To lock him up and his crackhead son. It’s catchy! A friend passed along this link. I always try to support the arts so I pass it along to all of you.
Category: Current Events
Twitter Cries Out!
Supposedly Elon Musk is going to buy Twitter on Friday. I don’t know if he is. Things seem to go back and forth on the sale so often it’s hard to say for sure. But I was interested in an article that quoted an open letter that some Twitter employees have released. It addresses a rumor that Musk is going to lay off 75% of the employees of the company.
Now that caught my attention. What a marvelous idea! Reducing Twitter’s payroll to two thousand employees sounded like a brilliant way to focus the attention of those remaining employees on doing their jobs instead of practicing social justice.
But apparently not everyone views this situation the same. The employees who wrote this open letter to Musk are not as thrilled as I am. Here are some excerpts:
We, the undersigned Twitter workers, believe the public conversation is in jeopardy.
Elon Musk’s plan to lay off 75% of Twitter workers will hurt Twitter’s ability to serve the public conversation. A threat of this magnitude is reckless, undermines our users’ and customers’ trust in our platform, and is a transparent act of worker intimidation…….
We demand of current and future leadership:
Respect: We demand leadership to respect the platform and the workers who maintain it by committing to preserving the current headcount.
Safety: We demand that leadership does not discriminate against workers on the basis of their race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or political beliefs. We also demand safety for workers on visas, who will be forced to leave the country they work in if they are laid off.
Protection: We demand Elon Musk explicitly commit to preserve our benefits, those both listed in the merger agreement and not (e.g. remote work). We demand leadership to establish and ensure fair severance policies for all workers before and after any change in ownership.
Dignity: We demand transparent, prompt and thoughtful communication around our working conditions. We demand to be treated with dignity, and to not be treated as mere pawns in a game played by billionaires.
You know, that’s a lot of demanding going on there. I have to assume they are speaking from a position of great strength. Otherwise, it might seem that they are painting bullseyes on their backs with respect to the new boss firing them.
Now the interesting thing is that they released this letter but refuse to release the identity of the signatories until some critical mass is reached. My guess is that will be never.
So, what will Musk do? Well, I can’t tell the richest man on Earth what to do. But if I could I’d tell him to change it to 80%. I’m on Twitter and as far as I can tell the algorithms are so rigged in favor of the wokesters that getting rid of almost everybody working there would be an enormous improvement.
I think the real challenge is to find the real bottom number for employment there. After all isn’t the whole point of automation and artificial intelligence that you leverage machines to do the work. Maybe the real number is one thousand or a hundred or even fifty. I think that’s where Elon should invest his time. He should figure out just how small a company is needed to run Twitter and that may tell him whether the whole thing even makes sense at all. Maybe he needs to change the “business model” for Twitter altogether and build in something more useful than just a message board for random humans.
And I think that’s what he intends to do. My guess is he thinks he can do better than Meta, YouTube and even Amazon. Maybe we’re about to find out if he’s right.
NYS Supreme Court Reinstates All Unvaccinated State Employees With Backpay
How sweet is this? Should be a hell of a season for lawsuits. This should be just the start. Shouldn’t be long before all the other states join in and then the military gets into the act and after that the wrongful death suits over vaccine side-effects will be moving along quite nicely.
And just news of this should inject renewed anger into the mid-terms just in time for the New York and Michigan races to let people get some payback for the sadistic lockdowns those two states’ governors perpetrated.
Cuomo’s gone but his henchwoman Hochul is running and of course the evil stepmother of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer is in a dead heat with the Republican challenger. Well it couldn’t happen to a nicer pair of witches this Halloween.
Manifest Destiny
I read recently that globalists have a plan to combine Mexico, America and Canada into a North America Union. I won’t go into why I think such a plan is bad for us. But because of all the talk about unions I had an idea. Let’s conquer Canada.
Not all of Canada. We’ll leave Eastern Canada alone. Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime Provinces don’t seem worth fighting over. They’re filled with people who remind me of New Englanders. We should annex the Western and Northern provinces. And while we’re at it we might as well buy Greenland from Denmark.
Now hear me out. I have a good reason. I hate Justin Trudeau and I think most people in Western Canada hate him too. Well, with the exception of Vancouver but we’ll just rename it North Seattle and fold it into the west coast exclusion zone (California, Oregon and Washington) that will be set up to prevent normal people from wandering in and suffering mental anguish from listening to crazy people.
So, we’ll liberate the good people of Western Canada and immediately begin intensive extraction of fossil fuels, radioactive minerals and anything else that will allow us to restore our civilization to a prosperous state. Meanwhile we can allow Eastern Canada to feel virtuous that they are no longer responsible for the use of evil fossil fuels from underneath their territory and in fact will no longer have enough petroleum to keep themselves warm and will therefore sink back into a neolithic existence where they’ll feel most morally comfortable. At that point the French and the English Canadians can resume their eighteenth-century war on a more equal footing and let the best man win. Hopefully Justin Trudeau will be one of the first victims of that conflict.
Now with all the resources we need for the foreseeable future it would be time to institute the great plan. A Manhattan Project to accomplish something worthwhile. The plan is to resurrect and modernize the industrial base of the United States and thus make us self-sufficient again. And while we’re at it we can figure out the energy resources that will get us through the next thousand years. Things like that are the natural province of scientists, engineers and economists, not hysterical teenage girls, nitwits and pseudoscientists.
But as soon as the conquest of Western Canada is complete it will also be time to begin re-evaluating our relationship with the other nations of the Earth. Our alliances have been fraught with dependence and dysfunction. NATO is a ridiculous sideshow. The first question to be asked is, does Russia have an interest in conquering Belgium? The people in Belgium believe in things that the Russians find repugnant. Their country is a tiny postage stamp that could fit in a suburb of Moscow. Their only exports are overpriced chocolates and bureaucracy for which there is no demand. Europe is putatively one of the richest and most technologically advanced regions on Earth. I think we can leave them to their own devices to defend themselves from their neighbors.
Now China is a threat to Japan and Korea. If we sell some ICBMs to these folks that should shore up the balance of power there and end our responsibility to these countries. And for the rest of the world, I don’t have much interest. Let the Indians and the Russians and the Chinese worry about the Iranians and the Arabs and the Turks. I suppose the Africans will need some help but it can be on a private charity basis. I figure the Australians and the New Zealanders can ask the Brits for nukes if they need them. And we can insist that Mexico and the countries to the south must stop trying to move in with us. We can’t figure out their problems for them. They’re going to have to do that on their own.
So, there’s my whole plan for the world. We can oversee northern North America (most of it) and let the rest of the world figure things out for themselves. Needless to say, we’ll need to have a very capable military and cutting-edge weapons systems to make sure no one is tempted to cause us any trouble. But for the most part we can mind our own business and make the lives of Americans the best they can be.
Maybe when we’ve done a really good job of raising the standard of living of the bulk of our people to middle class then we can think about interfering in other people’s affairs. Until then let’s see if we can get back to post World War II levels first. That would be the bench mark we can shoot for. Take that Trudeau.
The Haunted Election
Election Day this year is the night of the full moon and I just saw the first wolfsbane flowers in my yard.
Even a man who’s pure of heart
and says his prayers by night
may become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms
and the moon is full and bright
The damp cool autumnal weather certainly evokes a Halloween mood in my neighborhood. We have our share of jack o’lanterns festooning the house and the grandkids are already imagining their trick or treat loot. But this year even Election Day has an unreal flavor to it. Outlandish candidates like Fetterman and that creepy old ghoul haunting the White House add an Edgar Allan Poe tinge to even the political page.
Now am I claiming that werewolf John Fetterman will be lopsidedly prowling the woods of Pennsylvania in his stretched out hoodie tearing apart innocent Republican voters in his insane lust to become a United States Senator? Well, read the poem and do the math yourself! I’m going to add a little extra garlic to Camera Girl’s sauce this week and hope for the best.
Easy Does it in the Last Two Weeks
I was talking to the boys at lunchtime today. That’s one of the good things that came out of the whole COVID mess. We set up a Monday Zoom meeting between the guys who I used to take the coffee walk with in the morning. It’s surprisingly normal at this point. There are the usual jokes about keeping our hands visible and wearing pants around the home office for some of us. But it’s good comparing notes with the boys once a week.
I guess it was no surprise that confidence in a good outcome for the elections was pretty high. In fact, it was too high. It was way out of proportion. But we were having a good time. We were comparing notes on our favorite desperate Dem excuse for the bad polls. Mine was when some hairdo in a short dress was asking Pelosi about people rating inflation the top problem. The old bag said that when someone mentions inflation, she immediately stops him and changes the conversation by saying it’s not inflation it’s prices associated with the strong economy that the Democrats produced to save us from COVID. When she was telling this to the “journalist” Pelosi’s face was contorted in some combination of rage and excitement that made me think she was having a stroke. But no such luck.
One of the other guys was laughing about Kari Lake slamming Hillary Clinton for being a 2016 election denier. One of the other guys was talking about a DeSantis/Lake ticket. I put in my two cents. I said I was pretty sure Trump and DeSantis would be the ones sitting down talking about who was going to be what in 2024. And I reminded everyone that there’s at least 10-15% of the electorate that won’t even vote if Trump’s not running in 2024. That quieted them down a bit. And I think that’s about true. Some folks don’t trust anyone else. That’s a pretty important detail.
Now, do I think Trump could pass the torch? Maybe. But I still think it would dilute the enthusiasm for a bunch of his people. And as far as having DeSantis as the Veep I don’t think that would be wasting him at all. I have no doubt he would be doing a good deal of the behind the scenes work to put together the team out of his Florida administration. In fact, I worry that it would do some damage to Florida on that account.
I told them I’d be working at the elections this year and they all wanted to know if I needed assistants. And I asked, “What, to eat donuts and drink coffee?” And they all wanted to know when the dumpsters full of fake ballots show up and I said after midnight was the schedule, I saw for Philadelphia in 2020 and we all got a rueful laugh about that. And then the Zoom ended and we got back to our days.
Yeah, all the bad news for the Dems has been like a whiff of laughing gas. We’re all a little giddy and a little too confident. But this is just the run-up. Two weeks is a very long time. Every day I hear rumors coming out of Ukraine of a false flag dirty bomb by the Ukrainians to justify a NATO incursion and I think to myself that’s just the stupid trick Biden might welcome to distract the voters from the disaster he’s turned the economy into.
So easy does it. Take it all in stride. Don’t get too high or too low. Let’s see what new monstrosity Dopey Joe has in store tomorrow. But smell the coffee, get your own work done, laugh at the dopes in the news as their poll numbers plunge and at least make sure you get your votes in on time. Everything else will develop like a polaroid picture, a little at a time. You just have to be patient.
For Prospective Guest Contributors
For folks out there who are interested in contributing some content and want to know what I think will work best for this site here are some of my thoughts and some information.
- First off it’s not a paid arrangement. Anything that is provided is for free. All I provide is a venue.
- I categorize all the content from each guest contributor separately. If for some reason you decide you’d like to remove all or some of your content from the site I will do so without hesitation. In fact, I’ll e-mail you the data for your own use gladly.
- Approving content is my job. It has to be something that fits the site. Politics from a non-leftist perspective, family friendly culture, Americana, history, religion, military stories, uncontroversial photography, science and technology, energy, hunting and fishing, guns, cars, human interest stories, life stories, movie reviews, tv reviews, music reviews, book reviews and even fiction writing if you have the knack would all be good. In terms of the politics I’m sort of a civic nationalist but dissidents are allowed to voice their opinions but must keep it in the range of polite discussion. Threats and disparagement of any groups you don’t like probably won’t be a good fit for the site.
- Send the content in an e-mail and I can then evaluate it and let you know what I think.
- I have been interested in getting some female contributors to write about child-raising, home schooling, cooking and other family subjects. So far no luck.
- I would prefer the posts to be between 500 and 2000 words. If it’s much less it might be better off as a comment to another post. If it’s much more I’d think about splitting it up.
So I’ll leave this up on the header for those interested. Thanks for your attention. If you need to ask any questions just send an e-mail to orionscoldfire at charter dot net
Best regards
photog
Reinforcing Stupid
Every bad thing that’s happening right now is the result of Democrat stupidity, either direct or indirect. In fact, some of them are the result of cascading stupidity that just keeps ricocheting against other examples of former stupidity lying around. For instance, look at energy costs. The original anti-petroleum executive orders, like cancelling the pipeline and cancelling the exploration leases got the ball rolling and started gas prices soaring. And then for laughs Mushmouth Joe decided he wanted to fight a war against Russia the largest provider of energy to the West. Then just to make doubly sure there was no way to undo the damage, he blew up the Nord Stream pipelines that provide Russian natural gas to Europe. And when he insulted the Saudi foreign minister a year ago, he set himself up for OPEC to kick him while he is down. That’s why they just announced a three million barrel a day reduction in oil output just to make sure prices stay high.
It’s true. No one should underestimate Biden’s talent for hapless destruction. But there could be a silver lining in this whole situation. The grownups won’t be able to fix any of the stuff Biden has mucked up for a pretty long time. He’s still got over two years to destroy our economy. That might be long enough for the people who believe in green energy to get a real good look at what life in a green economy is actually like.
The people in Texas got a taste of it last year when the grid failed because of dependence on wind turbines that froze up. There’s nothing scarier than losing power in a real winter storm when you don’t have your own generator and emergency fuel. Sitting in the dark with no heat and no water is a bad feeling. And if it becomes a recurring thing it will disrupt your life. So much so that you’ll go out and install an expensive generator just to get back to a sense of normalcy.
Now imagine if you’re a greenie and you’ve always felt that gasoline and oil and natural gas are the devil’s own brew. But then imagine if it turns out that your very own gas-powered generator is the only thing saving you from misery. You might start to get confused about where your priorities were with respect to this whole climate thing.
And the first time one of those cute little electric cars gets stuck in a snow storm and runs out of charge on the road and has to be recharged by a gas-powered generator that a gas-powered truck had to haul out to do the job maybe the Gaia worshipper who gets stuck might start to put the dots together and realize he could just skip a step and buy a gas-powered car.
Of course, these are feeble hopes. Gaia worship is a cult that seemed to get started in fifth grade when the proselytizing starts. Really the only hope is that most of these people will need to freeze to death in a sudden storm that takes out the power and leaves them inside their well-insulated walls as the temperature reaches minus twenty. Hopefully they’ll be too eco-pure to ask to stay with their climate denier neighbor with the 25-kW generator and large oil tank. After all you just can’t virtue signal too much when you’re an eco-warrior.
Kudos to Sundance for Featuring Neil Oliver Again
Sundance over at The Conservative Treehouse has been recovering from the hurricane in Florida that blew through his town. It’s nice to see that he has resumed what appears to be full activity.
And it’s good to see that Neil Oliver has responded to the recent meltdown at 11 Downing St in London with passionate enthusiastic scorn for our elites and their endless plans to permanently subjugate us. Boy, I wish I could talk like him. He’s quite eloquent. And often inspiring. Not often you hear a conservative quoting Mike Tyson. But it’s apt.
Neil Oliver, Every Elite Has a Plan Until They Get Punched in the Face by The People
The Rallying Cry of 2024 – Defund the Deep State
Let’s face it, the political activism in 2022 is a purely defensive crouch. Taking back the House and Senate are the equivalent of bringing your arms and hands over your face while you’re on the ground being pummeled. It’s hardly a 4D chess move. But if we’re ever going to accomplish anything against the Leviathan in DC, we will need to starve it out.
I think the first step is to cap all federal salaries at $54,132 which is the median US salary and freeze hiring except at the discretion of the President. Then start punishing the Deep State swamp creatures by making their lives much less fun. Move the State Department to Baltimore and the FBI to St. Louis and reassign the sensitive jobs to direct appointees of the President. Then reduce and simplify the income tax so it can be done with sixth grader math and convert 90% of the employees of the IRS into public restroom attendants in the high crime districts of America.
So even this guerilla warfare against the Deep State would be just the warning shots. Whole agencies will have to be reinvented. The FBI and the CIA have to be defanged. In addition to repealing the Patriot Act and the FISA Courts all of the bad actors that staged the coup against Trump must be removed from positions of authority and put in charge of counting paper clips and shredding paper. And the new work that is determined to be valuable will be given to people who won’t have the power to attack the American people again. Those powers will be removed from the jobs.
Another priority is to legislate the venue for trials against federal employees to be in areas that don’t house large bureaucracies. The spectacle of John Durham’s prosecutions all being acquitted proves just what kind of justice you can expect in Washington DC.
Now let’s think of what some of the consequences of this kind of change will be. First of all, it will impoverish the Greater Washington DC area. How great is that? Rents and property values will collapse. Hobo jungles will spring up in Georgetown and Chevy Chase. PBS documentarians will be able to interview people like Antony Blinken and Merrick Garland as they huddle around a trash fire cooking their mulligan stew and hear disoriented stories about how they used to be somebody. And DC will revert to a slightly warmer Newark, New Jersey.
I understand that there are many priorities that vie for a place among what needs to be done to save this country from the disaster that is overtaking us. But directly attacking and taking the food out of the mouths of truly dangerous people like the deranged bureaucrats that torture us on a daily basis should be right at the top of that list. In the long run finally getting the budget under control will require paring down the federal bureaucracy so we might as well get some fun out of it too.
And defunding the Deep State does not mean we should neglect to prosecute the bad actors who’ve done so much harm in the last few years. I just think it will be easier and more effective if we first remove them from power. Once you’re only earning a third of what you once were you have bigger problems than promulgating new laws on pronouns. Instead, they’ll be concentrating on making that huge mortgage payment. That’s the time to drag them into court to answer for their past sins.
Now the problem with all this is that legislators have a very cozy relationship with the bureaucrats. Attacking them is tantamount to betrayal. That is why the influx of outsiders like Marjorie Taylor Greene is such a great thing. These people aren’t beholden to the Deep State. The problem is they’re a handful in a sea of insiders. This is why I almost despair of how much still has to be done. But there’s no reason not to define the problem. And that’s why I still bang this drum. Carthago delenda est.


