Author: photog

18MAR2025 – How the Week is Progressing

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What’s to say today?  I guess the most interesting news event is Musk’s Space-X stepped in and brought the astronauts stranded on the International Space Station home after Boeing stranded them there six months ago.

There’s something ironic in this situation.  Boeing has been in the news for the last year because of defective aircraft that many have associated with DEI based hiring practices.  And now Space-X; an Elon Musk company that prides itself on merit-based hiring, steps in and solves a frightening situation with a can-do approach to space flight.  It’s like watching the two approaches to hiring compared face to face before our eyes.

I guess the other big story is that lousy judge trying to block the deportation of Central American gang-bangers by the Trump administration.  Afterward Trump said he should be impeached.  And so Chief Justice Roberts opens his big mouth and says that precedent doesn’t call for impeachment on a difference of opinion on a judge’s ruling.

As if that were what is going on.  These slimy leftist judges will stall and block everything the Trump administration wants to get done for the American people.  We will see this for the next four years.  If Roberts wants to be at all useful, he should expedite all requests by Trump’s administration to have these phony judges’ decisions reviewed by the Supreme Court and allow Trump to fix all these problems.  Of course, impeachment will never solve the problem.  We would need a supermajority in the Congress.  What we need is the Supreme Court to provide constitutional review of these awful decisions.

Today I finally got a handle on the impasse I’ve been wrestling with in finishing my book.  What I need is a good crisis/resolution to reach the endpoint.  So here is a situation where you know where you want to end up but there needs to be a struggle to make it feel satisfying.  But I don’t need another physical battle.  I need a popular revolt.  And I think I’ve figured out an angle.  I think I’ll withdraw the consent of the governed.  I’ll have a national guard unit revolt and then let it cascade across a state and then across the country.  Now I have to figure out the dramatic details.  I’ll have the national guard unit refuse to hand over my protagonist then when the Army wants to send in regulars, I’ll have the governors of the four states where Connors people are located close ranks with all of their national guard troops to deny the arrest.  And then I’ll let it swell from there.  That seems pretty good.  After that I’ll let the newly appointed president convene a Constitutional Convention to begin cleaning up the mess that the Deep State has caused.  And that will give me a nice breakpoint to allow my protagonist to be pardoned by the president.  And more than pardoned, exonerated.  And then I can allow him to ride off into the sunset which is something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

So that’s what I was doing today.  Thursday will be a long day when I’ll be working on stuff I hate.  But that’s life.  I have one of the grandsons coming over Saturday.  That should be fun.  Apparently, he’s voted for spaghetti and meatballs and mint chocolate chip ice cream.  So, I’d better do some extra time on the rowing machine this week.  But maybe I’ll burn some of that off with a baseball catch.  I hope my shoulder is still functional after a winter of chopping ice.  I wonder what movie he wants to watch?  I hope it’s “The Return of the King.”  I haven’t seen that one in a while.  I think the “Ride of the Rohirrim” is about due.

Well, that should be enough for now.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 18MAR2025 – True Patriotism

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war pig

When they swore their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, they weren’t just ,making noise.
The brave and noble 56 signers
In the midst of America’s current summer of discontent, this is an appropriate time to reflect on the nation’s founding, some 244 years ago. On Independence Day, July 4, let us not forget to think about the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence – and the prices many paid for their respective commitments to forming a new nation.
The Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, approved the final wording of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. They’d been working on it for a couple of days after the draft was submitted on July 2 and finally agreed on all of the edits and changes.
• Five of the 56 Declaration signers were captured by the British and tortured as traitors.
• Nine of the 56 Declaration signers fought and died in the American Revolution.
• Four other of the 56 Declaration signers lost their sons in the Continental Army or had sons who were captured.
• At least a dozen of the 56 Declaration signers had their homes looted and destroyed.
• Declaration signer Richard Stockton, a New Jersey State Supreme Court Justice, returned to his Princeton estate to find that his wife and children were living like refugees after being betrayed by a Tory (an American colonist who supported the British) sympathizer who also revealed Stockton’s location. British troops captured him and threw him in jail, where he almost starved to death.
When he was finally released, he went home to find his estate had been looted and burned. He had been so badly beaten in prison that he died before the war’s end. His surviving family lived the rest of their lives off charity.
• At the Battle of Yorktown on the York River in Virginia, Thomas Nelson, Jr.’s home had been overrun by British Gen. Charles Cornwallis, who had taken over the Nelson home for his headquarters. Nelson urged Gen. George Washington to open fire on his own home. This was done, and the home was destroyed. Cornwallis later surrendered the British forces at Yorktown in 1781, ending the fighting in the American Revolution.
Nelson, one of the brave and noble 56 signers, died bankrupt.
The 56 Declaration of Independence signers in July 1776 came from various walks of life. Most were considered well-educated for the time. They 56 included lawyers, store merchants, farmers, teachers, one surveyor (Abraham Clark) and even one poor soul who was a printer (Ben Franklin).
All knew without a doubt what would happen if they were caught by the enemy or exposed by a traitor. Still, they signed that wonderful and (thus far) lasting document that, along with the U.S. Constitution, is the basis for the greatest nation on earth.
Let’s read from the National Archives for a moment as we observe and celebrate Independence Day 2020 and remember our nation’s Founding Fathers:
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
The brave and noble 56
New Hampshire:
Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton.
Massachusetts:
John Hancock, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry.
Rhode Island:
Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery.
Connecticut:
Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott.
New York:
William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris.
New Jersey:
Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark.
Pennsylvania:
Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross.
Delaware:
Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean.
Maryland:
Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton.
Virginia:
George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton.
North Carolina:
William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn.
South Carolina:
Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton.
Georgia:
Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton.
By the way, George Washington was not one of the 56 signers, as he was otherwise occupied. Gen. Washington and his troops were in New York preparing for the British invasion.
All Americans ought to respect, appreciate and try to emulate the efforts of these Founding Fathers.
Rory Ryan is publisher and owner of The Highland County Press.ble 56 signers

 

 

 

 

Dunwich Spring 2025 Has Sprung

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Today is Camera Girl’s birthday.  But being a woman, she doesn’t want to play up the whole getting older thing.  So, we call it St. Patrick’s Day and celebrate by having corned beef and cabbage.  But since boiled corned beef and cabbage is kind of blah, she makes it her own way.  It’s kind of Italian corned beef and cabbage.  The meat and potatoes are roasted and the cabbage is sauteed separately in olive oil with minced garlic and seasonings.  It’s really quite good that way.  This was also the day that the mallards returned to the puddle.

And the last of the great southern glacier melted away and left the great southern mud field.

I also used the warmer weather as an excuse to cut down all the raspberry canes in our garden.

This was a controversial act because depending upon whether we have summer or fall plants we will or won’t get any berries this year.  Apparently, summer berries take two years to produce berries while fall berries are one year berry producers.  If we have the two-year type then cutting all the canes means we’ll get nothing this year.  This will make me decidedly unpopular with Camera Girl and Princess Sack of Potatoes because they are big fans of this fruit.  But a man’s got to do, what a man’s got to do.  I was at an impasse.  I couldn’t tell what we had and figured solving it once and for all was the way to go.  May the Lord have mercy on my soul.  Well anyway, I’ll put out a bunch of fertilizer and try to maximize the growth we get this year.

Camera Girl was out feeding Moe the Crow and his wife Flo the Crow when she noticed that a large raptor was in one of the trees over the puddle.  After being alerted I sprang into action and captured some poor-quality photos through the balcony door window and a lot of intervening branches.  I think it’s a black vulture.  So now carrion birds are joining the menagerie.  Only in Dunwich.

Well things are moving forward and spring is in high gear.  We had a bunch of rain and so far, the Compound seems to have escaped any major winter structural damage.  And considering how much more and higher speed wind we’ve had in the last three or four years that’s encouraging.  This winter there have been nights when sitting in the living room and listening to the wind howling like some combination of a freight train and a banshee has been a little discouraging.  I mean I hate to be one of those old guys who claims that things were so much better when I was a youngster but honest to goodness, I think with the wind it must be objectively true.  And as a climate change denier this is inconvenient.  Although it’s as likely for the climate to be warming or cooling without the help of anthropogenic factors to blame.  So, it is nice that we can start to emerge from our winter cocoon and begin to enjoy the outside world again.

And so, slightly ahead of the calendar I hereby declare that Dunwich Spring has sprung.

It’s a Different World

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In Elena Gorokhova’s 2010 memoir “A Mountain of Crumbs” she famously writes: “The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.”

I guess that’s the only difference between us and the Soviets.  A lot of us didn’t know how much they were lying to us.  Probably it’s because the living is so much easier here than in Soviet Russia, that for most people we could assume that things were being run pretty well and we didn’t have to mistrust everything that our government said and did.

So maybe we didn’t get smarter.  Instead, life got tougher and so it was easier to see when they were lying and cheating us.  After all, when things are great and you have everything you need the fact that a lying skunk like Joe Biden is skimming a little from government contractors doesn’t seem like the end of the world.

But when the bottom falls out and they’re selling off your country by the metric ton and telling you it’s your own fault.  And then when they cause a plague and then gaslight you into locking yourself in your house for a couple of years it kind of becomes obvious what’s going on.  They lied about the border, they lied about crime, they lied about inflation, they lied about energy prices, they lied about COVID, they lied about the vaccines, they lied about transgender children, they lied about the elections, they lied about Trump, they lied about Joe Biden’s dementia and finally they lied about Kamala’s polls.

But in our favor, we didn’t pretend to believe them.  At least not those of us with normal intelligence.  So, we’re not as bad off as Soviet Russia.  The difference is we haven’t let them cow us into saying that 2 + 2 = 5.

But all of this came up because of that NY Times opinion article that owned up to all the lies about COVID that the government and the experts told.  A lot of us didn’t believe the lies because we had a little sense about how ridiculous it was to think that anything less than a biohazard pressure suit and a washdown airlock would keep us safe from an airborne respiratory virus.  But I shouldn’t be surprised that a lot of people would think, “The government wouldn’t lie to us about something that important.”

Well, guess what?  They did.  And that’s what’s so powerful about this moment.  Eureka!  Now what else have they lied to us about?  Until now the government has been protected from the worst suspicions because no one wants to feel like a paranoid mental case.

“There’s no way the CIA killed Kennedy.”  Wanna bet?

“There’s no way we knew Sadaam didn’t have a nuclear program.” Wanna bet?

“There’s no way the FBI had men on the ground on January 6th.  Wanna bet?

“There’s no way the CIA, the FBI and the Secret Service were responsible for letting that kid get a clip of ammo off at that Trump rally.”  Wanna bet?

Are all of these things 100% certain?  No.  But now that we know what goes on with our government is it as likely as not?  I’d say certainly.  So, let’s say half of them are true.  Look where that leaves us if half of those are true.  Look at where we are even if none of those are true but their actual lies make us all conspiracy theorists from now on.  And we have no choice.  Once you’ve seen some of the things we’ve seen; the COVID lies, you can’t unsee them.  You can no longer trust your government.  They have to be kept in check.  They have to be held accountable.  It’s different world.