All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
Huzzah! I emerge from my captivity under the evil duress of my blasphemous Dunwichian overlords. I must attend to my neglected chores early this morning but I will provide content with renewed vigor a little later today.
Rejoice faithful readers, photog is unbound. Or unbalanced. It’s one or the other. Or both.
The partisan divide that has attended the upcoming Witch Burning Referendum has ripped away the illusion of civility and civic spirit here in Dunwich. The latest flashpoint has been a state commission’s report that witch burning as currently practiced, falls afoul of Arkham’s stringent state greenhouse gas emissions standards. The review has declared that from now on witches will have to be burned using solar power.
An opinion solicited by the First Selectman from the leading solar energy researcher at Miskatonic University, Professor Nehemiah Scrimshaw was obtained by this newspaper and a few of his conclusions were:
Parenthetically, the professor remarked that since the mass of the magnifying device would be approximately a hundred times the mass of the Earth the actual means by which the device would be manufactured and tethered to Dunwich was unachievable using current human science and engineering. But he did say it posed an interesting thought experiment for his current graduate students.
We tried to reach First Selectman Cthulhu for comment but the reporter we sent has gone missing. Our eye in the sky OCF traffic copter was able to spot the First Selectman as he bee-lined for the state capital in Arkham. Based on the debris field in his wake it is estimated that not much will remain of the state house or most of the downtown area of Arkham. But it seems this will put to rest the question of state environmental permitting and also state government in general for that matter.
It is worth noting that the anti-witch burning party has within the hour disbanded its headquarters, erased its Facebook and Twitter pages and from what we can tell left town heading south at a good clip. And in fact, there was a goodly caravan of pro-witch citizens joining them. The Town Clerk’s office has described the results of the referendum (which was supposed to occur tomorrow) as completed, audited and certified to have been unanimous to extend witch burning to 24/7/365. And the other selectmen have hurriedly and unanimously passed an appropriation for fifty tons of the first Selectman’s favorite bath salts.
At press time it was noted that on his return from the state capital the First Selectman detoured to pass through the campus of Miskatonic University and it is now believed that Professor Scrimshaw has retired from active teaching and also, sadly, from breathing. But he’ll always be remembered for his remarkable lack of a sense of self preservation.
Six months into his tenure as “head twit” Musk says:
“Elon Musk said Twitter Inc. has a shot at being cash-flow positive next quarter, and he is optimistic about the company’s future after what he called a difficult past few months.
“I definitely don’t want to count chickens before they hatch,” he added Tuesday about his latest expectations for the company’s financial situation.
Mr. Musk, who acquired Twitter and took over as its chief executive in October, said the company would have gone bankrupt in four months if he hadn’t taken steps to rein in the company’s expenditures. … He also said Twitter faces around $1.5 billion in yearly interest payments on debt borrowed when he took the company private.”
The article says Twitter went from 8,000 employees to less than 2,000. So he eliminated more that 75% of his employees and now it works better and cheaper than before. You’ve got to ask if most of those 6,000+ salaries were worse than useless. How many of them were making Twitter worse.
I’m curious exactly how many were former intelligence agency employees whose real job was spying on the public.
Well, however he did it I commend him for the start he’s made and his future steps to make the company profitable and useful to the general public. And now that I’m a dues paying blue check twit I say let’s get OCF the viral status it so richly deserves.
Well done Elon.
So apparently FISA needs to be renewed by the end of the year. Here is Sundance’s take on this renewal effort:
“I will openly campaign against any politician or candidate who does not fully endorse the elimination of FISA 702 Authorization in sum and total. I don’t care who the candidate is, or what his/her political affiliation might be.
I am sick and tired of having to construct communication systems, to engage in ordinary conversation and/or communication, knowing the biggest challenge is to construct the system to defend ordinary people against unconstitutional searches and seizures. Ironically, this includes the very commenting system you are using to share any opinion of this outline. This domestic surveillance system just needs to be stopped.”
He’s right. It should be instructive to see which “conservatives” in Congress go along with the people intent on renewing FISA. FISA has been used to spy on and persecute anyone the Left doesn’t like. Those supporting this aren’t patriots. They’re Stalinists. Judge them by their actions.
BEWARE, Here Comes the Intel Community Laying Groundwork for FISA 702 Renewal
Work, work. Work, work, work. As stated earlier this week will be very busy. But not as bad as previously imagined. Today was surprisingly reasonable. Good.
CPAC established that Donald Trump is still the primary candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. It’s not clear to me how Ron DeSantis and the GOP establishment will deal with that. And honestly, I don’t much care. As the Z-Man likes to say the Democrats have “fortified democracy” in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Michigan. It probably won’t allow for Republicans to win in those states anymore. Or at least not until cannibalism breaks out pretty convincingly in those places.
The other stuff in the news is relatively tame. Bakhmut is about to fall in Ukraine but the billions keep flowing to Zelenskyyyyyyyyy and company. East Palestine Ohio has disappeared from the headlines but Mayor Pete will now be dressed as the construction worker instead of the policeman whenever YMCA is played during pride month. Mumbles Biden is no longer even trying to fashion coherent sentences or even use actual words. His utterances look like the gibberish that science fiction writers used to make their alien creatures spew. Long strings of zees and exes intermingled with random vowel sounds. You know; izzichthizzzzexxxx zeep seep eeeee! It’s funny. I think every single Democrat president has been worse than his predecessor since all the way to Jimmy Carter.
But with Biden we’ve somehow taken a horrible giant step change to something much worse. We now have a president that is so repellant in all his aspects that you begin to wonder if it will be possible to surpass or even equal him in awfulness. I was thinking of Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg and after review I think Biden has either of them beat. Sure, Kamala is stupider than Joe but for all of the horrible things she had to do to get to where she is, she can’t compare to the depravity and dishonesty that Joe just radiates. And the same goes for Mayor Pete. Sure, Pete’s a pathetic excuse for a man. But Joe is just plain loathsome. Just look at what he’s done to his son and daughter. He belongs in the asylum where they keep people like Hannibal Lecter. Even Lecter would ask to be moved to a better cell if Joe were his neighbor.
I don’t know. Maybe there is someone even more horrible waiting in the wings. Is Caligula about to be reincarnated? Could Rasputin have survived the various assassination attempts and somehow survived to end up in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue just to outdo Biden? Well, I guess we’ll have to wait and find out.
But all of this is just misdirected anger. It is America that is broken. Regardless of whether we blame the evil party or the stupid party or both, we must confess that our political system doesn’t work anymore. It’s been gamed. We are owned by the public servants who run the intelligence agencies and the Congress. And they are on the payroll of the corporations that cash in on the various government contracts, programs and monopolies. The weapons manufacturers, the drug companies and the tech companies work hand in hand with the regulators, the federal agencies and the Congress to keep the gravy train going and us under their heels.
Sure, this is probably how it’s been for the last century but things have accelerated. Running the United States isn’t enough anymore. They want the whole planet. And to make that work we aren’t needed. In fact, we won’t be tolerated. We’re in the way and they know what to do about that. We’re going to be downsized out of existence. And not slowly. Active measures are being taken and they don’t even have to pretend it’s not so. Accuse them of trying to get rid of the middle class and they just shrug their shoulders and say, “So?”
And maybe they can get away with all of this. Most of the people in the limelight don’t seem particularly smart or strong. But maybe the people really calling the shots are. Maybe they’ll win because they are smarter than us. And if they succeed in dominating China and Russia then maybe their system will overshadow the planet. What a thought; rainbow flags as far as the eye can see and transgender armies goose stepping in front of the Kremlin.
But just accepting all this seems weak. I think it’s worth resisting. Wouldn’t it be great to find out that they really aren’t that smart! Maybe it’s just the stupid party helping them win. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll find some smart people on our side. Okay, that’s enough for a Monday in hell week. We return you to the horror show already in progress.
This week will be extremely busy here in Dunwich. It’s time for the annual zombie roundup. We herd the zombies into the common and cut them in half at the waist. This makes them much slower but grosser looking. And it provides a sort of spring barbecue for First Selectman Cthulhu. He calls it drumstick week.
But it’s a tricky operation and will keep me busy for the whole week. I’ll do my best to provide content but there are bound to be gaps. We’ll see if there are any big things going on in the world. But I’ll be busy enough even if it’s a boring week for the rest of the world.
Well gotta make the drumsticks.
I’m stalling. There’s about three inches of dripping wet snow on my driveway and probably another couple of inches of the same that will be falling until tonight. I should be out there right now shoveling it. Not snow blowing. It won’t work on it. The machine is leaving the bottom inch and that will turn into an ice layer if I try it. So, shoveling it must be. But doing it twice is just too much for my lazy nature. So, I’m stalling.
I was gonna exercise but I convinced myself shoveling was more than enough of that. I read all the news. Oh, my aching head. Blather and more blather. I’m so tired of it all. I’m even more tired of the talkers on our side. And I’m most tired of listening to me!
So, I listened to some music. Some country, some opera, some old folk music. All kinds of stuff. That cheered me up. That was good stuff. It got me out of my funk.
There’s just been too much bad news lately. Local stuff. Like that girl beaten up on the school bus and those elementary school kids in Ohio who were brutalized by the black kids forcing them to pledge allegiance to BLM. Nightmarish stuff. And that synched up with Scott Adams’ statements about anti-white hate.
So, I was going to write a cautionary piece about schools and homeschooling and Florida’s new laws protecting school kids from CRT and LGBTQ grooming and all that crap but I’m too tired of listening to myself drone on. By now parents should be figuring out their options and doing something about it.
Today I want to talk about living. We get one life. These buggers are trying to take that away from us. Well, instead live it to the hilt. Cut a swath through this world. Leave your mark. Leave a trail of people who remember you and when they think of you, they smile. Think back on the people you’ve come in contact with in your life. Which ones are vivid and alive in your memory? They were the people who put something of themselves into their day-to-day interactions. Even if you were something as stultifyingly boring as a telemarketer selling children’s books if you put some of your personality into the pitch and some honesty about what you were doing you could turn this dehumanizing rote sales chore into a human interaction that both parties might look back on fondly.
I know this to be the case. Back in the good old days when I was between careers and schools I once had three different jobs going. On the day shift I was sorting stock certificates at a Wall Street brokerage house. On the night shift I was a telemarketer selling anything we were asked to sell; kids’ books, tv commercial gadgets, whatever. And on the third shift I was a proofreader at a law firm in the World Trade Center. To say that I was in a twilight existence would be putting it mildly. Depending on which day of the week it was I might be having my main meal at 6pm or 1am or 9 am. It was pretty insane. Luckily, I eventually got a full-time gig at a brokerage house.
But when I was doing the telemarketing, I was in a big boiler room operation and you could hear the salesmen all around you saying the same lines you had on your own script. And it was fascinating to hear the differences between the pitchmen. And what you could tell was that the people who approached it as a human interaction in which their actual personality was present had better success. And they seemed happier when we had our break time in the cafeteria. Now there were exceptions. There was this one guy who was a veritable machine. He never took no for an answer. His hard sell was frightening. I had it from one of the quality guys that “the machine” had been involved in a complaint where the script said, “We think (fill in the blank) is eight years old. Is that right?” and the mother answered, “Bobby died last year.” And the script handled such an eventuality with the answer, “I’m very sorry for your loss. I’m sorry to have disturbed you.” “The machine’s” answer was, “Tell me ma’am, do you have any other children that might be interested in these books?”
Now “the machine” was a great salesman but I think the auto dialer that he was connected to probably had more soul than he did. But on the other side of my cube was a middle-aged woman who didn’t use the hard sell and probably only got through 40% of the numbers “the machine” got through but her sell rate was much higher and she smiled and talked like a human being during the meal break. Now which of those two people can I remember as having an actual face and voice. “The machine” is just a droning noise and all I can remember of his appearance is that he shuffled along staring at the floor.
The sales lady was an old woman (to the kid I was) but with a pleasant voice and smiling face and someone willing to help the newbies with advice on doing their jobs and navigating the system at that office. She was a human being with a personality and took the time to make her surroundings better for the people around her. And so almost forty years later she still lives in my memory as a living being. “The machine” is just a cartoon character and a cautionary tale.
So that’s the point. A human being is an enormously powerful creature. But in order to bring that power to bear you have to find a way to leverage your talents and use them for good. That’s the trick. You have to find a way to bring your humanity to bear. And it seems like the world is making that harder and harder. But that’s what you have to do. Look at your environment and figure out how you can make the biggest impact for good. You don’t have to be a politician or a super genius or even an authority figure. Just find something useful and do it right. And treat people like they deserved to be treated. Some of them will turn out to be awful. But give everyone the benefit of the doubt to start with. Later on, you can bring out the brass knuckles. That’s my thought.
Well, that’s enough stalling. Out with the shovel. Oh, my aching back.
The Atlantic had an article called “Big Cities Are Ungovernable.” The writer’s thesis is basically that crime cannot be controlled by the mayors running these cities.
“But more than anything else, crime is weighing mayors down.”
Well at least he admits that. Some lefty journalists are still claiming there is no crime problem. The fact that Lori Lightfoot is being kicked to the curb after one term is almost solely because there is an epidemic of violent crime surging through Chicago.
“Crime is not, despite what some politicians might want you to believe, a uniquely urban problem. When violent crime surged around the nation starting in summer 2020, it surged in rural areas, too.
Notice the claim that it’s not just the cities being afflicted. The dishonesty of this is typical. The same criminals who have taken over the cities are now expanding into the suburbs and exurbs to compensate for the flight by businesses from these same cities. But it’s not the cities’ policies that are at fault. It must be someone else who is responsible. It must be Trump’s fault!
“Like presidents who are punished or rewarded for the performance of an economy over which they have little control, mayors don’t have that many levers to control public safety, yet voters will punish whoever is in charge as they search for improvement. The rise in violence was a nationwide trend, underscoring the minimal effect of municipal policies on keeping residents safe. COVID, which seems connected to some of the crime increase, was nationwide too.”
More lying. Mayors have no control over crime! We’re suppose to forget when and why all this began. The Democrat mayors and governors forced their police departments to stand down while the George Floyd rioters sacked and burned the downtown areas of almost all the major cities under their jurisdiction. This dimwit even manages to blame COVID for the surge in crime.
“A mayor can try to hire more police officers or reform the department, but that’s slow. She can seek new leaders, but Chicago, for example, has churned through police superintendents recently to little effect. … A mayor can try to address root causes through economic development, but that, too, is slow and subject to larger trends.”
And here is the final dishonesty, There’s no quick solution to the problem. Adding police or hiring new police leaders is slow and won’t result in a rapid decrease in crime. Blah, blah, blah. These lies are absurd. Reestablishing law and order is as simple as telling the police officers that they are allowed to do their jobs again. Firing Soros elected prosecutors, reestablishing police qualified immunity from prosecution and announcing all this to the general public would result in an enormous change in the amount of crime going on in the cities.
Now, granted, the prisons would be filled to capacity very quickly. Many criminals are morons and before they have a chance of adjusting to the new reality, they will be swept up in the new police activity. So new prisons will be needed. But that’s a good thing. Taking homicidal maniacs off the streets should be job one for any law enforcement department.
But this article wasn’t written for you or me. It was written for Democrat residents of these cities currently plagued by rampaging criminals. They’re being told that the criminals looting and assaulting them indiscriminately on the streets of these benighted metropolises really aren’t the fault of the mayors. No, it’s just unavoidable bad luck. Some mysterious force, possibly Trumpian in origin, is responsible for their cities being overrun by criminals of mostly one ethnic identity and that the mayors are completely blameless and helpless in its onslaught.
Based on Lori Lightfoot’s recent electoral ouster even Democrats don’t believe this jazz. High profile Democrats have to make the correct noises in public, like the writer of this fantasy piece. But all but the most totally brain-washed remember the Summer of George Floyd and the Democrats’ total surrender of their urban constituents to the fury of the rampaging but mostly peaceful arsonists, looters and thugs.
We’re three years into this new normal. The cities are changed in a way that cannot be ignored or explained by arguments like those provided by the writer of this present piece. To fix things the Democrat voters will have to admit defeat and give control over the levers of government power to people who will make law and order a priority. Republicans.
Frankly we’re not there yet. It still must get significantly worse. Possibly when the Lord Humongous first takes to the air waves and declares himself the supreme overlord of New York City and orders the first human sacrifices at City Hall then maybe even the Democrats will admit they’re in over their heads.
Personally, I’d like it to go on for another two or three years. I’ve always thought of cannibalism as the correct metric by which to judge where we are in terms of civilizational collapse. Until you can openly get human meat at the local butcher shop, we aren’t even close to hitting bottom. So, I try to exhibit patience. We’re not there yet. But we’re getting there.
Back on Monday the 27th of February I found a link in my mailbox to Curtis Yarvin’s substack, the Gray Mirror, with his latest post. It was a critique of Ron DeSantis’s efforts to replace the woke management of a small state college in Florida (called prosaically, New College of Florida) by replacing the board of trustees with conservatives. DeSantis put Chris Rufo and some other conservatives on the board and told them to excise the cancer of wokeism.
Yarvin tells a parable about how a drunken man chops down the mighty oak that shades the town square in some mythical Lithuanian town and the townspeople decide to replant the rootless trunk. But the wise man goes and scoops up acorns and plants them around the fallen tree’s stump.
Further on Yarvin explains that DeSantis and Rufo trying to reform Florida colleges is the town trying to replant a dead tree in the ground.
“The fallacy of replanting the tree is to believe that the past is something we can just have back. It isn’t. We can be inspired by the past. We can want a beautiful oak tree in our town square. But we live in the present and we have no oak tree, just raw lumber. We can build the future under the inspiration of the past—but it is not the past. And we have to be patient enough to wait for it, or we are just losers. Press F to pay regrets.”
But the wise man (according to Yarvin) is anyone who tries to build a new culture from the ground up by supporting coffeehouse artists in New York City that somehow aren’t woke.
“Do you want to win? Or do you want to wring your hands? Where did wokeness start? Among the cool kids. In the Village arts scene. To hear the story the world will be telling itself in 50 years, always listen to New York now. The future always starts at the center and at the top.”
So that’s one side. Today I read a rebuttal by Rufo. He calls Yarvin’s take “right-wing doomerism.”
“Yavin’s basic theme is that the progressive-managerial state, or Cathedral, is so powerful, that any action to challenge it will end up reinforcing its power. This is right-wing doomerism—if the beast is all-powerful, better to adopt the position of a prey animal and do nothing.
But I’m more optimistic than this. The takeover of New College has already changed the dynamics in higher education. We have a strong new president who has a mandate to change the administrative and academic trajectory of the institution. You’ll see changes in the next 120 days.
…
I believe in an uncompromising new conservatism that attempts to restore the authority of the people over their government—and lay waste to woke institutional capture. The Republic is not yet dead. We have a duty to do whatever we can to save it.
I’m ready to fight—and win.”
Okay, so there is definitely a lot of rah-rah stuff here. Rufo is cheerleading the efforts his people are making in Florida and anticipating victories and gains that won’t happen for years, or maybe decades.
But, so what? The progressives worked at this poison for over a hundred years. They worked away diligently and steadily. And the results have been astonishing. Horrifying, yes, but astonishing. So why should we expect that our results won’t be slow and incremental. As TomD said back a week ago or so in a comment “One step at a time is how we collectively got here and hopefully how we will get out.”
Sure, in my more pessimistic moments I fear that Yarvin is right. The Elites control everything and they have all the money. We can’t possibly win. But then I think, “Then what have we got to lose by trying to win?” So, I’ll take Rufo’s side in this cordial quarrel.
He’s making his play. Let him finish it before we start declaring him the loser. I hear DeSantis plans to roll out the same idea at other Florida state colleges. They’re talking about eliminating things like gender studies and DEI and even affirmative action. For all I know DeSantis is the next Pericles and Florida is the Athens of the new world. It’s certainly no stranger than the original Athens having happened.
How in the world do you get the Plato, Aristotle and Thucydides from a bunch of bronze age barbarians like the Dorians toppling Aegean civilization and celebrating it in epic poetry? Truly, the Afghanis aren’t that far removed in culture and lifestyle from the 9th century Dorian invaders. Predicting the Parthenon from them seems a bloody miracle.
Maybe we’ll get a miracle too. Our enemies aren’t geniuses they’re just better organized and better funded. There is such a thing as luck. And luck rewards persistence and intelligence. It’s like the old saying, “God helps those who help themselves.” If you’re just willing to lay down and die then you’ve already decided your fate. Luck isn’t going to pull you off the ground, put your sword back in your hand and strike down your enemy. You’ve got to try. So, let’s give DeSantis and Rufo the benefit of the doubt and all the help we can think of. Let’s cheer them on and provide all the rah-rah we can muster.
If DeSantis can turn around the Florida state colleges it’ll make guys like Abbott in Texas envious and might start a movement to clean up all the Red-State state-colleges. And after that maybe it’ll spread to the grammar and high schools. See what I mean? Rah-rah is easy. And it’s cheap. What’s a few electrons rattling around in my computer?
Anyway, I’ll bet on DeSantis and Rufo in this quarrel. Right wing doomerism just isn’t my cup of tea.
I came to answer your question “What is wrong with the Oscars”?
(Although I agree with the rant about crappy movies.)
1) Too long. If you can’t get it done in 2 hours – don’t do it. People have lives, they need to get up in the morning.
2) Too woke. Stop awarding movies no one is ever going to watch just because they are woke.
3) Too much self preening. Take your award. Thank you mama, high school drama coach and your spouse – then get off the stage. We don’t want to hear about your current pet project. (Unless you are funny. Humor is welcome. Brevity or levity.)
4) Get rid of the damn politics. The country is just about evenly divided. No matter what you say, you will piss off half the country. Stop it!
This shouldn’t be news to anyone. And the fact that the Oscars (and every other award show) keeps on doing these things is just a giant middle finger to the audience.
We get it. You don’t care about us. Understood. Message received. Loud and clear.
So stop asking why we don’t watch your silly little award show. You know why.