Month: September 2022

17SEP2022 – OCF Update – This’N’That

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner, Photography , , , , ,

Busy day.  Had lots of yard work to get ready for the end of warm weather.  I even cut the grass today.  I didn’t notice how long the grass had grown on account of all that rain.  Man, what a mess the clippings made.  But soon enough all that will be done with.   It was nice to get out and look around the fields.  There were tons of honey bees on the goldenrod.  Now that I’ve renewed my interest in keeping bees, I was looking at the varieties of bees that were on the flowers.  And I noticed they were almost exclusively Italian bees.  These are a southern bee and they don’t fare well in cold winter areas.  But they’re the kind of bees that people get when they buy a package of bees from one of the big breeders down south.  So most likely these bees aren’t feral bees but some beekeeper’s hive.

Funny, I got a little annoyed that someone was encroaching on my goldenrod.  What the what!  The only advantage of the Italian bees is their mild tempers.  They’re the least likely race of bees to sting you even if you’re in their nest messing around with the frames full of honey and brood.  So, knowing there are a lot of apiary hives around me was a little bit of a downer.  I’m hoping to catch a swarm next spring.  But if there are a lot of apiary hives in the area chances are that the swarm will come from one of them.  That means the bees will be southern bees and most probably also bees that have been living under a regimen of chemicals to ward off varroa mites and other plagues.  I won’t be using those chemicals so the bees will have to depend on their natural robustness to survive.  But since they’ve been dosed with various chemicals, they may be quite weak.

That makes me think that I may as well purchase a bee package from a breeder who keeps northern bees under a natural beekeeping regimen.  I know there are several breeders in Vermont who have this type of bee.  I’ve read about these northern bees.  They’re known either as Russian bees or dark bees.  They are extremely cold hardy and are specialized to collecting a large amount of nectar in order to survive the long cold northern winter.  Of course, that might mean a very long drive back and forth to Northern Vermont.  That’s a hike.  It’s possible they’ll mail the bees but maybe not.  Anyway, interesting things to think about today.

While I was working on the garden, I saw both grasshoppers and katydids that were so worn out that I was able to go up to them and pick them up by the wing covers.

Even the few butterflies I saw, some fritillaries and painted ladies, were flying very slowly.  And they were much less skittish than normally when I approached them while they fed.  Of vertebrates, there were some turkeys in the yard, a few small frogs and a vole that shot out of the garden and headed into the blueberry bushes when I approached.  I managed to get some shots of the turkeys as they noticed me and retreated into the forest.

Then I walked over by the swamp.  It was looking very beat up.

But this time of the year has its charms.  A good day out in the air.

Michael Anton Gives a Speech About the Deep State

photog Current Events

This is about a half hour long and it goes over a lot of territory that we’re all pretty familiar with but I found it pretty clearly spoken.  At the end he spends about five minutes talking about what should be done about the debacle that is the Deep State.  He says the CIA should be eliminated.  He thinks some of its functions should be handed over to the State Department and the Department of Defense.  And other functions like toppling banana republics should be eliminated.  He thinks the FBI has to be purged of all the bad actors and the FISA courts have to be eliminated.  He even questions whether we need the FBI at all.

Personally, I don’t think he goes nearly far enough.  Eliminating the CIA and the FBI is not enough.  What has to be reformed is the doctrine that prevents the President from firing everyone who obstructs him from carrying out any activity that is lawful under the Constitution.  Essentially the whole Justice Department conspired to prevent a legitimately elected President of the United States from carrying out the duties that he was elected to perform.  A new law needs to be written that clearly states that regardless of the qualifications of the bureaucrats in some executive branch agency if the duly elected President of the United States tells them to do something that he is not forbidden to do under the Constitution (which is just about anything) they have to do it or be immediately fired and prosecuted if they cause harm by their inaction.

The way I see it half of the FBI should already be in prison for their various crimes against the people of this country.  That they’re not is an indictment of the system that we currently live under.  The rule of law at the federal level is a charade.  Two systems exist.  One for us and another for them.  So Anton is bringing this situation up.  But for most people who visit this site it’s old news.  But he does describe it eloquently.

Surviving the Great Contraction

photog Current Events, Reclaiming the Family

What has been going on for the last thirty years has been explained to us as the off-shoring of manufacturing by the global capitalists to take advantage of cheap Asian labor.  And maybe that’s actually how it all started.  But what is now called the Great Reset is a much more ambitious agenda.  What is going on now is an elimination of the middle class in Western Society.  The wealthy and their chosen cadre in the managerial class will leverage automation and the offshoring of manufacturing to eliminate the vast majority of middle-class occupations.  This in turn will deprive young men of the wherewithal to marry and raise families.  And within two generations that will eliminate the majority of the descendants of the greatest generation.  What will be left will be the elites and the immigrants who will cut their grass and babysit their kids.

Now, this is not a prediction.  We’re already halfway through the first generation.  The Millennials are childless for the most part and living as Uber drivers and Starbucks baristas.  Once the same treatment is administered to the Zoomers we’ll be left with the Elites and the immigrants, legal and illegal, to clean toilets in hotels and wait tables in all those exotic restaurants that Cloud People like to eat in.  But the American population that fought the World Wars and built the modern world will be gone.  Curtain falls.

So that’s the plan.  The trick is to keep your descendants from joining the extinction.  One path is to join the Elite.  All you have to do is allow yourself to be subsumed into the Hive.  You must mouth all the right platitudes and denounce your ancestors and pay lip service to the Woke agenda and send your kids to the correct schools.  And grovel.  Basically, you have to learn to love Big Brother.  So, if you can lick the boots of the Elites, they’ll allow you to exist at the lowest rung of their world.  The question mark is whether that will permit your children the same dispensation.  I think the answer is probably not.  If for no other reason, there are very few seats available in the elite colleges and most of those are already reserved for “not you.”  Also, if you do bootlick your way into the Elites your kids will be exposed to so much propaganda that unless they’re equally “in the know” about the madness being preached at them they may be brainwashed into believing that it’s their duty to roll over and die for Gaia.

The other path is to harden your kids and grandkids against the Great Reset.  You’ll have to explain to them that America is no longer the land of opportunity.  They’re going to have to swim against the current and through hard work and perseverance they’ll have to do everything they can to avoid the fate that the Elites have engineered for them.  You’ll have to counter program them to want to get married and raise a family.  Maybe you’ll have to help them get started in small businesses.  You’ll have to provide support, both financial and psychological to make this path seem possible and desirable.  It’s a tall order.

I know what I’m saying sounds bizarre.  But it’s demonstrably true.  This is what the Millennials have experienced.  And it’s not going to get better.  It’s going to get even worse.  And even if some things start to turn around, which is far from certain, a lot of the damage is already done.  At this point we have to try to salvage as much of the younger generations as we can.

This is bad news.  But it has to be accepted and acted on.  The alternative is extinction.

The Terminal List (2022) – A TV Review

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“The Terminal List is Amazon Prime’s action thriller tv series based on Jack Carr’s 2018 novel of the same name.  It stars Chris Pratt as Navy Seal Lieutenant Commander James Reece and centers around Reece’s revenge mission to avenge the deaths of his family and comrades in arms.

I won’t put in my usual spoiler alert because I’d rather not go through the whole plot piece by piece.  I’ll just give you my reaction to the series and recommendations.

So, first off, the author Jack Carr was a Navy Seal so I guess that lends some credibility to the technical details of the show.  As far as the plot, it’s a highly charged story of wrongdoing by the rich and powerful that a few years ago I would have said was too outlandish to be true.  But now that real life government malfeasance (FBI targeting of political opponents, COVID related tyrannical actions) is standard operating procedure who is to say what’s outlandish.

The acting for the most part is very good.  There were maybe one or two scenes that didn’t seem to correspond to how I thought the characters emotional states would make them act.  But since the author probably corresponds more closely than I do to the psychological profile of the characters in the story maybe it’s my ignorance of their mindsets.

One of the plot elements involves the brain trauma that Reece is suffering from.  This leads him sometimes to slip back into old scenes in his life, sometimes at very inconvenient points in the plot.  Occasionally during the story, I thought the memory problems were a little distracting but by the end of the series I was satisfied that the plot device was justified.  It also gives us a chance to see his personal life with his murdered wife and daughter.  Now this is a difficult layer to add to a story like this.  I would say they pulled it off mostly well.  By the end of the story the character seems to have come to closure with his loss.

As far as action, there is plenty of it.  Reece and his allies do an amazing amount of damage to the people on his “terminal list.”  And there is quite a bit of brutality to his campaign.  Some of it is up close and personal.  But I would say the violence isn’t merely gratuitous but follows the plot of avenging the terrible crimes that have been committed against Reece.

I watched the show with Camera Girl.  Now she’s an action novel junkie.  She’s a big fan of Reacher and Bosch so a little violence isn’t a big deal to her.  There was one scene that she thought was a little too vicious but by the end of the series she was a big fan of the story.  So, I would recommend this series to anyone who likes the action thriller genre.  It also lacked any woke nonsense of any kind.  In that sense it was very refreshing.  I give this series a highly recommended rating.