Author: photog

That Would Be Great

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In the Hollywood film, “The Bad and the Beautiful” there is a discussion between an actor named Gaucho and a bit-part actress on the make named Lila.  Gaucho tells her that his producer friend Jonathan (Kirk Douglas’s character) is a great man.  But world-weary Lila laughs and replies “There are no great men, buster, there’s only men.”

So, are there any great men?  Were there ever any?  Is a Caesar or a Napoleon great?  Or were they just great generals.  Was Einstein great or was he merely a genius?  Was Socrates a great man or merely annoying?  How about St Paul?

It seems to me that the definition of a great man is one who is both intelligent and moral.  So, it’s not enough to be brilliant if the use of your intelligence is to do evil.  And it’s not enough to be a saint if you cannot somehow use this moral sense to benefit humanity as a whole or at least a significant chunk of it.

Framed the way I have here it’s not that easy to pick out these exceptional beings.  I guess religious leaders like Jesus, Buddha, Moses stand out.  They’ve had an outsized impact on the world.  They understood the problem of living in the world of men.  It’s so very hard to know what is the right thing to do in the multitude of decisions we make as we negotiate the confusing and frightening human world.  How often we choose the easier thing instead of the “right” choice.  We compromise our morals and standards to avoid pain or discomfort or even embarrassment.  How much more will a leader compromise because the stakes are just so incredibly high.

I guess the only leader that comes to mind is Marcus Aurelius; the philosopher king.  Not that he was perfect or that none of his philosophy was misguided.  But without a doubt he was intelligent and he used his powerful office to provide the best government he could to the millions who lived within the Roman empire in the second century AD.  Maybe this is an example of a great man.

So which Americans were great?  Washington, Jefferson?  Maybe.  In the last one hundred and fifty years I don’t think there’s been much greatness.  FDR had a large impact on the country but I don’t think he was wise.  And so many of our recent presidents are neither moral nor wise.  Some were truly awful, like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and especially Joe Biden.

So where does that leave Donald Trump?  Well, morality is not his forte.  His private life is a mess.  You need look no further than the “Stormy Daniels” episode to see that he does not restrain his baser nature at all.  Then again do any of the wealthy ever do better?  As for intelligence, he’s not a stupid man.  He is an ambitious businessman who knows how to market himself.  Is he wise?  Well, he’s no philosopher king.  But I think he does feel affection for his countrymen.  I think he does want to make America a better place and make life better for Americans.

So, let’s just say that if he succeeds, Donald Trump will perform a truly great service for the United States of America.  He will save it from the forces that are currently destroying it.  He can vanquish the managerial bureaucracy that rules over us and is leeching away our strength and vitality.  He will succeed where a century of American presidents has failed to save their country.  That would be great.

19FEB2025 – Quote of the Day

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The whole business of swearing, especially English swearing, is mysterious. Of its very nature swearing is as irrational as magic– indeed, it is a species of magic. But there is also a paradox about it, namely this: Our intention in swearing is to shock and wound, which we do by mentioning something that should be kept secret–usually something to do with the sexual functions. But the strange thing is that when a word is well established as a swear word, it seems to lose its original meaning; that is, it loses the thing that made it into a swear word. A word becomes an oath because it means a certain thing, and, because it has become an oath, it ceases to mean that thing.

George Orwell

 

Little Marco Grew Up

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In the above linked video CBS journalist Margaret Brennan confronts Secretary of State Marco Rubio about JD Vance’s statement that Europe has a problem with free speech.  She condemns Vance for defending free speech in Germany where she declares free speech was responsible for the Nazi genocide against the Jews.

I found this video interesting because I wouldn’t have guessed that Rubio would be as agile as he showed himself to be.  He fired back that he disagreed with her premise and forcefully stated that there was no free speech in Nazi Germany but there was a totalitarian state there.  And it blamed part of its population for economic and social problems and had no moral qualms with murdering these innocent men, women and children on an industrial scale.

I’ve never held the opinion that Marco Rubio was all that sharp.  But he did a very competent job making Brennan seem ridiculous.  Maybe he’s wised up over the years, maybe he’s more confident nowadays to speak sensibly out in the open because Trump has his back or maybe Brennan is just such a lightweight and her logic was so ridiculous that any half intelligent person can make her look like an idiot.

But whatever the cause it was stunning to see just how stupid her case sounded.  But Brennan can’t take all the blame.  After all free speech is not the law of the land in Germany, England or France.  In fact, in Germany there are laws that ban the distribution of materials from groups like the Nazis or other “unconstitutional organizations.”  These laws are being used to try to suppress the AFD (Alternative for Germany) party because they want to restrict immigration.  So, JD Vance advocating for free speech is actually radicalism in a place like Germany.  But Margaret Brennan managed to make it sound completely ridiculous by trying to blame the Holocaust on free speech.

What you see here is the difference between the American conception on free speech and the European fear of speaking uncomfortable truths.  To them some things are too dangerous to say or even think.  And that is the viewpoint that the Democrats tried hard during the Biden administration to import.  That is the reason for the emphasis on misinformation.  Apparently, people can’t be trusted to make up their minds about what is true and what isn’t.  We are too stupid to figure out what’s true so the government and the media have to tell us.

And that is why organizations like CBS fought like hell to make sure Donald Trump didn’t become president.  Because if he did people would be allowed to say what they really thought about things like transgender identity or how bad crime is and whether millions of illegal aliens were a good thing or not.

So here was CBS trying to condemn JD Vance for outraging Europeans with the opinion that denying their people free speech would come back to bite them.  And it was a useful demonstration of where main stream media’s true beliefs sit.  They are solidly behind the globalist position that regular people should just shut up and take at face value whatever the “experts” in the government (except Trump) or the media or the NGOs tell them.  And if you voice a dissenting opinion then your guilty of spreading disinformation and in a perfect world you’d be silenced and sent to the reeducation camp.  Very interesting indeed.

Kudos to JD Vance and (surprisingly) Marco Rubio.  I guess Little Marco grew up.

That Should Be the Plan

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Donald Trump’s All Star Barnstorming Travelling Medicine Show is approaching its one-month milestone.  And I think it’s fair to say its hallmark is that he keeps the hand grenades flying and that keeps his opponents off balance.  And kudos to him and his all stars for all their good work.  Bravo.

What that made me think of was how for the last fifty years our leaders have been keeping us off balance with one crisis after another.  There’s always another war or a banking crisis or stagflation, or COVID or Climate Change or civil rights or women’s rights or gay rights or you name it.  For all of my adult life we have had to forget about normalcy and prosperity and instead we had to give up our rights or our way of life or mortgage our future or our children’s future or lately our grandchildren’s future to save the world or destroy our enemies or cure some “original sin.”  It occurs to me that this is not an accident.  This is the means of controlling us and keeping us from prospering.

If Donald Trump and his successors want to save this country their assignment should be to restore this country to normalcy.  They need to allow us to get our feet back underneath us again and get back a sense of balance.  End all of the emergencies.  Give us some peace and quiet and allow us to live like Americans again instead of like serfs.

Fans of the “Lord of the Rings” know that the Shire is the most boring place imaginable.  All of the adventure and excitement happens in places like Rohan and Gondor that are full of battles against the agent of evil; orcs, trolls, evil men and the like.  But it’s also true that the greatest sense of loss for the hobbits is when they return home to the Shire only to find that these enemies have spoiled the boring peace and quiet of the Shire and replaced it with fear and danger.  Because what you discover is that safe, boring, prosperous, well-ordered communities are the only place where healthy people can exist.  Because they’re the only place where you can raise a family and earn a living and leave something behind for next generation.

And the only way to make that happen is to end the chaos.  End the protests and the grievances.  End the rancor.  People in the 1960s were always making fun of the 1950s.  They said it was boring and repressed compared to the sexual revolution and the revolution in the streets that came a decade after.  They mocked the bland image of Dwight Eisenhower as the father of the country overseeing a boring but prosperous nation chasing after and realizing the American Dream.

Well, that sounds just about like heaven to me right now.  Donald Trump and anyone who wants to follow him should be selling us on the idea that Washington should be moving heaven and earth to stop the chaos and give Americans a chance to be boring and happy.  They should arrange for the people in this country to have a generation when the priority is to earn a living, raise a family and maybe watch a baseball game on a Saturday afternoon without thinking about war, crime, or civil unrest.  The pursuit of happiness.

That should be the plan.

17FEB2025 – Quote of the Day

photog Quote of the Day ,

In addition to this there is the horrible — the really disquieting — prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

George Orwell

16FEB2025 – OCF Update – Nuts and Bolts

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This is an explanation for the “Test” post today.  I’ve been struggling to eliminate delays in posts showing up on the front page of the site.  There’s a thing called caching that cuts down on the site server’s work and therefore makes the site quicker.  But if it delays updating the site then folks don’t see the new content quickly.  I’m fighting a war to get the cache purge to happen every fifteen minutes.  I may have succeeded but only time will tell.

And now I return you to your regularly scheduled test pattern.