Month: December 2024

01JAN2025 – Quote of the Day

photog Quote of the Day ,

[Isaiah’s Job; The Atlantic Monthly (June 1936) (Part 8)]

If the modern spirit, whatever that may be, is disinclined towards taking the Lord’s word at its face value (as I hear is the case), we may observe that Isaiah’s testimony to the character of the masses has strong collateral support from respectable Gentile authority. Plato lived into the administration of Eubulus, when Athens was at the peak of its jazz-and-paper era, and he speaks of the Athenian masses with all Isaiah’s fervency, even comparing them to a herd of ravenous wild beasts.

Albert Jay Nock

A New Year’s Eve Look Back in Gob Smackedification

photog Current Events, Trump , , , ,

If 2024 had been the plot for a novel no one would have believed it.  The former president is running for the Republican nomination while under indictment in four separate cases in three separate jurisdictions.  He is found guilty in two of them even before the end of the primaries and every time a court case goes against him his popularity grows.  The incumbent Democratic candidate wins the primaries handily but drops out a hundred days before the election because he sounded like a talking turnip during the only debate.  The Democratic candidacy is handed over to the vice president because only she can legally use the multi-billion-dollar war chest but she also sounds like a talking turnip, albeit a slightly higher pitched one.  During the campaign the Republican candidate is put on open display by the secret service to not one but two snipers, one of whom misses a kill shot by fractions of an inch.

The media and the US government conspire to hide the incumbent president’s advanced dementia for his whole term in office, going so far as to claim he is actually some kind of political four-dimensional chess master while video evidence proves he’s forgotten how a door knob works.  When the election can’t even be stolen through massive blue city fraud the media claims that racism and misogyny are responsible despite the large gains the Republicans make among women and minority voters.  And as a parting absurdity the people in charge of the White House start rattling off thousands of blanket pardons including the president’s bag-man son who was already found guilty for various offenses large and small and whom the president had sworn he would never pardon.

And on the other side, the once and future Republican president has allied himself with a whole retinue of unlikely allies and future cabinet picks including the richest man in the world, a scion of the Kennedy clan and other heterodox individuals who would normally be anathema to a Republican administration.  And finally, the greatest absurdity of all is that this president-elect is someone like Donald Trump.  An almost cartoon character.  A caricature of the American huckster.  A modern-day P T Barnum.  But the only Republican to be honest about how the American political system is totally rigged against normal Americans.

And none of that even mentions incipient strains of World War III filtering out of the neo-con madness in Ukraine and with the Middle East in virtual flames as Gaza, Syria and Iran boil over in open war.  Just the other day the explosion of a weapons depot was so huge that some observers mistook it for a tactical nuclear weapon detonation.  And so, with just twenty days left before the end of the Biden presidency there seems to be no pause in the frenetic madness that has engulfed the world stage.

Looking back on this, stuns the mind.  To me this is the result of massive overreach.  When the Democrats unleashed George Floyd, COVID and election fraud in 2020 they pulled out all the stops and ran Washington like some private fiefdom.  And they brought in a collection of misfits and weirdos that couldn’t get out of their own way.  And so, they blew up the economy and unleashed actual stagflation.  They hid the stagnation part by putting everyone and his brother in government no-show jobs.  But the inflation was right out there for all to see and feel.  They tried to tell people that they shouldn’t believe their own lying eyes when looking at their empty wallets but instead bask in the glow of Bidenomics that was making them rich.  Of course, unless you’re an investment banker, tech entrepreneur or tenured Ivy League professor you probably don’t have a seven-figure 401K plan to offset the order of magnitude growth in the cost of housing and eggs but then again poor people should just shut up and vote Democrat.  Right?

So, as it turned out reality really is real.  And now the good(?) guys have their turn at bat.

I think I begin to understand how things speed up during these end of civilization events.  Once instability sets in, unbalanced parts of the system start to randomly knock into each other and catastrophic collapse is more or less inevitable.  Well, I guess this thing has to play out.  Perhaps 2025 will be a chance to do maintenance on the system and get it at least firing on an even number of cylinders.  Who knows?  Maybe Trump will turn out to be a Diocletian-like historical character who comes up with a patchwork solution to allow the empire to limp along for another century or two before complete collapse.

Well, there’s my annual pep talk.  Happy New Years and I’ll put together a look forward for tomorrow.

First Annual Orio’s Awards

photog Current Events, OCF, Photo Study, Photography ,

Year end award ceremonies are usually pretentious and subjective.  This leaves the viewers angry and jaded.  Not to be outdone by Hollywood and the mainstream media I am announcing and presenting this inaugural edition of the Orio’s.  Named for the website and embodying the timeless desire of all photographers to fill up space on his blog I am stepping forward and picking the five best photos from the last three hundred and sixty five “photo of the day” submissions.  I have absolutely no objective basis for my selection other than first impressions as I rapidly scanned through the shots from the last twelve months.  Well, here they are.

  1. Two Ducks in Freezing Water

This aptly titled work captures the essence of water fowl floating on a freezing pond.  I will say that Mrs.  Mallard seems to be giving Mr. Mallard the stink-eye for something that he is pretending he didn’t do.  There’s no way he gets away with it.

 

2. Come into my Parlor Said the Spider to the Fly

What is there to say about the visceral appeal of this stunning visual statement?  The drama of a lion bringing down a wildebeest on the Serengeti is (sorta) on display as arachnid faces off against the disgusting metallic sheen of the bottle fly.  Is there really any winner here?

 

3. The Wheel of Time

This fossilized ammonite shell reminds me that most of my life has been spent going around in circles.  Is it really about the journey if you end up in the same place you start from?  Oh well.

 

4.  Oh My Stars

I can’t think of any snarky wise cracks for this one.  I just like the way it looks.

 

5.  Make a Wish

Regular readers probably know that I kind of like the way that milkweed seed pods look after they explode.  Nuff said.

 

So that’s it.  A whole year will elapse before we find ourselves here again to rate and praise the best of the best of the best!  Well, save up your excitement and the seconds will pass like seconds.  Thank you for your attention and hopefully all comments should be equally light-hearted.

31DEC2024 – Quote of the Day

photog Quote of the Day ,

[Isaiah’s Job; The Atlantic Monthly (June 1936) (Part 7)]

The picture which Isaiah presents of the Judean masses is most unfavorable. In his view, the mass-man — be he high or be he lowly, rich or poor, prince or pauper — gets off very badly. He appears as not only weak-minded and weak-willed, but as by consequence knavish, arrogant, grasping, dissipated, unprincipled, unscrupulous. The mass-woman also gets off badly, as sharing all the mass-man’s untoward qualities, and contributing a few of her own in the way of vanity and laziness, extravagance and foible.

Albert Jay Nock

Never Go All in Against a Witch

photog Current Events, Reclaiming the Family ,

Some of the grandkids were over today to complete my transformation into a beached whale.  More food appeared from heaven knows where and eggnog and desserts rounded out the meal.  And after some talk of this and that we got down to a high stakes game of Texas hold ’em.  The game was played completely for pride with no cash changing hands.  The chips were divvied up and play went on for hours with fortunes waning and waxing almost at random.  All except Camera Girl.  She is not only a canny bettor but also possesses supernatural luck.  And finally, it came down to her and me.  I was holding a pair of aces and the flop was nothing to write home about.  She and I were betting very heavily.  On the turn an ace showed up.  The final card was a second queen.  We had put most of our chips in the pot and I went all in.  I showed her my two aces and she showed me her pair of queens.  Four of a kind!  I accused her of witchcraft and spent the rest of the game railing at her from the sidelines.

Luckily coffee was served shortly after the game was over and I could gracefully move on from my somewhat unsportsmanlike behavior to my more dignified pose as pater familia and patriarch of a great nation.  All question of who beat whom in a meaningless game of chance was left behind and more important matters took center stage.  Discussions about which were the best Christmas toys or gifts were spirited.  The remote-controlled planes seemed to be the people’s choice.  I watched some cellphone video of these battery powered wonders buzzing the neighborhood at remarkable speed and surprising acrobatic agility.  The remarkable thing was how they survived the crashes I witnessed into the ground and trees.  It seems the drone revolution has reached the adolescent fraction of the American population and it is being enthusiastically embraced.  I was happy to see that these flying wonders did not include munitions of even the mock variety.  A small victory for world peace.

Tomorrow is work.  But I’m hoping it will be a short week and I’ll be able to extend the family fun a while longer while the kids are still off from school next week.  It’s heartening to see that simple games and food can still serve as an adequate excuse for fun.  No video games were played.  We even left the television off.  Sibling rivalry and parental scolding were not absent and some folks were too drowsy from food to avoid snoozing on recliners but for the most part the generations showed sufficient tolerance for each other to bridge the boomer/millennial/zoomer chasms of culture and conditioning.  And even that most fraught relationship, father-in-law/son-in-law was carried through with mutual regard and tolerance.  Having now been on both sides of that relationship I have equal respect for both partners in that arrangement.  It’s a strange but important set of rituals that bind up families and benefit everyone.  But for grown men it will always be a somewhat awkward interaction.  Luckily the wives and daughters can help to smooth out and buffer the whole dance.

I was thinking of writing something about the H-1B visa squabble going on.  But I’ll leave that up to various talking heads to battle it out.  Trump should be smart enough to figure out which way the wind blows on immigration, legal and illegal.  If he can’t figure it out, he’s not going to have a very productive presidency.  Instead, I’ll spend a little more time calculating the odds of getting a four of a kind in a Texas hold ‘em hand.  Now that’s an important question.

30DEC2024 – Quote of the Day

photog Quote of the Day ,

[Isaiah’s Job; The Atlantic Monthly (June 1936) (Part 6)]

The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses. The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.

Albert Jay Nock

Tom’s World – 29DEC2024 – Sandy Springs

photog Americana, Guest Contributors, TomD ,

Tom | Flickr

TomD

Speaking of homogeneous ethnic enclaves, I grew up in Sandy Springs in the 50’s and 60’s, a North Atlanta suburb populated almost exclusively by what were known as WASPS. As far as we were aware, there was no crime at all until drugs started to come into the scene, which would have been the latter half of the 60’s. But, even then, there was no evident violent crime.

I assume that this idyllic period during my formative years is behind my conviction that the present world should somehow achieve that status.

But even Sandy Springs doesn’t exist any more except in name. The monster that metro Atlanta has become ate it decades ago. The woods behind the neighborhood containing the abandoned POW camp have been replaced by high rise offices; the quarry with the lake at the bottom where we kids used to take our .22’s to shoot water snakes is long ago filled in..

And I’m of an age where I won’t exist a lot longer either but that’s okay. It seems that my world is gone and some nightmarish creation taken its’ place.