Month: November 2021
The New Third World Normal
People on the dissident right talk about the difference between high trust and low trust societies. In a high trust society, you have communities where doors and cars aren’t locked, people can walk in cities at night without fear of being mugged and children can play outside without their mothers fearing for their lives.
This week Waukesha, Wisconsin found out that a Christmas Parade is something you don’t attend in a low trust society. I’ve lived in small towns and large cities. But the size of the community isn’t the defining parameter for how safe a place it is. The difference is whether the community tolerates lawlessness. The classic urban example is New York City. Back in the 1970s and 1980s New York City degenerated into a high-crime environment where assault and robbery were at epidemic levels. Very expensive neighborhoods in Manhattan were deserted at night because muggers would emerge out of Central Park at night and prey on the affluent inhabitants. And a million inhabitants exited the city to escape the dangerous environment. When Rudy Giuliani became mayor there in 1992, he used the police department to shut down the violent crime but he also took a zero-tolerance approach toward quality-of-life violations like squeegee men harassing drivers and deranged homeless people engaging in depravity on the city streets. So even though New York City is an enormous impersonal place, for twenty years it was one of the safest large cities in the country. The program was so successful that it allowed a new generation of progressives to take over the city. And this new generation had no fear of violence. And this same generation is running all the cities of America. And they are now learning exactly why a police force with zero tolerance for lawlessness is the only way to have a city as large as New York safe.
But now look at a place like Waukesha. It has a population of 70,000 people. It has been fairly crime free and well ordered for its whole history and the people there probably think of their home as a big town rather than a city. It has local sports teams and small companies as employers and community activities centered on schools and churches. It has a relatively small black population and no major inner-city crime problem. But then last year in neighboring Minnesota the George Floyd riots began and black criminals became convinced that they could no longer be arrested. And so, for the last year black criminals have behaved as though there is no brake on their activities. If they commit a crime and the police show up, they do not surrender. They bolt and often the police just let them go. None of the police want to end up on trial for shooting a black suspect. They remember Derek Chauvin and his fate. None of them want that so they’ll let these perpetrators escape. And that’s how you get to a place like Waukesha today where people think they’re living in a safe place when they’re really not.
The only question left to answer is where will pushback finally happen? New York voted in a black former NYPD officer as mayor. This is a change from the anti-police, anti-white mayor Bill DeBlasio they currently suffer under. But it’s not clear whether the will is there yet to meaningfully correct the weakening of the police there. I believe things will have to get a lot worse before anything effective will be done.
In the meantime, people living in cities, large and small, need to realize what their new environment means for their safety. Being mistaken about what kind of a place they now live in could cost them a lot, maybe all.
22NOV2021 – OCF Update – Monday Maunderings
November 22nd 1963. Everyone of my generation remembers this day as a nightmare. The adults were in a panic over the death of President John Kennedy on the streets of Dallas. I was in first grade at the time and the nuns were openly weeping which freaked the kids out. Watching Walter Cronkite crying on tv reinforced the feeling that the world was coming apart. But the country came together in solidarity.
November 22nd 2021. News this morning that a crazed criminal purposefully drove his SUV through a crowd of children and their families watching a Christmas Parade. Based on the killer’s social media profile it is strongly suspected that he is an anti-white bigot who probably wanted to strike back after the Rittenhouse acquittal. Chances of the country coming together in solidarity not very likely.
I’ll confess that this incident has cancelled some of my recent enthusiasm. Evil and crazy people will always be with us. But what makes it disastrous is that there is no longer a consensus that they are the problem. The current reflex is to blame the victim. If only we had made the lunatic feel loved. Maybe then he wouldn’t have killed so many. Or even if he still would have killed them at least we wouldn’t take it so personally if we had grown to love him for the good natured homicidal maniac that he is.
So instead of giving this psychopath the electric chair which at least validates the idea that sociopaths need to be excluded from society we will be told that somehow all of this is our fault. Those murdered children had it coming for being privileged white people.
Not a great way to start the week of Thanksgiving.
The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962) – A Science Fiction and Fantasy Movie Review
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were brothers who studied German language and folklore during the 18th and 19th centuries. They are best remembered by people today for their collection of German fairy tales. And this movie is a fanciful story of the two brothers struggling to find a paying audience for their talents. Wilhelm is presented as the idealist spending all his time collecting folktales from old women while his brother Jacob attempts to keep their heads above water by slaving away at tedious but paying work such as writing the family history of the local duke.
And interspersed with the story of the brothers are the fairy tale sequences of the film which correspond to three of the stories that Wilhelm hears from his sources. They are versions of, “The Dancing Princess,” “The Cobbler and the Elves” and “The Singing Bone.” In each case a different cast of actors portray the action. And even though this is a German/American production there are some familiar American and British actors sprinkled in the cast. Jim Backus, Claire Bloom, Beulah Bondi, Terry Thomas, Buddy Hackett and Barbara Eden are among the more well-known cast members.
The story about the brothers reaches its crisis when Wilhelm loses the draft of the duke’s family history in a river while rushing back from hearing a story in a “witch’s” cottage. Jacob storms off vowing never to work with Wilhelm again. The duke vows to prosecute Wilhelm if he doesn’t recompense him for the free home provided Wilhelm and his family during the unsuccessful project. And simultaneously Wilhelm becomes seriously ill with pneumonia. But hearing of Wilhelm’s dire straits Jacob sells his private library and uses the money to save Wilhelm. Afterwards they continue on together with Jacob writing scholarly works on German philology and Wilhelm publishing his stories. Eventually the king has the brothers nominated for the Prussian Royal Academy but the citation only includes Jacob’s scholarly works as cause for the nomination. Saddened, Wilhelm still congratulates Jacob for the honor they will both be given. But when they reach Berlin, the train is met by thousands of children cheering for Wilhelm to “tell them a story.” And he starts off, “There once lived two brothers.”
I saw this movie as child when the nuns at my grammar school called an assembly in the gymnasium and played it to reward us for not burning down the school that year. There was an unfortunate incident before the film. A very good friend of mine, one of the most naturally talented comics I’ve ever known but who had extremely poor impulse control got in trouble for mouthing off to the principal, Sister Theodore. She pulled him out of line and after a little back and forth dialog she slapped him in the face. Unfortunately for his school career he slapped her back and added a few loud and obscene remarks. Unsurprisingly he was expelled. And the diversion made us pay less attention to the movie than we might have otherwise done.
But I remember from back then that it was an amusing movie. And a recent viewing confirms that opinion. The fairy tale sequences are played in a broad, very comical style. Whereas the story of the brothers is in a dramatic style that chronicles the difficulty of trying to earn a living at a dull task when your heart is somewhere else. Being a dreamer myself, may be why I’m so sympathetic with Wilhelm’s plight.
I’m not sure who I would recommend this movie for. It’s not really a children’s story but I think many children might like it. As for adults, it might be too primitive for people brought up on CGI special effects. Maybe it’s only for old folks like me who are still young at heart.
22NOV2021 – Photo of the Day
22NOV2021 – Quote of the Day
Of all the heavenly gifts that mortal men commend,
What trusty treasure in the world can countervail a friend?
Nicholas Grimald
Practically Speaking, How Would a President Dismantle the FBI?
After what we’ve seen happening over the last two decades in the intelligence agencies there’s no doubt in my mind that they need to be fundamentally altered. And I don’t think the word dismantle is an exaggeration of what needs to be done. It could be argued that there are functions that the FBI is uniquely suited to perform that need to be done. But I look at those functions as the exceptions.
I imagine that someone tasked with this dismantling would form a new “group within the bureau and reassign all the personnel and infrastructure critical for these useful functions to this new group. Once that is done, he could begin dismantling the rest of the agency without too much fear of meaningful disruption.
Fire all of the top echelon of management. Assign trusted personnel to take over and begin removing any functionality that has been abused in the past. Using internal rules block the access to FISA courts from anyone who isn’t appointed by the new management. Begin surveilling the use of federal resources by the FBI personnel to find anyone who is running counter-intelligence operations against the new management and the President. And continue to prune back the agency from the top down.
Look for hidden caches of information on powerful people and figure out what this has been used in the past to blackmail them into doing. Figure out how this information is best disposed of. In some cases, where real crime has occurred, exposing the information may make sense. In other cases, confronting the victim and forcing changes in the status quo may be possible.
And once power has been wrested from the FBI and other intelligence agencies then the laws that have allowed them to terrorize this nation need to be changed to prevent these abuses from recurring. The obvious one is the Patriot Act. The Supreme Court knows it is unconstitutional but during the supposed “War on Terror” it allowed the law to stand in order to allow unrestrained pursuit of Islamic terrorists hiding in the United States. I think we’ve learned that the law was meant to be used against all of us.
And other laws need to be changed. The definition of civil rights needs to be rationally defined to prevent the kind of outrageous overreach that was on display in the federal government’s interference in the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases. And we can’t allow actual domestic terrorists like Antifa and BLM and their confederates in the blue city governments to perpetrate outrages like the George Floyd riots against American citizens.
And who would be the right person for a Republican president to appoint Attorney General? I’m guessing it will require someone who has worked for the Justice Department. Maybe someone like Rudy Giuliani. He’s getting kind of old but he still might be the right guy. But whoever it is he can’t be like William Barr who just tiptoes around the edges of the FBI and lets the swamp creatures run the show. It has to be someone who is willing to perform radical surgery with a chain saw. Because that is exactly what is needed.
So, will this ever happen? If we ever want to get our country back it’s a necessity. But it’s going to take brains and guts. Where will we find those?
21NOV2021 – Another Autumn Poem
November Night
Listen…
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
And fall.
Adelaide Crapsey
Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 08 – For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky
I prefer to call this episode “For the Show is Cancelled and I Must Call My Agent.” This one’s a doozy. We start off with the Enterprise under attack from sub-light speed missiles which are easily destroyed by the ship’s phasers. Following the path of the missiles back they find that an asteroid about 200 miles in diameter was the source and that the asteroid is a powered ship on a collision course with planet blah-blah-blah V. The asteroid is hollow with a breathable atmosphere within but somehow the Enterprise’s sensors can’t detect the inhabitants.
Before Kirk and Spock can transport into the asteroid a panicked call from Nurse Chapel to the bridge warns us all is not well in Sick Bay but before we can assume that McCoy has gotten grabby with the good nurse, we find out that McCoy is dying of plasmopneumohyposarcocorneomyelofruitrolleos and has less than a year to live. After the shock wears off for Kirk all three intrepid officers head for the transporter while Scotty is left holding the bag trying to keep Sulu, Chekov and Uhura focused on their work instead of talking about their favorite boy bands.
The people on the asteroid dress like denizens of Studio 54 with their pastel and plaid patterned pajamas and phony looking swords. But phony or not they easily overpower the landing party. The rather pretty high priestess Natira takes a shine to McCoy and brings the three spacemen to the presence of the Oracle. The Oracle looks like an elevator button on a plaster cast wall display. But he packs a wallop. He zaps our three friends just to show them who’s boss.
A subplot is Natira convincing McCoy to stay on the asteroid to live out his year with her. The catch is that McCoy has to have an implant that allows the Oracle to read his thoughts and kill him if he commits sacrilege, as for instance if he tells anyone that they are living inside of an asteroid instead of a planet. When Spock and Kirk retreat to the Enterprise to escape a death sentence for spying on the Oracle. McCoy gets zapped by the Oracle when he tries to tell them about how to fix the faulty guidance system that is heading the asteroid toward a collision with planet blah-blah-blah V which is supposed to be the destination of the asteroid/escape ship.
Kirk and Spock save McCoy by removing the implant and then save Natira by removing her implant. Then Kirk hits Ctrl+Alt+Del to shut off the Oracle. Spock fixes the glitch in the guidance system and hopefully turns off the murderous Oracle permanently. McCoy decides to go back to the ship so that he can find a cure for plasmopneumohyposarcocorneomyelofruitrolleos (not for himself of course, but for the good of all mankind) but Natira decides to stay with her people and colonize planet blah-blah-blah V. By the way, no explanation as to why the inhabitants there won’t take offense at illegal immigrants showing up uninvited but we’ll let that pass. And right at the last-minute Spock scans the memory banks of the ship and determines that the Oracle has a cure for McCoy’s case of plasmopneumohyposarcocorneomyelofruitrolleos. After some grunting and groaning and a blanket over him on the sick bay bed so he doesn’t catch cold, McCoy is cured. And just to show everyone he’s a sport Kirk tells McCoy that he’ll make sure the Enterprise is near to planet blah-blah-blah V in 390 days when the asteroid shows up so McCoy can make a booty call on Natira.
Alright, this episode isn’t a total loss. Natira is a pretty babe wearing some kind of a two-piece metallic silk wrap-around garment which sort of works on her. Beyond that? Well, not so much. The plot has a dozen holes in it. How exactly can sub-light speed weapons even find the Enterprise when it’s travelling at some supra-light speed? How in hell could Spock find the cure for plasmopneumohyposarcocorneomyelofruitrolleos in an alien database in less than a minute and a half? Why would a cute babe be interested in McCoy? Why are there still 16 episodes left in Season 3 for me to suffer through? But this is still not the worst episode I’ve seen.
I’ll give it a 5 // 2.
Guest Contributor – Chemist – America Loses Its Way
Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville said, “America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great!”
What does it mean to be good?
In my mind it means we are governed by Judeo / Christian values and we stick to the rules. We have a government of laws, not men and no man is above the law.
America was the place to take a chance, build a business, a family, a life because it was governed by laws. There were rules and the rules were enforced. In other countries you might labor and sacrifice for decades to build up a business, only to see the government nationalize it “For the greater good”. But America wasn’t like that. There were laws to protect you and a written Constitution to back up those laws. The constitution limited the power of the government. It was unheard of!
America allowed people to take risks and prosper and the risk takers, the winners, the entrepreneurs came here. They built companies and, in so doing, created wealth and prosperity for millions of other people.
Recently, however, America has changed. It is no longer “good”. Certain people are now above the law. Congress exempts itself from the laws it forces the rest of us to live under. Federal and local law enforcement agencies “Seize” money and property and innocent people have to prove they deserve it to get it back. The wealthy and connected go free. While the nation’s premier law enforcement agency hides evidence allowing the innocent to go to jail. The Clintons, Kennedys, Duponts, actors and celebrities never pay for their crimes.
One class of people is permitted to riot, burn and murder and they go free. Another class of people engages in a few hours of peaceful protest and they spend months in solitary confinement without a trial.
It used to be that each branch of government knew its limitations and would not dare to try and do something that was not specifically written in the constitution. Now we have an executive who has the attitude of “What are you going to do about it?” They create powers that don’t exist (Vaccination mandates) and ignore duties spelled out in the constitution (Enforce the boarders).
Entire cities have decided to stop enforcing property laws and allow wholesale theft from retail businesses. Then the cities are surprised when the businesses – the makers of prosperity – leave. Worse yet, they hurl epithets at them as they leave calling them “Greedy capitalists”. Yet who could blame them? They tried to play by the rules. The rules said they paid taxes and the city protected them from thieves. Now the city says; “No protection, but you still have to pay taxes”.
Who would build a business in a country where it can all be destroyed or stolen tomorrow and there is no recourse? Who would invest when the government is talking about taking your investments in the name of “Fairness” or “Equity”? Right now there are elected politicians who want to take your pension, IRA and 401K because other people don’t have one. Just last month, the current administration talked about “Taxing unrealized capital gains”. That means: If you buy stock or a home or anything and the value increases, you owe taxes on the increase in value. Even if you have not sold a share of stock or your home. the feds want their cut.
All of these ideas, as stupid as they sound, create uncertainty and that kills investment.
America is no longer good. In a misguided attempt to try to atone for wrongs that may have been done hundreds of years ago, some Americans are destroying everything it ever stood for. (Others are doing it out of sheer greed.) Our constitution is one of the greatest documents ever written and is the blueprint for a prosperous nation – a nation of laws. John Adams observed that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” We are no longer moral. America is no longer good and unless we change it back, the future will not be pretty.