Month: January 2022

20JAN2022 – OCF Update – This’N’That

photog Current Events, OCF

Today I intend to mail off my old camera for sale.  I feel a little disloyal for casting it away but I have had it for over four years and the trade up in capability is well justified.  But it’s funny how mechanical devices can become like old friends.  I’ve gotten e-mails from people who, after seeing the classic car photos of the day, wrote about some memories of their favorite old car.  It’s almost like there’s a symbiosis between our machines and us.

But it’s got to go and so that’s that.  The main problem is that it’s snowing again so I’ll first have to clear a path so I can drive to the post office.  This snowing every other day is a royal pain but at least a familiar one.  It gives me an additional reason for hating New England.

Last night I headed out to attend the monthly Dunwich Republican Committee meeting and when I got to the town hall I found out the meeting had been cancelled.  No announcement, no nothing.  And the building custodian shows up at the door wearing a face mask and so now they’ve brought those stupid things back.  When he sees I’m not wearing a mask he hands me a stack of R-95 masks and tells me how great they are.  I thought of saying something sarcastic and then thought, “The poor guy is only doing his job.  It’s not his fault he lives in a mental asylum.”

The battle to repair the heating system is (seemingly) headed for the final chapter.  After the last burst of activity the system worked without failure for a full week.  Then it developed a new failure mode.  This time the system would fail to restart after it cycled off on high loop temperature.  Because no failure code and hard lockout occurred this apparently proved that the problem is indeed in the power venter.  Now a crack team of technicians will descend on the compound in the next day or two and replace the power venter and order will be restored to my heating system.  But somehow it reminds me of that scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where HAL 9000 declares that a component on the external surface of the spaceship will fail and must be replaced.  I feel like I’m being lured into some horrible conspiracy where I’ll discover that a maniacal mechanical device is attempting to finish me off to further a bureaucratic initiative that is “for my own good.”

After snow removal and mailing off the camera I really have to do some photo work.  I’m out of photos again and must put in the time for the post-processing.

I watched some of Dementia Joe’s press conference yesterday.  After a very few minutes I had to turn it off.  His endless lies and play acting are really hard to stomach.  I read an article that discussed the unlikelihood that after the current Supreme Court session the Dems will try again to get Justice Breyer to retire so they can nominate Kamala Harris to the Court.  Amusingly it would require Harris to vote for herself to get it passed.  Also it would leave the Senate deadlocked until a new Vice President was installed and that might prevent one from being installed at all.  So theoretically, if Dementia Joe dropped dead, the future Republican Speaker of the House would then succeed to the presidency.  So if Harris leaves the VP spot this year maybe Trump will run for congress just to be able to become Republican Speaker of the House just in case Biden drops dead.  How’s that for 4D chess nonsense?  The article was especially amusing because of how openly it disparaged the intelligence of both Harris and Justice Sotomayor.

Well, gotta go make the donuts.  I’ll be back later with more interesting things.

20JAN2022 – Quote of the Day

photog Quote of the Day ,

I am no politician, and still less can I be said to be a party-man : I have a hatred of tyranny, and a contempt for its tools; and this feeling I have expressed as often and as strongly as I could. I cannot sit quietly down under the claims of barefaced power, and have tried to expose the little arts of sophistry by which they are defended. I have no mind to have my person made a property of, nor my understanding made a dupe of. I deny that liberty and slavery are convertible terms, that right and wrong, truth and falsehood, plenty and famine, the comforts or wretchedness of a people, are matters of perfect indifference. That is all I know of the matter; but on these points I am likely to remain incorrigible, in spite of any arguments that I have seen used to the contrary. It needs no sagacity to discover that two and two make four; but to persist in maintaining this obvious position, if all the fashion, authority, hypocrisy, and venality of mankind were arrayed against it, would require a considerable effort of personal courage, and would soon leave a man in a very formidable minority.

William Hazlitt

The Silver Lining to the Hell We’re Going Through

photog Current Events ,

Compared to the horrors of World War II something like the COVID-19 pandemic is trivial.  And compared to the dislocations of the Great Depressions some might think the slow-motion erosion of wealth in the United States over the last fifty years is easier to escape.  I won’t dispute these judgements.  But nothing this country has endured previously has ever destroyed the morale of its people the way the ascendant cultural Marxist attacks on the identity of traditional Americans has.  The combined power and reach of the educational, cultural, commercial, legal, financial and informational institutions have combined to demean and harm anyone who doesn’t grovel before the perverse and dishonest narrative that the Left compels everyone to acknowledge as truth.

And even though we are starting to fight back, the battle is so lopsidedly in their favor that we will continue to lose the majority of battles for the foreseeable future.  They own all of the high ground.  We barely have some bunkers in no-man’s land.  They will continue to punish with impunity anyone who defies them in any meaningful way.

But what they’ve lost is credibility.  No one sane believes what they are saying anymore.

I never really thought deeply about the biblical quote “The truth shall set you free.”  As a child I thought it was a trap to get me to ‘fess up when I had done something wrong.  Well, that had more to say about my questionable morals than about scripture.

But now I understand.  The truth shall set you free is another way of saying “I was blind but now I see.”  When we base our actions on inaccurate information, we may fail to escape from the problems that those lies are propagating.  Knowing the truth sets you free from the circle of failure that lies perpetuate.  An example from my life was finally realizing that the Republican establishment wasn’t trying to defend conservative life.  Once I saw that truth everything that had been puzzling about the political situation in the United States made perfect sense.  Suddenly I saw that some whom I had assumed were friends were really enemies and some whom I assumed were crazy turned out to be sane and actually wise.

Now, in the last five or six years the Trump revolution has turbo-charged the Left into a manic assault on all things normal.  All the masks have dropped off and all on the Left have shown their true colors.  And there is the silver lining.  Even the dense and even the stupid can now see clearly that the Left is openly attacking normalcy with the intention of replacing it completely with perversion, dysfunction and madness.

This clarity finally makes it possible to stop losing ground and slowly make progress.  Even starting from bunkers in no-man’s land we can begin to improve our positions and reclaim territory.  And most importantly we can organize friends and shun our enemies.  Both are important.  Helping friends is critical when we are so weak and disorganized.  But as we get better organized and bigger, we can start to do damage to our enemies.  Losing our business will begin to hurt our enemies more and more as time goes on.

So, there’s the silver lining.  The truth shall set us free.  And from my point of view, it already has.

Thanks to the MaddMedic for the Links the Last Few Days

photog Current Events, OCF ,

MaddMedic who runs the “FREEDOM IS JUST ANOTHER WORD…: blog and news aggregation site, linked up a couple of my posts over the last few days.

Thanks Medic for the visibility.  I’m always glad to have more viewers visit the site.

 

And I’ll take the opportunity to ask anyone who likes the content here to pass it along and add us to any blog rolls that might help us get seen by people who would enjoy the content here.