to say, ‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!
And it’s beginning to look like that someone is going to have to be a Caesar. Or it will be no one.
Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 03 – The Paradise Syndrome
I’ve mentioned this before but I think it’s necessary to reiterate that the third season episodes are truly awful.
Kirk, Spock and McCoy beam down to a planet that will be struck by an asteroid within a couple of months. It is inhabited by American Indians. Spock immediately chimes in that they are made up of a population that is a combination of Navajo, Mohican, and Delaware tribes. Now, how in hell he’d know this looking at them walking around on the edge of a lake is a complete mystery to me. And just to make the plot more absurd they have less than thirty minutes to get back to the Enterprise and travel at Warp 9 toward the asteroid before it’s too late to deflect the asteroid from its collision course. So of course, while Spock and McCoy are doing whatever, Kirk manages to get lost. He’s standing in front of an alien obelisk and when he communicates with the Enterprise it somehow activates a hidden trapdoor on the spot Kirk is standing and he falls into the hidden chamber where he manages to get electrocuted by the alien mechanism and loses his memory. As an aside, for the “Shatner Mockery” rating of this episode it must be noted that Shatner performs one of his most spastic instances of the pain face. This is the one he does when he’s really suffering badly. It’s hard to compare these things but I’d say it’s one of his all-time worst occurrences. This will earn him high marks for this episode.
Because Kirk is hidden inside of the obelisk Spock and McCoy waste precious time looking for him. When they finally return to the Enterprise without him, they are already too late. They reach the asteroid but neither their deflector beam nor the phasers are able to neutralize the threat of the asteroid. In addition, the overloading of the Enterprise’s engines by the phaser bombardment destroys the warp drive and now the Enterprise, on impulse power, is barely able to stay ahead of the asteroid as they both head back to the planet on a trajectory that will take about two months. Apparently, the crew will be barely a few hours ahead of the asteroid and will need to locate Kirk and attempt to find a way to save the planet. As an aside while the Enterprise engines are being destroyed Scotty is lamenting their fate, moaning, “Oh my poor bearings!” Apparently, the warp drive has ball bearings. Who knew?
Meanwhile back on the planet, Kirk awakens inside the obelisk but he can no longer remember who he is or why he is there. He wanders out of the obelisk and is immediately declared the first wizard deluxe (or at least a god) and assigned the task of stopping the darkening of the sky which is clearly the approach of the asteroid. We find out that the Indians were placed on this planet by an advanced species that liked moving humanoids around the galaxy. The obelisk is actually a very powerful deflector beam that is supposed to be controlled by the medicine man of the tribe. But the present medicine man’s father died before passing the training down to his son. Now seeing that Kirk (or Kirock as he painfully named himself while trying to remember his own name) is a god they make him the medicine man and give him the priestess, Miramanee to be his wife. This supremely ticks off the medicine man because he’s not only lost his job but also his main squeeze. The medicine man attacks Kirock with a knife and finds out that Kirk can bleed. He taunts him with the phrase, “Behold the god that bleeds!” This is one of two plot devices that this episode stole from classic movies. This same device of the bleeding god occurs in the book and movie “The Man Who Would be King” by Rudyard Kipling. The other theft occurs when Kirock is being considered for godhood. A boy is brought into the wigwam by the women and they tell the chief that he was trapped under water and drowned. The medicine man declares him dead but Kirock performs artificial respiration and saves the boy. This clinches his inclusion in the pantheon of useful deities. This scene is lifted from the movie, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre where the old prospector, Howard performs a similar resuscitation on a Mexican Indian boy.
So Kirock and Miramanee are shacked up and she is pregnant with James Tiberius Jr. But the asteroid arrives and Kirock is dragged to the obelisk and is told to take care of the asteroid. He stands there with his arms in the air telling the asteroid to go away. When that doesn’t work the medicine man goads the tribe to start pelting Kirock with foam rocks about the size of cabbages. It’s funny to watch them bouncing off of him. Miramanee runs to protect him and is stoned too. Just then Spock and McCoy beam down and the natives scatter and run for the hills. Spock uses the Vulcan mind meld on Kirock to remind him that he’s Kirk. Also, Spock has figured out that the entrance to the obelisk is sound activated so Kirk recreates his call to the Enterprise at the beginning of the story and the trapdoor opens. Spock pushes a button and the deflector beams takes care of the asteroid. Easy peasy.
But the highly advanced medicine of Dr. McCoy, the vaunted surgical techniques that could reattach Spock’s brain in the last episode, somehow are unable to repair or replace the damage that Miramanee sustained by being pelted with cabbage sized foam rocks. So, she dies the beautiful death in Kirock’s manly arms. A last note, the actress who played Miramanee is indeed a beautiful young woman.
The End.
This was even worse than it sounds. Shatner turns his powers of bad acting up to eleven. It’s all there. Shoulder rolls and some kind of a stripper pole swing kick during his fight with the medicine man. There are frequent expressions that are supposed to be painful struggles against amnesia but more resemble a case of constipation. And when Kirock is semiconscious on the obelisk steps after being stoned he keeps calling out Miramanee’s name and it is truly maudlin.
So once again we have an episode that rates a very low number as a dramatic story but as an example of Shatner’s ham acting is a stellar sample.
Let’s say 2 // 10.
Season Three does it again!