Month: February 2022

Reframing Life in Woke America

photog Current Events

So, the word is out, Biden is a bust.  His presidency will be remembered along with Jimmy Carter’s and Herbert Hoover’s as a disaster for the United States.  All well and good.  But he’s going to be around for years and the country is still in the hand of Marxists so what do we do in the meantime?

Well, we live!  We’ve still got families and friends and jobs and responsibilities, mortgages and food bills and all the other things that require our attention and organize our days.  We’ll still have to deal with woke psychopaths who run the companies we work for and torment us with diversity, equity and inclusion jibber jabber.  We still have the federal and maybe state government trying to covidize our lives.  And we still have to manage to deal with the shambles Biden has made of our economy.  And if you live in a blue city you have to dodge homicidal criminals without the help of a functioning police force.  That’s what you still have to do.  Sounds not too good.  But we’ll do it.  And an important strategy in surviving this mess is framing the situation correctly.  I’ll explain.

Losing your job is a bad way to deal with the annoyances that have become attached to modern companies.  You’re going to have to put up with watching the corporate harassment training video and now they’ll have the diversity, equity and inclusion video too.  And if you’re in management they’ll expect you to drink the Kool-Aid and spout the party line.  But who says you have to go the management route?  If you’ve got an important skill, you can avoid all the nonsense by just doing your job and avoiding the wrong people.  What do I mean by the wrong people?  I mean the woke, the social justice warriors, the true believers.  You’ll be able to spot them a mile away.  They always have several rainbow flags adorning their work space and other such paraphernalia.  They’re mostly women and/or queer but there are plenty of exceptions.  Some of the worst of the worst are straight white men who want to prove their loyalty to the cause.

These people will not hesitate to get you fired.  Never socialize with them.  Avoid talking to them about anything but work and limit even that to the minimum necessary to do your job right.  This has a twofold benefit.  The obvious one is it protects you from being reported to Human Resources for some kind of harassment offense.  And that is a very important benefit.  But the second one is also important.  Avoiding these people makes your life better.  I’ll give an example.

I used to work with this guy who was a progressive.  Sort of like one of the old hippies.  He and I both worked for a contract engineering company and were both assigned to the same client for a very extended contract.  Eventually both of us went to work for the client directly.  I had always tried to be friendly with the guy.  We had worked on an assignment together in California years before and for the most part he was a nice enough guy, maybe a bit too goofy.  But because the client company we both joined had a very lefty culture he quickly became adapted and soon he was one of the worst of the bunch.  And since we still spent plenty of time together at lunch and coffee breaks, he quickly became one of the most annoying parts of my day.  And this went on for the better part of a year until one day after one of these aggravating conversations it occurred to me that I disliked this guy intensely and eventually this was going to end up with this guy reporting me for some kind of thought crime.  It was the logical outcome.  So, the next time he started up on something, I told him I had had enough and from now on we would limit our conversations to work concerns only.  He looked a little stunned but he could tell I was completely serious and that was the last personal conversation we ever had.  Almost immediately I felt like some horrible irritant had been removed from my life.  I realized that I no longer had indigestion after lunch and I felt much less tired in the afternoon.  Sure, there were still plenty of lefties at work but I wasn’t responsible for talking with them at lunch or on coffee breaks.  I made a point after that to spend my time at lunch or break with like minded people and that worked wonders.

And this is a good policy everywhere.  Both at work and outside work I look to spend my time with people whose opinions I respect.  It can never be one hundred percent.  Most of my bosses were lefties.  I was always very professional and performed what was expected of me but when it came to company social functions I would bow out.  No golf.  That was with the management types and they were woke types almost to a man.  Bowling would be better but still there were problems so I even let that go.  I preferred to organize my own after work activities with only people I knew wouldn’t aggravate me with some progressive nonsense.

And that’s what I mean by reframing the situation.  Just because the Left controls the public and private organizations doesn’t mean they control most of the important parts of our lives.  We have control of most of the space we live in.  Sort out the world into the good and the bad.  Avoid those people who only cause grief and trouble.  Seek out the people who won’t cause heartburn when you spend time with them.  They don’t have to be your clones.  There’s plenty of variation on our side of the fence.  There are intellectuals and guys who prefer to get their hands dirty.  There are introverts and extroverts.  You name it.

So, there’s my secret in a nutshell.  Search out the people on our side of the fence and maximize the connections you have with them.  Fraternize with them.  Do business with them.  Help them when they need help.  And more importantly, avoid the opposite types.  Don’t waste your free time around them.  Avoid them like the plague.  You’ll be happier and you’ll isolate them from normal people.  And that’s what they deserve.

Leptons and Bosons and Quarks, Oh My!

photog photog's Corner, Science

I was wandering around the interwebs and opened up an article that asked “What Does the Grand Unified Theory Mean?”  Okay what could I do?  I haven’t read anything much on particle physics since undergraduate days when I took a course that was called, quaintly, “Atomic Physics.”  When I signed up for the course I immediately thought in my best Bill Murray voice, “Back off man!  I’m a scientist.”

Well, the article is a rambling incoherent mess.  Which told me that my grasp of particle physics is woefully insufficient.  So I found this book on-line, Elementary Particle Physics, TIMOTHY L. BARKLOWAND MARTINL. PERL,  Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305. I’m going to try and glean enough about the standard model to be able to tell if the popular accounts are at all accurate.

I put this up just in case anyone else gets the bug.

 

Nobody’s Clapping Joe

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Approval rating, legitimacy, consent of the governed.  These words mean different things.  But they are linked.  The consent of the governed is needed to provide legitimacy to a government.  And if the approval rating for a leader, edges down to a third of the voters it starts to look like the consent of that country is evaporating.

I think what we are seeing is America turning its back on Dementia Joe.  A quarter of his term is over and he has shown himself to be dishonest, dangerous and incompetent.  America doesn’t know how to get rid of Biden but they want him to go away.  As a proxy for that we will take away his legislative enablers, the Democrat majorities in the House and Senate.  This will force him to rely on executive orders to perpetrate his crimes against the Constitution and the American people.

Now this has happened before.  In fact, most presidents lose seats in congress during the off-year election.  Probably Obama is closest to Biden’s case in terms of paying for his progressive overreach during his off-year election in 2010.  He is closest but not close.  Biden is a very special case.  Not since Carter have we had a president who ignited an economic disaster as Joe has with the runaway inflation now afflicting the working people of America.  And when you combine that with the other two plagues; rampant urban crime and COVID tyranny; and with the fact that he sounds like a dementia patient, what you get is a someone who is not a credible leader.  And when that happens people no longer give him the benefit of the doubt.

I think an example of this was how the AP reporter started challenging the State Department spokesman who called a press conference to announce the supposed Russian false flag operation against the Ukraine.  The reporter refused to take the spokesman’s word at face value and asked for some kind of proof of his allegations.  And even the usually compliant jellyfish at CNN and MSNBC are beginning to push back against the more patently false statements and lame explanations that the administration feeds them concerning inflation, crime and other ongoing catastrophes.  So even his usually dependable stenographers are showing incredulity at the bolder lies being distributed.

But it’s more than that.  A large and growing percentage of Americans are done with this president and his administration.  They want a solution to moving on from this dysfunctional mess we’re in.  It’s like when a mayor has betrayed the police force in his town and the police respond by turning their backs on the mayor at a formal ceremony.  It’s a vote of no confidence.  The American people have no confidence in Joe Biden.  They don’t like him.  They don’t trust him.  And they want him to go away.

But how to get rid of him?  Even after the mid-terms we won’t have anywhere near enough senators to convict him during an impeachment trial.  I think it requires a two thirds majority.  And even if we did, we’d end up with Kamala Harris which would be equally if differently bad.  We’d have to impeach her too and then we’d end up with the Speaker of the House which would probably be Kevin McCarthy.  And that wouldn’t be much of an improvement.

So, we’ll be in a bad position for three more years.  We’ll be stuck with Biden.  The damage he’ll be able to do will be somewhat limited but he’ll continue to harm us every way he can.  He’ll allow illegal aliens to flood the country and he’ll use executive decrees to undermine the laws that are supposed to protect us.

But at least no serious person will pretend that he’s anything but the lying, crack-brained, crooked creep that he’s always been.  There won’t be any more applause or even polite silence.  It will be derision and hatred for the rest of his miserable and despised term in office.  Let’s go Brandon.

19FEB2022 – OCF Update – Weather Weirdness Continues

photog Current Events, OCF ,

 

We go from having a couple of feet of snow on the ground to nothing.  In the last three days we’ve had sixty mile an hour wind, heavy rain, sixty five degree temperatures, five degree temperatures and now snow.  All we need is frogs falling from the sky to complete the list.  Ah, whatever.  Camera Girl brought home some Chinese food for lunch after her sojourn to the empty but expensive grocery stores.  And I never look gift chop suey in the mouth.

I’ve gotten so used to high winds that I didn’t do anything in preparation and, sure enough, disaster struck.  Well, not disaster.  My barbecue grill blew off the deck and got busted up a bit.  It’ll need some straightening up but it should still get the job done.  Oh well.

So, February 19th, almost the end of the month!  Sure, March is still winter where I live but the days are getting longer and you start getting that itch to look for signs of spring.  Crocuses, daffodils, tulips.  None of those are anywhere near appearing.  But other things are happening.  New birds are starting to appear.  The turkeys have been on the move and the pond has thawed completely.  Soon frogs and salamanders will be heading for vernal ponds to breed.

So, even as the snow whips by my window I am thinking of grass and flowers.  And without the stupid mask nonsense spring and summer will be the free time they ae supposed to be.  Barbecues and soon even opening the swimming pool and the grandkids coming over to swim and even a baseball catch.  All really good things.

NYC, Deadly Environment for Women

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Not that this is a shocker but New Yorkers are rediscovering that women are the perfect target for violent predators in the urban environment.

Nicole Gelinas over at City Journal has a story about the last four women randomly murdered by violent psychopaths that stalk women in New York City:

“Even with New York’s City’s overall murder rate up 53 percent in two years— from 319 in 2019 to 488 last year—these murders are especially dislocating. In each case, there was nothing the victim could have done to prevent her death. …    It’s impossible to recall so many fatal stranger-on-stranger attacks on women in such a short time, seemingly motivated by nothing other than misogynistic and, perhaps, racial hatred. We all like to think we have some measure of control over our own public safety, but what could any of these women have done to remain alive, besides not go outside?”

Then Gelinas discusses the history of women existing in New York City in three periods.  There was the Giuliani period of law and order and the before period and the after period (now):

“A great deal of what we call public space is, in fact, male turf. . . . Fear of rape and attack, of which low-level aggravation is a reminder, plays a part in keeping women from claiming public space.” …”

“That changed. Under Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, women increasingly felt safe, and for good reason. Stranger-on-stranger violent crime, let alone murder, wasn’t nonexistent, but it became extremely unusual over a generation of remarkable public safety in New York. In December 2019, when three teenagers held 18-year-old Columbia University student Tessa Majors down in Morningside Park and stabbed her to death, the crime was rare and shocking. Not today. With Lee’s death making four in six weeks, a woman isn’t even safe walking briskly from a taxi to her own apartment.”

The article also reinforces that the City administration refuses to acknowledge that the changes in policing, prosecution and incarceration are the direct cause for all of these murders and other criminality.  Instead of acknowledging that these mega-repeat offenders who finally end up murdering random people are loose only because of these changes Mayor Adams and the other officials talk about the endemic problems of mental health and racism.

This agrees with my opinion that these cities are doomed until the general population becomes completely sick of progressive lies and demands a return to law and order.  And that won’t happen until things get even worse.  My yardstick is it will happen when the first cannibal stories appear in the New York Post.