Category: Current Events

Celebrating the Fourth of July as an Act of Defiance

photog Current Events , ,

I didn’t celebrate Pride Month.  I didn’t celebrate Juneteenth.  I didn’t celebrate Black History Month or Women’s History Month or any other history month.  I did celebrate Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, Columbus Day, Washington’s Birthday and all the holidays we had back in the good old days.  And I will be celebrating the Fourth of July.

The Fourth of July commemorates the War of Independence and the Founding Fathers’ courage and wisdom in creating a new nation and providing it with an enlightened Constitution that provided the framework for living a free life.

Nowadays those Founding Fathers and their Constitution are targets for hate and derision by the Left and anyone else who buys into their whole George Floyd/Black Lives Matter/anti-white campaign.  To them the Fourth of July is just a reminder of all the injustice and racism they claim is inherent in America and its history.

Well. good.  Let them disown the Fourth categorically and absolutely.  Let them reject anyone who celebrates it as a deplorable enemy of all they stand for.  That suits me right down to my toes.  It makes my enjoyment of the fireworks and the barbecues and the parades that much the sweeter.

Tomorrow my grandchildren will be riding on wagon covered in July 4th posters and other artwork of their design in a parade.  The wagon will be pulled by a tractor that their father and uncle will be driving.  And when they get to the town common, they’ll listen to music, speeches, poems and other patriotic thoughts that were written centuries ago by Jefferson, Paine and Henry.  And I’ll stand on the side of the street and wave to them and applaud their efforts and afterward we’ll celebrate with some more hot dogs and hamburgers and watermelon.

And tomorrow night we’ll watch the local fireworks displays.  They won’t be anything too spectacular.  They’re not a patch on the ones I used to watch in New York City when I was young.  Those were spectacular.  But these are just as important.  Maybe more so.  They represent the local enthusiasm and will to celebrate the things that we believe in.  This is us saying we are the United States of America.  Anyone who says that this is a racist and evil country is not an American.

He is a parasite growing at the expense of his host.  Eventually he hopes to kill off his host and replace him.  Right now, we haven’t managed to find the drug that will kill this parasite.  So, we have to suffer the symptoms.  But we definitely don’t have to pretend that this creature is part of the body.  We don’t have to cooperate with its destructive activities or treat it as a friend.  Its only goal is our destruction and our only goal is to cut off its blood supply and poison it.

Well, all that is not the result of eating some hamburgers and shooting off some fireworks.  But those are the things that give children the message that this is a country worth defending from those who would take away our freedoms and prosperity and replace them with poverty and dependency.  So that makes celebrating the Fourth of July a worthwhile and strengthening endeavor.  And based on the current propaganda it is also transgressive and defiant.  It’s a thumb in the eye of the Biden administration and its “new world order.”  After all what do parades, fireworks and barbecues have in common?  Well, they all add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.  Chew on that Dementia Joe.

Partisan Point of View

photog Current Events ,

Today was a classic, perfect July day.  Sunny, high 80’s, 5-10 mph breeze, wonderful.  We had the younger grandchildren over to swim in the pool along with their mothers.  Camera Girl and I presided over the jubilant aquatic marauders and after the swimming and lunch I played a spirited game of billiards with the older of the two boys.  And maybe saying it was billiards is stretching the definition.  A purist would have noted a number of scratches that weren’t penalized.  But to me every game of pool is a chance to bond with the younger generation and discuss semi-elastic Newtonian physics in an enjoyable venue.

But after the kids left for home, I managed to read some of the news.  There was an article by a Leftist in a leftist magazine that I thought captured the delusional aspect of the progressive viewpoint.

Apparently, the Supreme Court recognizing that the Constitution doesn’t bless abortion and leaving it to the voters of each state to decide if they’ll sanction it, is madness.  So, actual democracy is beyond the pale.  Alito wanting to allowing the voters and their representatives to decide on abortion is equivalent to Robespierre unleashing Madame Guillotine on the unsuspecting populace.

 

I’ve selected some of my favorite quotes from this masterpiece:

“Similarly, when asked on a conference call with reporters this week what Biden could be doing differently to respond to the ruling, Sarah Lipton-Lubet, the executive director of the Take Back the Court Action Fund, a group advocating for expanding the Supreme Court, told me he should “stop treating the Supreme Court like it’s some untouchable panel of demigods. This Court is brazenly political, and we have to stop pretending otherwise.” That sentiment among Democrats escalated further today, when the Court capped its term by hobbling the federal government’s ability to regulate the carbon emissions that cause climate change.”

“As concerned as many Democrats are about Biden’s advanced age and his diminished approval ratings, the persistent chatter among them about whether he should run again in 2024 centers as much on the fear that he’s a man out of time. Many activists express a similar frustration with the party’s politburo of aging congressional leaders. “It’s not necessarily only an age thing, but I do think the younger crop of leaders have cut their teeth during times when they never really believed our institutions were legitimate,” Adam Jentleson, a former Democratic Senate leadership aide and a co-founder of Battle Born Collective, a liberal advocacy group, told me. “They don’t have this nostalgia for a [prior] set of norms and principles, because they never experienced them.””

“They feel the system is fundamentally corrupted; they are experiencing a crisis of legitimacy in our institutions,” he said—and they want the party to “craft a message around that. The failure to do that explains where we are right now.” Indeed, polling released this week by a coalition of liberal groups led by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee found strong agreement among Democrats, and even many swing voters, for the argument that the Supreme Court is “broken” and “facing a legitimacy crisis.”

 

So, you see, if the government is doing what they want, then the progressives have the highest respect for institutions.  But if our system disagrees with their priorities then burn it down!

 

There was also a bunch of screeching interlaced with their call to action.  I really liked these so I’ll share a few:

“Compounding those anxieties, Undem said, is “almost despair” among left-leaning voters that Democratic leaders seemingly have no plan for how to respond to this multipronged offensive. Jentleson likewise said that Biden has created an “enormous disconnect” and “feeling of powerlessness” among Democrats by failing to make a broader case against structural problems such as the Senate’s small-state bias or the skewing of the Supreme Court bench that the GOP may exploit for sustained minority rule.”

“Biden’s Democratic critics express more fear of demoralizing their own voters. For them, last week’s Supreme Court decision put an exclamation point on the feeling that Republicans are driving the national agenda even though Democrats nominally hold unified control of the White House, the House, and the Senate.”

 

So, there we have it.  The progs want to nuke the filibuster and pack the Supreme Court.  Isn’t that special!  They forgot what happened when they nuked the lower court filibuster.  It blew up in their faces.  Now what happens when the Republicans remember their words and decide to nuke the filibuster altogether and really go to town when we control the trifecta in 2024.  Well, bring it on, bring it on, bring it on.

A Garden Surprise

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner, Uncategorized ,

So Camera Girl had me back in the salt mines.  Well, literally, she had me turning over some of her vegetable garden with a pitchfork.  And while I was working on a section I started noticing that the ground started moving!  I flipped over a piece of vegetation and saw this:

Apparently a rabbit somehow built a burrow inside the garden, which is surrounded by a 4 X 4 lumber rectangle.  Is there a tunnel from somewhere outside the garden?  Beats the hell out of me.

Greeting on the Ultimate Day of June 2022

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner ,

Camera Girl and I took a morning stroll around the grounds and it was encouraging.  Cone flowers are blooming, daylilies are about to pop and the first few eggplants and squash are on the vines.

 

The weeds and crab grass are growing at a prodigious rate and the local hawk has been picking off mourning does at the pace of one every other day.  Black-eyed Susans and Shasta Daisies are everywhere and the milkweed is in bloom and feeding a new cohort of Monarch butterfly caterpillars.

 

Basically, life is exploding everywhere I look.  Which means I’ll be busy watering, weeding and cutting grass for the foreseeable future.

I am on record as saying July is my favorite time of the year.  But this year I’ll be away on a trip from the 11th to the 20th.  While I’m away I’ll be viewing and photographing bison, grizzly bears, wolves, elk, moose, geysers, mountains and other items that usually don’t feature into life at the Compound.  And doubtless that will be exciting.  But in a way I’ll be sorry to miss the little milestones that happen here every July.  In July I’ll find the first praying mantis.

Me and My Shadow

In July I usually see the first fireflies.  And in the middle of the month, I always celebrate my birthday with a party.  Well, you can’t make an omelet without cracking a few eggs.

I’ll try to post from time to time but I expect before, during and after the trip there will be disruptions.  It’s been a busy month and I haven’t had a chance to cache a bunch of pictures and quotes for the interregnum.  But I’ll do my best to provide some content.  Hopefully I’ll be able to put up some interesting photos during the trip.

What is becoming clear to me is that after the trip I’ll be revising my writing schedule to facilitate my fiction writing.  It’s just too difficult to write between posts.  It’s got to become the opposite, posting between writing.  Reading about the output that Nick Cole produces filled me with envy and shame.  So, things must change.

As for the latest news of the day, why, it’s chicanery, skullduggery, buffoonery, imbecility, failure and ruin as far as the eye can see.  As the cities descend into howling chaos, hyperinflation bankrupts us and the economy continues to sputter into recession, Dementia Joe moves full speed ahead to usher in WWIII.  I guess since he’s finished off the Democrats’ chances in November, he figures he might as well go out with a bang.  It will be interesting to see if his brinksmanship ends up causing an actual war or just destroys what’s left of this country’s military reputation.

Well, I shouldn’t let this devolve into depression.  There are plenty of good things happening too.  There’s plenty to do and not enough time to do it in.  So, let’s see what I can do to keep some copy up on the site and try to keep it on the light side.  Enjoy the glorious weather.

The Hat of Death

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner , ,

Here at the Compound we have a species of deer fly that is specific to Dunwich.  They are known to transmit lycanthropy and a horrible syndrome known locally as Biden Brain which afflicts almost twenty percent of the population.

Because of this I have adopted a form of passive aggressive self defense, the sticky hat.

The wonderful thing about the hat is the waves of schadenfreude that envelope you when the flies are stuck on the glue but keep flapping their wings trying to escape.  The feeling of revenge is very sweet indeed.  Currently I have eight deer fly and some random black flies and mosquitoes.

I like to think as I walk around with the hat on that the flies recognize a cousin or a brother and experience horror and murderous anger and that that is what drives them to join their brethren on the Hat of Death.  Notice the bits of vegetation on the hat.  These occur when I stupidly walk under low hanging tree branches.  Eventually the glue stops working and I break out a new strip and start the fun all over again.

An Explanation of the Slippery Slope to Grooming Kids

photog Current Events ,

Matthew Boose over at American Greatness wrote a good explanation of the how and why of the LGBTQ movement.  I think he summed it up well at the end.

“For too long, mainstream society has been walking on eggshells around an aggrieved, pathological minority that has been empowered to dictate social norms for ordinary people. This has led to such absurdities as men competing in women’s sports, and pressure on the remainder of the population to adopt tortured, dehumanizing language like “pregnant people” or frivolous ”pronouns.”

Up to a point, we could call this trend unreasonable, bothersome, or unfair. Now, it is a danger to the innocence and well-being of a generation. It’s time for those in the mainstream, those with an actual stake in the future, to assert their place in society and stop appeasing an extreme fringe.”

That about sums it up.

Culture Future Shock

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner , , , ,

Today I had to bring my car into the local Dunwich auto shop for some routine maintenance.  I dutifully signed my name to the work invoice without pricing and shuffled over to the waiting area with its free coffee station, now coffee-less because of COVID and the free popcorn which is likewise sans popcorn.

They’ve got a hi-def 80-inch tv that plays millennium talk shows endlessly so I knew to bring a book to read and sit in one of the chairs facing away from the screen.  But unfortunately, it was a technical book that required pretty serious concentration to follow the thread of the argument and what I found was the tv was horribly distracting.  I could hear these three voices jabbering and crooning at each other in a patois that I assume was hip-hop speak.  I tried my best to tune it out but the tv was blaring at 80 decibels and these three bozos were shouting at the top of their lungs as if what they were saying was some life and death matter.

Finally, I gave up trying to read and I figured I’d just vegetate and that way the tv wouldn’t be such a nuisance.  But I couldn’t do that either.  Now I couldn’t even distract myself with the hopeless task of reading the book.  Now I couldn’t help hearing their moronic conversation.  And the true stupidity of what they were saying hit home.  They were a popular culture review program.  They were reviewing things like some kind of hip-hop award ceremony and the associated red carpet activity.

The descriptions were hard to understand because it was larded with words that, though English, were being used in senses that you could not find in a dictionary.  Although maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe the urban dictionary was invented for these meanings.  As an example, they were describing the probably pornographic outfit and “dancing” that one female rapper was wearing at the afterparty and they were full of approbation for this sight and they kept saying that she was “always giving.”  And I couldn’t quite imagine what “giving” referred to.  I think it involved not covering up her primary and secondary sex organs but I wasn’t completely sure.

I did understand what twerking was.  That detail was something that Miley Cyrus explained back in 2016 when she was campaigning for Hillary Clinton.  Now it appears to be as routine a part of hip-hop activity as to be the equivalent of saying hello.  Anyway, the awfulness of the discussion never got better.  And I found that I was becoming increasingly aggravated by listening to these cretins.  So, I got up and turned around to see who these people were and who was watching this crap on the screen.

The three “hosts” were somewhat young.  There was a black woman, a Latina and a gay black man dressed in spandex with a bow in his hair.  Then I looked at the audience.  There were four guys between the ages of about forty and sixty.  And they were sitting there with glazed over expressions.  I read my audience and acted.  I went over to the side of the flat screen and hit the power button.  The screen went black and the voices ended.  All four men looked up at me surprised.  But then one guy smiled and said “Thank you.”

I got back to my seat and started to read my book.  But I half expected someone to turn the tv back on and was resigned to waiting outside in the hot noon time sun just to avoid listening to any more of that drivel.  But it never came back on.  And I couldn’t concentrate on my book.  I was thinking about the putrid level our culture has reached.  And it wasn’t even just the perversity of the subject matter.  It was the abysmal level of the discussion.  These people weren’t just vapid.  They were clearly morons.  Communicating with them would be like trying to discuss politics or morality with a cow or a horse.  Absurd.

I sometimes feel that the Dissident Right exaggerates the falling off of intelligence in the new America.  After all, the baby boomers had their weird and moronic cultural moments when they were young.  No one could claim that watching “The Monkees” was an intellectual pursuit.  But this is different.  This is the victory of stupidity.  This is the mainstreaming of dimwit chic.

Well, I did get to see something of the world today.  But it wasn’t good.

Nothing Wins Like Winning

photog Current Events , , , ,

I was out of town yesterday at a family event.  I got to talk to some folks I haven’t spoken to in years.  And it was immediately clear that everyone was galvanized by the Roe v. Wade decision.  It was all they could talk about.  Even people who still didn’t know what is going on in the country, people submerged in the New York city progressive bubble were animated and excited and thinking about further changes that the Supreme Court could enact.

And this was in the belly of the beast.  There were progressives everywhere I looked.  But people were talking openly about which progressive law could be flipped next.  Gay marriage, affirmative action, freedom of association and religious freedom were all being excitedly discussed while radical progressives were in earshot.  There was an energy and an attitude.  It was as if the Supreme Court had given us permission to speak the unspeakable.  I’m guessing this is what it was like when the Soviet Union crumbled.  No one had to be careful what they said about the government.  They no longer had to pretend to love Big Brother.  You could finally state out loud that 2 + 2 = 4.

And so that is the revolution.  It turns out that we could have been winning all along.  All of these Republican judges and congressman and senators (and presidents!) were working against us all along.  All it required was for us to elect someone who was actually on our side.  All it required was for someone to actually want to win these things for us.  All it required was someone to finally do something.  And now even the sleepers are aware that something has been unleashed in the world that has been chained up for half a century.  The normal people have suddenly experienced what representative government is supposed to be like.

Probably you’ve often heard of the progressive program as a one-way ratchet.  The powers-that-be have used a slow but steady escalation of progressive changes that always moves in one direction.  Worse and worse and worse.  Like a band around our chests constricting our breathing.  But now it’s as if someone has released the pawl and the gear has spun loose.  All the tension is removed and we can breathe!  And once you can breathe you can also think clearly.  And you wonder how the hell did we end up this way?

If we’re not idiots we should be thinking about how to prevent this from happening again.  We should be looking at who stood by and watched all this going on and either was too stupid to fix it or was part of the plot to make it happen.  In either case these are the people we need to blame.  These are the people we must fire.  Now admittedly, some of these sleepers who are finally becoming aware truly are too stupid to help themselves.  I already was hearing them mention admiringly Nikki Haley and Kristi Noem as conservative women who could lead us to victory.  At that point I walked away and looked for someone with at least half a brain.  And that confirmed that indeed the “conservatives” are their own worst enemies because a very large contingent just don’t have a clue.  But that’s fine.  The 80/20 rule says that eighty percent of the work is done by twenty percent of the group so all we have to do is find the two out of ten people with the sense to come in out of the rain and let them run the show.

So yesterday was very encouraging.  A month or two ago I asked “Is Something Real Starting to Happen?”  I think yesterday I saw a very large affirmation that it is.  I’m reminded of what Churchill said.  This isn’t the end or even the beginning of the end.  But it feels like the end of the beginning.  Things are starting to roll.