Author: photog

29SEP2025 – Quote of the Day

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A LOST CHORD

Seated one day at the Organ,

I was weary and ill at ease,

And my fingers wandered idly

Over the noisy keys.

 

I do not know what I was playing,

Or what I was dreaming then;

But I struck one chord of music,

Like the sound of a great Amen.

 

It flooded the crimson twilight

Like the close of an Angel’s Psalm,

And it lay on my fevered spirit

With a touch of infinite calm.

 

It quieted pain and sorrow,

Like love overcoming strife;

It seemed the harmonious echo

From our discordant life.

 

It linked all perplexed meanings

Into one perfect peace,

And trembled away into silence

As if it were loth to cease.

 

I have sought, but I seek it vainly,

That one lost chord divine,

Which came from the soul of the Organ,

And entered into mine.

 

It may be that Death’s bright angel

Will speak in that chord again,–

It may be that only in Heaven

I shall hear that grand Amen.

Adelaide Anne Procter

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 28SEP2025 – Dem’s Scylla and Charybdis

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Milo’s analogy reminds me of a situation I saw. There was a pear tree on land near my home that was unclear if it was on my property or the neighbors. It was in a bad way as where it had been planted was rocky quick draining soil so it was often starved for moisture. After a couple dry summers and cold snowless winters it was on its last legs. I got out my pruning saw and was ready to do some major clean up removing some of the branches which were clearly damaged or diseased. The neighbor came out and said it was his tree and I was not to touch it. In the interest of neighborhood peace I didn’t even argue. withing 2 years the pear tree was dead and he had to have someone come in and remove it.

Like that tree the US has some damaged sections. Radical pruning is called for to solve (or at least mitigate issues) now. But the Democrats see this as our tree don’t you touch it! In my case the tree had been planted by the previous owners so I had little interest and just walked away. We can’t do that we depend on this tree and honestly, it feels like the USA is the last flowering tree of the Scottish Enlightenment. The UK, Australia and Canada (and little New Zealand) have all fallen to the modernist tilt.

I think Trump has carefully wedged the Democrat leadership between Scylla and Charybdis and is enjoying watching them squirm. Because the language the Trump Administration proposes is such that the removed positions are not layoffs or furloughs the positions cease to exist. Because of the language (unfunded positions) the removals essentially go around the civil service protections. In general, this hurts primarily Blue voters in areas so blue that they are bound both by representation and electoral votes to the Democrat party. Schumer can’t let this happen as hordes of his supporters will be unemployed. But neither can he give in as other parts of his base would be enraged. I suspect he chooses the former, hoping that the enraged unemployed Democrats vent their anger at the Administration. The one downside of this for the Republican party is this probably wipes out any Chance Winsome-Sears had of winning the Virginia Gubernatorial election if this falls out like I suspect. That’s a shame. Ms. Winsome-Sears is an impressive lady but not being native born she is not eligible for Vice president or president. A ticket with Vance/Winsome-Sears in 2028 would have made the Democrats heads explode.

Tom’s World – 28SEP2025 – Rename Them “Fa”???

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Tom | Flickr

TomD

It may not be delicious irony but it is surely irony defined when an organization named anitfa(scist) didn’t go to the trouble to research exactly what a fascist means and then adopts methods used by the 1930’s German fascists.

The rampages of the Brown Shirts during the late 1930’s around Kristallnacht weren’t inherent to Fascism but it was inherent in Naziism.

Fascism was the child of Socialism first envisioned by Benito Mussolini who was then a high party official of the Italian Socialist Party.

Guest Contributor – Milo Mindbender – 28SEP2025 – Trim It Back

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Sometimes the thing best for a social organism is hardest on the individual.
Our government is vastly bloated with bureaucratic leeches, and other parasites. These unelected bureaucrats are not working to serve the American people, but preserve their sinecures and privilege.
Shutting down the government again at this time will hopefully demonstrate the true authors of the shutdown. It seems that every time the government gets shut down Republicans get blamed, even when the president holds line item authority.
Congress has the requirement to present a budget, but we have been working under a series of continuing resolutions. The last time the federal budget was passed as a total is 1996. This should be criminal as the continuing funding resolutions are focused spending.
Shut it down, and rather than than leave the rotted branches, trim it back.

Rose City Antifa is about to Get Visitors

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So, Donald Trump is sending the National Guard to Portland, Oregon.  Okay, what can we expect?  Well, Portland is the epicenter of Antifa fanaticism.  It is the land of fruits and nuts, dialed up to eleven.  There will be so many short, fat women dressed in black that you will think you’re at the 6:30 am Mass in a 1950s Italian parish in Brooklyn.  And there will also be a goodly contingent of “trans-women,” meaning hulking men dressed as women and boiling over with cross-hormonal rage.

So how will this play out?  No one really knows at the moment.  I’ve heard that Antifa has called for reinforcements from other cities; Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle.  Allegedly, they want to make this a full-scale war with the feds.  I’m not sure I believe that.  It seems kind of risky for an army of freaks and weirdos with umbrellas and bricks as their weapons to array themselves against trained soldiers.  I’ve always assumed that Antifa only goes on the offense when they are protected by a local friendly government that can protect them from losses by shielding them from prosecution.  So even if some of their members are arrested, they are immediately released and no charges are ever filed against them.  If the National Guard is called in and interference is deemed a federal offense then Portland can’t protect those arrested from felony prosecution.

Of course, this is assuming the DOJ is taking off the gloves and arrests anyone who breaks the law.  That would be a break with the past.  For the most part these National Guard operations haven’t netted hundreds of arrests other than the illegal aliens that form the reason for the protests.  So, I would be pleasantly surprised to hear about a roundup of the Antifa army in Portland.  In fact, I’d be thrilled.  Because that is exactly what needs to happen.  If Antifa is foolish enough to send in an army of crazies to battle the National Guard, then arresting and possibly shooting some of these people would have a salutary effect on the protests across the country.  If some core of the leadership of the Portland gang were prosecuted and handed ten-year sentences, I think it would stop Antifa in its tracks.  The very craziest wouldn’t be deterred but the army of morbidly obese, blue-haired, septum-ring wearing, women would be.  They can’t afford to go to prison for ten years.  Their cats would starve to death.  They’re in it for the cheap thrills.  They’re not martyr material.

I wonder how long it will take to know which way this will go?  I heard confrontations between ICE and Antifa are not expected to start over the weekend.  So maybe Monday or Tuesday will be D-Day.  My fondest hope will be that Trump himself will go to his Truth Social page and brag about the scalps he collected in Portland.  I’m all for that.  I’d love to see the names and photos of these people reported along with the crimes they were arrested for.  Alright, I’m starting to get ahead of myself.  To be continued.

Let the Daylight In

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Supposedly October 1st is the deadline for the latest government shutdown scare.  The Democrats have said that unless Biden’s Obamacare boondoggles are extended and PBS gets funded, they won’t vote for an extension of the present budget.

Now the talking heads on the Left are split fifty/fifty on whether this is a good idea or a terrible one.  The conundrum is that if they allow the government to shut down, they will take a good chunk of the blame in the eyes of the public.  In addition, Trump has indicated that unlike in shutdowns past, he doesn’t intend to furlough federal employees.  He’s going to fire huge numbers in order to reduce the size of the federal government.  And the great majority of these employees are Democrats.  So, the feeling on the Left is that whatever blame Trump gets will not make up for the blame the Democrats themselves will get for abandoning their most loyal voters (federal bureaucrats) to the fate of unemployment and eventual starvation.  After all these aren’t rocket scientists.  Most of these people aren’t qualified to cross the street even with a traffic light.  If the government lets them go, it’s not even a sure thing they’ll make it home successfully.  Like lemmings they may all follow some confused creature into the Potomac where we can only assume they’ll all be washed out to sea.

So, I guess we have to see what Trump plans to do.  If he does plan to eliminate some enormous number of federal workers maybe this is a watershed moment for the country.  And who knows, maybe he also will ask the senate to take the nuclear option and eliminate the filibuster all together.  And if they do eliminate it, maybe they’ll go the whole way and then just enact a real honest-to-goodness budget like they used to before Obama gave up on federal budgets.

So, there is the shiny happy version of things.  What’s the other choice?  Well, firing millions of people, even useless stupid people will have economic consequences.  Bureaucrats have dependents.  Mostly they’re cats but there must be some children too.  And if all of a sudden there are millions of kids falling into poverty, this will have some consequences.  If they’re dire enough maybe it will anger Americans who hate to see poor people suffering.  Maybe this will lead to the Republicans getting pounded in the 2026 midterms.  And that would lead to divided government for the last two years of Trump’s term.

Well, you know, I think my gut tells me that the correct strategy is for Trump to “go big.”  Emptying out Washington DC is a once in a century situation.  Doing it now hurts the Left almost exclusively.  If all these people find themselves unemployed it will have a huge impact on elections.  These are the Democrats’ most loyal voters.  But if they lose those government jobs something tells me they’ll be too busy struggling to survive to bother voting at all.  In fact, firing huge numbers of bureaucrats will change the whole ecosystem around Washington.  Who knows, it might turn Virginia red again when all the carpetbaggers have to go home to mom and dad’s basement in California, Massachusetts and New York.

So go ahead DJT, start up that chainsaw.  Let the daylight in.