Category: Current Events

17SEP2022 – OCF Update – This’N’That

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Busy day.  Had lots of yard work to get ready for the end of warm weather.  I even cut the grass today.  I didn’t notice how long the grass had grown on account of all that rain.  Man, what a mess the clippings made.  But soon enough all that will be done with.   It was nice to get out and look around the fields.  There were tons of honey bees on the goldenrod.  Now that I’ve renewed my interest in keeping bees, I was looking at the varieties of bees that were on the flowers.  And I noticed they were almost exclusively Italian bees.  These are a southern bee and they don’t fare well in cold winter areas.  But they’re the kind of bees that people get when they buy a package of bees from one of the big breeders down south.  So most likely these bees aren’t feral bees but some beekeeper’s hive.

Funny, I got a little annoyed that someone was encroaching on my goldenrod.  What the what!  The only advantage of the Italian bees is their mild tempers.  They’re the least likely race of bees to sting you even if you’re in their nest messing around with the frames full of honey and brood.  So, knowing there are a lot of apiary hives around me was a little bit of a downer.  I’m hoping to catch a swarm next spring.  But if there are a lot of apiary hives in the area chances are that the swarm will come from one of them.  That means the bees will be southern bees and most probably also bees that have been living under a regimen of chemicals to ward off varroa mites and other plagues.  I won’t be using those chemicals so the bees will have to depend on their natural robustness to survive.  But since they’ve been dosed with various chemicals, they may be quite weak.

That makes me think that I may as well purchase a bee package from a breeder who keeps northern bees under a natural beekeeping regimen.  I know there are several breeders in Vermont who have this type of bee.  I’ve read about these northern bees.  They’re known either as Russian bees or dark bees.  They are extremely cold hardy and are specialized to collecting a large amount of nectar in order to survive the long cold northern winter.  Of course, that might mean a very long drive back and forth to Northern Vermont.  That’s a hike.  It’s possible they’ll mail the bees but maybe not.  Anyway, interesting things to think about today.

While I was working on the garden, I saw both grasshoppers and katydids that were so worn out that I was able to go up to them and pick them up by the wing covers.

Even the few butterflies I saw, some fritillaries and painted ladies, were flying very slowly.  And they were much less skittish than normally when I approached them while they fed.  Of vertebrates, there were some turkeys in the yard, a few small frogs and a vole that shot out of the garden and headed into the blueberry bushes when I approached.  I managed to get some shots of the turkeys as they noticed me and retreated into the forest.

Then I walked over by the swamp.  It was looking very beat up.

But this time of the year has its charms.  A good day out in the air.

Michael Anton Gives a Speech About the Deep State

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This is about a half hour long and it goes over a lot of territory that we’re all pretty familiar with but I found it pretty clearly spoken.  At the end he spends about five minutes talking about what should be done about the debacle that is the Deep State.  He says the CIA should be eliminated.  He thinks some of its functions should be handed over to the State Department and the Department of Defense.  And other functions like toppling banana republics should be eliminated.  He thinks the FBI has to be purged of all the bad actors and the FISA courts have to be eliminated.  He even questions whether we need the FBI at all.

Personally, I don’t think he goes nearly far enough.  Eliminating the CIA and the FBI is not enough.  What has to be reformed is the doctrine that prevents the President from firing everyone who obstructs him from carrying out any activity that is lawful under the Constitution.  Essentially the whole Justice Department conspired to prevent a legitimately elected President of the United States from carrying out the duties that he was elected to perform.  A new law needs to be written that clearly states that regardless of the qualifications of the bureaucrats in some executive branch agency if the duly elected President of the United States tells them to do something that he is not forbidden to do under the Constitution (which is just about anything) they have to do it or be immediately fired and prosecuted if they cause harm by their inaction.

The way I see it half of the FBI should already be in prison for their various crimes against the people of this country.  That they’re not is an indictment of the system that we currently live under.  The rule of law at the federal level is a charade.  Two systems exist.  One for us and another for them.  So Anton is bringing this situation up.  But for most people who visit this site it’s old news.  But he does describe it eloquently.

Surviving the Great Contraction

photog Current Events, Reclaiming the Family

What has been going on for the last thirty years has been explained to us as the off-shoring of manufacturing by the global capitalists to take advantage of cheap Asian labor.  And maybe that’s actually how it all started.  But what is now called the Great Reset is a much more ambitious agenda.  What is going on now is an elimination of the middle class in Western Society.  The wealthy and their chosen cadre in the managerial class will leverage automation and the offshoring of manufacturing to eliminate the vast majority of middle-class occupations.  This in turn will deprive young men of the wherewithal to marry and raise families.  And within two generations that will eliminate the majority of the descendants of the greatest generation.  What will be left will be the elites and the immigrants who will cut their grass and babysit their kids.

Now, this is not a prediction.  We’re already halfway through the first generation.  The Millennials are childless for the most part and living as Uber drivers and Starbucks baristas.  Once the same treatment is administered to the Zoomers we’ll be left with the Elites and the immigrants, legal and illegal, to clean toilets in hotels and wait tables in all those exotic restaurants that Cloud People like to eat in.  But the American population that fought the World Wars and built the modern world will be gone.  Curtain falls.

So that’s the plan.  The trick is to keep your descendants from joining the extinction.  One path is to join the Elite.  All you have to do is allow yourself to be subsumed into the Hive.  You must mouth all the right platitudes and denounce your ancestors and pay lip service to the Woke agenda and send your kids to the correct schools.  And grovel.  Basically, you have to learn to love Big Brother.  So, if you can lick the boots of the Elites, they’ll allow you to exist at the lowest rung of their world.  The question mark is whether that will permit your children the same dispensation.  I think the answer is probably not.  If for no other reason, there are very few seats available in the elite colleges and most of those are already reserved for “not you.”  Also, if you do bootlick your way into the Elites your kids will be exposed to so much propaganda that unless they’re equally “in the know” about the madness being preached at them they may be brainwashed into believing that it’s their duty to roll over and die for Gaia.

The other path is to harden your kids and grandkids against the Great Reset.  You’ll have to explain to them that America is no longer the land of opportunity.  They’re going to have to swim against the current and through hard work and perseverance they’ll have to do everything they can to avoid the fate that the Elites have engineered for them.  You’ll have to counter program them to want to get married and raise a family.  Maybe you’ll have to help them get started in small businesses.  You’ll have to provide support, both financial and psychological to make this path seem possible and desirable.  It’s a tall order.

I know what I’m saying sounds bizarre.  But it’s demonstrably true.  This is what the Millennials have experienced.  And it’s not going to get better.  It’s going to get even worse.  And even if some things start to turn around, which is far from certain, a lot of the damage is already done.  At this point we have to try to salvage as much of the younger generations as we can.

This is bad news.  But it has to be accepted and acted on.  The alternative is extinction.

CFPM in Action

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Here at the Compound, in the soggy land of endless wet, our water comes from a well.  And in between that well and my alimentary canal is a large capacity sediment filter with a nominal 25-micron rating.  And when they say nominal, they mean that’s a make-believe number your supposed to take with a grain of salt (which would also pass right through it).

This filter comes with a filter life rating of six months.  Now in as much as I’m an engineer who has a very intimate relationship with filters from reverse osmosis pore size that can restrict the passage of atom sized particles up to bag filters that stop more or less nothing, I feel qualified and even privileged to insert my own factor onto this rating.  And the factor I used turns out to be twelve.  It was about six years ago that I installed the last edition of this handy household protective device.

I know, I know, I’m a monster.  I’m endangering my plumbing, my heating system, the well pump and the very fabric of space-time in the general vicinity of the Compound.  Fine, guilty as charged.  But look at it from my point of view.  I’m terminally lazy and keeping track of all the stuff I’m supposed to care about is just too much.  My system of maintenance is called the catastrophic failure panic method or CFPM for short.  Under this nifty protocol I more or less let things run on their own until catastrophic failure or the fear thereof concentrates my attention on some terrifying effect, like flood, fire or downed power lines crackling and buzzing like a giant nest of angry hornets.

I won’t claim that this lifestyle choice doesn’t have some difficulties.  It’s definitely expensive in the long run.  But it goes hand in hand with my belief that I live a charmed existence.  Somehow, I’ve managed to sidestep the consequences of my negligence and laziness pretty much entirely.  Sure, I have to pay a lot of money to fix the things I neglect but not worrying about all the things I should be taking care of and concentrating on the things that interest me has meant that life is a wonderful adventure with just enough excitement (or fear) to keep it interesting.

Take this filter thing as an example.  I remember about three years ago Camera Girl said to me that the clear plastic filter housing looked really gross.  Now gross is her layman’s term for filled with silt and rust.  And she may have thought that I ignored her warning.  But she couldn’t have been more wrong.  Her words were recorded and analyzed by my subconscious and became a part of the enormous algorithm that is my brain’s response to the great big wide wonderful world that I imagine surrounds me.

And at precisely the right time I remembered that filter and so about a week ago I looked at that filter and was repulsed at how gross it looked and some other part of my brain measured the pressure drop that the water system was experiencing coming from the well to my faucet (well indirectly, actually I was noting the lower flow rates I’ve been seeing lately).  And my fear of catastrophically destroying the well pump triggered CFPM action and I bought the new filter and installed it today.

The system works!

You might think, “What the hell is wrong with this guy?”  Many laymen confuse the CFPM with complete imbecility.  But there’s nothing complete about it all.  After all I brush my teeth every day and that’s annoying so I definitely have my limits.  But this whole thing has made me think I should change my factor from twelve to two.  After all, an annual event would tie it into the celestial cycle and trigger my interest in all things occult.  Just as the Druids sacrificed captives at the Autumnal Equinox (okay maybe I made that up) so I could celebrate the changing of the filter as a sacrifice to the great gods of pressure drop; Moody, Fanning, Darcy and Reynolds.

Well, it’s been a taxing day.  I ‘m going to go relax before tackling the last episode of “The Terminal List.”  Camera Girl’s initial reservations about the show have evaporated due to her love of cinematic blood-thirsty violence.  But this brush with disaster has made me more thoughtful.  Maybe I should take a look at that gage on the propane tanks.  I’d hate to run out of fuel for the generator this winter.  Ahhh, there’s plenty of time.  I’ll just make a mental note.

Nuclear Power is Coming Back

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Even that animated haircut Gavin Newsom realizes that shutting down the nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon would get him bounced out of his job as governor of the stupidest state in the union.

He’s put the closure on hold until 2030 when he’ll be safely out of politics and doing harm in some other capacity.

And this same realization is coming to all the other geniuses who thought windmills and solar panels could replace the gigawatts of power we currently use to fuel a modern civilization.

“Across the United States, according to the fifth annual ecoAmerica survey, support for nuclear energy has risen to 60% (up from Gallup-reported 51% in 2015. Business Wire says support for nuclear has never been higher, though the survey also reported a majority still harbor fears about nuclear solid waste disposal, health and safety, security and weaponization, and cost.”

And overseas other nations are changing their minds about nuclear power.

” The British – who are even calling for fracking and renewed oil and gas exploration and development in the North Sea – are bullish on nuclear energy today despite plans to close five of its eight old reactors. France, Japan, China, India, Finland and Hungary are also building new nuclear plants, and Poland, Romania, and the Czech Republic want to go nuclear.”

Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Austria have still maintained their pledges to shut down their existing nuclear plants but even the Germans with their dominant Green movement, are probably starting to wonder if reality will allow them to do this in the face of the loss of Russian natural gas.

The hippies dealt the US nuclear industry a seemingly lethal wound after Three Mile Island.  But now the hippies are in nursing homes and maybe their just as stupid children may be forced to decide which they hate more fossil fuels or nuclear power.  They’re going to have to choose one.  Tilting at windmills won’t keep the lights on.

Waiting for Significance

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You may have noticed I haven’t had many political posts in the last few days.  I scan the headlines every day.  After all, railing against the outrage of the day is sort of my schtick.  But for the last few days all I see is “same old, same old.”  The FBI raids Trump associates.  Political polls from Left and Right claim advantage for their side in the mid-terms.  Economic indicators and business events reinforce that we’re in a recession and statements from politicians on both sides confirm that we hate each other’s guts.  You, see?  Same old, same old.

There have been some stories about CNN firing some frothing at the mouth Trump-haters.  That I consider newsworthy.  That’s something different going on.  So that’s an example of the kind of thing I’m looking for.  New developments.  News!  When I see a story about someone on the Left waking up to the anti-freedom excesses of the current regime, I think that is newsworthy.  Anytime I see some establishment type waking up to the reality of what our government has become that’s sort of newsworthy.

But outrage for the sake of having something to say is becoming boring and even painful to write.  We all know it’s bad.  Only the brain dead could miss the fact that things are awful.  Only the hopelessly clueless don’t see where the awfulness emanates from.  Only a Democrat flak can listen to a Joe Biden speech and pretend that what he is saying resembles reality.

But what I write has to have some freshness, some life to it.  Even for me it can’t just reiterate the same old thing.  So, you may see some days when my post will be a review of a movie or a book.  Or it may be about something else I’m interested in like photography or beekeeping or some aspect of science and technology.

And this is all to the good.  Just banging the same old drum doesn’t really accomplish anything except wear out the reader’s patience.  There are always plenty of things going on in the world and there are even the beginnings of alternative cultural and social organizations doing things in the world.  These will give us things to talk about.

So don’t be alarmed if I haven’t ranted in a week or so.  It’s simply that there’s nothing new worth saying about life in Oceania.  I can’t record every last word and deed of Big Brother.  I may have to say I love him but I can’t claim he isn’t boring as all hell.

Another Anniversary of a Very Sad Day

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Time passes and perspective changes.  The horror of that day fades and what remains is the damage that was done in the name of protecting the country from danger.  The overarching result was the surveillance state which as we’ve seen doesn’t protect us from foreign threats but instead is a weapon against Americans.  The Patriot Act and all the other measures that have been put in place to monitor our every word, action and even thought is a monstrous law that has changed the very nature of our relationship to our government.  It is literally 1984’s Ministry of Love.  It combines complete surveillance of the citizenry with unlimited power to punish of anyone who objects to it.  And now with the capture of the internet through proxies like Google and Facebook we have the Ministry of Truth instituted too.  Free speech is seen to be non-existent as any attempts to contradict the Ministry of Truth’s pronouncements are erased from the network.

Looking back to where we were twenty-one years ago, we can see that we have lost our freedoms and gained nothing of security.  It was all a lie.  The only question is can we undo what has been done.  There are two mechanisms.  If we had a majority in Congress and a President who both wanted to repeal the Patriot Act it could be done.  Currently even if the Republicans controlled the Congress there are too many Senators who work for the military industrial complex and would never dream of curtailing its power.  The other way it could be done would be to have the Supreme Court find the Patriot Act unconstitutional.  That would work.  I wonder if the Justice Department and the other parts of the Security State would just ignore the Supreme Court and just continue on with their abuses of power.  It might only serve to prove that we are no longer living under a constitutional government but under a junta instead.

September Eleventh highlights that our government relies on the good will of the people running it to keep it honest.  What is plain to see is that Obama and his regime completely corrupted the security apparatus and now that they’ve gotten a taste for unlimited power, they have no intention of backing away from it.

It will take a concerted effort by all branches of the government; President, Congress and Supreme Court to undo the damage that has been inflicted on our freedoms by the Patriot Act and the other surveillance and control methods.  The problem is how do we reach a national consensus to build up that concerted effort?  So many Americans benefit from the current regime.  They’ve been bought off with money and programs that allow them to coast along.

So that brings us to the possibility that it’s already too late to undo the harm.  If that’s the case then the present regime will have to go through the evolution that all diseased states experience.  The discrepancies between reality and the narrative that the government enforces will eventually lead to massive dysfunction.  And without a feedback mechanism to correct these problems the whole titanic structure of the bureaucracy will crumble under its own weight.  It took seventy years for the Soviet Empire to suffer this kind of catastrophic failure.  Maybe the American Empire will take another hundred years.  Or maybe it’s already starting to tear itself apart.  A case could be made for either scenario.

But what I’ve decided is that the 2022 election is the test case for me.  The disastrous consequences of the Left’s agenda are on full display.  If this does not provide enough impetus to the American electorate to throw out the Democrats, en masse, then nothing ever will.  What we’ll end up with is the situation in Massachusetts where the excesses of the hyper-progressive left are balanced off every eight or twelve years with some squishy Republican who pumps out the water from the sinking ship of state and restores some semblance of sanity until the next spasm of progressive insanity sweeps in another madman who proceeds to sink the ship again.

So, I’m looking for signs that people have had enough.  I can see some hope in places like Florida and Texas where Democrat voters are switching sides.  But so far these are isolated cases.  We’ll need to see it spreading to places like Wisconsin, Nevada and Pennsylvania.  So far, the polls are inconclusive.    But it’s less than two months until we’ll know.

A sad day.

Choose Carefully

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Each of us has his own “world.”  It’s made up of all the connections we use throughout our day.  We’re connected to our families by each word we pass, every facial expression we use to communicate.  After that the average man is connected to the world by his phone.  It is the nexus for all the calls, texts, e-mails, YouTube videos, news items, tweets, Amazon purchases, Google searches and on and on and on.  After that we have the relationships we have with our job, with the various government entities and the various corporations that we employ to provide us with goods and services to live our lives as consumers.  All of these connections give us a sense of being connected and grounded to the world around us.

But lately more and more of these connections have started to have a disorienting effect.  The head of the United States, Joseph Biden just gave a speech that declared, specifically that people like you and me are dangerous extremists intent on destroying the United States.  And a while ago the top health expert in the federal government told us that unless we shut down our country and hid in our homes wearing masks over our faces, we would all die of a horrible disease.  And around the same time, we were told that mobs of rioters looting and burning down the commercial districts of our largest cities were completely within their rights to do exactly that.  But if anyone tried to resist them with a weapon that would be prosecuted vigorously by law enforcement as assault.

If you read the news and especially if you read the mainstream media you might begin to believe that the whole world has gone insane and that we’ll be headed for a new dark age any day now.  Without a doubt, the people running much of western civilization have lost touch with reality and are trying to push the world in an unhealthy direction.  I won’t go through the whole litany but looking at some of the worst aspects; green energy initiatives, defund the police and transgender affirming treatments for minors, we can see that dangerous ideas have been mainstreamed by people with great power.

All of this can make it seem like there’s no place to turn for a breath of sanity.  Part of the reason it feels so dire is that for most of our lives we never had to worry about most of these institutions becoming unhinged.  Most of the United States was remarkably well run.  And even the bureaucracies, although they might be incompetent, uncaring or inefficient were never working to destroy us.  Now we can see they are.  And in addition, private companies have jumped on board the project to speed up our destruction.  Once you internalize that perspective it becomes easier to deal with the problems.

Once you change your point of view and assume that none of these organizations is necessarily on your side, it frees you up to begin evaluating your environment dispassionately and systematically.  This goes for all of the relationships you have.  From top down you can start with your country, state and town.  And from bottom up you can look at where you buy your coffee, what news you read and where you spend your entertainment dollar.  Each of these is a choice.  And granted, good options are hard to find in a lot of categories.  But that doesn’t excuse us from at least looking at the options and choosing the least bad choice.  And if you put in the work, you might be surprised at the good options you never knew existed.

Some of them are easy.  Looking at movies and tv just read the reviews and you can pretty easily find out what sounds like woke propaganda.  Another tactic is to buy local.  Small stores are more expensive than megastores.  But if you know for a fact that the owner is one of us then that’s got to sweeten the deal quite a lot and might put a small premium in price in perspective.  And get involved in your local community.  That can pay enormous dividends and will make you more aware of problems that may be coming your way.  And finally, it extends all the way up to deciding what state or even country you should live in.  It may seem extreme to contemplate such a huge change.  But if you look at it dispassionately, it might be the best move you’ll ever make.

08SEP2022 – OCF Update – This’N’That

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So, I finally bit the bullet and began post-processing my Yellowstone Trip photos.  I’m surprised at how many nice wildflower shots I got.  I know, I know.  Wapiti and bison and bears, oh my.

But the landscape and flora stuff are good too.  Many of the flowers are very different from the vegetation in the northeast.

And some of the wildflowers are the cousins of perennials that we plant like lupines and monkshood.  It adds another dimension to the trip.  I’ll probably spend the winter looking up the flowers to identify them and then do a post on my favorites.

With the grandkids already back in school Camera Girl is not as insanely busy as usual so I told her we needed to find a new tv series to watch.  I had heard that the “Terminal List” with Chris Pratt was pretty good so we watched the first episode last night.  Well, Camera Girl told me there’s too much killing.    Since Jack Reacher is one of her favorite fictional characters, I found this very surprising.  It turns out that when civilians are the victims, she processes the killings differently.  So, we’re going to watch the second episode tonight.  I suspect she’ll be more comfortable with the violence when it’s just bad guys getting offed.

And at last, it stopped raining.  So, we got out for a walk in the forest.  And the lake has almost reached back up to the spillway height.  The sun was warm but we could feel that the summer heat is waning.  The afternoon shadows are already hiding half the fields from the sun and the butterflies and dragonflies are on their last legs.  But just as a last gasp of summer Camera Girl found a Spicebush Swallowtail Butterfly caterpillar.

I set it up in a net cage with some sassafras leaves and it almost immediately metamorphosed into a chrysalis.

Well, that’s another natural history project for Princess Sack of Potatoes.  I’ve got to hand it to Camera Girl she has sharp eyes.

I was thinking today, it’s almost beyond belief to think that Joe Biden could actually be President of the United States.  I mean he’s a congenital liar, a dimwit and a sexual deviant.  The only answer that makes sense is that we’ve gotten way stupider as a country.  Or possibly we really have reached that tipping point where more than half the country is being bribed by a something for nothing program.  Then again maybe it’s a combination.  Maybe if you add up all the dimwits and all the loafers it’s 51%.

Well, whatever it is, it’s damn discouraging.  I mean he’s such a sleazy crook, that it’s embarrassing to be associated with a constituency that would have him.  I wonder if a good campaign against him in 2022 and 2024 could appeal to people’s sense of shame at allowing such a pathetic loser to be their leader.  What could be the slogan?  How about, “Joe’s a moron.  If you vote for him, you’re a moron too.”  Or maybe, “What grown man showers with his twelve-year-old daughter?  What kind of man raises a son who has sex with his dead brother’s widow?  What kind of man sniffs the hair of women and girls during a White House ceremony?  Is Joe Biden President of the United States or Caligula?  Anyway, it’s a thought.

Well, now that the rain has stopped, I can get some more of the outside projects finished.  Soon we’ll be putting all the yard equipment indoors for the winter.  And Camera Girl has started putting up the Halloween decorations.  I thought it was a little early but she says Princess Sack of Potatoes really likes scary stuff.  I can’t argue with that.  I guess it’s time to bust out the Universal Monster Movies.  Well, there are some consolations to the end of summer.

Tend Your Own Garden

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What is my thesis today?  Well, I’m having trouble encapsulating it in one phrase.  That’s usually thought to be the result of fuzzy thinking.  And fuzzy thinking is what I seem to do best.  The topic is a mixture of ideas about how to most effectively invest time in the current environment.  After all, if we will always be living under Big Brother’s dark shadow then we must know how to avoid his attention but still wring the most joy out of life.

It seems to me that what is most critical is raising up the young to avoid the destructive effects of the culture.  They need to be helped along to find jobs and start families while negotiating all the barriers that the Left throws in their path.

Now this is an enormous challenge.  Schools, and industry hamper the progress of young men trying to start careers.  And all the outlets of the media and other purveyors of the “culture” poison the minds of young women against a normal life as wives and mothers.  Counteracting these things is a herculean task.  But it is the most worthwhile work there is to do.

Part of it might be to move to a state (or country) where the influences are less pernicious and where opportunities for work exist.  But just as important is to keep your ears and eyes open and recognize when the young people are running into problems.  Be ready to provide advice, and more importantly, money and other resources when they’re needed.  Maybe a contact for finding a job or help with watching children might be needed.  Whatever it is don’t shut your eyes to the problems that the younger generation is facing.  Regardless of the financial challenges we faced in our youth it’s a much greater problem that exists today when the whole weight of the government, private industry and the culture is arrayed against young people trying to live a normal life.

But the good news is that concentrating on that aspect of life means you can de-emphasize all the other nonsense.  Men in sundresses, cities being burned down, the breakdown of law and order, a demented young woman shrieking about global warming and old women demanding abortion up until the moment of birth.  All of these things are symptoms of young people being corrupted by the schools and the culture.  Concentrate on preventing that and giving the young a head-start in their lives and you’ll be doing the most you can do to eliminate these other sicknesses.

Plus accomplishing something concrete for real people, people you care about, is much more rewarding than fighting rhetorical battles in cyberspace.  I see this in my own life.  Agonizing over poll numbers and opining on the latest leftist outrage saps your energy and leaves you drained.  Whereas getting involved with some family project or hearing what’s up with the young people is incredibly energizing.  Even when there are problems you find yourself thinking about the problems and looking for ways to help.  Helping people you like in real life is much more fun than battling psychopaths on-line.

So then what is my thesis?  I guess it’s sort of, “Think globally, act locally.”  Gee, that sounds kind of hackneyed.  I better come up with something more clever.  Well whatever I come up with, it’ll be the title when you read this.