Category: Current Events

Now is the Heating System of My Discontent Turned Glorious Prose by This Sun of a Gun

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Camera Girl and I are huddled together over mugs of tea trying to stave off hypothermia.  The heating system finally gave up the ghost last night and the house has settled down to ambient temperatures.  We slipped below fifty-five degrees a little while ago and I’ve begun to understand how the Donner party got to where they did.  I got off the phone with the “tech manager” a while ago and she was very sympathetic to my plight.  I didn’t swear at the woman so that speaks well of me but I did question the competency and integrity of the company.  Their pre-recorded message that plays while you’re on hold tells me that they are growing by leaps and bounds and have branches from Vermont to Delaware.  Thinking about the viability of every state in that area doesn’t increase my confidence in the business model or mission statement of the “Company.”

This stream of consciousness post is meant to document my descent into cold induced dementia.  Now I can fully understand Joe Biden.  His brain is frozen and no meaningful thinking can occur.  I forgive him for everything except for the child sniffing and for his cruelty to Corn Pop.  Soon I will send Camera Girl off to one of her daughters’ houses to survive.  I will stay here and sacrifice myself as a protest against the cruelty and incompetence of “Big Oil” or, more accurately, “Small Oil.”

My only regret is that I couldn’t live to see Liz Cheney drummed out of the Republican Party and booted out of Congress.  Wait, that’s not true.  There are other things I wish I could have lived to see.  For instance:

  • Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, AOC and Liz Cheney forced to work as Amway reps.
  • The ZMan move out of Lagos on the Chesapeake
  • Joe Biden audibly fart during the State of the Union address.
  • Kamala Harris run away screaming at a press conference and never be heard from again.
  • Lori Lightfoot, Anthony Fauci, Beto O’Rourke and Bill deBlasio arrested for impersonating human beings.
  • The Mario Cuomo Bridge renamed the Tappan Zee Bridge, Andrew Cuomo renamed Tappan Zee and Chris Cuomo legally renamed Fredo.
  • The Squad deported to wherever anyone is willing to take them.
  • Fredo, Don Lemon, Rachel Maddow, Joe Scarborough, Anderson Cooper and Chris Hayes forced by court order to serve for five years as dunk tank clowns in a travelling carnival.

Tell the world my story.

2022. So Here We Go Again

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The holidays are over.  Daily life resumes.  I’ve read all the columnists predicting, extrapolating, interpolating, deducing, inducing, reducing and producing a lot of heat but not much light.  Those on the Left are either whistling past the graveyard or shrieking in fury that all of this bad news is Trump’s fault.  Those on the Right are rubbing their hands together and licking their chops and crowing that Joe Biden will be the downfall of Left and everything will be back to where it should be.  Blah, blah, blah.

Where we really are is interesting.  Omicron is delivering much as predicted.  Everybody is catching it but almost everybody is asymptomatic or experiencing a cold.  Very few people are going to the hospital and very, very few people are dying from it.  Because of the enormous number of people testing positive even the Covidian true believers are facing reality and minimizing the impact of the “stop the spread” protocols.  Instead of staying at home for fourteen days after testing positive, it’s five days at home and then five days wearing a mask at work.  And I read where some hospitals that fired non-vaccinated nurses and doctors were pleading with them to come back temporarily to help out during the spike.  The powers that be are pushing the same narrative of death and destruction for the unvaccinated but the average person is starting to realize that the story doesn’t fit the facts on the ground.  It should be interesting to see if Biden decides to declare victory and fold his tent soon.  Probably the biggest test will be what happens on January 7th when the Supreme Court reviews the OSHA vaccine mandate.  If they throw it out that might be enough to force the feds to say uncle.

Outside of COVID many of us are looking out at a high inflation economy and thinking of ways to save a few pennies here and there to avoid eating away at the nest egg.  Well, they say Americans are too fat.  Maybe we can all tighten our belts a little bit and save some money that way.  But for families with children, it’s a little more of a problem and definitely not a laughing matter.  This general anxiety over money will continue to hound the administration and will come back to bite the Democrats in the November elections.  Good.

I read a ton of copy on how urban crime is a top concern for citizens.  And Mayors are wringing their hands trying to convince their constituencies that they’re doing everything humanly possible to rein it in.  I very much doubt that they are and so the problem will fester and I believe that this deterioration in law and order will become the largest factor in political change over the next several years.  The inability of Democrats to address unchecked black criminality will be their Achilles Heel.  But whether the cities will be restored to safety is very much in doubt.  I’m of the opinion they will become like Detroit and Baltimore, third world hell-holes that reasonable people will avoid at all costs.

On the personal front here at the compound, we’re still battling the war against cold because of our defective heating system.  Our heating oil provider (which is also our heating system maintenance contractor) has made almost ten trips out and still hasn’t solved the problem.  I believe there was a problem with the installation of a fan called a “power venter” and this installation issue has metastasized into a fatal flaw.  I will have to fight the good fight and convince the bureaucrats at the oil company that they are the guilty party and must make things right.  Camera Girl is very vocal in her opinion that I haven’t been forceful enough in my efforts to goad the contactor to take action.  But the truth is the mechanics who might be able to get something done have been away on vacation and won’t be back until Monday.  Forcing them to send out the “D” team on a holiday weekend is worse than useless as we found out last week around Christmas.  We’ll limp through until tomorrow and then I’ll ramp up the pressure for a final solution that probably involves replacing the replacement unit and performing a careful installation.  Ah, it feels like the good old days of project engineering when haranguing mechanical contractors was my daily exercise.

On the review front, I’ve made it to the halfway point of season three of Star Trek and it’s very painful.  Many have told me to abandon this horrible and meaningless pursuit but I’m just too obsessively compulsive and stubborn to quit.  What renders this task so Kafkaesque is that each succeeding episode is an order of magnitude worse than the preceding one.  Don’t ask me how that is possible but it’s true!  I plan to bang through the rest of the episodes as quickly as humanly possible.  I apologize to the readers in advance.  Read them at your own peril.

So here we are in January.  It’s a weird and confusing world but some progress has been made.

My 2022 Resolutions

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I reviewed what was being put up on the site and I thought of some improvements.

  • Avoid repetition. Looking over the output I have produced in the last couple of years I note a lot of sameness.  Banging away at the same few themes must be tiresome for the reader.
  • Don’t write something just to have something to write. If there’s nothing worth saying, wait till there is.
  • Eliminate doom and gloom. It’s stupid.
  • Increase the amount of cultural content (reviews, photography, fiction, humor).

 

Hopefully these changes will improve the content for the readers and for myself.

Happy New Year

31DEC2021 – OCF Update – New Year’s Eve Message

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After my very depressing non-predictions post I thought it was a good idea to post something a little bit more positive.to balance out the end of the year.

Camera Girl went out and got chicken chop suey from our favorite local Chinese restaurant and we’ll watch some fun movies and celebrate the New Year on a good note.  We’ve managed to eat or give away most of the Christmas leftovers and even most of the Christmas cookies which is quite an accomplishment.  Everyone in the family is doing pretty well and even this state hasn’t resorted to masking in grocery stores or other establishments.  I heard a local health care authority admit on television that the omicron “plague” while causing tremendous numbers of infected is failing to cause many serious cases and even fewer deaths.  It looks like the COVID panic will be allowed to evaporate.  So things are looking up even here in the Evil Empire.

I’m still in the very early stages of learning how to use the new camera (Sony A7 IV).  But so far it checks all the boxes I needed.  Tomorrow, if weather permits, I’ll have Camera Girl unleash the hounds and do a tracking autofocus test on them.  So expect some info soon.  I want to see what the larger file size allows me in cropping my macro shots.

Like everyone else, I’ll be counting my pennies from now on.  Food and everything else is becoming horribly expensive so avoiding waste will have to become a priority.  Luckily Camera girl is very frugal.  I’ll unleash this super power of hers by not calling her cheap anymore.

And finally in the New Year I resolve to spend more of my day writing my fiction.  It will probably cut into my blogging time but I see now it’s unavoidable.  Those morning hours are the only time when creativity exists.

So Happy New Year everyone out there in the big, wide wonderful world that doesn’t believe what Dementia Joe says.  We’ll make progress in 2022 and we’ll figure out a way to prosper despite the awful people who make it their business to torture us.  In fact I predict they will be the ones suffering this year.

Happy New Year.

My 2022 Non-Predictions

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I woke up to the ZMan’s “2022 Predictions.”  Nothing too shocking in there except he went out on a limb and said the powers that be will force Kamala Harris to resign and be replaced and then Dementia Joe will step aside for a new President.  Now, none of this is original, many have speculated on this scenario.  The replacement president has been either Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama depending on whom you listen to.  But it’s a bold prediction because if it doesn’t happen there’s not much in the way of excuses as to why you were so wrong.  So, bravo to the ZMan for taking a bold stand.

My crystal ball is broken.  I can see nothing in the future except for some obvious trends.  We’re all going to be a lot poorer in the new year.  And that’s just obvious.  The reins of power are in the hands of villains and idiots.  Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, AOC and the rest of the “Squad” are mouth-breathing morons and everything they plan to do spells disaster for this country.  Their energy policy will nationalize the problems that California currently suffers from.  We’ll see blackouts and rolling brownouts and the cost of gasoline, diesel, natural gas and heating oil will march steadily higher.  The cost of food will skyrocket.  Basically, they will eliminate the middle-class.

Will all that bad news lead to voters throwing the bums out?  Probably.  We’re bound to have the Republicans take back the House of Representatives in November.  But will that do any good?  The system is so broken it seems that nothing can stop this runaway train we’re all trapped on.  As usual everything is balanced on a knife’s edge.  The way I look at things there are two ways all this can go.

The first scenario is that the Red States begin to take matters into their own hands and restrain the federal government from destroying our way of life.  That is the preferable way things can go.  It would allow for a controlled braking action to the runaway train we currently are trapped on.

The second scenario is the strong man.  For this scenario let me switch metaphors.  Instead of the runaway train let’s go with the forest fire.  There is so much tinder lying around after the last few years of hurricanes that one lightning strike will burn the whole thing down.  When the strong man shows up, he will be the lightning strike.  And what comes afterwards is completely unknowable.  Out of the French Revolution came Napoleon and from him came the formation of a united Germany and that led to World War I which led to the Soviet Union and on and on and on.  What is certain is that our civilization has become unstable.  The basic beliefs have been undermined by the people who run our society.  This can be seen in the disillusionment of the present generation with marriage and raising families or even working for a living.  And it has reached the pinnacle of dysfunction with the present madness over the concept of transgenderism.  A society can’t thrive when there isn’t a foundation that provides a common basis of understanding.  If we can’t agree on what is good or evil then eventually, we will come to blows.

So, there are my not so Happy New Year’s non-predictions.  More incompetence, more dysfunction and more anger.  More tinder is building up and what is certain is that eventually the breaking point will come.  Plan accordingly.  Find a safe spot for you and yours.

Poor Brandon

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As I mentioned yesterday, the Left is peppering their latest screeds with the trope, “Why can’t we all just get along?”  This is coming from the same people who recently were declaring their hatred for the white race that had caused all the evil in the world and stood on the wrong side of history and was now doomed to disappear from the face of the earth.  Funny how that happens.  It seems that the number of people saying, “Let’s go Brandon” has reached such a level that even Joe Biden has finally started parroting it.  And, wonder of wonders, forcing people to endure an unending gauntlet of isolation, humiliation and petty torture for the sake of an impossible goal of eliminating a not-very dangerous but extremely communicable virus has finally alienated even the most compliant citizens.  Add to that an economy mishandled into stagflation and the breakdown of law and order in all the major urban centers and you’ve got a recipe for political death at the voting booth.

So, when the reality of what’s going on sinks in, what do the geniuses on the left come up with?  “We’re all in this together!”  Suddenly the people they’ve been vilifying and torturing for five years are all of a sudden, their best friends!  Of course, there’s no practical expression of this new-found friendship.  They haven’t reversed their vaccination mandates.  People are still losing their jobs for refusing the jab.  They haven’t changed their minds about the necessity of wiping toxic white people from the face of the earth.  You’re still a cancer on the nation.  Even four dollar a gallon gasoline and the inflation that it engenders in the economy hasn’t changed their minds about the wisdom of their moronic energy policy.  All of these things are the same.  But you have to reach across the aisle and embrace the people who hate you for the good of the country.

Hah!

The only answer any of these appeals to brotherly love deserve is a prominent middle finger salute and a hearty chorus of “Let’s go Brandon.”  They’ve dug their own graves and it’s our patriotic duty to make sure they get complete credit for all the wreckage and hate that they’re so clearly responsible for.  My favorite emphasis is on “defund the police.”  I think the damage that has been done by the weakening of the police and the strengthening of urban crime gangs is a scourge that will take decades to reverse.  Depositing that disaster right at the feet of the people who are responsible is, in my opinion, the single most effective weapon against the Democrat party.  Images of rioting, looting arsonists marauding through the streets of America’s cities is a powerful message that will resonate with everyone except the dysfunctional looters themselves.

In conclusion, I’d like to propose a toast to our beloved President Brandon.  Long may he stammer and fart and threaten Americans with his exhausted patience.  Very soon he will be relegated to the same place that Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush were sent, the land of one-term presidents.  And we will go forward trying to salvage what is left of this country and regain the freedoms we were born with.

Hat Tip to Chemist for this Link. Red States Starting to Coordinate Their Interests

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Here’s the beginning of a counterattack against the corporate thugs who carry water for the Marxists.  Hitting the banks where it hurts is a very good beginning.  They should do the same to the banks that cancel people for free speech.  It’s finally good to see some coordination getting started.

 

 

 

 

Who Will Be the Hero of the Story This Year?

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Coming to the end of 2021 I think the most compelling story this year was Kyle Rittenhouse.  Here was a kid who had everything going against him going into his murder trial.  But against all odds every single thing broke in his favor and he was acquitted on all counts.  The moral of this story wasn’t charge into the lion’s den and fear no evil.  I guess message must be that God sometimes intervenes and saves the innocent from his own rash behavior.  Rittenhouse is a feel-good story but it isn’t representative of any plan for dealing with crime or civil unrest.  It’s more like one of those stories about a kitten being rescued from a very tall tree.  Heartwarming?  Surely.  But more of a cautionary tale than a blueprint.

But maybe this will be a year with a hero’s tale.  The wind has definitely shifted in our favor and with a little bit of luck we may get a big win for our side this year.  Maybe the Supreme Court steps up and decides the abortion case and the gun case in our favor.  That would be a big win.

A better case would be if in a couple of weeks, the Supreme Court permanently shuts down the vaccine mandate.  Now that would be a shot in the arm (no pun intended).  And while they’re at it, stop the mask nonsense too.  All of this COVID fascism is the worst kind of tyranny and letting it go on makes a mockery of our supposed freedoms.

But what I’d really like to see is some kind of Red State Convention where the leaders of these freer states sit down together and establish policies to allow them to coordinate their actions and effectively resist all of the federal programs and policies that victimize Americans.  The biggest thing would be to come up with an effective way to gather up the illegal aliens that Biden is dumping in the heartland and deliver them to Washington and New York and Boston and California and all the other sanctuary cities and states where they are allegedly so welcome.  They could coordinate policies around the Democrat controlled cities in their states to counteract the lawlessness and dysfunction that’s rampant in these jurisdictions.  And they can craft business policy to foster more manufacturing jobs from employers.  They can punish those companies that have gone offshore with their manufacturing jobs and reward those who bring new jobs here.  Tax policy can act as both a carrot and a stick.  Look for instance at how jobs from California are migrating to Texas and Florida.

So that’s where I’m hoping to see some things to cheer for this year.  Waiting for the midterms in November isn’t a very inspiring message.  That’s almost a whole year away and really is a limited accomplishment.  After all, it’s not as if it would be a veto proof majority that could legislate.  It only takes some of the weapons out of Dementia Joe’s feeble hands.

So that’s my New Year wish.  I’d love to see Governors DeSantis and Abbott and their colleagues sit down together and take the first steps to building a better world for their citizens.  Dream big.

Ending Off 2021 Right

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2020 was a nightmare from beginning to end and 2021 didn’t begin any better.  2021 started off as pure poison.  But the naked fraud and inexcusable subverting of the law has disgusted and radicalized whole segments of the population that up until now were sleep walking through the coup.  And what we’ve seen for the last five months is the chickens finally coming home to roost.  The combination of economic disaster, naked cronyism in the legislature and incompetence in multiple departments of the executive branch has turned the voting public against Dementia Joe and his lackeys.  And 2022 promises to be even worse for these crooks and weirdos.  It promises to be a disaster from beginning to end.  And all of this bad news for the bad guys has given me the opportunity to sendoff 2021 in style.

I just finished off the Christmas holiday exactly as I had hoped it would go.  All of my grandkids were over today and after having a Camera Girl feast that included roast beast and all the fixings, I basked in the bright light of all that youthful energy.  Most of the energy was dissipated shooting nerf projectiles at each other and the surroundings.  But there were some proceedings that I was qualified to join in.  And there was a fun toy that they brought along.  I bought the boys an Oculus virtual reality (VR) headset about two years ago.  I asked them about it recently and they talked about a fun module that they could run on the headset and I asked them to bring it over for me to try.  It’s a simulation of a rollercoaster.  Now it wouldn’t occur to me that wearing a visor over my eyes would in some way simulate the sensation of motion that happens when you ride on a rollercoaster but so help me it does!  The visual stimuli of riding around on a fast-moving car that is constantly changing direction and speed even convinces the pit of your stomach that you’re climbing and plunging on the tracks of a coaster.  I convinced Camera Girl to put it on but she has such extreme motion sickness that she yanked the headset off her face after barely ten seconds.  She told me she would have been violently ill if she had waited any more time at all.  Such a big baby!

Then I convinced my little granddaughter to watch the old Disney movie Dumbo.  She was very hesitant because she is marvelously sensitive to cinematic sadness.  When the baby elephant was separated from his mother, I thought Princess Sack of Potatoes was going to burst out crying.  I had to convince her to hang in there because there would be a reunion.  Sure enough, once that occurred, she was enthralled by the song the mother elephant cooed to her child.  Unfortunately, she had to go home before she got to see the happily ever after ending but she’ll be back next week to finish it off.

And the sum total of all the human interactions between kids, parents and grandparents over the course of two days of feasting, playing and talking was the perfect ending to a holiday that is the perfect ending to a year.  With the kids off until after the New Year we’ll get a chance to spend more time together to talk about high school and college decisions and their day-to-day doings.  I recently sent the older boys a bunch of science fiction novels and apparently, they’re were very favorably impressed with the stories so I’ll get their feedback on these.  And we’ll play few games of pool now that they’ve mastered the fundamentals of holding the cue and lining up a shot.  And we’ll spend the next week finishing off the leftovers from the feast.  And they promised they’d help me to figure out if there is an easy and inexpensive way to play Doom 2 on the Oculus VR system.  I’ve always wanted to revisit that video game without the restriction of having to use a joystick or keyboard to look behind my back for the monster that is always sneaking up on me in that game.

So, all this will recharge my batteries to endure the colossal amounts of dishonesty and stupidity that will be on display by all the politicians who will make 2022 a veritable marathon of evil.  After the fact, I see now what I missed during the COVID crisis.  I was isolated from the things that make life worth living.  Spending time with the people in your life that count is several orders of magnitude more important than all the other things you do with your time.  Making sure there are people left who care about the things you care about is the justification for fighting against the Left.  If we prevailed over the Left but those people were lost to us then none of it would personally benefit us.  It would be at best an intellectual exercise and personally meaningless.  So, I intend to enjoy my time off with loved ones and prioritize those activities right now.  Later on, I’ll get back to ranting about the losers who are out there mucking up this beautiful world.