Month: July 2022

The Bigger Picture

photog Current Events

When things get as bad as they have now, you start to think that just tweaking the system won’t ever be enough to fix things.  After all, we went through this cycle in the seventies and eighties of the last century and here we are even worse off than then.  What it seems to say to me is that just fixing a few laws and getting rid of a few programs isn’t going to change the direction the country is going.

The rot is now spread to almost every facet and organization of American society.  The litany of organizations is too long and familiar to bother repeating again.  But the anti-American and specifically anti-white programs that the schools, media, colleges and corporations have adopted has to be opposed by state and federal law.  It will require drastic measures.  The playing field will have to be tilted drastically to frighten these people.

And worse still, the American people have become dysfunctional.  They want the government to run their lives and take care of them.  They want to study basket weaving at a college and then complain when they can’t find a basket-weaving job to let them pay off their student loan.

And the recent Supreme Court rulings has reinforced the feeling that drastic change is needed.  If a law is wrong then it can’t be tweaked.  It has to be thrown out.  If an agency is corrupted you can’t just fire the boss.  You have to purge it and start over.  If a program is harming the country it has to be ended and replaced with something that helps.  If a company is abusing Americans, then it needs to be put out of business.  What is needed is the right-wing equivalent of the New Deal.

The central idea needs to be restoring American civilization.  One thrust of it would be to strip away all the laws and regulations that have strangled the freedoms in the Bill of Rights.  That will require taking a chainsaw to whole agencies of the bureaucracy.  The IRS, FBI, Justice Department and the agencies that regulate banking will have to cease and desist torturing citizens and stealing their rights and money.  And innumerable other agencies and departments will need to be pruned.

Another change will be re-industrializing the country.  All the corporations that off-shored their factories will be informed that they are now considered foreign businesses and will be taxed and tariffed accordingly.  And alternatively, any company that expands its industrial and commercial operations to employ American citizens will be advantaged handsomely with respect to taxes.  And an important part of the business plan will be a long-term energy policy.  Everything possible needs to be done to stabilize prices for gasoline and heating fuels.  In addition, the government must spearhead a program to restore the use of nuclear power for electrical generation and other energy needs.  Currently only nuclear power has the hope of replacing petroleum at the point where reserves of gas, oil and coal are depleted.  Of course, questions of safety must be addressed so that the public will be confident in the program but the current fantasy of powering the electric grid with windmills and solar panels is just that, a fantasy.

But a final plank in any program to restore the country has to address the moral decline in the country.  And this will have to involve education and re-establishing a partnership between the government and the families of this country.  The schools have to stop poisoning children’s minds.  They need to prepare children to take their place in the world.  The children must be taught that one day they will have to have families of their own and assume responsibility for other lives.  They need to know that growing up is a part of American life not something to be avoided.  And the government needs to provide financial incentives and aid in raising a family.  Anyone who marries and works full time to support his wife and kids needs to have the government on his side.

I’m not saying we should pay for his life but we should make it possible to achieve a middle-class existence for being an honest working-class American.  These are just commonsense ideas that outline the bare bones of what is needed to restore this country to normalcy.

But they need to be adopted and preached by a leader smart enough and persuasive enough to galvanize the people in this country who want to save it.  He has to make it a crusade to save America.  He has to paint the moment for what it is.  This is a desperate situation we’re in.  Think of it as a ship with no one at the wheel that’s approaching an iceberg.  Either someone is going to make a drastic course correction or total catastrophe will occur.  That is how it is and how it needs to be sold.

Ride the High Country (1962) – A Movie Review

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“Ride the High Country” was a 1960s revisionist Western directed by Sam Peckinpah.  It stars Joel McCrea as Steve Judd an over the hill lawman who is taking on a job to guard a gold shipment from a mining town called Hornitos in the Sierra Nevada.  Judd hires his old partner Gil Westrum, played by Randolph Scott, and a young cowboy named Heck Longtree to help him guard the gold on the trip.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

Along the way to Hornitos, they stay over at a farmhouse owned by Joshua Knudsen.  And we meet his daughter Elsa, played by a very young Mariette Hartley, who wants to run away from home to marry one of the miners in Hornitos named Billy Hammond against her father’s will.  After the men head out Elsa catches up to them and Judd allows her to ride with them out of concern that she might be attacked by wild animals in the wilderness.  Along the way we see Longtree flirting with Elsa.  But we also learn that Westrum and Longtree plan to steal the gold from Judd.

When they reach Hornitos, Elsa meets up with Billy and the rest of the Hammond brothers.  To say the least they are depraved animals.  Billy marries Elsa in the town bordello with the madame and prostitutes as bridal party.  When Billy passes out before the honeymoon two of the brothers attempt to rape her in the “bridal suite.”  Judd and Longtree hear her screams and rescue her from the Hammonds.  When Billy demands his wife back Westrum threatens the judge who married them to force him to claim that the marriage was illegitimate.

They leave Hornitos with Elsa in tow to bring her back to her father.  The next night Westrum and Longtree attempt to sneak out of camp at night with the gold.  But Judd catches them and takes them prisoner.  He binds their hands and declares that he will hand them over to the law when he delivers the gold.

The next day Billy Hammond and his brothers catch up with Judd and demand to have Elsa back.  Judd agrees to allow Longtree to have a gun and between them they kill two of the Hammonds.  The other Hammonds ride off and Judd and the rest of the company stop for the night.  Westrum escapes on horseback and returns to the scene of the gun battle and retrieves a pistol from one of the dead Hammonds.  Then he begins to follow Judd’s party.

When Judd and Longtree reach Elsa’s home they find her father dead on the ground and come under fire from the Hammonds who have set up an ambush.  Longtree is shot in the leg and Judd is hit in the belly.  But before the Hammonds can finish them off Westrum rides into the scene and tells Judd that he’s returned to help his old partner face off against the Hammonds.  A classic gun duel, with both sides walking toward each ensues and the three Hammonds riddle Judd with bullets but the two old lawmen manage to kill their three enemies in the fight.

Judd tells Westrum that he’s going to die but doesn’t want Longtree and Elsa to see him expire.  He tells Westrum to finish up the gold delivery and also says that he is satisfied that Westrum has come back to his duty and will do the right thing.  Then he dies and Westrum joins Longtree and Elsa to tend to Longtree’s wounds and finish the job.

Although this is supposed to be a modern Western with a blurred boundary between the good guys and the bad, for the most part McCrea and Scott are very close to the quintessential golden age cowboys.  Scott’s turn as a bad guy is shown to be not very deep seated as he comes back at the end to risk his life for his old friend.  There is a lot more realism in the depiction of how depraved the folks in the mining camp were as compared to a classic western.  But for the most part this film still stays pretty close to a classic western.  I’ll say that I quite enjoyed the movie and I recommend it for fans of traditional westerns.  It’s about halfway between the movies made in the ‘30s and ‘40s and the stuff you might see in the spaghetti westerns that Clint Eastwood starred in.

Guest Contributor – TomD – 04JUL2022 – Photo

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Tom | Flickr

TomD

 

100 trillion zimbabwe front.jpg
100 trillion zimbabwe front.jpg

Here’s an amusing part of my collection, the highest denomination banknote ever issued: a $100 trillion “dollar” (10^14th) Zimbabwean note issued in 2008. The actual monetary value of the note when issued was somewhat less that the worth of 8 ounces of used cat litter. Shortly thereafter the Zimbabwean currency system totally collapsed with the locals instead temporarily adopting 6 packs or Heineken beer (really!) as a basis for economic exchange until the US dollar became the de facto currency.

In the meantime, Zimbabwean currency in various denominations from a few hundred millions up to the pictured 10^14th became available for amusement purposes for a (US) dollar or two on ebay. I bought twenty or thirty of the pictured notes and gave all but two away as joke gifts. But, as it turn out, the joke ended up being on me. Fourteen years later, the highest denomination bill ever issued has become scarce and is now selling for $100 to $300 US dollars.

One wonders whether some enterprising Chinese group has started counterfeiting the notes yet? (Another story but the Chinese counterfeiters are the bane of the existence of collectors of pretty much anything valuable.)

Celebrating the Fourth of July as an Act of Defiance

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I didn’t celebrate Pride Month.  I didn’t celebrate Juneteenth.  I didn’t celebrate Black History Month or Women’s History Month or any other history month.  I did celebrate Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, Columbus Day, Washington’s Birthday and all the holidays we had back in the good old days.  And I will be celebrating the Fourth of July.

The Fourth of July commemorates the War of Independence and the Founding Fathers’ courage and wisdom in creating a new nation and providing it with an enlightened Constitution that provided the framework for living a free life.

Nowadays those Founding Fathers and their Constitution are targets for hate and derision by the Left and anyone else who buys into their whole George Floyd/Black Lives Matter/anti-white campaign.  To them the Fourth of July is just a reminder of all the injustice and racism they claim is inherent in America and its history.

Well. good.  Let them disown the Fourth categorically and absolutely.  Let them reject anyone who celebrates it as a deplorable enemy of all they stand for.  That suits me right down to my toes.  It makes my enjoyment of the fireworks and the barbecues and the parades that much the sweeter.

Tomorrow my grandchildren will be riding on wagon covered in July 4th posters and other artwork of their design in a parade.  The wagon will be pulled by a tractor that their father and uncle will be driving.  And when they get to the town common, they’ll listen to music, speeches, poems and other patriotic thoughts that were written centuries ago by Jefferson, Paine and Henry.  And I’ll stand on the side of the street and wave to them and applaud their efforts and afterward we’ll celebrate with some more hot dogs and hamburgers and watermelon.

And tomorrow night we’ll watch the local fireworks displays.  They won’t be anything too spectacular.  They’re not a patch on the ones I used to watch in New York City when I was young.  Those were spectacular.  But these are just as important.  Maybe more so.  They represent the local enthusiasm and will to celebrate the things that we believe in.  This is us saying we are the United States of America.  Anyone who says that this is a racist and evil country is not an American.

He is a parasite growing at the expense of his host.  Eventually he hopes to kill off his host and replace him.  Right now, we haven’t managed to find the drug that will kill this parasite.  So, we have to suffer the symptoms.  But we definitely don’t have to pretend that this creature is part of the body.  We don’t have to cooperate with its destructive activities or treat it as a friend.  Its only goal is our destruction and our only goal is to cut off its blood supply and poison it.

Well, all that is not the result of eating some hamburgers and shooting off some fireworks.  But those are the things that give children the message that this is a country worth defending from those who would take away our freedoms and prosperity and replace them with poverty and dependency.  So that makes celebrating the Fourth of July a worthwhile and strengthening endeavor.  And based on the current propaganda it is also transgressive and defiant.  It’s a thumb in the eye of the Biden administration and its “new world order.”  After all what do parades, fireworks and barbecues have in common?  Well, they all add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.  Chew on that Dementia Joe.