Author: photog
Sympathy for Sauron
The Compound has been invaded by an army. They have occupied many of the high points and they have laid siege to the citadel. Actually, I have a contractor doing major surgery on the foundations of an extension of the main building that was rotting out. The floor of a room had rotted away and the only reasonable solution was to replace a column-on-pier foundation with a poured slab. Suffice it to say that it is fiendishly expensive and extremely ticklish construction in that the three stories on that part of the building will need to be jacked up off the piers and the columns truncated to accommodate the new height of the foundation which will also be the new floor for that room. I daily expect the whole building to collapse like Barad-dûr after the destruction of the One Ring. Poor Sauron. A ring makes a damn poor foundation for a tall structure like that tower.
But while all this is going on I’m kept amused at just how little insurance companies are willing to admit is within the scope of their policies. Regardless of how much we pay in premiums their responsibilities are hemmed in by endless deductibles and limitations on liability. Their favorite retort to almost anything I say is, “You’re not covered for that.” It’s to the point I’d almost hope that a catastrophe would be truly apocalyptic so that I could see them cower at the size of their payout. But deep down I know I would still be the loser. You can’t beat these people. Compared to them the Mafia are boy scouts. Poor Sauron. I’ll bet he got nothing from his insurance company when the Barad-dûr came crashing down. They probably had a waiver for unforeseen termite or hobbit damage.
So daily I have to reassure Camera Girl that when all this is over, she’ll still have a roof over her head and enough money to buy us pumpernickel bagels. She is extremely allergic to large checks. In fact, she insists that I write all of them because that way it’s my fault. In some sense I guess she’s right. If it had been up to her, we’d still be living in an apartment in Brooklyn. I guess in that sense she is the true conservative in the family.
When the dumpster arrived, Camera Girl was hopeful that the builder would allow her to use the dumpster to get rid of some of her least favorite debris. We have a collection of yard junk that she hates with a passion; garden hoses, wire fencing, a couple of old garden swings and a large pool warming cover that is flaking apart. I opined that the dumpster would be completely filled and probably filled again before the builder was finished but hope springs eternal. But then I told her that she could get her own dumpster for less than what a contractor would charge her for interfering in his operation and that seemed to work. She hates being charged more for anything. She is a very frugal woman (thank heaven).
I wonder who got the contract to remediate the site of the Barad-dûr collapse. After all that had to be some serious toxic waste. I’m guessing it would have been dwarves that took the work. They worked in metal and stone. Surely, they could salvage something from the rubble pile. Maybe they could turn it into Section 8 housing for unemployed orcs. I mean live and let live, right?
Those who call houses money pits are completely justified. Unless you yourself are a jack of all trades, the liabilities of owning a home are staggering. But the alternative of renting is even worse. I completely sympathize with the Millennials and Zoomers who are confronting the herculean task of trying to buy a home in Joe Biden’s America. But without home ownership how can you truly know the joy of having someone knock your house down just to rebuild it at great expense. God bless America.
27AUG2024 – Photo of the Day
27AUG2024 – Quote of the Day
I acknowledge that history is full of religious wars: but we must distinguish; it is not the multiplicity of religions which has produced wars; it is the intolerant spirit animating that which believed itself in the ascendant.
Charles de Montesquieu
Guest Contributor – TomD – 26AUG2024 – Photo – Military
In reply to MasterDiver.
This is a ”disappearing gun” emplacement dating from 130 years ago. It is was a coastal defense weapon.
Sure looks to be that the risings seas have flooded this emplacement out. There is a sea wall on base at NAS Pensacola that has been in place for about the same amount of time and contemporary pictures showing the seawall in the first decade of the 1900’s show no discernible difference from now in water levels.
The Shining City on the Hill
A question that gets asked a lot is whether the elites who run this country really believe in all their woke pieties or are they just using them as a blunt object to pummel the dirt people that they despise so much. My belief is that in a sense they do believe the things they talk about. But not in the way that someone would believe in things like gravity or fire. The things that they espouse, that are crazy, they believe in the way that kids believe in Santa Claus. They want to believe in it because it makes them feel good.
And part of the reason it makes them feel good is because it makes them feel better than the bad people who don’t believe in these things. So, these beliefs, such as America is rife with systemic racism, serve as the basis for membership in the elite hierarchy but at the same time don’t require that these beliefs be tested because membership in the elite insulates the elect from exposure to the real world where reality shows its ugly face.
So, if you’re one of the cloud people you can drive your electric car three miles back and forth from Harvard Yard to your home in Cambridge and the reality of what green energy is doing to the American energy system won’t cause you a moment’s discomfort. But if you’re a family trying to make it on two minimum wage salaries and gasoline has doubled in price over the last four years there’s a lot of pain. Or if you’re an old money legacy candidate at an Ivy League school then the minority affirmative action candidates won’t affect you. But if you’re a poor white kid with 1600 SAT scores it will.
When you’re part of the elite the rules are different. And you have to know that, but you don’t admit it, even to yourself. From where you stand, you’re one of the good guys and you deserve to have the game played by your rules. And in a sense, this may have always been the case. After all, aren’t these the same people who have been calling the shots since Plymouth Rock? Whether they were justifying the dispossession of the local Indian tribes or enforcing the blue laws against the Irish riff-raff or finding a pretext for the Spanish American War haven’t the elites always justified their preferences as being moral and on the side of the angels or more recently “on the right side of history?” Somehow the consequences of whatever crusade they decide to declare are always paid for by less important people; the riff-raff or foreigners who need the work.
People think that because the elites are advocating mass immigration from the third world that they are trying to eliminate their own European legacy. But I think they have that wrong. The elites believe and probably rightly that they will still be in charge and they will be immune to the chaos that this importation will wreak on the rest of the country. And maybe they’re right. Maybe Cambridge and Martha’s Vineyard and the other homes of the elite will roll right along basically unchanged.
But maybe they’re wrong.
26AUG2024 – Photo of the Day
26AUG2024 – Quote of the Day
You have to study a great deal to know a little.
Charles de Montesquieu
The DNC Through the Eyes of the Former Woke
Sasha Stone is one of that small group of leftist journalists who sometime in the last four years or so had an epiphany. People like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald realized after the 2020 election that the Left had thrown away all pretense at objectivity and abandoned all of their former devotion to freedom of speech and other constitutional rights. Their employers at the New York Times or the Washington Post or Rolling Stone didn’t want the truth. They wanted good old propaganda and they didn’t need any honesty.
So like her colleagues Stone has had her red pill moment and against all odds is now on the Trump train. But I have no illusions that Stone or Greenwald view me as anything other than a knuckle-dragging subhuman with my lack of celebratory enthusiasm for the rainbow flag and all its multitudinous perversities. But it is interesting to read their version of the red-pill moment and its various echoes down the years as they bump into the same dishonesty and delusion we all experience in Joe Biden’s America.
https://sashastone.substack.com/p/they-love-bombed-us-with-kamala
RFK Jr.
I watched RFK Jr.’s announcement. His pulling out of the swing states is a very interesting tactic. I guess it’s possible he might nudge enough voters into Trump’s column to swing a few of those swing states. Wouldn’t that be crazy! From everything I’ve read about Kennedy he seems like a very strange man. I think I read that he may have pushed one of his wives to commit suicide. So, like everything else about the American political scene, Kennedy is another weird enigma that makes it easier to believe we’re living through some kind of apocalyptic end time.
But when you separate the man from the message, I have to think that his reasons for opposing the Democrats mostly rings true:
- Free Speech
- Ukraine
- Public Health
And especially the first two issues are so clearly aimed at the disastrous policies that the Democrats have allowed the Deep State to foist on the country. The campaign by the intelligence agencies to dictate to the social media sites what they can and cannot allow to be said is such a transparent violation of the first amendment that it’s shocking that the Supreme Court hasn’t already taken some direct action against it. I’m guessing it’s through fear. After all, where exactly is the Supreme Court’s army? After the Supreme Court tells the CIA to cease and desist who exactly goes down to the CIA and frog marches them to jail? Nope.
As for Ukraine, I listened to Kennedy’s description of how the State Department initiated the war and it was spot on. He might as well have had me write it for all the difference in our ideas about it. He’s right and unless the Democrats lose the chances of a shooting war with the Russians is probably 100%.
So even though I think RFK Jr. is a weird unsympathetic character (a Kennedy) I agree with his reasons for not supporting the Democrats and hope that his support for Trump will be enough to throw one or more swing states into the Trump column. I wondered if maybe Kennedy has someone else who does his thinking for him. I’m not implying he isn’t intelligent but the fact that the issues he is championing make perfect sense to me doesn’t jibe with the reputation he has for adopting weird fringe causes. If he had said that he was opposing the Harris campaign because of their stance on alien abduction and probing that would feel like an RFK Jr. signature move. But I believe in taking the W when it presents itself. And if a kook suddenly stops spouting gibberish and wants to help my side, I’ll gladly hand him a shovel point him toward the front lines and tell him to start digging foxholes.
On a personal note, I find listening to his horrible voice impediment almost impossible to do. It’s like listening to someone scraping a steel nail against a slate chalkboard. It’s physical and mental torture. But regardless of my personal feeling I say, well done Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy Junior. You have proven that the Kennedy family isn’t a complete and utter waste of everyone’s time. You’ve done one useful thing in your time on this Earth. Kudos.