Author: photog

O Canada!

photog Current Events ,

Alberta is taking a page from Quebec’s separatist campaign and the way things look there will be a referendum in October.  The exact wording of the referendum question will be “”Do you agree that the Province of Alberta should cease to be a part of Canada to become an independent state?”  This wording was selected because it adheres to the phrasing in Canada’s federal Clarity Act.

Will the referendum succeed?  The polls I’ve seen say no.  Only about a third of voters want independence.  But then again, I remember how many polls said Hillary and Kamala were way ahead of Trump in their presidential races.  So, we’ll have to see.

But even if it fails this time I can see how a day will come when one or more of the western Canadian provinces will secede.  I was watching a video from a fellow in British Columbia who was of the opinion that if Alberta secedes, BC would not only secede but it would fragment into three separate parts.  I don’t pretend to know the details of provincial politics in Canada but I’ve heard that if Alberta leaves Saskatchewan and Manitoba are also very likely to follow suit.

Whether any seceding Canadian provinces decide to apply for American statehood is an interesting question.  I think there’s a good chance that they won’t.  They might feel their best option is combining with each other to form an alternative to Canada.  And that raises another question.  Without the western provinces would Quebec want to remain with rump Canada?  After all, Quebec decided not to secede because they know they receive much more from the federal government than they pay.  But that might no longer be the case when all that is left is Eastern Canada and the Arctic.  So pretty soon Canada becomes essentially Ontario and the Maritime provinces with the Yukon and Hudson Bay thrown in for ice fishing.  Now that is a different reality from the current situation.  But I think it’s a definite possibility in the next decade or so.

And why do I think all of this is important?  Because Canada is an extension of the same cultural and political environment that the United States inhabits.  Because of Quebec, Canada had to provide self-determination to their provinces to show that they weren’t ruling an empire.  Well, now it’s going to bite them on the butt.  And when Canada implodes, it is going to provide a spectacle for the Americans south of their border.

It’s funny how the Left always points at Canada as the template they approve of.  Well, maybe they would go along with adding a constitutional amendment allowing for secession referenda.  After all, if Canada does it, then it must be progressive and therefore good!  Well, anyway, it’s a thought.

The world is changing.  The globalist agenda has shaken things up and it will continue to change for the foreseeable future.  Where it ends up is anyone’s guess.  But I think it’s as likely to get better as it is to get worse.  So, I’ll keep my eyes and ears open and see where the opportunities open up.  O Canada!

Donnie Darko (2001) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

photog Movie Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Movie Reviews , , , , ,

Continuing my review of a list of “best Science fiction movies” from YouTube, the next installment is a movie from 2001 that I have heard spoken of as a “forgotten gem;” Donnie Darko.  I will attempt to disavow my audience of that idea.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

I would compare this movie to some mash-up of “The Breakfast Club” with a cheapo time travel/horror movie.  The movie is stewed in teenage angst in an upscale California town where Donnie Darko (played by a young Jake Gyllenhaal) is undergoing psychotherapy to find out why he is hallucinating about a man in a dog mask who seems to be telling him to do dangerous and harmful things like smashing a water main to flood out his high school and burn down the house of a motivational speaker who is appearing at the school’s Health classes.

While staying out all night at the urging of Frank (the dog guy) Donnie escapes death when an airliner engine falls out of the sky and destroys his bedroom.  It turns out that the FAA can’t locate a plane that lost an engine that day.  Meanwhile his science teacher answers questions about time travel by using Stephen Hawking’s theories about wormholes to justify Donnie’s belief that his psychosis is really messages being sent to him from time travelers.  And when he finds out that an old woman who lives up in the hills was a teacher at his school who wrote a book about time-travel he becomes convinced that he will be involved in a time travel event.

It all comes to a head around Halloween so the fact that some of the kids in the movie are wearing masks becomes less inexplicable but no less annoying.  By the end of the movie several people have been killed violently which appears to include his mother and younger sister who are aboard a jet airliner that coincidently has lost an engine over his town before landing.

At that point, Donnie goes up to the mountains to await the time-traveling storm that’s about to strike.  The end of the movie returns back a month before all the trouble started and this time Donnie is in the room when the engine strikes.  So apparently, he’s sacrificed himself to prevent the deaths of his mother and sister and his girlfriend and the guy who ran her over and was then shot to death by Donnie.  The end.

I hated this movie so much I can’t state it enough.  I despised everyone in it.  That includes Donnie, his English teacher (played by Drew Barrymore), his mother (played by the actress who was the president’s wife in Independence Day), the motivational speaker who turned out to be a kiddie porn purveyor (played by Patrick Swayze), and basically everyone else in the movie.  Everything about this movie was annoying or depressing.  And calling it science fiction is absurd.  There’s absolutely no justification given for any of the events or hallucinations that Donnie experienced.  But honestly, he was such an unlikeable character that all I felt at the end of the movie was annoyance that I had sat through this ridiculous movie.  I don’t recommend this movie to any fans of science fiction.

Cultural Pep Talk

photog Current Events, photog's Corner, Reclaiming the Family , , ,

So, what’s the deal?  Are we reaching the end of the American Century and should we abandon all hope, we who enter?  Or is there any other way to approach the situation we are in?  Well, I would be accused of being a hopeless optimist if I didn’t admit that western civilization has fallen off a cliff at this point.  Looking around and seeing what passes for leadership and competency it’s impossible not to see a step change down from what existed a generation before.  Even the crooks are a couple of standard deviations below the level that used to operate in the last century.  Everything is diminished.  It’s undeniable.

Where do we go from here?

A few years ago, I read a book by a culture critic named Rod Dreher called “The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation.”  Now Dreher is a man of the right but he has had lots of fights with many other folks on his “side of the aisle.”  If I remember correctly, he’s not very fond of Donald Trump.  Oh, well.  But there was much in his book that I found interesting and helpful.  He talked about how our era had commonalities with 5th century A.D. Europe during the fall of the Roman Empire.  The Benedict in the title refers to Saint Benedict who at that time founded the Benedictine monastic order that began the slow painful process of restoring civilization to the human wreckage that existed after civil authority broke down after the barbarian hordes knocked over the Roman government.  Dreher’s point was that we no longer live in a society united under a common culture or religion.  But that doesn’t prevent us from forming our own communities to preserve the things we value and pass them on to our descendants.

And he’s absolutely correct.  Now admittedly, the left is doing everything it can to infect all areas of civil life with their Anti-American, Anti-European, Anti-Christian, Anti-western-civilization, anti-white propaganda and agenda.  But giving up because it’s difficult is the very definition of weakness.  If the things we want to see endure are worth saving then they are certainly worth fighting for.

So, I see this as the alternative to despair.  Look at the current state of affairs as a test of fitness for people and ideas.  If you’re not willing to fight for the things you value then maybe you don’t actually value them that much at all.  It certainly is a shame that the elites in this country valued the monetary advantages they could gain from globalism over the patriotic loyalty they owed to their fellow citizens and drowned our culture in third world “diversity.”  But just giving up is weak and defeatist and now that the globalists have been exposed it’s incumbent on us to support all individuals and organizations that work toward preserving the best parts of our traditional culture and do everything we can to reconstitute that culture and allow it to flourish again in this country.  Start rebuilding.