Fugit Inreparabile Tempus

The sands of the hour glass run out on Summer 2023.  The various grandchildren are back from their vacations and soon their world will be submerged into the confines of the classroom.  But for the next two weeks their parents will be scrambling to keep the kids busy while all of the various work schedules re-mesh after summer.

And at a time like this, grandparents can be really useful.  Camera Girl will be a veritable general.  She will wield a spatula like a baton, whipping up scrambled eggs, pancakes, grilled cheese sandwiches and spaghetti and meatballs as the moment requires.  I will be more like the NCO trying to maintain order among the troops and where necessary preventing mayhem.  I will be more or less on duty for the duration.

I will try to provide content as best I can but without a doubt there will be some gaps on the site as is probably already apparent.  Well, in these dog days we all have to make do.  But there will be plenty of fascinating developments in the fall.  Most likely the world will be exploding in all directions and in all senses of the word by the end of September.

I think the days of the Silicon Valley miracle are coming to an end.  I think the next bust is upon us and among the casualties, most of the companies that have been providing news and entertainment content are going to disappear.

The interesting thing to see is who will be the survivors.  And right in the center of this trend is Elon Musk and his bet on X.  Can he make that bet pay off?  Not being any kind of technology maven, as far as I know, his chances are precisely 50/50.  But even the Googles and the Facebooks don’t have much better than those odds to survive long term.

The basis for our information economy hasn’t reached any stable equilibrium and all of these companies are to a certain extent monopolies that the surveillance state allows to exist.  What will happen in the future is completely indeterminate.  But for some reason Elon Musk seemed to think he could run one of these companies without the blessing of the feds.  Now whether he’s changed his mind about that or not is a question.  Free speech is a bold claim in 2023.  Can it actually exist in America?  That’s what everyone wants to know.

But almost as difficult to know is whether even fake news can make a profit anymore.  Do serfs really need the news?  And would they actually pay to read it?  It seems unlikely in the extreme.  But it’s an important question.  We’re all forced to pay for our cable bill and out of that we pay CNN and MSNBC to shovel horse manure through the copper and fiber-optic wires that run down our streets.  And they shoot it up to cell towers and bounce it off satellites.  But eventually when only Guatemalan and Congolese Americans are left will they be willing or even able to pay for a cable bill?  And why would they care what Rachel Maddow or Anderson Cooper has to tell them about Joe Biden or Dylan Mulvaney?

It just seems to me that all of this we see, YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and all the rest is ephemeral nonsense to be swept away along with virtual reality headsets and transgender influencers.  It’s all just absurd nonsense like flag pole sitters and gold fish eating college kids.  Pretty soon the reality of our national debt is going to hit home and then we’ll find out what we’re willing to spend money on.  The answer is probably bread and not much else.

But here at the end of the silly season I’ll enjoy the warmish weather and ignore the periodic sprinklings of volcanic ash that filter down from the mouth of Vesuvius.  I mean what are the odds?

My Obligatory Oliver Anthony Post

Matt Walsh did a good job here summing up the phenomenon that Oliver Anthony created with his song.  What Walsh says is that the real story isn’t whether the singer or the song are remarkably good.  The real story is that people are starved for authentic values in the things they see and hear for entertainment.  They’re starved for things in their lives that reflect the values that our culture shuns.  They also want entertainers who speak to their lives and their experiences.  Walsh is a talented communicator.

Uganda Refuses the Pot of Gold at the End of the Rainbow

Shocking.  Who knew the third world was allowed to tell the globalists no.  Maybe one day we will be allowed also.

I like his copybook version of his speech.  His penmanship is probably neater than mine is at this point.

 

 

Vision

One thing you can’t say about the Left.  No one can say they don’t have a plan.  For the last two hundred some-odd years they have been expanding on one idea relentlessly in the West and with a few interruptions here and there they’ve made steady progress.  From the French Revolution to the latest dictates on transgender children they’ve been assaulting traditional society from every angle imaginable.  They are organized and they are relentless.

Now how about our side?  You could say that as a practical, moderate attempt to square the circle and provide a workable compromise between freedom of the individual and the needs of society, that creating the United States Constitution was kind of a master stroke.  And it truly was.  But after two hundred years of assaults from the Left there’s almost nothing left of it.  It’s been savaged and shredded by every imaginable special interest and grievance group.  And the most that the Right manages to do is provide feeble and half-hearted resistance.

Really the only meaningful fight that’s been launched in the last hundred years or more was by Donald Trump.  He identified the death blows that the Left wants to inflict on us.  And he tried to stop them.  And maybe he can do something about immigration and try to resurrect manufacturing in the United States if he’s re-elected.  Those are good things but they’re just the beginning and they’re not enough.

It’s no wonder our backs are to the wall.  We don’t have a plan.  We don’t know what we want to substitute for the Left’s vision of the future.  And that’s because we have no vision of our own.  The most that anyone can articulate about what we want for our future is to try and get back to yesterday or ten years ago or 1984 or 1950 or some other mythical golden age.  What they don’t understand is that the Left won’t let this happen and even if somehow, we managed to push things back more or less to that state they will never stop pushing back in their direction.  Because they know what they don’t want and that is what they will destroy.

The only way to prevent this destruction is if we have an agenda that we are constantly working toward and putting all our efforts into realizing.  In other words, “WE NEED A PLAN.”

In fact, that we actually don’t already have a plan means we can’t fix anything.  It means we haven’t diagnosed the strategy by which the enemies are attacking us.  And without that understanding we can’t formulate a solution to this problem.  Just as their plan is to eliminate us, our plan has to be eliminating them.  We need an action plan that continuously weakens them and strengthens us.  But we can’t make that plan because we don’t even understand what it is they are attacking.  We’ve lost sight of the principles that are the basis of a moral and sane world.  We’ve allowed relativism to creep into our world view and we no longer know what is right and what is wrong.

And until we start basing our choices on unassailable principles the Left will keep wearing down our world until there is nothing left worth living for.  So that’s where this needs to go.  We need a leader, either political or ethical who can start directing a list of actions that will address the things in our society that are diseased and which are harming us, body and soul.

And they’re not mysterious or impractical or esoteric actions.  There are examples in things that are being done by the Hungarians.  They are coming to the aid of families that want to raise children.  The government will provide support and relief to women who stay home and raise children.  They are investing in healthy citizens because the alternative is a childless future where the only source of citizens is immigration.  Another obvious direction to go is school choice to allow families to save their children from the disastrous effects of the public schools.

And just applying the same principles we can decide on an agenda that supports the things we know are right.  All of them will be things that support stable, healthy families and things that allow normal people to live healthy meaningful lives.  And if that means that there are fewer billionaires and less global growth then so be it.

And there are a thousand things that need to be done.  All of them can be discovered by looking at something that is currently causing diseased behavior and dysfunction and attacking it by figuring out what will result in less of it.  Maybe one of the things that will go away will be most of the internet.  Well then good.  Currently most of the cancer spreading through the veins of this country goes through the on-line system.  If kids are kept off of it until they’re thirty I wouldn’t complain.

But all of this is just examples.  What is really needed is the vision.  Someone or some group has to be thinking about these things.  And has to have a plan that is based on this kind of thinking.  And then that group has to expand out to include a larger group that includes representatives in every state so that leaders can be trained who will begin to implement these actions.  And just as importantly this group has to begin informing the people at large of what they want to do and how the common people can support this by voting, by providing time and money at the grassroots level to start instituting some of these things locally.

But instead of leaders we have a few talking heads who want to be president.  That will not achieve anything until an organization with a platform of practical actions has begun instituting change at the state and local level.  DeSantis is doing some of that in Florida.  But he needs to bring together as many leaders of the various communities and the various sectors of society to come up with a program.  Call it a reformation.  Make it a call to arms to fix as many broken parts of society as it’s practical to do.  Attack poverty by forcing able-bodied people to work.  Attack crime by attacking criminals.  Enforce illegal immigration bans on employment and housing.  Punish companies that offshore their operations by imposing stiff tariffs on these products.  And on and on.

Then spread this program across the red states.  Once the results of this program show people that there is a way forward then you can start to talk about a presidential run.  Until then we’re just wasting time and energy on a figurehead position while the whole country goes straight to hell.

Vision.

Flash Mob Loots Nordstrom – LA Mayor Says Mean Things

This is hilarious.  Woke mayor of LA is really, really mad.  And she’s gonna tell the police to do something about this.  Boy, that’ll scare the criminals!