Geometric.
surface of a diamond seen through a microscope pic.twitter.com/zIgV1wdVH8
— microscopic images. (@microscopicture) August 22, 2023
Category: Current Events
22AUG2023 – Scenes from a Family Gathering
Driving from a rural area toward a megalopolis is almost always a frustrating experience. The closer you get to the heart of darkness, the worse the traffic becomes and the more likely it is that you will accidentally cross the event horizon and be sucked in, never to break free of the bumper-to-bumper traffic of the black hole collapse. Or so it seems to me.
By comparison driving in the reverse direction, away from the beast, feels like a continuously increasing sense of relief as the road and the entrances become less and less congested and the craziest of the homicidal drivers are left behind or at least no longer have the traffic density needed to ensure maximum mayhem.
Now all of that was true yesterday as I arrived and departed from the party that I travelled to. But despite the tension of defying the human density gradient around the suburbs of Gotham City I was sorry that the party couldn’t have been extended indefinitely.
Everything about the gathering was congenial. It was almost the entire family. And that’s no mean feat. We are many and we are scattered much more than in the past. And Sunday is a tough day for travelling. Saturday being the optimal day to allow for recovery before work resumes.
And everyone there was splendidly sociable. The talk was the usual mixture of family events, politics, current events and reminiscing about crazier things and planning for crazier things. And I learned things that I had never known about people I know very well. And I saw what the youngest generation is starting to look like when they socialize. And despite all the dire warnings and predictions they seemed quite healthy and normal.
Of course, food is always a highly important component of one of these shindigs and the hostess was extremely wise in her choices and provisioning. There were several completely different themes with respect to the menu and there was never any danger of running out of the favorites which is always comforting. I will admit that I no longer make the impact on the buffet table that I used to. And that is necessary. I wouldn’t have survived my former exploits as a trencherman. But I still grazed high and low and tried a bit of everything. Wonderful.
But the highlight is when the old bulls stagger into a corner, collapse into a circle of chairs and start pontificating about what’s wrong with the world and what we should do about it. And eventually we come to agreement that things are going to go to hell no matter what we say or do and then we come to agreement that at least the world has us in it to make it a world worth living in. Now this was what I remember when the old bulls were my father’s and my grandfather’s generations laying down the law and telling us what was wrong with my generation. And now, heaven help me, I’m at my grandfather’s age and making my last speeches before shuffling off the stage permanently. What a strange thing time is.
And just in time the cake and coffee are served and we lapse into a warm glow of caffeine and pastry ingredients. And all too soon it’s time to go. We need to leave before it’s too late to make the drive back. But of course, there is at least a half hour of goodbyes, to each and every one. Back slapping and hugs and hand shakes for one and all and then last-minute details remembered and plans for the next gathering. And then we’re on the road and headed home. But the glow from the party is still with us. We talk about what we’ve heard and seen. We talk about those who couldn’t make it and those who are gone. But it’s all a happy feeling. A good feeling.
The country and the world have gone straight to hell. There’s no denying it. But good things still exist. And the best of those things is family, is the humanness of family. The ties that bind and the hope for a future and the precious, priceless treasure of the young in our midst.
The world is not all ruin and depravity. There is hope. And I can see it when we get together.
20AUG2023 – The Last Gasp of Summer 2023
Camera Girl and I journey today to the southernmost border of New England where the smoldering ashes of what was once Gotham City color the horizon with a somber palette. But we will be celebrating family and life and all that stuff. This week will be Camera Girl’s greatest challenge. She will be besieged by teeming hordes of berserk descendants desperately trying to fend off thoughts of the impending school year.
It will take all her powers to occupy these desperate young’uns and divert their attention from the impending horror. Of course it will really help if somehow we can avoid torrential rains for the week. That will provide us with so many more options for activities than being stuck in the house with the boob tube and my feeble wits.
But once the week is complete, it really will be fall. And it’s been a very strange summer. So much rain and so little sun has destroyed the vegetable garden. Other than some tomatoes and what looks to be a decent crop of eggplants it has been a disaster. I think we’ve gotten one zucchini and so far no butternut squash. And while we’ve gotten a few red razzberries from the plants I put in last year and the plants have increased and spread, I can hardly say they have been a success yet.
And as far as the blueberries, whereas I managed to get a few handfuls of berries last year, this year the birds perfected their technique of picking the fruit precisely before I myself judged them ripe enough to eat. And it was a bumper crop. I guess if I’m really serious about eating any of this fruit I’ll have to start using netting over the plants. Who am I kidding? I’m too lazy to do that.
And likewise, the rain put a serious dent into the flowers in the yard. The butterfly bush died back to the ground because of the lack of snow cover during the coldest part of the winter. It sprouted from the roots eventually but was a mere shadow of its size and bloomed very late. And many other plants were late and stunted. The only pleasant surprise was the Inula helenium (elecampane) that I put in last year. The stalks were seven feet tall and there were plenty of bright yellow flowers.
Also there were very few butterflies this year. Probably the sparse snow cover again. Well, complaining won’t do any good so best to just move on. I’ll just chalk it up to experience and hope that this year we get more snow. Wait, more snow? What am I saying? Oh well.
So fall in Dunwich is a busy time for me. We’ll be pretending to re-elect First Selectman Cthulhu which is always a painful process involving the loss of several bureaucrats in his entourage when he becomes aggravated and therefore hungry. My part in the process is also, let us say, delicate. I’m required by tradition and statute to second the motion for his unanimous re-election by acclaim. If I hesitate by more than a split second after the original motion is exclaimed my fate will be sealed. Therefore I have perfected the “echo method.” As the motion is being spoken I echo the words coming out of his mouth almost simultaneously. It sort of sounds like that scene in the movie “Pride of the Yankees” where Gary Cooper is saying, “But today … today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.” And so I can keep each word going just that little time extra needed to detect the last word and begin my sentence without any noticeable pause. Actually quite ingenious. It’s quite remarkable what fear can do for your IQ.
Well, it’s time to get going. The sun is shining and nothing has burned down or exploded in the news yet so I can wish everyone a nice day with at least the hope that it’s possible. Adios amigos.
Updates
Bigus Macus
It was down in the mid-sixties with low humidity this morning in Hampton Roads. It will be hotter tomorrow, but I’m ready for Autumn to start. I’m getting the fireplace cleaned and inspected this week and I need to cover the firewood for the start of the season.
TomD
Meanwhile, down here in the Florida Panhandle, fall hasn’t yet appeared on the distant horizon as we’re looking at a white hot week: in the 100’s with saturating humidity. It has been like this for a month, there is a big and stable high pressure system camped out in the middle of the country.
What we need is a tropical storm to come through and bust this weather stasis up. A similar pattern seems common in late summer and will just stay until pushed out by a big system.
Unlike California, tropical storms are common enough down here as to not overly upset us.
A few years ago, I decided to see what it would be like to ride my road bike (bicycle) in a tropical storm (wind only at that time). At one place where there’s about a 100’+ 5% grade hill to climb, the wind was pushing me up the hill at over 20 mph.
Panem Et Circenses
“I recollect, when I was lamenting to the Doctor the misfortunes of the American war, and exclaimed, “If we go on at this rate, the nation must be ruined; he answered, “Be assured, my young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.””
(Sir John Sinclair, 1st Baronet)
In 1776 England was among the greatest nations on Earth. And this in multiple measures. Financially, economically, scientifically, militarily, geographically, even culturally it was a power to be reckoned with. So, when Adam Smith opined that even defeat in the American War of Independence wouldn’t topple Great Britain, he was correct. And history has many examples of great powers sustaining a terrible loss and recovering.
But history is also full of great nations abandoning the practices that made them great and falling into ruin. And although the fall may be gradual, nevertheless, the ruin is assured by the reversal inherent in the loss of so important a characteristic. There may be a great deal of ruin in a nation but once the well-being of the citizens is no longer the driving force behind its government that ruin is assured and the greater the nation the more dramatic the fall.
And as in so many discussions of the American republic we always seem to come back to Rome as the exemplar of a republic that began as a wildly successful partnership between the common people and the elites and ended up as a tyrannical oligarchy where most citizens were impoverished serfs who were essentially slaves to the rich landowners.
Of course, it took about five hundred years for this change to destroy Rome but it is patently obvious that it was the freedom of the Roman citizens in their heyday that made the Roman legion the most fearsome fighting force of the ancient world. They were fighting for their small farms and families. These were things worth fighting and dying for. But by the fifth century A.D. your average Roman commoner didn’t own anything and wouldn’t care whether he was ruled by a Frank, a Visigoth, a Hun or a Roman emperor. So why would he fight to maintain the empire? He wouldn’t. And so, it fell.
What about us? How do we end up? Well, currently the globalists have been announcing that in the future “you won’t own anything and you’ll like it.” That sounds an awful lot like bread and circuses to me. We’re creating a state that has no patriotic aspect to it. Now whether such a state can exist in the current international environment is an open question. But I would say that the idea that such a country could be a militarily dominant state doesn’t seem likely. I think that will be on display going forward. Currently, the American nuclear arsenal acts as a powerful deterrent against the great powers attacking the country. But the idea of using the threat of nuclear annihilation to coerce Hungary or Afghanistan into celebrating gay pride seems kind of absurd. So, we can conclude that our influence around the world will diminish along with the diminution of our military and economic power.
So, what will we look like going forward? Probably like an updated version of England. We’ll be the former hegemon slowly muscled out of all the territories we used to dominate. And we already see it. Asia and Africa are already going their own ways. Then the Americas and finally Europe. Who knows? The day could come when even Canada starts kicking sand in our face. That would be the bottom.
There is nothing certain about the arc of our historical relevance as a great power. The elites that currently embrace all of the madness that is leading us to ruin could wake up tomorrow and decide that, “Wait a minute, a closed border and resurgent industrial policy is exactly what the Democratic party has always stood for. And weren’t Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis magnanimous in defeat and shouldn’t we let bygones be bygones? And what the hell is going on in the cities with criminals running amok? Law and order is the Democrat way.” Hell, they wouldn’t even have to let Donald Trump out of prison. They’d claim he had been the woke problem all along. After all we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
They could do this because the underlying motivation is their own self-interest. If the globalist project suddenly founders then it will be all aboard the new American century with red, white and blue bunting and hip, hip hooray for our boys. We can even expect another attack on the “homeland” at some point. But as the Roman elites eventually discovered slaves don’t make very convincing legionnaires. And I think we may be past the point where American troops will dominate the world stage. So even if there is a pivot to sanity, we won’t again approach what we were in 1941 or even 2001. Americans just aren’t going to buy into it again. We’re just another declining empire with puppet masters pulling the strings and the serfs trying to avoid the consequences of the next reflexive spasm of the great dying beast.
And so, as I said earlier, there may be a great deal of ruin in a nation but once the well-being of the citizens is no longer the driving force behind its government that ruin is assured and the greater the nation the more dramatic the fall. And depending on the surrounding circumstances the fall isn’t necessarily slow. Keep your eye on the exits.
There Are Limits
So, after spending the last few days eating fried foods and being pummeled by my descendants in Monopoly and other blood sports, I am finally resurfacing to catch my breath, look around at the state of the world, such as it is, and make a few rude comments.
I notice that the “news” consists of various Republican candidates for president speaking out in outrage about, well, everything. And all of it is pretty predictable. The only one I found amusing was Chris Christie. Currently standing at a whopping 2.7% in the Real Clear Politics average, Christie will tell anyone who’ll listen, which tends to be MSNBC or CNN, that Trump is frightened to death of him.
Now I could imagine that there are things that Donald Trump is frightened by. Being railroaded by a DC jury in one of the kangaroo courts he’s being tried in could be one of them. Seeing another election stolen from him by the crooks in Philadelphia and Atlanta is probably another. But the only thing about Chris Christie that inspires fear is being stuck in an elevator with him and plummeting to your death because of weight capacity issues. In what sense is Chris Christie considered a Republican? At best, he’s a liberal Democrat. Maybe fiscally he’s somewhat moderate, somewhat, but in no way a conservative. And didn’t Trump pummel Christie along with the rest of the seven dwarfs back in 2016?
Then there’s the RNC threatening to keep Donald Trump out of the debates if he won’t take the pledge to support the winner of the Republican presidential primary. I mean, who are they kidding? The various polls have Trump with somewhere between fifty and sixty percent of the vote right now. The only way Trump loses the primary is if the RNC rigs the rules to prevent him from appearing on the ballot. And if they do that, I’ll bet thirty to forty percent of Republican voters stay home on election day.
Nah, they’ll let him in the debates and they’ll let him win the primaries and the nomination. This thing has a life of its own at this point. A big chunk of the population knows we’re being scammed and they want this thing to play out to the last drop of poison. After all, it’s not everyday you get to watch the “shining city on a hill” become a bona fide banana republic with the honest to goodness flim-flam man installed as president and with his bagman in plain view. And then they’ll jail the political opposition. Even the Perons in Argentina would have blushed at that agenda.
Yes, I think at this point we’re all along for the ride and we want to see it through. I guess what we’re expecting is that once the Republicans lose 2024 that the parts of the country where the Democrats are minorities will start taking direct action to make their states as independent of the federal government as possible.
At least that’s what I’m expecting. I want someone like DeSantis or Abbott or both to go on Tucker Carlson’s show or some other platform and say officially that Republicans have been shut out of Washington DC permanently and it’s time to find another way to prevent us from being treated as serfs by the oligarchs.
Until then we’ll just be waiting around with Republican senators and congressmen and presidential candidates making silly statements about how they’re going to drain the swamp and fire the Deep State and get Washington back to doing the people’s work.
And I’m hopeful that it might happen. After all, Biden has had three years to wreck this country and he’s done an amazing job of it. The carnage is staggering. Even Jimmy Carter didn’t do this thorough a job of crippling the United States. So, if after all that, the election is declared in favor of that walking corpse then only a moron would still think that the election results reflect reality.
Well, anyway, that’s what reading the news stories today got me thinking about. We all still have to do our best to keep the wheels from falling off the bus and we all still have to make the doughnuts but at least none of us has to believe that Donald Trump is afraid of Chris Christie. There are limits.
The Portly Politico Provides a Primer on the Southerner’s Viewpoint
Richard Weaver was a mid century American who wrote about the South and its culture. In this post Tyler provides a sample of Weaver’s writing on the difference between Northern and Southern “tolerance.”
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.
The entertainment industry hates normal people. People who read their Bibles, have traditional values, and care about things like hard work and honesty. Their response to Oliver Anthony's song shows us this.
From ep. 1204: https://t.co/6bhpPJXbQy pic.twitter.com/BicP2lLNCu
— The Matt Walsh Show (@MattWalshShow) August 14, 2023
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.
So, the World Bank tried to coerce Uganda into accepting homosexuality by threatening to cancel certain loan guarantees. Uganda's president refused. https://t.co/rDCEwWmDDj
— orionscoldfire (@orionscoldfire) August 14, 2023
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.