Month: December 2022

H/T to Conservative Treehouse for News of Brazil’s Election Unrest

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Sundance has been following Bolsonaro’s fate after his electoral loss in the recent election.  It appears that the military may be taking Bolsonaro’s part in this quarrel over election fraud.  It seems political stability is beginning to break down all over the world.  We may be entering even more chaotic times.  Brazil is a more unstable place than America.  But it may be a test case for the people losing faith in the traditional democratic institutions.

11DEC2022 – OCF Update – Waiting for Snow

photog Current Events, OCF

We’re supposed to get our first measurable snowfall later today.  I dragged out the snow shovel, the one that still looked usable out of the pile I used last year.  I’ve got to get around to getting a good metal one.  The plastic ones are just not up to the challenge.  I suppose aluminum is the practical material, good strength to weight ratio but secretly I yearn for a titanium shovel.  Must look into it.

I bought a copy of John D. Brown’s book, “Create Story Ideas That Beg to Be Written: The Simple Secrets to Start Producing Terrific Ideas Today.”  I heard about it on Larry Correia’s podcast “Writer Dojo.”  Recent problems I had outlining some stories made me wonder whether I was missing the boat on standard operating procedures for brilliant authors.  So, we’ll see.

I’ve gotten through all four of my favorite Christmas Carol movies and last night began round two with the George C. Scott version.  Most satisfactory.  And I had the first season’s viewing of, “The Holly and the Ivy.”  Very enjoyable.  I’m in the mood for some old Alfred Hitchcock movies, the ones from England.  I think I’ll start with, “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”

We had Princess Sack of Potatoes over for a sleepover on Friday and Saturday.  She went home this morning.  We must have played Candy Land with her thirty times between her grandmother and me.  It is remarkable how much repetition a young child can tolerate.  But much more interesting was a game she made up with her toy animals.  She has a wooden box full of plastic rhinos and elephants and even spiders, grasshoppers, scorpions and snakes.  In this morning’s version I was the king, the rhino and someone had stolen my money and I interrogated various animals and each time I was assured that the cheetah or pig or scorpion couldn’t have stolen my money but certainly it was the next one she picked out.  And on and on through each iteration.  And in each case her defense of that animal’s innocence was heart felt and convincing.  Eventually I became convinced that I was being played.  All of these animals were obviously in cahoots.  But what would come next?  This high powered public defender was running rings around the king.  Would I next be accused of having stolen the money from myself?  Luckily Camera Girl broke up the game for breakfast.  Who says it’s good being king?

It’s remarkable to think that it’s two weeks to Christmas Day.  And despite the destruction of western civilization I’m quite looking forward to it.  Maybe that’s what it was like in fifth century as the barbarians were at the gate.  Sure they would burn the city to the ground and take all the gold and silver as spoil but you still had to celebrate the holidays in some manner or other.  Sure, Incitatus or Biden is emperor and the CDC has subcontracted to the CCP to infect the world with a gain of function bat virus so they could force us to take their mRNA poison on the government’s terabuck.  And America is right on board with the Ukraine, COVID lockdowns, transgender insanity and global madness.  But I have countless things to feel happy about and grateful for this Christmas.  Friends, food, family, life and love.

Sure we’re surrounded by the depraved but most of the damage they do is to themselves.  In a way knowing these people are driving themselves to madness is encouraging.  It proves the laws of the universe are still in full effect.  This is still a very wonderful life.  So here we go.  A new week started and things on the upswing.

Brain Researchers Are Finally Waking Up From Their Alzheimer’s Errors

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For the last twenty plus years researchers have single-mindedly chased the amyloid hypothesis as the solution to Alzheimer’s Disease.  And this has led nowhere.  Finally after hundreds of drug trials and billions of dollars spent, they’re waking up from their delusion and realizing that amyloid is a symptom of the disease not its cause.

More than anything this is an indictment of the system of selecting research and development targets in biomedical science.  But ti also may reflect the waning of the scientific method in the West too.  Considerable fraud was involved in a landmark research project that perpetuated the mistaken direction of Alzheimer’s research for decades.

The government/industry/academic “partnership” is at the center of the dysfunction that has become endemic across America and Europe.  The complex no longer rewards merit and is highly influenced by gender and racial politics and other irrelevant considerations that limit the scientific method.

But at least now maybe some progress can be made in this terribly debilitating disease.  In fact it might turn out that small molecule solutions that aren’t as costly or require such long development times as the antibody drugs might turn up now.

The Culture Wars Are Won One Child at a Time

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Legislating morality and thinking that will be enough to protect children is a mistaken idea.  The individuals who seek to prey on young people are working at the personal level and they need to be stopped at the same personal level, one on one.  Excluding these individuals from access to your children has to be done by design and diligence.

Look who has access to your kids.  The biggest pools of access are in the schools they attend.  There you have the school boards who set policy, the principals who oversee the operation and the teachers and other functionaries like librarians, nurses, teacher’s aides and administrators who directly interact with your children.  Figuring out how to evaluate the records and personalities of these people is far from a trivial exercise.  But this is your responsibility.  You’ve got to utilize any and every resource available.  Do a search for best practices in evaluating schools for safety risks like sex offenders among the staff.  Demand to see the curriculum and actual course materials that your children will be studying.  Find out what outside personnel and resources will be used in any enrichment activities the school plans for the coming year.  Talk to the teachers individually and engage them with frank questions about their perspectives about anything that the teachers might try to use to interject their personal beliefs on your children.  Note these teachers’ appearances and mannerisms.  Are they unusual looking?  Do they behave at all abnormally?  Look for danger signs.  An obvious one is an LGBTQ individual.  Worse still is someone who presents as transgender.  If the school is terrible, then look for an alternative.

And the schools are not the only danger zones.  Day care and after school activities such as gym classes, dance classes, sports, scouting, swimming lessons, self-defense classes, art classes, music lessons are all things that must be investigated to feel confident that the personnel are safe and to be trusted.  And even then, remember that other children are also to be taken into consideration from a risk point of view.  Will your child be supervised in a responsible manner by the personnel present.  Or alternatively will you be present to take care of the supervision?

And finally, the other reservoir of concern are your children’s friends and their families and parents.  Leaving your kids with strangers is extremely irresponsible.  Get to know your kids’ friends and their families.  Friends have an enormous influence on growing children.  Peer pressure about sex and drug use are extremely hard to overestimate.  Kids are horribly suggestible well into their twenties.  But do your best to exclude the worst examples among their peers that you can.  And the best way to do this is to dominate their free time with activities and playmates that you have planned and vetted.  One of the best ways for you to do this is to volunteer for the supervision of the activities that your kids will be participating in.  Coaching kids’ sports teams is a great way to see which kids are odd or abnormal.  Also, you’ll get to meet the other parents and try to distinguish the good from the bad.  But remember your knowledge of other people will always be limited.  Always be careful of the situations you leave your kids in when you can’t be there.

And finally come up with a program for making your kids aware of the dangers that they may be exposed to when you’re not around.  Have appropriate discussions with your kids about the strange things that have begun to infect the world.  Somehow, you’ll have to explain some of the abnormalities that have become commonplace in the modern American landscape.  You’ll have to explain things like homosexuality and transgenderism and how they can protect themselves from the people attempting to normalize these behaviors to children.  You’re going to have to find resources to explain these concepts in ways that don’t frighten kids but at the same time allow them to adopt a posture that allows them to keep away from it.  That is far from a trivial assignment.

This is an enormous amount of work.  You can make it easier by living in a state like Florida that is starting to legislate against schools teaching perversion to young children.  But even in a “safe” state the burden is still on you to ensure that dangerous predators don’t manage to get access to your children.  But if you’re a parent, that is your job and if you’re successful you will win the culture war in the most important sense of the term.  You’ll have protected your child from the sexual confusion and nihilism that is the worst damage that the Left inflicts on children.  And you’ll maximize your chances of someday having grandchildren that will need to be protected too.  But then you’ll have raised children that will be up to the challenge of being those parents.