Category: Current Events

Howie Carr Gloats at Impotent Rage of Boston Maskers

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Howie Carr is one of a very few sane New England journalists.  He loves tweaking the Left in Boston.  I just had to quote from an article he posted mocking the anger and fear expressed by commenters on the Boston Globe over the judge ending air travel masking.

“I’ve had two vaccines, and two boosters, and have already booked my fifth, sixth and seventh shots. Whenever I step outside my mansion in Lincoln, which I haven’t done since February 2020, I wear 17 masks, all N95’s, but now I am terrified that I will be infected by a MAGA supporter in the tourist section of my next flight to Martha’s Vineyard. P.S. When will Trump be tried as a war criminal?”

Now obviously he’s exaggerating what he read in the Globe comments section.  But based on what I know of these people it’s pretty close to reality.

Kudos to Howie.

What Happens After the Mid-Terms?

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Prognostication, predicting the future.  Oh, what a foolish thing to do.  But let’s talk about after the mid-terms.  But what happens afterward depends on how they end up to some extent.  Let’s look at the possibilities and then the follow-up for each case.

Suppose the Democrats somehow get through the elections and maintain their majorities in both Houses.   Based on the current projections this is the most unlikely outcome but let’s say for the sake of argument that SCOTUS overturns Roe and the Media manages to enflame the female half of America to go on the warpath and vote out every Republican they can.  So, let’s say the Democrats gain seats in the Senate and House.  This would have the effect of emboldening Biden and would mean there would be even more radicalization of the actions being taken by the feds and that would also translate at the state and local levels in Democrat locales.  That would make things increasingly worse for us and would also indicate that the Dems would hold the White House in 2024.

But as I said this is an almost absurdly unlikely election outcome.  Voter sentiment is lopsidedly negative on Biden’s performance in office.  And this has translated effectively against the Democrats in Congress and in state and local governments.  So, let’s look at a more likely outcome.

Currently the polls indicate that the Republicans are likely to take back the House of Representatives with a shift of somewhere between thirty and sixty seats.  The Senate is predicted to return to Republican control with a shift of two to five seats.  What happens then?

The Republicans capturing Congress will put an end to Biden appointing anymore Supreme Court justices or any other judges if the Senate is in that mood.  It will also limit the kinds of cabinet changes that Biden will be able to make during his last two years in office. And finally, it will put an end to any laws he is hoping to pass.  And those are all good things.  In addition, the House and Senate can go about investigating and probably impeaching Biden for the multitude of shady deeds that have been leaking out of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.  There won’t be enough votes to convict him in the Senate but plenty to get the impeachment going in the House.  And the investigations will uncover enough dirt to make the 2024 election a mud-slinging extravaganza.

But all these good things won’t change the fact that Biden will still have two years to continue his destruction of the working and middle classes in this country.  We will have to endure his open borders nightmare and the punishing inflation that his terrible policies have inflicted on us.

Now let’s look at the other unlikely possibility.  Suppose by November that the country crashes spectacularly.  A bad recession strikes but inflation goes on raging.  If this were bad enough the country might get truly desperate and even Democrats might throw out their own senators and representatives.  This would give the Republicans enough votes in the Senate to convict Biden and Harris.  And that would force the Speaker of the House into the presidency.  Now this would have the added benefits over the last options of ending all of Biden’s awful programs.  And it would give the incoming president a clear powerful majority in Congress and a clear mandate for change.

But the chaos inherent in this kind of violent change would require extremely smart handling to prevent it from devolving into chaos.  Think about it.  Kevin McCarthy would be President of the United States.  How exactly is that supposed to work?  Sure, there might be ways of making someone else president but the mind boggles trying to figure out how it doesn’t all go wrong.  And as I said it’s a very unlikely scenario.

So, the short answer to this whole question is that after the mid-terms we will be looking at a weakened but not neutralized Joe Biden.  It’s possible that if he’s serious about running 2024 he may try to triangulate to less unpopular actions and policies but that’s unlikely.  Other people are pulling his strings and they’ll use his last two years to keep the damage coming.  I think they know at this point that 2024 will most likely go to a Republican.

So, that’s my read.  Don’t assume that because Joe Biden has loused up the country that the mid-terms will fix everything.  What it tells me is I need to figure out a way to survive the damage of the next two and a half years and hope and pray that we find someone who can break us out of the death trap we find ourselves in.

Hat Tip To the Conservative Treehouse, The Airlines Are Ending the Mask Mandate

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Hallelujah, Hallelujah!  Fantastic news.  Enough is enough.  Kudos to that judge for making this happen just as the CDC decided to extend the mandate again.  I can imagine the anger and even rage as the flying Karens are forced to sit next to normal people with naked faces.

I’ll tell you, this is great news for me.  I’m flying in July and wearing a mask would have been an enormous pain in the butt.  Well, let’s hope this is the final nail in the coffin for the COVID-nazis.  And may we get the chance to show them our thanks in November.

Fill Up the Space and There’s No Room for Dysfunction

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Getting together with the family yesterday was a shot in the arm (no, not a vaccine) for me.  Great food, Easter-chocolate-fueled kids, friendly family, boisterous activity, a few sprinkles of hail and snow, sunshine, a passel of tail-wagging dogs and no television or electronic devices at all.

The time passed so quickly and no one was bored.  I’ve arranged to see the new Batman movie with the two older boys tomorrow.  I opined that this new Batman will be lame because he’s being played by some emo-actor named Robert Pattinson who apparently is best known for playing some lame vampire that girls loved.  The boys agreed that the Dark Knight is still the gold standard for Batman movies but feel we should give this one a try.  I told them we should rent the Michael Keaton Batman from the 1980’s.  Anyway, we’ll buy some greasy popcorn and watch this ridiculous movie and we’ll spend the two hours back and forth talking about everything and nothing.

One of my sons-in-law is starting a small business of his own so we swapped information on LLC’s and sole proprietorships and I told him I’d let him know what I found out from the town hall about paperwork.  And then we discussed his recent foray into welding and metalworking.  I have some projects that would benefit from custom hardware and I told him I’d see if he had any time to cost out some items.  As if he isn’t busy enough running a small factory and large family.  But it was good to have someone who’s trying to build something too, to talk to.

And Camera Girl was in her element with the kids to play with and her daughters to compare notes with on managing homes, kids and dogs.  And there was talk between them about flowers and vegetables and kids’ activities coming up and a summer trip up to Old Orchard Beach, Maine, and on and on and on.

It seemed like everyone there was suffering from allergies.  Kids and adults.  And there was sneezing and runny noses and coughing and no one was wearing any stupid masks or apologizing for sneezing germs on each other.  That nonsense seems to have gone the way of the dinosaurs.

And I had a long discussion on dinosaurs with my youngest grandson.  But yesterday the new fascination was Pokémon.  He inherited a book of the cards from one of his older brothers and he regaled me with detailed information about the names, powers and relative value of this album of meaningless monsters.  But showing my attention to this ritual of pre-adolescent consumer culture gained me all kinds of street cred with this miniature descendant of mine.

All in all, it was a roaring success.  Good feelings reigned supreme and the winter was officially laid to rest and the outdoor season was christened with the kids tracking mud into the kitchen and all over their Easter clothes.  And not a single word was spoken about Biden or inflation or transgender anything.  We talked about the kids’ schools and sports and the plans for the next get togethers.  Life and family and friends fill up the spaces in your life if you take the time and trouble to involve yourself with life.  It’s good reminder for me.

Another Small Step Toward Holding Woke Organizations Accountable

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First the Ohio Appeals Court Upholds $31 Million Award Against Oberlin College for calling innocent people racists.  Now another Ohio college has to pay a professor $400,000 for trying to force him to kowtow to the “pronoun” speech dictates of delusional students.  What is it with Ohio colleges?

This needs to happen more and more.  After enough colleges are bankrupted through lawsuits, they’ll start towing the line.  If the spineless “conservatives” on the Supreme Court were not mostly useless they’d spend the next year clearing out all the unconstitutional things going on in the country and rid us of our woke masters.  But in the meantime, it looks like the solution is more lawyers who know how to hit these people where it hurts, in the wallet.  Although I have to confess, I’d prefer if these were criminal cases where the perpetrators could go to prison for a decade or two.

What I really wish is that I lived in a state like Florida where they are addressing these problems head on with laws and government actions against the perpetrators.  Keep it up people.  If enough action is taken, we’ll start seeing this stuff rolled back.

Something to Show To Confused Children and Their Parents

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Tucker Carlson interviews a young woman who has “de-transitioned.”  In other words she got over her delusions that she was male and now realizes that she allowed herself to be convinced by the trendy trans-gender influencers that she wasn’t a normal girl.
This young woman very eloquently and movingly describes how her normal awkward feelings going through puberty were interpreted by these dangerous outsiders as definite signs that she was “trans.”

Kudos to Carlson and especially this young woman for speaking out about what a dangerous thing it is convincing vulnerable and suggestable teenagers (and younger) that they should disrupt the critical physical changes going on during puberty.  Dosing children with puberty blockers and hormones is madness.  How much worse then is surgically mutilating them?  Carlson is performing a public service.  This interview should be required viewing for any parents out there.

Protect your kids.

Curtis Yarvin Gives an Example of Winning the Battle and Losing the War

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I was reading an article by that highly intellectual critic of the social order we live under, Curtis Yarvin.  If you are unfamiliar with his writing, Yarvin’s analysis of the oligarchic nature of the American power structure is in many ways observably correct.  And although his writing style and his elitist perspective are sometimes maddening, his ideas are very often illuminating.

In this case he was writing about Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter and bring it private.  The gist of the argument was that because, potentially, Musk could completely control Twitter’s policies and actions toward the public it was a rare chance for a pure strategic victory against the Left.

And to contrast it with a tactical victory that eventually led to a strategic defeat he relates the decades long struggle against crime in New York City.  The familiar story relates that under decades long liberal rule New York grew more and more crime-infested until by the late 1980s there were over 2,000 murders a year and the whole city was besieged by petty and serious crime.  People were leaving the city by the hundreds of thousands and public confidence had evaporated.  This set the stage for a law-and-order Republican, Rudy Giuliani, to win the mayor’s office on the strength of a promise to restore law and order through stringent policing methods.

And it worked.  For more than twenty years Giuliani and Bloomberg who came after him, were able to maintain New York City at low levels of crime.  Levels that hadn’t been seen previously even in less chaotic times.  New York became a livable big city and thrived financially and culturally.  But what had not changed was that the majority of New Yorkers were still progressives who deep down in their souls resented the fact that this criminal justice system ended up incarcerating mostly black criminals.  Since their logic told them that somehow this wasn’t fair, they were never happy with the system even if it saved them from a tidal wave of crime.

So, after they became complacent about crime and when the George Floyd moment came New Yorkers were glad to have the excuse to abandon effective policing.  And the rest was inevitable.  Now the city is more dangerous than ever and trying to get back to where they were a few years ago seems politically impossible.

Yarvin’s point was that the tactical victory by Rudy Giuliani allowed for the strategic defeat that came afterward.  In other words, allowing conservatives to do the dirty work for the progressives doesn’t alter the beliefs of the progressives.  It only enables it.  It never leads to permanent change.

And I saw the same thing in Massachusetts during the 1990’s.  The Democrats would crash the state fiscally with bleeding heart programs and corrupt practices and then the Republicans would have to clean it up.  But they would never get any credit for the changes.  And as soon as the ship was righted they would be replaced with another round of dysfunction.  At best the Republicans were a relief valve that kept the whole insane machine from exploding.

Well, this is an old story.  But Yarvin’s emphasis resonated with me.  Winning a battle and losing the war was not something that should be done.  What we can’t afford to do is patch up the Left’s system.  We need to let them utterly fail at what they do.  We need to exclude them from some endeavor as completely as is possible and then make that endeavor an undeniable success.  And then keep them out of it.

Where I see that already happening is at the state level.  Places like Florida and Texas and other states need to change their laws to make them uninviting for progressives fleeing from California and New York.  And they need to protect themselves as completely as possible from the federal government.  In that way they can build their own system and reap the benefits while excluding the Left.

Places like California and New York need to be completely abandoned by the Right.  They need to crash completely.  As I like to portray it, they need to reach the level where cannibalism is the dominant lifestyle of the inhabitants.  Things need to get so bad that eventually the Leftists simply die off completely.  And all that is left are normal human beings.

The point is victory is only victory when it weakens your enemy and strengthens you.

15APR2022 – OCF Update – Good Friday All Around

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Life is good today.  It rained hard last night and now it’s a bright sunny day.  Now that’s the way to arrange the weather!  My thanks to the Man Upstairs for this indulgence.

A beautiful day for a walk in the woods.  A good telecon with a business consultant.  Useful actionable advice.  Progress on all fronts of the business effort.  No new roadblocks appearing.  Domestic tranquility continues.  Plans for the summer Yellowstone trip coalescing nicely  Some books and movies to finish up for reviews. Projects around the house and yard coming along fine.  What can I say?  Life is good today.

Of course, in the larger world, that sleazy dopey wrecker in the White House continues to dismantle the United States of America with alarming speed.  The economy continues to shake itself to pieces with costs soaring into the stratosphere and staple supplies disappearing from store shelves on a random basis.  Disorder stalks the metropolitan areas and international relations are becoming strained even among supposed allies.

But today is Good Friday.  For Christians a time to reflect on the things that are most important in life.  Most fundamentally, on our families and friends.  Jesus spoke mostly of love.  Right now it is paramount that we love and protect those we care about.  Protect them from the coming storms.

But right at this moment we can also share some happy moments with them.  Sunday we’re getting together at the house of one of my daughters.  All of my grandchildren will be there and all but one of my children.  We’ll eat way too much fattening food and I hope we’ll have a chance to throw a baseball around.  But the forecast isn’t promising.  Cold and wet is the forecast.

But that matters not at all.  We’ll talk about what the kids are up to and applaud their sports victories and condole the losses.  We’ll talk about upcoming college admission.  We’ll talk about vacation plans and trips on the new boat that’s in the driveway.  and there will be talk about dinosaurs with my youngest grandson who is a connoisseur of all things saurian.

And I know Camera Girl is going to bake a ricotta cheesecake for the holiday and that is one of my favorites.  And even though I’ve switched from coffee to tea this year I will indulge in some good coffee for the occasion.  And I intend to revel in the chaos of five grandchildren playing (and fighting) all around me.  And I intend to participate in the games of whatever variety they choose.  Last time we got together they had me try out an virtual reality contraption called an Occulus.  I bought this for them a couple of years ago and I was surprised at just how realistic the illusion it produces is.

It’s funny how these holidays provide so much continuity in our lives.  It’s comforting to have these rituals to ground us and those we love in a familiar pattern.  And for me Easter is a pivotal point in the year.  Long New England winters finally release the landscape around Easter and people can go outside and breath a little fresh air.  It’s the beginning of outdoor life.

Everyone enjoy the day especially those who are religious.  And get a little air and sun if it’s around.

Elon Musk and Twitter

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Everyone’s heard that Elon Musk has made an offer to buy Twitter and convert it into a privately held company.  And if you asked me my opinion about this situation I’d have to say, “What the hell is Twitter and why should I care?”  I looked up Twitter and what I learned is that it’s a social media website that allows any idiot to post a message up to a maximum of 288 characters long (but somehow this doesn’t count any enormously larger attached video clip).

But the proviso is that the poster has to be a brain-dead doofus.  For non-doofuses your every utterance will be scrutinized by uber-leftist social justice warriors who will report any violations against Democrat party talking points to the commissars at Twitter’s Ministry of Truth where you will be suspended either temporarily or permanently and then cast into the outer darkness where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

So, the supposedly smartest and richest man in the world wants to buy this company.  Why?  What will be accomplished if he owns this weird network?  Will he somehow level the playing field?  Will his employees allow this to happen?  Will the government allow this to happen or will they instead administer a death by a thousand paper cuts?  And is Twitter really of any value to the world?  Does it have an impact?

I have to confess I’ve never really understood the allure of a 288-character snippet of information.  That’s like forty, fifty words.  So far, this post is about 250 words and I haven’t really finished the initial idea.  If a tweet is really just a headline for an attached normal sized post, I guess that would make sense.  Is it just that Twitter has such a large user base that it acts as a global bulletin board?

Okay, but if you were the richest man in the world and also supposedly one of the most technologically savvy individuals couldn’t you just build something better from the ground up?    And you wouldn’t even have to do it alone.  Peter Thiel is another tech billionaire who is interested in free speech concerns with the social media platforms.  Couldn’t these two titans of industry capitalize on the demand of a public that is hungry for a level political playing field and build something much, much better than Twitter, YouTube or Facebook?  After all, much less savvy people have begun to create alternates to Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

Surely the financial and intellectual resources that an Elon Musk or a Peter Thiel can bring to bear on this kind of opportunity must be considerable.  And if Musk is seriously considering buying Twitter, then he has identified it as a viable business opportunity.  He doesn’t need to spend tens of billions of dollars to create an exciting and profitable business that already has a large population of people who would make up its user base.  Probably one billion dollars would get the job done.  And what’s one crummy billion dollars to Elon Musk?

I hold out the possibility that Musk is hoping that Twitter rejects his offer and that he plans to build his own platform.  Maybe this whole bid is a publicity stunt to advertise his own entry into the social media business.  I hope it is.  Places like Gab and Truth don’t have the clout needed to compete with the established social media platforms.  And, honestly, it’s not enough to just provide a similar product.  Twitter and Facebook aren’t providing a satisfying product.  They thrive merely because they currently enjoy a monopolistic stranglehold on the niches they created.  What’s needed is something that provides a healthier environment for people on-line.  A truly honest marketplace of ideas would be that healthier environment.

So, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and any other entrepreneurs out there who see an opportunity in Twitter’s partisan methods; don’t try to fix Twitter.  Instead, bury it with a superior platform.  And make obscene amounts of money doing it.

14APR2022 – OCF Update-Camera Girl Finally Frees the Slaves

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Winter, Sony A7 III, Voigtlander 10mm f\5.6 lens, 22APR2021 – Photo of the Day

Today was a day of toil.  About a week ago Camera Girl was  in her garden, supposedly turning the soil with a pitchfork.  I say supposedly because after ten or fifteen minutes of effort the pitchfork was still stuck in the ground and the ground was having the best of the argument.

Finally she gave up and complained bitterly of her fate.  Being the gentlemanly parfait knight that I am, I mocked her.  I said, “Sure women are always saying how they can do anything a man can but apparently that doesn’t apply to pitchforks.”  She sot me a look that seemed to imply something about the quality of that night’s dinner.  So I displayed magnanimity.  I said, “You poor weak creature, I will turn the soil for you, only not today.

Well, apparently “not today” was today.  So I went out to the west field and starting singing road gang spirituals.  And to be honest, between the matted weed roots and the stupid liner that someone put in the soil was incredibly tough and heavy to turn.  But three hours of working like a hired field hand got it done.  About half way through it occurred to me that I could have rented a rototiller.  But by the end I was so satisfied with myself that it was worth it.  I showed up afterward in the kitchen drenched in sweat and covered with dirt but extremely pleased with myself.

I preened in front of Camera Girl and lectured on the difference between man’s work and woman’s work.  I mentioned that I left some clean up of weeds and liner next to the garden.  And that she should get that squared away as soon as possible.  She mumbled something under her breath but I pretended not to hear her.  Then I headed up for a well deserved shower.

Remarkably shortly after i finished working the skies opened up and it poured to beat the band.  Probably some of the seedling I put in this week may be washed away.  But some of them will make it and I ‘ve got more for next week too.  As long as we don’t have a repeat of last spring when it rained for forty days and forty nights, things will be fine in the garden.

This year we intend to grow a lot of butternut squash because Camera girl makes a great chicken soup with it.  And we’ll grow lots of zucchini and eggplant.  This year we’ll put in some thorn-less raspberries and I might move my blueberry bushes to make it easier to protect them from the birds.  Most years they get more than I do.  And I have to remember to put out the egg cases that the praying mantis laid over the winter.   I sure don’t want them hatching in the house.

So it was a work day but I’ll be sure to find something to be outraged about in the news when I check it out.  Enjoy your Thursday night.