Category: Current Events

Overheard in a Post Office

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

I get out into the real world so infrequently that I forget there are other people still inhabiting this planet.  But today I had to send off a package and buy some stamps for Camera Girl’s Christmas cards.  I was standing in one of the lines, which thankfully no longer requires a stupid mask, and there was an elderly lady probably in her late seventies in the next line with a mask on.  I was waiting for my mail lady to finish solving some kind of partial postal differential equation so I unintentionally eavesdropped on the conversation going on in the other line.  Apparently, the postman and the old lady were acquaintances and were discussing some kind of holiday performance, possibly a play, and the man asked her whether she liked it and she said she enjoyed the way they enforced their mask mandate and social distancing.  Then she asked him if he liked the intermission speech and he rather heatedly exclaimed that no he wasn’t happy that they had preached some social justice message at him.  He said, “No, I’m done with diversity, I’ve had diversity up to here.  I don’t want to hear who or what you’re sleeping with and I certainly don’t want it creeping into the story I’m watching.”  I could see that the old lady was taken aback.  He added a few other statements about how he felt about being the target of proselytizing and then got her the stamps she wanted.

So. this is a public conversation and from a federal employee no less.  I have to say this gave me a boost.  I had to stop myself from cheering and clapping.  I’ll tell you I wish that guy had been working on my postal problems.  I know he’s got the right stuff, for a postman anyway.  So even here in Dunwich, at the nexus of all things diabolical and woke there still lives a few hardy souls who aren’t writing their pronouns on their business cards and taping “Black Lives Matter” on their car bumpers.

Just a quick anecdote but worth considering.

16DEC2021 – OCF Update – A Quiet Day

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Good morning, good morning.  Less than ten days to Christmas and the grandkids are buzzing with anticipation.  Camera Girl is like some kind of kitchen prisoner slaving away at cookie dough and stockpiling the gravies and other ingredients she’ll need for the roast beast that will be served for Christmas dinner.  And I, even I, am experiencing the pre-Christmas rebirth that makes this such a great time.  I can watch one of the Christmas Carol versions and still get the thrill of seeing Scrooge repent his inhumanity.  I can still see him marvel at Fezziwig’s kindness and get a kind of sympathetic response when I look back on my own life and remember when I was the beneficiary of an act of true kindness from a family member or a friend, or even better, from a total stranger.  And maybe a lot of other people have this sort of feeling at this time of the year too.

As for the site, I will have a lot of chores in the next week or so.  This may cut into my posting a bit but I’m sure everyone else is also busy.  A few less outrages to read about won’t harm any of us, even the most bloody minded.  I’ll try to include all the positive things I can find or think of but since traffic goes down quite a bit at this time of year I’m sure I’ll be forgiven for any lapses.  So enjoy the 16th of December and we’ll see what emerges today.

November 8th 2022 Should Be Named Liz Cheney Replacement Day

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Liz Cheney is America’s Karen.  She’s an upper class white woman who lectures and browbeats normal Americans with her shrewish and obnoxious words and views.  But in about a year Liz will be booted out of the House of Representatives and sent back to her family.  Hopefully they will grow so tired of having her around that they’ll put her in charge of something completely unimportant that will take up all of her time.  Possibly she can become the crossing guard at a corner that no one ever walks by.  I can see her with her hand held stop and go sign and here reflective uniform and her whistle.  She can jump up and down and screech at motorists and force them to stop whenever a squirrel or turtle wants to cross the road.  It would be her highest and best use in society.  Eventually some sleepy truck driver will accidentally run her over while she attempts to warn him off some crow picking at road kill on her corner.  And so she would attain martyrdom.  Saint Liz the Patron Saint of Scolds, Banshees and Karens.

But hopefully it will also be the day when we lose a whole company of RINOs.  There are something like twenty of them that self-identified by voting for impeachment this year after Donald Trump was out of office.  And there are enough other dolts who have proven their untrustworthy nature during all the COVID and George Floyd madness to bring their cases to the attention of voters next year.  And hopefully based on the recent polling there will be a very good sized company of Democrats who will also be joining them in the unemployment line too.

All in all next Election Day should be something of a celebration for the country.  Maybe we can call it Schadenfreude Day, or to make it sound a little more American, Comeuppance Day.  But whatever we do or don’t bother to call it, it will be a day when hopefully we take the first step toward ridding ourselves of the phonies who claim to be on “our side.”  Liz Cheney has no business representing real Americans.  She’s a phony from the the get go and if she wants to represent anyone let her get residency in New York City or San Francisco and represent the phonies and weirdos who live there.  Of course, because she’s a “Republican” they won’t have her.  Even she isn’t crazy enough for their liking but let her deal with that, not us.  I’d prefer the crazies that actually belong on our side.  We can work our way through them to find the few good people around like Ron DeSantis.  The last thing we need is to get a Jeb Bush or a Mitt Romney foisted on us as our supposed presidential candidate.

So I’m looking forward to Comeuppance Day. Now of course Liz will already have been eliminated during the primary election well before the general election day.  But I want to celebrate all the losses, both RINO and Dem on the same day so I’ll have to practice delayed gratification to make it a much more meaningful celebration.

I figure I’ll celebrate with corned beef and pastrami sandwiches and later on some pie and ice cream with good coffee.  Hopefully there will be a Youtube video that includes all my favorites wailing about their losses.  Boy I love being mean.

What Will Real Energy Innovation Look Like?

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Back when Barry Soweto pretended to be an American president, he spent his terms in office trying to convince us that solar and wind powered electric generation installations were the future of the American energy strategy.  Because he was just an actor playing a part, he can be partially excused for espousing a policy that is pathetically absurd.

If you covered the planet with wind turbines, land and sea, besides killing off the bird population of the planet you would not solve the energy problems of the human population.  Wind by itself is a fluctuating power source.  As are photo-voltaic solar panels.  On their own they will not provide the kind of consistent supply of electric power that we expect from our electrical utilities.  That is why California, the land of fruits and nuts, that despises fossil fuels, has recently installed many gas turbine generators to augment the unreliable and inadequate “renewable” wind and sun-based generation.

None of this is to say that wind and sun-based power is valueless.  In places where there is substantial wind and plentiful sunny days there is power to be harvested.  But it should be used in an intelligent manner.  Storing that energy in a recoverable form would allow it to be accumulated into a valuable commodity.  For instance, if it was the power source for an electrolytic process for separating water into hydrogen and oxygen then that hydrogen could be stored and used later as a vehicle fuel, chemical raw material or for combustion to fuel electrical generation.

Or sun and wind generated power could be used as a source of power for water desalination plants.  The output of the plant would be controlled so that at night when only wind power was available a lower out put would be maintained and likewise in the day when clouds limited the amount of solar energy available.

But with these environmental energy sources careful attention should be made to the cost of maintaining the generation infrastructure.  I have been told that the replacement cost of the solar panels had been ignored in the Obama era installation of these panels willy-nilly across the roofs of unsuspecting Americans.  Just because the government decides to “give” you something for free doesn’t mean that the cost of these items make them sensible investments.  And the cost of maintaining wind turbines also must be reckoned in the calculation of their desirability as an energy choice.

And there are other energy sources that must be explored.  Geothermal energy has only seen limited exploitation because of the scarcity of obvious geothermal hot spots.  But if resources are made available to study how a more general approach could be taken there might be great gain to be made on this front.

But the most obvious source of energy has been available to us for almost a hundred years.  Nuclear fission thermal power stations provide enormously dense energy supplies in almost limitless capacity.  The fact that there are safety and waste management challenges in such a complex and new technology is hardly surprising.  The fact that people around the world have allowed themselves to be panicked into abandoning this technology says more about the low morale of the current human population than it does about the difficulty of harnessing this amazing natural resource.  After all radioactivity is the source of the sun’s power and in fact the nuclear fusion that powers the sun is a much more technically challenging process for humans to harvest than the heat coming off of a fission pile.  To think that radioactive energy is any more mysterious than electrical or chemical energy is to be a primitive undeserving to utilize modern technology, one who should be relegated to living in a cave and warming himself by wearing furs and daubing himself with mastodon lard, too stupid to harness the frightening technology of fire.

The good news is that more confident humans at some time in the near future will return to nuclear power.  If the West fails to be the ones to do it then they will see themselves eclipsed and will deservedly sink into the lower echelons of third world nationhood.  Hopefully before that happens the modern humans among us will rally the people and admonish them to man up.

The Soros Crime Epidemic

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This article does a pretty fair job at summarizing the where and the why of George Soros’s sabotage of the criminal justice system in a multitude of American cities.  Soros is an enemy of healthy society.  He is intelligent and he is evil.  I hope he dies very soon and his money is frittered away by his despicable offspring as soon as possible.

The sheer numbers of lives lost because he has been able to elect district attorneys that will not take dangerous criminals off the street is stunning.  Thousands of extra lives have been lost and many American cities have become war zones.  Soros will rot in hell for this but we will bear most of the burden for a long time to come.  Stay away from these cities if you value your life and your family’s.

 

Modern Astrophysicists Are Hacks

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I’m sure most people are familiar with the CBS network comedy The Big Bang Theory.  In it a group of young physicists (and a spacecraft engineer) who are friends display their sexual and social dysfunction around a pretty blonde girl.  As amusing as that was (for a short time) the real takeaway should have been that what passes for astrophysicists today should disqualify this discipline from inclusion in the modern academy.

Now you may think I’m being ridiculous.  But I’m not.  Currently the astrophysical community believes in things called dark matter and dark energy because it’s the only way to explain why their models of the universe don’t correspond to their observations.  To me this means that they are hacks who would rather pretend that making up whole pantheons of fictitious and undetectable matter and energy particles without a shred of evidence is preferable to junking unproven assumptions like the Cosmological Principle.

This German lady physicist goes over the recent measurements that basically invalidate the Cosmological Principle.  And this basically invalidates the conclusions of the 2011 Nobel Prizes in Physics that went to the astrophysicists that supposedly demonstrated that the accelerating expansion of the universe.is caused by dark energy.  So I hope the Nobel committee is going to demand back their million dollars or whatever it is today.

Honestly, these people are an embarrassment to science.  I guess considering what passes for science today i shouldn’t be surprised.  Global warming pseudoscience gets a pass from governments and universities.  Why shouldn’t astrophysics be mumbo jumbo with string theory, dark matter and dark energy taking the place of actual thought.  If Einstein or Planck were alive today they’d slap the collective face of these mental midgets.  I guess it just confirms the general decline of our civilization.  Okay rant over.

 

 

 

 

 

Choosing Sides

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As I was reading one of the endless posts decrying the crime wave that has a ignited across America I was reminded of a conversation I had with a friend about this.  I was saying that the cities that still had enough sane people would have to reauthorize the police to restore order and then restore the police tactics and policies that were shown to work back two decades ago in places like New York, things like broken windows enforcement.

This friend is a rabid opponent of the police.  He is a libertarian that would like to see open carry as the solution to violence.  When asked whether he would be glad to see a policeman instead of a gangbanger if he found himself at night in a really bad neighborhood he replied he’d much prefer that his gun was there to protect him.

Putting aside the small proportion of the population that would prefer to shoot it out with the bad guys personally, I thought about where all this anarchy is leading.  And what I concluded was that we’re all going to have to choose sides.  For a large but not majority section of the population the police are a gang that harasses their people.  The largest part of this section are urban blacks.  They have been the recipients of stop and frisk and other urban anti-crime tactics.  So logically they are the most opposed to the activities of this “gang.”  Other components of the Left are the other opponents of the police.  Some of these components like the whites and the Asians do not themselves suffer from these policies and tactics.  In all honesty they are the beneficiaries of these programs.  But in solidarity with their fellow partisans and in the spirit of doing what they believe is “the right thing” they take the side of the urban blacks and decry the “injustice” of these police intrusions on the activities of young black men.

But now things are changing.  The activities of the other gangs, the ones that up until now have mostly only impacted the residents of the destitute black neighborhoods, are being felt everywhere.  Smash and grab theft is happening exclusively in affluent white areas of the cities and carjackings and drive by shootings and just plain assaults and murders are spreading to every neighborhood of these unpoliced cities.  Now that makes the calculus of these leftists more complicated.  How much pain, fear and uncertainty must be accepted in order to show support for their black brothers?  And even for black residents of the inner city, which gang do they fear more?  Sure, the cops are white outsider oppressors of the neighborhood ecosystem but what about the local gangs that now shoot up the neighborhood more or less with impunity.  Is it worse if your eighteen-year-old brother gets frisked by the cops on Friday night but then goes on his way or that he gets gunned down by some neighborhood kid who is auditioning for the local amateur version of the Bloods and Crips?  And forget about adults what about your three-year-old daughter who is sleeping in her crib and suddenly is struck by a stray bullet when rival gangs fill the air with lead on your street?

Back in the 1990’s New York City chose the police as the gang to back in the war that was playing out on the streets of New York.  But that was a very different New York City.  I think it will take a long time for the minority majority population of New York City to figure all this out.  But that is what has to happen to set things right.  In this “democracy” we supposedly inhabit the people have to wake up from their social justice daydream and realize that the police are the least dangerous gang that is needed to keep all the other gangs from running amok.  Sure there will always be rogue cops and sure the police will always to a certain extent use their privileged position to tilt the scales when one of their own is at fault.  But that is just human nature and it is seen everywhere people interact.  It’s no different than what politicians do every day.  It’s what we all do when we’re in charge of anything from a little league team to a corporate behemoth like Google.

So my prediction is when the pain and fear reaches 51 % of the city population, they’ll bring back the cops and put down the gangs.  That is of course if the gangs haven’t gotten too strong in the meantime to outshoot the cops.  At that point we’ll need the Marines to restore order.  Sort of like Mogadishu.

Justified Deadly Force and the Myth of Systemic Racism, by Mike Simonelli – A Book Review

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I have known Mike Simonelli, the author of this book, for over forty years and he has always been an honest, talented and patriotic American.  After separating from the Air Force, he transferred into the US Army Reserves to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan, retiring with the rank of lieutenant colonel.  Currently as a law enforcement officer he has been dealing with the reality of trying to keep the peace in an America where everything is upside down.  The media paints the police as racist monsters intent on harming and even killing innocent black citizens.  And at the same time the media works to paint black criminals as innocent bystanders who just happen to be “in the wrong place at the wrong time” in an attempt to mask the fact that criminality is the cause of a great majority of their frequent encounters with the police.

Officer Simonelli told me that he wrote this book for two reasons.  The first is to provide a balance against the books that have appeared over the last decade that paint the false picture of the police in America as a fatally flawed product of racist objectives and behaviors.  The second reason was to provide a resource for people who need to address these false portrayals of law enforcement in America.  These may be private citizens arguing with friends and neighbors about something they heard on the news.  Or it might be an elected official who needs to dig up verifiable facts about the use of deadly force against blacks by the police.  It could even be a town police chief trying to counteract a passionate but misinformed resident at a town council meeting.  But for whatever specific need this book will serve to provide ready facts and references for the rebuttal of the endless accusations of systemic police racism as it applies to the use of deadly force against black Americans.

The majority of the book is divided into three main headings:

Part 1. Deadly Police Shootings: Racial Bias by the Press, Protestors and Politicians

This section is broken down into sub-sections on; Research Study Introduction, Literature Review Methodology and Results.

Part 2. Justified Deadly Force of Unarmed Subjects, 2019 to 2020

This section is broken down into sub-sections on; Incidents in 20219, Incidents in 2020 and Analysis.

Part 3. Felonious Line of Duty Murders of Law Enforcement Officers 2019 to 2020

This section is broken down into sub-sections on; Incidents in 20219, Incidents in 2020 and Analysis.

 

The sub-sections listed as incidents in 2019 and 2020 in both Part 2 and Part 3 are case histories for all the events under those categories that occurred in the United States.  Each death of an unarmed subject and each murdered policeman is given its own case study.  This is an enormous amount of research to back up the assertions and conclusions that Officer Simonelli makes in his book.

Obviously, I find myself in complete agreement with the conclusions of this study.  But it is extremely gratifying to have facts and figures at my disposal when debating the rabid Left or even the misinformed or uninformed among the general public.

One of the amazing facts that is highlighted in the book is that an almost complete analog to the George Floyd death occurred only this time with a white subject, a man named Tony Timpa in Texas who died under almost exactly the same circumstances and yet because he was white there was no outrage, no riots and arson, no vilification of the police and no beatification of the deceased.

Reading the case studies, especially the accounts of the murdered police officers, makes it painfully clear just what an impossible job it is to, at the same time, protect the public, minimize the risk to oneself and still avoid being accused of using unjustified or excessive force against a suspect.  And now in the current environment where immunity from civil lawsuits for police officers has been removed, I’m shocked that even larger numbers of police have not retired or resigned from the blue state and blue city jurisdictions.

As a friend, I hope a million people head over to Amazon and buy Mike Simonelli’s book.  But more importantly I hope everyone sends a link to this post to friends who they think might be interested in or helped by the facts that are documented in this book.  It really is a unique resource.

 

Justified Deadly Force and the Myth of Systemic Racism, by Mike Simonelli

 

The Worm is Beginning to Turn

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Just how tone deaf can you be?

Illinois Representative Jonathan Carroll is scrapping his proposed legislation to make willfully unvaccinated people pay COVID-19 hospital bills out of pocket after he received violent threats that also targeted his family, staff and synagogue.

This dope goes out of his way to try and pass a law that kicks his own constituents in the teeth and he’s surprised when the less reasonable and less careful members of that group say mean things to him.  I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s one of those guys who doesn’t get re-elected next year, even in Illinois.

Maybe, just maybe, the COVID  clown car is running out of gas.