Month: July 2022

In the Bright Light of Day

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So, I’m finally over my jetlag from the Yellowstone trip.  I lost ten pounds during my trek and I think that discombobulated my system.  I felt low energy and a little bit down.  But last night Camera Girl killed the fatted calf (she made spaghetti, meat balls and sausage) and I feel back to my old self.

And with this physical restoration my mood has improved and I can face the world of Creepy Uncle Joe and his incompetent version of a neo-Stalinist rainbow new world order.  The thing to remember is that we are in a new world.  For example, worrying about the consequences of blue city crime is a waste of time.  Instead, anticipate where you can escape from this problem and in that way prosper despite their dysfunction.

Trying to shore up a dying civilization is a fool’s errand.  When Rome is falling look for Byzantium or the Franks as a new haven of stability.  Or maybe you join the Huns or the Vandals.  At least you’ll have some freedom and a share in the loot.  That’s better than being another Roman serf being worked to death by a Roman or barbarian master.

So that’s my brave talk for today.  The thing for us to do is look for advantage wherever we can find it.  Look for leaders who want to provide a local environment that’s better than the cataclysm that’s Joe’s New World Order.  I think Ron DeSantis is trying to show Floridians that he can do things to counteract the feds and their dysfunctional social agenda.  That’s the kind of thing we need to be looking for.

The order of the day is work arounds and ad hoc solutions to the break down of just about everything.  When the power grid stops being reliable, we’ll need generators and battery back-ups.  When schools become woke grooming academies, we’ll set up educational collectives in our neighborhoods that will evolve into new schools.  When gasoline stations start disappearing, we’ll be like Mad Max in the wasteland looking for the last fuel depot to get us out of the fiefdom of the Lord Humongous on our way to a better place.

It seems bleak but the alternative is just acquiescing to the mindless degradation that our opponents seem fixated on rolling out.  In reality it’s still easier than the precarious existence that was the 18th century American frontier or the nightmare that was the European middle-ages.  We need to begin the process of separating from and building up an identity distinct from the current “America.”  Apparently, there is an enormous group of people who believe in the woke America and being trapped in an environment with them is incredibly painful and unhealthy for us.

Build our own things.  That sounds simple but it will be a full-time job and it will be a continuous battle.  We’re starting to see some results from the conservative Supreme Court.  The decision on religious schools in Maine is the first step in prying education out of the hands of the Left.  More decisions like that will start to turn the tide.  Of course, the Left isn’t just sitting there.  They’ll try to pack the court.  Maybe they’ll win.  If they do then we look further afield for relief.  Maybe we find a state to push back against the feds.  Or maybe we leave these shores if there’s no alternative.  But giving up is not a choice.

How’s that for a more up-beat attitude?

How Far Will the Pendulum Swing this Time?

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Back in the 1970s America went off the rails.  The cities became drug and crime infested hell holes.  The economy cratered into stagflation.  Public trust in government and other institutions nose dived and Americans were afraid for the future.

And this low point was followed by Ronald Reagan’s election and a renewal that ushered in the optimism of the 1980s and beyond.

By my scorecard we’re even lower now than we were in the late seventies.  By every social, economic, cultural and physical measure, our world is shaking itself apart like an unbalanced rotating machine.  So many things are out of whack that it’s hard to see how the whole damn thing doesn’t smash itself to bits and lay across the landscape like a shrapnel field.

But someone once said, “There’s a lot of ruin in a nation.”  And he was right.  There have already been reactions to the madness of George Floyd and Joe Biden in places like Florida and Texas.  Someone like Ron DeSantis is sticking his neck out to defy COVID lockdowns and illegal alien invasions and crime waves and pedophile grooming in the elementary schools.

The pendulum will swing back against the stroke of madness.  The only question I wonder about is how far.  You see, I think we may not end up in positive territory after this latest debacle.  Back in the 1970s we didn’t have gay marriage, defund the police, sanctuary cities, legalized drugs, doctors castrating children and cancel culture.  I’m not sure we’ll get back far enough to keep the lights burning.

There are basic problems with our society that may preclude our survival as a culture.  Western civilization has convinced itself that abandoning things like petroleum and nuclear power will be possible without abandoning their benefits.  For the last century and more we’ve enjoyed the luxuries that electricity and the internal combustion engine have provided us.  The freedom to live our lives the way we want has been provided by the automobile and the instant communication inherent in the telephone.  Things like central heating and air conditioning were made possible by fossil fuels and the chemistry that they provided.

Now our descendants have become detached from reality and in order to pay homage to the Earth Goddess Gaia they demand that we cover the landscape with windmills and solar panels and pretend that this will allow us to carry on as before.  Screeching mental defectives like that Scandinavian harpy Greta Thunberg cow the leaders of modern countries into shutting down the resources needed to keep the wheels of industry turning.  Currently the price of fuel has doubled and when winter returns to the Northern Hemisphere we may see some truly frightening increases in the cost of heating oil and gas.

So, all of this is my way of wondering out loud whether we can turn this thing around.  Suppose we banish the Democrats from their leadership positions in the House and Senate in November.  That’s a start.  And suppose we retake the White House in 2024.  And suppose the Supreme Court overturns the constitutionality of gay marriage and affirmative action.  Will that be enough to push things back to normalcy?  I’m not so sure.

What I hope is that if those minimal things happen then some of the states will start nullifying federal actions that they find unconstitutional.  Sort of like the blue states did with sanctuary cities and legalized pot.  And that may be as good as it will get.  For some areas of the country, it’s probably too late.  Places like Baltimore and Philadelphia may not make it back to the rule of law.  Baltimore has been seven years without a working criminal justice system.  There may not be the will to reestablish law and order there.  Even New York and Chicago are becoming thugocracies.  Packs of teenage children hunt down and batter old people to death for sport.  This is not something you fix with an election or two.

Leave your comments below.  I’m curious to get the consensus from the readers.  Will we get back to where we were in 2000?  What do you think?

Sanctuary Cities Full Up

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It turns out NYC and Washington DC would like a few less illegal aliens looking for sanctuary in their sanctuary cities.  When Joe Biden unleashed the endless caravan of the unwashed on the US borders some of the governors (Abbott in Texas and DeSantis in Florida) decided it would be poetic justice to pay for bus tickets to send these “undocumented Americans” to those two blue cities.

Well, lo and behold, Mayor Adams of New York and Mayor Bowser of DC have discovered that illegal aliens cost money to keep alive.  In fact, Bowser is upset that the illegals were “tricked” into getting on the buses.  Now she wants Creepy Uncle Joe to step in and pick up the tab.

Hey, good for DeSantis and Abbott.  While they’re at it they might as well send them to the other sanctuary cities too.  San Francisco can always use more homeless people crapping on its streets.  And don’t forget Portland, Oregon.  It’s obvious that Antifa needs help finishing off Portland.  Ten or twenty thousand starving immigrants would really seal the deal.

So, once again, Biden has a policy that’s so bloody awful that even his own partisans are getting fragged by the fallout.  I like this current strategy so much I’m looking for ways to expand its impact.  To really hammer the point home the red states should craft policies that encourage illegal aliens and even just people on welfare to move to the blue cities.  The free bus ticket is good but really there should be a whole agency of government in these states to identify and expedite the migration of these people to New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Providence, Newark, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, Baltimore and the rest of the sanctuary cities.  They should hire lawyers to help these people get housing, health care, food stamps and all the other benefits you would expect from a first-rate sanctuary city.  To do less would just reek of insincerity for a real sanctuary.

But it’s not enough.  I think these sanctuary cities should also become sanctuaries for those getting out of prison in the red states.  After all, with the Soros prosecutors now eliminating bail requirements and nullifying arrests for anything less serious than serial murder these recent alumni of red state prisons deserve to relocate to an area where they can ply their professions (drug kingpin, gang banger, thug) without the annoying interference of law enforcement and other components of the criminal justice system.

Looks like a win/win to me.  The red states get to off load unproductive and anti-social residents and the blue cities can virtue signal how much they care about the wretched refuse and how they can run big cities without police or sanity.  Seems about right.

Maybe all of this is a taste of things to come.  With the federal government refusing to provide services like border protection the states will have to become creative at protecting themselves from the predatory actions by Washington.  I could see states begin following the letter of the law on enforcing employment bans against illegal aliens.  Punishing employers who break these laws with extremely harsh penalties would fix the problem very quickly.  Pretty soon all the illegals would be where they belong, in the sanctuary states and the rest of the country could get back to normal life.