Category: Current Events

10SEP2023 – OCF Update

photog Current Events, OCF

Up through Tuesday I’ll be scrambling around from chore to chore.  It will all culminate with the arrival of the very important canine that will replace me as monarch of this realm.  But I will do my darnedest to post my photos and quotes and even attempt to express myself in lucid hexameter (or something).  My feelings about the future have shifted into a decidedly more  pragmatic approach.  Fixing the republic is a pipe dream.  Surviving in the belly of the beast is the order of the day.  And who knows, maybe in the long run we’ll make some progress against the monsters.

Today is a family gathering and it should be fun.  Tomorrow is a catch up day at work and Tuesday is a travel day.  I will try to forget the 9/11 memorial.  They’ve poisoned it by using it as a weapon against our own people.  If tomorrow planes were flown into steel towers in Manhattan I’d ask the victims why they were still there?  What’s the difference between jumping out of a hundred story window and being beaten to death by a gang of feral teenagers out for a laugh?  I think I’d prefer the leap.  Less pain.

Well, I hope your Sunday goes well and I’ll speak to you soon.

Who Are the Good Guys?

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If you pay attention to what’s going on in the world, it would be easy to get the impression that the world is full up with horrible people.  Specifically, you might say that anyone with power was a corrupt monster doing everything imaginable to destroy all the good things that made up America as it was seventy-five years ago.

And if we were judging based on the preponderance of examples that would be true.  Almost every Democrat politician is a monster.  Almost every Republican politician in a federal office is a crook.  The bureaucracy is a minefield ranging from the rapacious greed of the FDA to the jackbooted thuggery of the surveillance state.  The majority of corporate executives pay at least lip service and sometimes much more to promulgating anti-white policies like DEI and affirmative action along with destructive ideas like transgender rights.  As for the schools and colleges, they’re almost completely dedicated to indoctrinating children with poisonous lies about race and sexuality.  I won’t even bother to mention the mass media.

So, yeah, looking out there.  It’s a mess.  But can that be the entirety of it?  Are there no good guys?

I can think of a few.  Let’s start with politicians.  I’ll start with people who have done some good:

  • Trump did some good on two fronts. He opened up our eyes to what the Republicans were really all about and why even when we won an election nothing improved.  And when he got in office he tried to fix as many things as he was allowed to.  And this was while he was being undercut and sabotaged by the Republicans in Congress and in his own administration.  Without a doubt he is one of the good guys.
  • Rand Paul seems to me to be interested in serving the interests of his constituency. He was one of the earliest voices to speak out against the COVID lockdowns and vaccine and mask mandates.  He is a critic of the FBI’s surveillance of US citizens and he believes that a balanced budget is a necessity for the long-term survival of our country.  I think he’s one of the good guys.
  • Ron DeSantis has used his tenure as Florida’s governor to defend the rights of his citizens against bureaucratic malice and other governmental and corporate bad actors. He resisted the call to continue masking school children and others when it was obvious that it did no good.  He helped get legislation passed to prevent grade schools from indoctrinating very young children about various sexual deviancies that the schools wanted to make part of the curriculum.  And he punished Disney when they tried to throw their weight behind these school programs.  He has fired district attorneys who wouldn’t prosecute criminals because of racial issues and he has even begun the reform of the Florida State college system by putting conservatives on the boards of trustees and empowered them to get rid of affirmative action, gender studies programs, leftist bias against men and whites, DEI and all the other crap that has become the norm at American colleges.  Regardless of competition between him and Donald Trump about running for president I’ll say that DeSantis is one of the good guys.
  • And to a lesser extent I think Governor Abbott of Texas has done some things that help the people of his state survive the terrible policies of the federal government especially concerning illegal immigration. His policy of bussing illegals to cities like New York, San Francisco and Chicago has worked brilliantly and has now got Mayor Adams of New York sounding like a nativist.  So, let’s say on balance Abbott has done some good for his state.

Moving on from politicians, let’s see who else might be doing some good out there:

  • Some of the Supreme Court justices have shown themselves honest. Thomas and Alito are rock solid.  The three new Trump picks are a mixed bag.  Good on some votes, bad on others.  Chief Justice Roberts is almost as bad as the communists but he votes mostly with the majority.  On average let’s say the current US supreme Court is kind of good.
  • Coming from the last place I’d expect honesty and courage, cable news, I’d have to say Tucker Carlson is one of the good guys. Over the last few years, he has said things on the air that no one else came close to saying.  He almost sounded like someone on the dissident right.  And this is a guy who was paid millions of dollars by Fox News to put out the kind of middle of the road Republican pablum that we came to expect from Sean Hannity and the rest of the suits there.  It basically got him fired.  And now that he’s been sidelined by a non-compete clause of his contract, he’s basically giving away his product on Elon Musk’s X rather than be silenced during this election year.  He’s shown nerve in the face of threats by crazy leftists against himself and his family.  He’s performing a service that currently is completely absent from mainstream media.  Yep, a good guy.
  • I’ll put Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald and Bari Weiss in a single entry. All three are leftist journalists who probably disagree with me on almost every social issue.  But what they have in common is that all three are honest enough to admit that the Biden White House and its allies in the federal government and the news media are routinely trampling on the constitutional rights of Americans in a whole host of areas.  From the COVID lockdowns and lies to the illegal surveillance of Republican politicians to suppression of the truth by the tech companies in collusion with the government these three have shown courage and integrity.  I guess I’ll have to grudgingly call them “good” guys.  But they’re still commies, regardless.
  • Chris Rufo is a pundit I guess you’d call him. I think he was associated with the Claremont folks in California.  But recently he went to work for Ron DeSantis reforming the Florida state colleges.  As part of that effort, he has been trail-blazing for anyone else who will be trying to rein in the leftists at red state colleges.  His efforts are already having real results.  New faculty is being hired.  Human resources policies have been changed and curriculum has been purged of leftist nut-jobbery.  I don’t know too much about him but I’m going to include him in the good guys because instead of just talking about stuff, he’s getting things done.
  • And what about Elon Musk? Is he on our side?  Maybe he is!  But at the very least he has provided a platform for our side’s words and opinions.  A place to spread news and find each other.

Well, that’s all I can think of for now.  Now it’s your turn.  Tell me what you think of my choices.  But more importantly, add names to this list.  Give folks out there something to be hopeful about.

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 08SEP2023 – Gun Laws Will Do Nothing

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“Four very young men, all carrying guns, beat me violently down to the ground in front of our kids,” Shivanthi Sathanandan said in a Facebook post. “The young men held our neighbors up at gunpoint when they ran over and tried to help me. All in broad daylight.”

Well. Four juveniles. So I think we can say it was illegal for them to have guns. Does this liberal now understand that gun laws will do nothing?
No.
Further in her post she says they need to get the guns off the street.
It isn’t the gun, lady. It’s the person using it.
It is so sad when people refuse to learn.

Here’s a thought: What if even one of her neighbors had been armed?
The outcome would have been very different. The beating would not have gone on as long as it did and, maybe, some bad guys would be in jail.

08SEP2023 – The Chickens Have Come Home to Roost!

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There’s nothing like a brutal beat down and a broken leg during a carjacking to change a “defund the police” activist into a “law and order” advocate.  I’m not sure whether Saint George of Floyd will forgive this falling away from the faith.  It seems a little fickle.

Before beatdown:

In June of 2020, Sathanandan wrote in a post on Facebook: “We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. Say it with me. DISMANTLE The Minneapolis Police Department.”

After beatdown:

“Look at my face. These criminals will not win. We need to take back our city. And this will not be the last you hear from me about this. Thank you to the incredible Minneapolis 4th Precinct Officers,

Maybe after she’s had a chance to wash the blood off her face she’ll calm down and realize that those kooky, crazy carjacking kids were just full of high spirits and she should chalk it up to reparations.  After all, maybe it was some form of white privilege or white supremacy or something white that triggered their understandable reaction.  Stop blaming the victims Shivanthi and look in the mirror for the true culprit.

The Walls of Stupidity

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My perusal of the political opinion crap pile today included an article called Don’t Panic When You See New Trump-Biden Poll Numbers.   Apparently, the latest WSJ poll has Biden and Trump tied at 46%.  And the Left’s reaction is a cross between astonishment and panic:

“My informal canvas of liberal friends reveals that this feeling — something like incredulous despair verging on panic — is not unusual. We tamp it down and joke about it, but it never disappears. Tens of millions of Americans are fine with Trump’s brand of revanchist authoritarianism, and even yearn for it. Tens of millions more see him as just one choice among many; maybe they’ll vote for him again if the price of gas goes up.”

This post of mine isn’t meant to blow this poll result into some kind of hopeful sign that the Democrat voter fraud effort will somehow fail to fabricate the requisite millions of fake ballots needed to steal the 2024 election.  Far from it.  I see that as the reality that we now live with.  Protected by the Justice Department the blue city Democrats have carte blanche to steal any election that depends on these states with large cities like Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona.  That’s a given.

But what this poll does tell us is that about half the country no longer believes the narrative.  In the old days telling the American voters that a candidate was a criminal and that he tried to steal his last election from the rightful winner would have completely destroyed his chances in any subsequent election.  Under that old idea of political reality Donald Trump or anyone who was branded a criminal the way he has would be polling 0.0%.  In fact, there wouldn’t even be a spot for him on the polling sheet.  He would just be a cautionary tale about not allowing crazy people to enter politics.

But that’s not today.  Trump panicked the Left.  He triggered the Deep State to pull out all the stops.  They activated all of their bag of tricks; phony prosecutors, phony judges, fake news, FBI goon squads, the COVID voting fraud, basically anything and everything.

So that is what my article is about.  This poll result is what I would call proof that everyone that can be awakened to the truth about our government and politics, has been.  These people are selecting Trump not despite the criminal charges but specifically because of them.  The prosecutions are proof that the system is rigged.  And Trump is our protest vote against this charade.  We are saying, “We see you behind the curtain pulling the strings.  We’re not fooled.  We’re not going to pretend.”

Now this in no way means that we will somehow overcome the regime that runs our country.  They are vicious, powerful and firmly entrenched.  Their actions to eliminate the middle class are proceeding at flank speed.  They have the whip hand and they know it.

But this awakening is a radical shift in the dynamic.  It means that the narrative is dead.  We’re not going to contribute to our own demise.

We’re not going to cheerfully adopt insanities like DEI, transgenderism, endless immigration or climate change as if they were for our own good.  We’re not going to pretend that the endless wars are making us safer.  Appeals to patriotism or legitimacy of rule or even fair play are meaningless.  We have the same relationship to the regime in Washington that the Russians had to the Soviet government.  It was their oppressive master that had to be avoided by any means possible and for which the hope was that eventually it would collapse on its own due to corruption, stupidity and the cumulative effects of the people’s resistance to its rule.

And so, I have the proof I need to unequivocally say something fundamental has changed in the United States.  We are now two different populations with completely separate narratives and diametrically opposed agendas.  The “point of no return” has been reached.  Donald Trump broke down the walls of our stupidity.  We should all thank him for that.

Real Artificial Intelligence

photog Current Events, Literature, OCF, photog's Corner, Poetry

Many people have heard at some point in their educational careers that in 79 A.D. Mount Vesuvius erupted and completely buried the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum that were located at the foot of the volcano.  Vesuvius is located adjacent to the present Italian city Naples.

What most people are unaware of is that during excavations of Herculaneum in 1752 a building was discovered that contained ancient books, or more accurately, papyrus scrolls.  Unfortunately the heat from the lava flow had reduced these scrolls to carbonized lumps.  For the last two hundred years and more scholars have attempted to unroll these carbonized scrolls and read their text.  The painstaking work has only been minimally successful and mostly they’ve managed to find a small amount of text while basically destroying the scrolls.

But now modern medical imaging technology and advanced machine vision and machine learning techniques have combined to produce a possible way to read these ancient books.  Using x-ray tomography images that look through the burned books can help identify layers where ink appears on the papyrus.  Combining this with computer mapping of the ink locations the scroll can be “virtually unrolled” to reveal the text on the ancient remnant.  The proof of concept has now been performed on a small bit of the scan.  The challenge is to do this for the bulk of the document.  It is a daunting task because of the terribly distorted shape of the scrolls.

Now a million dollar prize has been offered for any silicon valley type who is savvy enough to take the scans and turn it into a readable text.

For most people this is meaningless.  Interest in even the books written a few years ago pales in comparison to watching a “TikTok” video of some vapid “influencer” describing her workout routine or grapefruit-papaya diet or other earth-shaking events. These old arcane texts have no bearing on their lives.  And the scrolls currently unearthed are the works of an unimportant Roman philosopher.  But it is believed that the rest of the unexcavated building is the repository of a very large private library that may contain many lost works by the best classical authors of Greece and Rome.  The lost tragedies of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides and the comedies of Aristophanes and lost histories that we currently only know the names of would be immensely interesting to scholars and also people like me who find remarkable relevance in these testaments from thousands of years ago.

So the fact that finally there seems to be some real progress on this project that has gone on for centuries, I find fascinating.  But my skeptical nature also forbids me from allowing unbounded enthusiasm to blind me to the likely outcome; failure.

So I share this with you, my readers, to let you know what I find to be the real progress that “AI” can provide to the world.  Not ChatGPT which just automates the nitwittery found on TikTok but instead the brute force restoration of books that were burned to a crisp by a volcanic eruption almost two thousand years ago.  A computer program guided by state of the art imaging technology plucking lost works from antiquity out of a pile of ashes.  That’s magic.

Superman Updates the Fifth Commandment for the ACLU

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Extremely succinct and simple enough for even the murderous cretins that the Democrats support to follow.  A murdering rapist wants to be made into a eunuch while waiting on death row.  And not getting that demand is an example of cruel and unusual punishment to the ACLU.  Something like this will be used as proof that our civilization committed suicide early in the 21st century.

 

 

Margaritaville

photog Current Events, photog's Corner

In the anti-Christian world that we now live in, the academicians made a noisy point of replacing the Christian temporal markers BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini) that we used to use to define historical dates.  At first, they replaced them with BCE (Before Christian Era) and CE (Christian Era) but still not satisfied with any relationship to Jesus remaining, they repurposed the acronyms into Before Common Era and Common Era.  Well, the enemies of God could be expected to do no less.

But maybe soon we’ll be back to BC and AD.  But the underlying time markers will stand for Before COVID and After the Destruction.  After all, historians of the future will decide that western civilization’s self-immolation reached its climax with the decision to wreck the industrial, commercial and social basis of the western world for the sake of running the COVID play book the way they did.

But in my own humble way I am also embarking on a new epoch.  The divisions will be designated BP and AP, Before Puppy and After Puppy.  In the waning days of the BP era, I have before me a solid week when Camera Girl will still be at my beck and call.  After that I’ll be abandoned to my fate, left to fend for myself and survive on any scraps that the very important canine deigns to leave in her bowl.  I’ll probably lose my spot on the couch and be forced to sleep in the shed or the garage.  I’ll be kept around as a maintenance man or security guard for the estate.  My main employment will probably be sanitation worker armed with a shovel and a pail.  How the mighty hath fallen.

But this week is my last hurrah.  Yesterday the kids and grandkids were over and I incinerated the burgers and dogs and the kids went into the already very cold pool water one last time and played some wiffle ball and shot some pool.  And we all ate too much ice cream and drank too much lemonade one last time before they settled into school.

So now I can relax and enjoy the unseasonably hot weather and rearrange my priorities in preparation for the rest of the year.  And hopefully I come up with an efficient and productive schedule for myself.  It’s badly needed.  I am a disorganized man.

But even if I don’t completely revolutionize my schedule into a perfection of photog-ergic productivity, I intend to finish this week with the satisfaction of having done whatever I do or don’t do on my own terms.  For the next few days, I’m the master of my soul and the captain of my destiny.  Or something that sounds like that.

So, if I end up wasting the time and achieving nothing and leaving myself in an awful spot, I have no one to blame but myself.  And to my mind that is exactly what I want.  I will have clear cause and effect relationship between what I do and what ends up happening to me.    I will have established my own example of free will at work in the world.  A perfect laboratory of volition.  The immovable object (me) meeting the irresistible force (the full catastrophe that is my life).  It’ll be my own damn fault.  What man could ask for more than that?

The Last Page

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I was watching a news clip from ABC News (H/T to the Conservative Treehouse) where that Clinton White House weasel George Stephanopoulos is asking his fellow Democrat sycophants what they made of Donald Trump’s continued dominance in the Republican primary despite four separate criminal indictments.  And frankly they were scared.  The last opinion came from Donna Brazile and she stated that Donald Trump’s hold on his partisans reminded her of the “movements” that followed Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.  And she said, “and anyone who thinks that you can apply the old political rules to try to defeat this candidate based on he’s scary, he’s ugly, whatever you might want to call him, this is a movement. And we have to respect the fact that it’s a movement.”

And I thought to myself, “If someone as stupid and as partisan as Donna Brazile recognizes and admits that Donald Trump is the leader of a huge grassroots movement then it’s obvious that this isn’t business as usual in Washington.  Things are extremely bad there and they are even starting to admit it.  They long ago threw away the rule book and now they just do whatever they can think of to try to put the genie back in the bottle.  Voter fraud, wag the dog wars, biological warfare, printing trillions of dollars to bribe the populace, you name it.  Now they’re using kangaroo courts to jail their political enemies.  But all this has had the unfortunate result of waking up a large chunk of the populace.  And so, the genie can’t go back in the bottle.

But what’s next?

Well, that’s the most beautiful part.  Because the absolute unalloyed truth is that nobody knows the answer to that question.  Nobody.  Not the Deep State or the oligarchs or the CIA or the FBI or Barack Obama or even Donald Trump.  And certainly not Joe Biden.  He barely knows which way the bathroom is.  No one has read the last page of this story.

Nobody knows how all of this will end.  We’re so far out in left field that even the impossible is possible.  Imagine the craziest scenario for where we end up in five years and it could come true.  Anything from a return to 1950s America to an Orwellian nightmare to anything in between is almost equally likely.

So, when the pundits bloviate about how the new world order will be such and such and such, just relax.  They’re making it up.  They have no idea.  They’re like the Second Foundationers in the Asimov story who have figured out the future using their advanced science.  But then the Mule comes along (read Trump here) and the plan blows up.  History always has to reckon with the great man.  If the right man shows up at the right time, he can sweep away the best laid plans and reset the game.

Sure, the powers that be have led us by the noses for generations.  But they got too greedy or they’re stupider than their predecessors or they went to the same well once too often.  And now the rubes are wise to the grift.

Will it turn out well for us?  As I said, it’s impossible to say.  History would tend to say no.  These situations usually lead to tyranny.  But the future is not predetermined.  Random events and factors can set us on a different path.

So, as I said, relax.  Let the game play out and pay attention to who is lying to you and who is telling the truth.  The liars are the enemy.  And the other guys just might be the future.

The Top of the Swing

photog Current Events, OCF, photog's Corner

Tomorrow is the unofficial end of summer.  My family will gather for one last barbecue and the kids will swim in the pool one last time.  Hot dogs and burgers will be cooked on the grill and everyone will talk about what’s coming up in the fall.  We’ll throw around a baseball and swat mosquitoes.  Good stuff.

But the forecast is recording an oddity.  At least it’s odd for this year.  We have a seven-day forecast where the chance of rain is zero.  So now that it’s September and the kids have to retreat to the schoolroom it’s going to be real summer weather with highs in the nineties, something we rarely saw at all in July and August.  Ah, the weather gods!

Well, it’s very ungracious for the kids but a late blast of heat will be welcomed by me.  It won’t revive my vegetable garden or provide new life to the flowering plants but it will provide a backdrop to enjoy the transition to autumn.  And it will give me a chance to do some of the repairs and the preparation for winter.  I can collect up all the yard and lawn equipment and store it away more carefully than I usually do and fix that gate that’s been hanging crooked for a couple of years.  And this year I’ll bed down some of the more sensitive shrubs so they don’t get frost-burned if the snow cover fails again.

So, the late heat wills serve a purpose.  But more than that it will give me a chance to reflect on 2023.  Most people do their thinking in the winter.  The long evenings and the retreat from the outside are conducive to reflection.  But I like late summer.  I like to walk around after the kids are back in school and think about how the world is shifting.  I like to feel the shift in the cycle.  The days are already shorter but the heat of summer is still there and the growth is about to stall.  It’s like we’re at the top of some kind of pendulum swing.  The forward momentum has died and for just a second, we’re suspended in free fall, just hanging there.  In the next moment gravity will pull us down, but just for that moment we can imagine the whole of creation at perfect equilibrium and with no future or past to consider.  The Garden of Eden before the Fall.

And that’s the payoff of the year for me.  If I can have those few golden days at the end, I’m reconciled to the reality of a New England winter.  After all we’ll have Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas to break up the dreariness and I’ll be busy with work and snow removal and chores and I should be busy with writing so the time will pass.  And Camera Girl will have her new puppy to keep her busy.  So, the world will take care of itself.

But for just a short time every year I try to shake loose from the day-to-day thoughts and just try to feel the Earth turning under my feet, try to hear the cicadas running out of sap and watch the mechanical dragonflies winding down to a stop.  At play in the fields of the Lord for at least one more year.