Month: September 2023

Superman Updates the Fifth Commandment for the ACLU

photog Current Events , ,

Extremely succinct and simple enough for even the murderous cretins that the Democrats support to follow.  A murdering rapist wants to be made into a eunuch while waiting on death row.  And not getting that demand is an example of cruel and unusual punishment to the ACLU.  Something like this will be used as proof that our civilization committed suicide early in the 21st century.

 

 

Margaritaville

photog Current Events, photog's Corner

In the anti-Christian world that we now live in, the academicians made a noisy point of replacing the Christian temporal markers BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini) that we used to use to define historical dates.  At first, they replaced them with BCE (Before Christian Era) and CE (Christian Era) but still not satisfied with any relationship to Jesus remaining, they repurposed the acronyms into Before Common Era and Common Era.  Well, the enemies of God could be expected to do no less.

But maybe soon we’ll be back to BC and AD.  But the underlying time markers will stand for Before COVID and After the Destruction.  After all, historians of the future will decide that western civilization’s self-immolation reached its climax with the decision to wreck the industrial, commercial and social basis of the western world for the sake of running the COVID play book the way they did.

But in my own humble way I am also embarking on a new epoch.  The divisions will be designated BP and AP, Before Puppy and After Puppy.  In the waning days of the BP era, I have before me a solid week when Camera Girl will still be at my beck and call.  After that I’ll be abandoned to my fate, left to fend for myself and survive on any scraps that the very important canine deigns to leave in her bowl.  I’ll probably lose my spot on the couch and be forced to sleep in the shed or the garage.  I’ll be kept around as a maintenance man or security guard for the estate.  My main employment will probably be sanitation worker armed with a shovel and a pail.  How the mighty hath fallen.

But this week is my last hurrah.  Yesterday the kids and grandkids were over and I incinerated the burgers and dogs and the kids went into the already very cold pool water one last time and played some wiffle ball and shot some pool.  And we all ate too much ice cream and drank too much lemonade one last time before they settled into school.

So now I can relax and enjoy the unseasonably hot weather and rearrange my priorities in preparation for the rest of the year.  And hopefully I come up with an efficient and productive schedule for myself.  It’s badly needed.  I am a disorganized man.

But even if I don’t completely revolutionize my schedule into a perfection of photog-ergic productivity, I intend to finish this week with the satisfaction of having done whatever I do or don’t do on my own terms.  For the next few days, I’m the master of my soul and the captain of my destiny.  Or something that sounds like that.

So, if I end up wasting the time and achieving nothing and leaving myself in an awful spot, I have no one to blame but myself.  And to my mind that is exactly what I want.  I will have clear cause and effect relationship between what I do and what ends up happening to me.    I will have established my own example of free will at work in the world.  A perfect laboratory of volition.  The immovable object (me) meeting the irresistible force (the full catastrophe that is my life).  It’ll be my own damn fault.  What man could ask for more than that?

The Last Page

photog Current Events ,

I was watching a news clip from ABC News (H/T to the Conservative Treehouse) where that Clinton White House weasel George Stephanopoulos is asking his fellow Democrat sycophants what they made of Donald Trump’s continued dominance in the Republican primary despite four separate criminal indictments.  And frankly they were scared.  The last opinion came from Donna Brazile and she stated that Donald Trump’s hold on his partisans reminded her of the “movements” that followed Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.  And she said, “and anyone who thinks that you can apply the old political rules to try to defeat this candidate based on he’s scary, he’s ugly, whatever you might want to call him, this is a movement. And we have to respect the fact that it’s a movement.”

And I thought to myself, “If someone as stupid and as partisan as Donna Brazile recognizes and admits that Donald Trump is the leader of a huge grassroots movement then it’s obvious that this isn’t business as usual in Washington.  Things are extremely bad there and they are even starting to admit it.  They long ago threw away the rule book and now they just do whatever they can think of to try to put the genie back in the bottle.  Voter fraud, wag the dog wars, biological warfare, printing trillions of dollars to bribe the populace, you name it.  Now they’re using kangaroo courts to jail their political enemies.  But all this has had the unfortunate result of waking up a large chunk of the populace.  And so, the genie can’t go back in the bottle.

But what’s next?

Well, that’s the most beautiful part.  Because the absolute unalloyed truth is that nobody knows the answer to that question.  Nobody.  Not the Deep State or the oligarchs or the CIA or the FBI or Barack Obama or even Donald Trump.  And certainly not Joe Biden.  He barely knows which way the bathroom is.  No one has read the last page of this story.

Nobody knows how all of this will end.  We’re so far out in left field that even the impossible is possible.  Imagine the craziest scenario for where we end up in five years and it could come true.  Anything from a return to 1950s America to an Orwellian nightmare to anything in between is almost equally likely.

So, when the pundits bloviate about how the new world order will be such and such and such, just relax.  They’re making it up.  They have no idea.  They’re like the Second Foundationers in the Asimov story who have figured out the future using their advanced science.  But then the Mule comes along (read Trump here) and the plan blows up.  History always has to reckon with the great man.  If the right man shows up at the right time, he can sweep away the best laid plans and reset the game.

Sure, the powers that be have led us by the noses for generations.  But they got too greedy or they’re stupider than their predecessors or they went to the same well once too often.  And now the rubes are wise to the grift.

Will it turn out well for us?  As I said, it’s impossible to say.  History would tend to say no.  These situations usually lead to tyranny.  But the future is not predetermined.  Random events and factors can set us on a different path.

So, as I said, relax.  Let the game play out and pay attention to who is lying to you and who is telling the truth.  The liars are the enemy.  And the other guys just might be the future.

The Top of the Swing

photog Current Events, OCF, photog's Corner

Tomorrow is the unofficial end of summer.  My family will gather for one last barbecue and the kids will swim in the pool one last time.  Hot dogs and burgers will be cooked on the grill and everyone will talk about what’s coming up in the fall.  We’ll throw around a baseball and swat mosquitoes.  Good stuff.

But the forecast is recording an oddity.  At least it’s odd for this year.  We have a seven-day forecast where the chance of rain is zero.  So now that it’s September and the kids have to retreat to the schoolroom it’s going to be real summer weather with highs in the nineties, something we rarely saw at all in July and August.  Ah, the weather gods!

Well, it’s very ungracious for the kids but a late blast of heat will be welcomed by me.  It won’t revive my vegetable garden or provide new life to the flowering plants but it will provide a backdrop to enjoy the transition to autumn.  And it will give me a chance to do some of the repairs and the preparation for winter.  I can collect up all the yard and lawn equipment and store it away more carefully than I usually do and fix that gate that’s been hanging crooked for a couple of years.  And this year I’ll bed down some of the more sensitive shrubs so they don’t get frost-burned if the snow cover fails again.

So, the late heat wills serve a purpose.  But more than that it will give me a chance to reflect on 2023.  Most people do their thinking in the winter.  The long evenings and the retreat from the outside are conducive to reflection.  But I like late summer.  I like to walk around after the kids are back in school and think about how the world is shifting.  I like to feel the shift in the cycle.  The days are already shorter but the heat of summer is still there and the growth is about to stall.  It’s like we’re at the top of some kind of pendulum swing.  The forward momentum has died and for just a second, we’re suspended in free fall, just hanging there.  In the next moment gravity will pull us down, but just for that moment we can imagine the whole of creation at perfect equilibrium and with no future or past to consider.  The Garden of Eden before the Fall.

And that’s the payoff of the year for me.  If I can have those few golden days at the end, I’m reconciled to the reality of a New England winter.  After all we’ll have Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas to break up the dreariness and I’ll be busy with work and snow removal and chores and I should be busy with writing so the time will pass.  And Camera Girl will have her new puppy to keep her busy.  So, the world will take care of itself.

But for just a short time every year I try to shake loose from the day-to-day thoughts and just try to feel the Earth turning under my feet, try to hear the cicadas running out of sap and watch the mechanical dragonflies winding down to a stop.  At play in the fields of the Lord for at least one more year.