Category: OCF

Strip Away the Rot and Build on the Strong

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Living as I do in the land of fungus it’s important to look for where moisture has seeped into wood and rotted it away.  This is critical because structural members can be compromised and your whole house can come crashing down.  You have to look for the telltale signs and when the long horrible winter is over you have to figure out how the water has been getting in and remove that vulnerability.  And then you have to remove the rotted wood and replace it.  And it’s expensive and difficult.  Things have to be shored up while replacing structural supports and if you don’t identify the point of water infiltration you may have to do the whole painful repair over again.

Based on what I’ve observed I’d say that the Republican Party is pretty much rotted away.  To continue the analogy, the question remains whether it’s best to demolish the structure and build a new one or begin shoring up the structure and ripping out the rot.  I’ll leave that decision with whoever thinks he has the budget to build a new party.

But this post isn’t really about rebuilding a conservative party.  It’s about discarding the thoughts and actions that have become useless and redirecting my actions to things that are useful.  Writing endlessly about Washington and the atrocities of the dementia patient in the White House is not only useless, it’s debilitating.  Thinking about the daily assaults on us is like a drip of water that slowly over time erodes your mind.

I have to find positive activities and they have to have some measurable results.  That goes for both my personal activities and the things I choose to write about.  And maybe I’ll be writing less, at least here.  I have my own writing that I want to do.  Blogging takes up a good deal of time.  I intend to make sure I have something that is worth people’s time reading.

What I think I will concentrate on for the blog are things that I have found that are useful.  I like to think that the reviews of music, movies and books are of that sort.  These are things that can be useful to people looking for entertainment.  I’ll try to provide similar factual posts about other aspects of living.  Maybe it will be about a company that provides a product or service.  Maybe it will be an organization that supports the values that I believe in.  Maybe it will be an activity that I have heard about that is useful or enjoyable for families and communities on our side of the cultural divide.  And sometimes it will be a politician who seems to want to help.

Another aspect of the blog that I intend to change is interaction with the readers.  I really need a lot more feedback from you all.  I confess I haven’t figured out yet how to do this yet.  I think that the site would benefit from having people express their opinions.  I especially am interested in people who disagree with my opinions.  Not progressive trolls who just want to disrupt the proceedings but people on our side who think we are making mistakes either tactically or in a more fundamental way.  And I am especially eager to hear your thoughts about how we can thrive during these dark times.  A one-way conversation can be frustrating.  So, here’s to a new day and a new direction.  Out with the old and in with the new.

What’s on My Mind Today

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Yesterday was a sort of hectic day.  I had to clear the snow from the driveways so I could get out and head off on an errand.  That kind of interrupted the usual time I like to take in the morning for the site and for reading up on stuff.  Today is sort of back to normal but when I looked around there wasn’t too much to review.

There were the usual atrocities by the Dems and the usual useless hand waving by the GOPe.  Blah, blah, blah.  There was that nice piece of news about DeSantis going after the Social Media sites that discriminate against conservatives.  It’s encouraging to see that a few red state governors have some desire to help us.  Excellent.  May twenty more do just as much.  Then we’d have something to talk about.

And since the news didn’t take much time, I started thinking about what is meaningful for me to do with my time and with my website.  One of my fans said I should do more with the photography side of things.  He likes the macro stuff I do and thinks I should put it up on YouTube as a slide show montage thing.  That sounds kind of interesting.  I’m also thinking about publishing some art books with the landscape and macro stuff.  I also have been neglecting my fiction writing during the inauguration excitement but now that things are slowing down, I really must get some discipline and put in the hours to move those projects along.  I’ll put up links to these other things here on the site.

On the local front I’ve had some friends show interest in putting together the first local chapter of the He-Man Woman Hater’s Club.  High on the agenda for the club was hammering out the rules for the poker game.  There were some who wanted to allow for a high stakes option.  I was completely opposed for a couple of reasons.  One is that I want to allow for the widest possible socio-economic inclusivity (there is that word sneaking in!).  Even the least of my brothers must be able to enjoy the benefits of manly camaraderie.  The other is that I’m a truly awful poker player and I don’t want to be beaten by Camera Girl if I lose the milk money.  The next question on the agenda is whether sandwiches will be premade or assembled as needed.  My opinion was that each man must build his own sandwich and that only a few sandwich building breaks should be allotted.  Otherwise, the game would become too fragmented.  Of course, chips and drinks can be snagged at the end of every hand.  And finally, the type of poker was debated strenuously.  Some of the younger guys said it should be strictly Texas Hold’em.  Having been raised on draw and stud poker I resisted this idea.  But I went as far as to agree that some limits be made on the side bets for high spade and other distractions.

All of this was very gratifying and sound.  But what brought us all up to a halt was setting the date for the first game.  After all we’re still in the “lockdown.”  If we assemble at someone’s house, we’ll have to shut our lights as we near the driveway and camouflage the parked cars for fear that the neighborhood Karens will rat us out to the storm troopers.  I mean, I like a good ham swiss and mustard as much as the next guy but getting tased and thrown in the local COVID tank with the other sinners is a bit much.  We tabled the item with the understanding that it would be in April or May.

But just talking to the “boys” about some old-fashioned male bonding was inspirational.  It’s good to be making plans again and living in the future and not just dwelling on the nightmares of the recent past.  If you think about it, other than this COVID crap the government really doesn’t have much of a stranglehold on what adults do with their lives.  Lying to the authorities and our bosses at work will become second nature the way it does in any totalitarian state but we can still be ourselves with our friends and family.  And one day we’ll pull the whole thing down around their ears and march them off to the gulag as payback.

So today is a good day to plan and get things done.

02FEB2021 – OCF Update – Happy Groundhog Day

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Well just like Bill Murray in the movie, snow is making my life difficult.  It will be slow here on the site while I move X number of tons of snow and then head off to the dentist for Marathon Man fun and games.  I’ll update this update later when time allows.

Update:

Neill has suggested that a machine could replace me in my epic battle with the forces of nature.  But just as John Henry defeated the Steam Engine, I will defeat the bot.  Or die trying.  Well, maybe not.  I’ll probably split the work up into two days.  But it’s still plenty heroic of me.

25JAN2021 – OCF Update – New Things

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The good guys at Whatfinger have asked me if I’d be interested in getting them to link up to a Friday feature on OCF where I put together a bunch links to good articles I’ve found.  With that in mind if any of the readers here come across any interesting links put them in the comments to this post and I’ll check them out.  I’ve also reached out to some other blogs that I am associated with to see if they have anything I might want to look at.  So this should be an interesting learning experience for me.  I’m thinking of calling it photog’s Friday Finds.  What do you think, clever enough?  You see, because ph sounds like f it’s alliterative, right right?  Anyway I’m still working on the name.

More people are coming to the site and commenting.  And yesterday I had a commenter “John Chapter 8,” who took issue with my definition of a what traditional wife was.  Okay, so we disagree.  He may state things a little more angrily than I choose to but I see the points he’s making.  Maybe he saw the point that my reply to him was trying to make.  The main thing is there was some dialog.  And as long as it doesn’t turn into some insane rant then information has a chance to pass back and forth.  And others reading this also can make up their minds about what is being debated.  I’m actually supportive of a reasonable airing out of opinions.  My way of looking at it is, have your say.  If everyone has his say then at least you get that much satisfaction.  It’s not like anyone is going to convince everyone even on a small site like OCF to think the same way.  But there is value in making your case.  Being forced to make a persuasive argument sharpens the mind.  You may even have to modify your own beliefs if you look at them closely enough.

I think a significant number of people have found the “Reclaiming the Family” series interesting.  I intend to look around at additional subjects under that category that I can think about.  In general I think it’s time to start looking at how all this madness in our politics is effecting regular people and write about that.  One avenue that could really use attention is the effect on the younger people.  And by younger I’m extending that all the way up to people in their forties.  As a codger I am sort of trapped in the “boomer mindset.”  I get a kick out of the “sure boomer” meme that the zoomers and millennials have adopted as their battle cry.  I am not unsympathetic to their position but I also think they are being manipulated to some extent by certain of their peers.  For every selfish old guy who is saying “let them eat cake” there are ten oldies who worry constantly about their children and grandchildren and want to help build a brighter future than the bleak dystopia that the Left is making.

Anyway, this should be a busy week and there are all kind of cultural and political things I am looking at.  I just started reading Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and it has opened my eyes to just how far we will have to fall before we are anything close to the horror show that Soviet Russia was.  And other stuff too.  Have a great day.

Reclaiming the Family – Part 6 – The Miracle of a Traditional Wife

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I never tire of reminding Camera Girl that in my mind she and I are very close in behavior to the married couple in W. C. Fields two classic movies, “It’s A Gift” and “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.”  In both movies Field’s hen-pecked character has a wife played by Kathleen Howard a tall, stout woman who affects the character of a cultured, histrionic scold who constantly hectors and nags at Fields’ character.  And Fields’ answer to almost every utterance of his wife is a meek, “yes dear.”  And I tell her this not because there is any resemblance physically or temperamentally between her and this shrewish character but because this reminds me of the natural antagonism that husband and wife experience in the course of their wedded bliss.  Well, also because I am sort of a jerk.

A few weeks ago, we were sitting down to dinner and she had cooked a soup using the leftovers from a ham we had for the holidays.  It was a ham and lentil soup and she decided to make it so thick that we call it a stoup, meaning stew/soup.  As I started eating dinner it occurred to me that being married to a woman like my wife is probably the greatest good that a man can have in his life.

A traditional wife makes your house into a home and raises a family.  And a family is the only true wealth that any man ever actually possesses.  And if she’s also pretty and a good cook like mine then it’s as close to heaven as any man can hope to see on this side of the great divide.  That’s the information I can provide to the young guys around today.

But where can you find such a woman today?  All the American girls have been sold on the idea that they have to have a career to be fulfilled in the modern world.  That is the root of the problem.  There are only two solutions, either convince some woman that there is a better option or go outside of the local pool of women.

As far as convincing women to move away from careers I think a man has to have the wherewithal to convince a woman that he can support a stay-at-home wife.  Probably that means owning your own home and having a stable income.  It would be best if you are up front about your plans and expectations so that you can eliminate the girls that will never work out.  I’m too old to know anything about on-line dating services but I would imagine a primary function would be trying to line up marital expectations.  Correct me if I’m mistaken that they must have a profile that corresponds to a traditional homemaker.

One thing that might be a starting point is avoid any girl who is planning on going to some very expensive college.  Unless her parents have funded her entire education, she is going to have to pay back those student loans and that will make it doubly difficult for you to afford a one income lifestyle.  So maybe you should be looking at women who go to the local community college or even better ones working in local jobs that do not require high powered college credentials.

But however you find one, if she has all the qualifications I mentioned in my intro then marry her and never let her work a day of her life outside of the home.  Have a passel of kids and enjoy every day of it for as long as you both shall live.  Raising a family is a challenging and sometimes a confusing task but as you get older, you’ll find that it really is the only meaningful thing that most human beings ever accomplish.    Ray Bradbury wrote a story called the Happiness Machine.  In it an inventor tried to make a machine that would make a person happy if he sat in it.  It had all the sights and sounds that he imagined could make a person happy.  Music, exotic vistas, delicious aromas, everything he thought he would want.  But by the end of the story, he discovers the truth when he looks into the window of his own house and sees his family, his wife and his children, performing their routine daily activities together in his own home.  That is the true happiness machine.  And if a man can’t find happiness in that then maybe he never will.

22JAN2021 – OCF Update – Glass Half Full Kind of Day

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I feel disgustingly cheerful today.  It’s a very bright sunny day here in the gulag.  Because of the bitter cold, the furnace is roaring away on fuel oil and the forced hot water is merrily exchanging heat with the air in my living room here at the Compound.  Camera Girl has sallied forth in Old Car to Wally World to bring me flesh, and bring me wine, and bring me pine logs hither, sort of.  Old dog and not so old dog are lazing near the radiators and I have just finished listening to the ZMan’s Friday Power Hour, his weekly podcast, and despite the predictions of crime waves and government malfeasance it was surprisingly upbeat, I thought.

And I find myself almost ebullient.  In the last four days I think four of my posts were linked over at Whatfinger and several thousand extra pageviews were registered and new subscribers joined and new voices appeared in the comments and an interesting opportunity for the site has appeared that may bring still more traffic here.  So, a big shout out to Sergeant Pat and the other guys over at Whatfinger.

But in addition, recent events have led me to believe that the result of the fraudulent election will spark changes in this country that are all for the good.  The spell is broken.  Everyone is paying attention to the man behind the curtain.  And he is definitely not the great and powerful anything.  He’s just a cheap grifter with a very powerful organization pulling the strings.  The problem for him is that, us being able to see the strings takes away a good deal of the effectiveness of his grift.  If the suckers figure out that the three-card monte game is really there as a distraction to help the pickpockets in the crowd then it becomes a lot harder to pick pockets.  If the Eloi figure out that the Morlocks are cannibals then they’ll stop walking into the frying pan and that will make it a lot harder on the poor Morlocks trying to make an honest living eating Eloi.

And the other part of this whole thing is that I actually feel happier not having to make believe I’m in any way associated with people who either believe or publicly pretend to believe that Dementia Joe is their leader.  I want to be in a separate grouping from them.  I’m ecstatic if they shun me.  I look forward to having different social media platforms, payment processors, crowdfunding sites, even retailers and banks.  All those things will be immeasurably better if leftists shun them completely.  We should make a point of emblazoning on everything we own some triggering slogan that will send the SJW’s into paroxysms of rage and assure that they will never patronize that site.  If I thought it would do any good, I’d emblazon the header of my site with “All Lives Matter!!!!” or something equally scandalous.

Of course, an enormous amount of work is ahead of us to build these new platforms and the Left will do everything they can to torture and attack us every step of the way.  But we are still infinitely better off now that the lights are on and we can see the threats.  Blundering around in the dark is not only dangerous but it’s also demoralizing.  An unseen danger is much more frightening and confusing.  For tens of millions of people, the knowledge of who is and isn’t your friend will make avoiding harm a lot easier.  Thinking that Mitch McConnell and John Roberts will ride to our rescue is now obvious lunacy.  It’s Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown for the millionth time.  It’s done for all but the terminally stupid.

We are at last moving on from the grifters.

Organizing Free America

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As I’ve mentioned previously there’s no reason to wait for a superhero to start organizing our people into a new tribe.  I want to do my part and provide the foundation for an organization that provides a network to local communities to share information and socialize.  Eventually when things really get going that superhero is going to need a sophisticated network with all kinds of capability that the geniuses in Silicon Valley have invented in the last decade but for now Orion’s Cold Fire (OCF) and my primitive internet will have to do.

And in the underground you don’t take names and publish a membership list.  Pseudonyms and anonymity make a lot of sense when Dementia Joe is starting to act like another Uncle Joe of gulag fame.  I just finished Solzhenitsyn’s “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch” and the idea of snitches pervading the society of a captive nation seems a lot more real now that the Left is adopting the idea of re-education camps and purging non-Leftists from all aspects of public and private life.

Well, all that’s fine with me.  The internet is a vast web of people who look for what they need.  And maybe what they need is hope.  And believe it or not I feel more hopeful in the last few weeks than I have in several years.  The endless delays by Bill Barr and the endless betrayals by judges and legislators was so frustrating that I often despaired of ever making any headway.  But in the midst of the political collapse after the fraudulent elections I see truth shining through and revealing our enemies for who they are and the eyes of the people finally opening to that truth.  That is what gives me hope and it sweeps away the false paths and points to the correct road.  We must abandon all the institutions that have proven themselves corrupt and build from the ground up.  And part of building up these new institutions is smashing the old ones.  It’s not enough to build a new political party.  We must destroy the Republican party to do it.  Primarying all but the loyal GOP office holders.  And any of the disloyal who get through the primaries need to be beaten by their Democrat opponents even in safe red states.  Mitch McConnell needs to be powerless and abandoned by his paymasters as a warning to those in our new party that might think of betraying us.

And just to be clear I’m no political mastermind.  I’m just a humble scribbler of stories who would like nothing better than to get back to writing stories and playing with my grandchildren.  But if those kids are going to have a country half as good as the one my parents gave to me then I’m going to have to try and wake up the sleepers and get them doing something in their local communities and talking together about doing something on a national level.

So here’s my sermon for the day.  Go out and talk with five or ten or twenty good men and come back and tell us what they think.  Build up a club and accomplish some small thing that feels like a small piece of freedom from the repulsive tyranny spreading out of Washington.  And come here and brag about it.  No names, no places, just ideas and tips on what works and what doesn’t.

15JAN2021 – OCF Update

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I have had a an account on Gab since 2016 but stopped using it because it was a pretty chaotic.  I’m going to try posting there again to see if I get any feedback there.

This week will be another circus as the Dems pretend that Dementia Joe is the target of an army of ninja assassins who will do anything to derail the great Biden restoration.  I will be studiously ignoring all of that nonsense.  I’m just waiting for the impeachment farce to play out so that I can collect the names of Senators who need to be primaried.

I have been re-reading Homer’s Odyssey (Fitzgerald’s poetic translation).  It is a great story and reminds me that the timeless story of a brave man and a faithful woman facing the adventure of a mad world still has something to say to us today.  But it was so strange.  The sunburned Aethiopians were mentioned but at no point did Zeus get around to giving the rest of the Olympians a struggle session about how Sunburned Aethiopians Lives Matter.  And shockingly, even though Odysseus was accosted by several goddesses during his wanderings not a single one of them was a trans-goddess.  Well, I’m sure the publishers will write one in.

When I get through I’m going to start reading J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy.  I heard they made a movie out of it which kind of scares me.  But I’ve heard it’s interesting.

And I’ve started re-watching the TV series Justified.  Camera Girl and I agree that there just doesn’t seem to be a new show that’s anywhere as good.  Just proves that good writing trumps everything else in drama.

Hat Tip to Neil for the Link

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In the comments for yesterday’s post Neil linked to this post on Poweline:

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/01/countering-big-tech-censorship-through-state-legislation-part-one.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+powerlineblog%2Flivefeed+%28Power+Line%29

Seeing a lot of action by red states to rein in the woke corporations and elbow the Feds out of our lives would certainly be a welcome development.  In general this would be a quick way to punish the people torturing us.  Waiting for Washington to come to our aid is a hopeless idea.  If the states don’t step up then it’ll have to be something desperate.  And that would look like a guerilla war.

Free America – The Realm in Exile – Part 1

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I hope that President Trump finds a platform soon and gives us a rousing speech and declares himself the leader in exile of the free people of the former United States of America.  I hope he gives us his version of the St. Crispin’s Day speech to raise our spirits and begin this period in exile on a high note.  I hope he raises his flag and begins building an alternative to the Republican party so that we have something we can belong to that stands for what we believe in.  And when he does I’ll join it on the first day and support it any way I can.

But I don’t feel like waiting.  I’m in the mood to mutiny.  I aim to misbehave.  I hereby declare myself a charter member of Free America.  Free America is the part of the former United states of America that rejects the fraudulent elections that took place in 2020 and will maintain a nation in exile until we are freed from the control of the Pretender who will soon inflict his evil and illegitimate control over us in any way he can.

I will do all that is within my very meager powers to lend support and comfort to anyone of my brothers and sisters out there who is of the same spirit.  I will do my best to provide information and hopefully morale for those of us who are unrepresented in the tyrannical regime that has usurped power in Washington.

So until someone comes up with a better term and builds a more meaningful platform to represent our people, Orion’s Cold Fire will be the headquarters for Free America and the voice of free Americans living within the borders of Post-America.  Tell all your friends that they are invited to come and speak their minds and share information and provide encouragement for the rest of us who don’t feel like just knuckling under and giving up all hope.  Giving up is stupid and weak.  There’s too much here worth keeping alive here to allow these creeps to win without even trying.  So that’s what I feel like saying today.  If someone smarter and stronger and with a bigger following wants to lead then let him show up and I’ll wave his banner.  But until that day I’ll make a start and plant my flag and say, “Here I am.”