Category: Current Events

Ron DeSantis Keeps Taking the Right Actions to Protect His People From Biden

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I’m starting to feel like a broken record praising this guy but he’s not taking no for an answer in pushing for a shield against Floridians losing their jobs over refusing the vaccine.  Here he is calling the Florida legislature into special session to enact laws to prevent mandates from taking away the jobs of those who refuse to be vaccinated.

At this rate I expect him to issue a warrant to have Dementia Joe hauled down to Florida and prosecuted for mopery and dopery and eventually forced to pick up trash on roadsides with that stick with the spike at the end in an orange jump suit.

Well, anyway, it’s good to see there’s at least one politician who isn’t going to just sit there and let Washington treat us like slaves without at least putting up a fight.

More Motes and Oxen

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I was on a zoom call with a couple of friends who live in central Massachusetts and they were telling me that the pot business is a howling success.  There are billboards on all the state highways.  The “dispensaries” as the pot shops are known are doing a land office business.  And we discussed how exactly the “growers” managed to protect their crop.  The theory was that although there were probably some crops outdoors, hidden from the view of the populace, mostly the stuff is being grown in locked greenhouses.  And we assumed this means that the “farmers” must have fairly robust security and probably a few guns thrown in for good measure.  One of the guys said that the biggest problem that’s become apparent is that the stuff being sold today is many times more potent than the stuff that used to be sold before legalization.  He mentioned THC levels that were near 90%.  And the upshot of this is psychological symptoms among the users are much worse and much more prevalent than in the past.  Anxiety and paranoia manifest at levels that render the users incapable of normal life.  They can’t keep a job or maintain relationships.

And it just struck me that here is a blue state policy to contrast with their alleged commitment to safety on the COVID front.  They’ll force you to be vaccinated and wear a mask against your will supposedly for your own good but they’ll allow a practice that they know is a mental and physical health threat and also a public safety hazard from the consideration of people driving under the influence and walking among us in a mentally unbalanced state.  In addition, since the FDA still considers marijuana illegal, they won’t get involved in regulating the safety of the pot that’s being sold and so any terrible mistake involving pesticides or other toxins finding its way into the drug cannot be prevented or adjudicated.

So here is the double standard.  They get to decide when freedom is important and when it’s not.  Freedom for me but not for thee.  But this definitely opens up the model for how the red states can change things in their favor.  Pick and choose the places where they will obey or defy federal law.  As an example, Texas needs to close their border with Mexico.  They should build their own wall a mile inside the federal wall.  They should arrest all illegal aliens and jail them until they agree to leave the country and if they come back make their next stay in jail very uncomfortable.  They should force all employers to obey immigration laws under the penalty of massive fines.  If the federal government squawks flip them the bird and continue on with real life.  And there are other things that make sense.  Welfare needs to be tightened up to the point where those who refuse to work should be so hard-up that they decide to leave and go to a blue state like California on their own.  Hell, that could be part of the policy to offer them bus or plane tickets to the blue state of their choice.

So that was what I was thinking about today.  Instead of freedom for thee but not for me let’s make it you live your life your way and I’ll live my life mine.

Even Saturday Night Live Has Started to Make Fun of Dementia Joe

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Possibly we’ve reached the tipping point where even the most rabid supporters of the leftist narrative have thrown in the towel and admitted the emperor has no clothes, or brain for that matter.  Saturday Night Live performed a skit where a doddering, incoherent Biden meets his self from eight years ago and the world can see what he’s lost in those eight years, namely his brain.  I guess it’s possible that they don’t mean any harm to Team Biden but there are plenty of digs.  At one point the earlier Biden says to his current self, “I’m a lot like you only lucid.”  They even have a shot of one Biden sniffing the other guy’s head.  This doesn’t exactly seem like the kind of treatment that a popular Democrat president gets from the SNL team.  Seems more like Joe being declared DOA and the corpse getting thrown to the wolves.

Hard to say for sure, but I think it’s sinking in that the White House and the rest of this administration is “not ready for prime time.”  If the price of oil continues on its present course and the price of necessities continues to skyrocket if they are even available at all I can see Biden reaching Jimmy Carter territory very soon.

Of course, the Republicans are useless and so it’s up to the Democrats to keep shooting themselves in the foot but the way things are going I could believe they really will screw things up badly to give even the stupid party a chance to capitalize on what’s going wrong in the country.  It really is amazing to see what a mess they’ve made of the economy.  Stagflation wasn’t a word I ever expected to hear again but low and behold the economy is in the tank and inflation is out of control.

So hurrah for Dementia Joe, or Let’s Go Brandon or Jet Pack Joe or Beavis or whatever current mockery the American people think up next.  Once people are sure Biden is a vegetable and he can’t fix the problems that he has spawned they will be forced to think of how they can get themselves out of this mess.  At that point maybe someone intelligent from our side might be able to show some leadership and persuade the country we need to start doing things differently.  If not, then we are good and truly doomed and each of us needs to figure out Plan B.

How Do You Coexist with People Who Won’t Tolerate Your Existence?

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An open question in my mind is a hypothetical.  Bear with me for a moment.  Let’s suppose that sometime in the coming months a portion of the country will begin to go its own way on federal laws that overstep what is tolerable by the people living there.  Maybe it will start with gun rights or abortion or illegal immigration.  Under this hypothetical, a state, let’s say Texas, will defy some federal laws and somehow manages to make it stick.  For the sake of argument let’s say that the federal government decides that ignoring the decision is in their short-term interests and they take no action.  And let us further suppose that this behavior is copied by the rest of the red states and after a certain amount of time it becomes the status quo with both red and blue states ignoring whatever federal laws they don’t agree with.  It’s not a very improbable supposition if you look at what’s going on with drug and gun laws in the blue states.  It only requires that some red state shows the backbone to defy the tyrants in Washington D.C.  So, this is the scenario.

Now here’s the question.  If these states start making their own laws, will they mimic the blue states and make these laws punitive against the subset of their citizens that have blue state lifestyles and values?  As an example of blue state behavior, I will mention Colorado’s repeated prosecution of a wedding baker for refusing to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex wedding.  Even after the Supreme Court decided in his favor the authorities in Colorado are still harassing him.

Obviously if red states wanted to rearrange the social order, they could outlaw homosexual marriage.  They could reinstate sodomy laws, effectively criminalizing homosexuality.  They could ban pornography.  There are many steps that they could take to reverse the current legal status of many things they object to.

And that is my question.  Would they draw the line at preventing the rights of normal people from being trampled on?  This would involve restoring the bill of rights, that is, freedom of speech, religion, association.  And also restoring equal protection under the law by eliminating affirmative action for women and minorities.

Or would they go well beyond that to remove the innovations that the Left has pushed on us under the label of social justice?  This would include eliminating abortion, homosexual rights including marriage, so-called transgender status and other progressive mandates that have been forced through over the years.

Admittedly, this is all a hypothetical exercise.  Even the first group of changes that just restore the rights of normal people aren’t anywhere on the horizon in any red state right now.  But if our side ever gets going with reestablishing our rights then the question will be asked whether we want to limit the changes to things we’ve lost or extend it to reordering society so that those who despise us aren’t accommodated by the law.

So, there’s the whole question.  I’m not sure what the Red States would do in this scenario.  Maybe it will be a range of things depending on the state.  Maybe a place like Florida would be in the first case.  Whereas some place like Alabama might be closer to the second case.  One thing that might color the way people act is the knowledge that making it uncomfortable for people who have been persecuting you for the last fifty years might motivate them to leave and go live in a blue state.  And in fact, thinking about the policies like the one in Colorado leads me to believe that blue states have been doing this exact thing all along.  So, as the saying goes, “What goes around comes around.”  Who knows, whole cities like Austin might empty out overnight.

Anyway, what do you think is the likely behavior?

 

Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.

Of Eye Motes and Gored Oxen

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I make it a point to know by whom and in which an article is published.  Places like the New York Times and the Washington Post have had to resort to deceptive titling to fool normal people into clicking on their absurdly biased news and opinion content.  Ninety nine out of a hundred times I skip right past their offerings.  But today I saw an article entitled “Why Merrick Garland Can’t Win” (please do not click on this unless you’re willing to read leftist crap) written by Dahlia Lithwick in Slate.  Now if there was ever an article with three strikes against it this would be it.  But before I start my rant I just want to ask how does anyone get named Dahlia Lithwick who isn’t a character in some Victorian Romance novel?

I make it a point to know by whom and in which an article is published.  Places like the New York Times and the Washington Post have had to resort to deceptive titling to fool normal people into clicking on their absurdly biased news and opinion content.  Ninety nine out of a hundred times I skip right past their offerings.  But today I saw an article entitled “Why Merrick Garland Can’t Win” (please do not click on this unless you’re willing to read leftist crap) written by Dahlia Lithwick in Slate.  Now if there was ever an article with three strikes against it this would be it.  But before I start my rant, I just want to ask how does anyone get named Dahlia Lithwick who isn’t a character in some Victorian Romance novel?

So, before I decided to read this screed, I knew that nothing that Dahlia Lithwick could write or Slate would publish had any possible chance of me agreeing with it.  So, they were completely dependent on the title to fool me.  Based on the title it sounded like it was an essay proving that Merrick Garland won’t be able to distort his role as Attorney General to harm conservatives.  Well, I know from long experience that this is a ploy.  Instead, it will be a defense of Garland and all he does.  But I clicked on it.  Maybe I thought I needed to suffer for some terrible sins in my past.  But for whatever reason I decided to click on it.  And when I did, I found myself through the looking glass.

Dahlia Lithwick was moaning about how the evil deplorables were impugning the good name of Merrick Garland by pretending that he was the fascist instead of themselves!  Here’s a sample:

“Garland is currently attempting to restore confidence in an independent, professionalized, apolitical Department of Justice, but he is doing so in the face of claims by his opponents that the DOJ is the new KGB and that its jackbooted thugs are coming to arrest you in the dark of night for expressing peaceful opposition to a classroom curriculum. If you forge conspiracies where no conspiracies exist, at bare minimum you will have raised the questions. The questions backfill the truth. It doesn’t matter what the Garland DOJ is doing—trying to protect school officials who are threatened and stalked. The point is to say he’s creating an army of federal forces to enforce critical race theory in school. Try as he may, Merrick Garland cannot perform boring independence fast enough to outrun GOP claims that he’s a wild-eyed, violent socialist. And while the GOP currently exists only to cast everything you thought you believed into doubt, the real endgame is vigilantism. The endgame is to ensure that people mistrust government, election systems, school boards, the media, and the justice system enough to lend a hand in their destruction.”

Notice that the Department of Justice is just doing its boring job locking up innocent citizens that it wants to destroy for the FBI set-up on January 6th but it’s also doing its job when it allows BLM and antifa to run amok for a year in the streets of America’s cities.  And it’s equally doing its job when it threatens parents for opposing the brainwashing of their children.

But none of that is what is distressing Dahlia.  What bothers her is that we no longer believe this narrative.  Her side can pretend to believe every lie that the Deep State feeds to the media but we aren’t allowed to believe what our own damn lying eyes see in front of us.  She insists that we must believe in the honesty of the Deep State or the terrorists win.  She’s angry that after having the football pulled away a thousand times we’ve finally smartened up and don’t want to play the fool for her side again.  Poor Dahlia, so sad.

22OCT2021 – Thoughts for the Day

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Outside some of the trees, the maples and the birches have already shed their leaves.  The oaks are turning red and the very last of the flowers are still bravely displaying their gaudy colors, bright yellow and purple right to the last, but Autumn is in the air.  The smell of the fallen leaves and the other signs of decay are unmistakable.  But I’m past my summer mourning period and I have embraced the short cool days and long chilly nights.  Halloween is a week from this Sunday and Camera Girl has festooned our door with fake cobwebs and skulls and all kinds of macabre paraphernalia.  Princess Sack of Potatoes is engrossed with all the Halloween themed library books that are being read to her.  Several grandchild birthday parties are in the offing and of course the big gatherings are right around the corner.  My outside chores are way behind schedule but that’s sort of my norm.  Right now, the home front is a happy place.

Looking at the news today is a continuation of what has been going on.  Biden’s poll numbers are something like 40/50 so definitely underwater and probably a bit worse than that in reality.  Probably more like 35/55.  But those numbers aren’t very important at the moment.  The big surprise for me is Manchin and Sinema holding out against the Reconciliation Bill.  I figured once they were given the requisite payoff they would fold.  I’ll have to keep an eye on that.

And all the other things going on in politics, the Virginia governor’s race, Biden yammering about the Senate disposing of the filibuster, Garland threatening parents for objecting to racist ideology being taught to children, Florida legislating against the vaccine mandates in the workforce, teachers and firemen and cops suing cities over the mandates, inflation and empty store shelves, you name it, all this stuff gives hints that the country is coalescing around the idea that the Democrats are making things worse in any number of ways.

The thing I find hopeful is that what is being demonstrated is not only outrageously extreme policies but more importantly, bungling incompetence.  Milley, Austin, Buttigieg, that fat guy in the wig and dress, Blinken, Harris are basically a clown car full of failures.  And leading up to the “Big Guy,” Dementia Joe himself.  If the empty shelves crush the Christmas season, I could see the 2022 mid-terms being a referendum on Biden.  That could give us some breathing room from the Dems instituting most of their agenda permanently.

But being honest I have to admit that this is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  We still haven’t seen anyone stopping any of the leftist agenda.  It just rolls on poisoning the minds of our children and rendering us pariahs in our own country.  What would warrant me taking notice is some conservative state legislation either getting confirmed by the Supreme Court or being rejected by the Supreme Court and the state telling the federal government that they reject the decision and will implement it despite the rejection.  In fact, I would prefer the latter.  That would be a real Crossing of the Rubicon.  That would be authoritative proof that men with convictions and courage still exist in this country.

Okay, dream over.  The news is more of the same but life goes on here at the Compound.  We’re living our lives the best we can here behind the Iron Curtain and watching which way the wind blows.  Have a wonderful weekend.

 

My Intro to Local Politics

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So, I finally went to a meeting of the Republican Party in my town.  Being that the local election is in two weeks it was a pretty long meeting, two hours.  But it was fairly interesting to see what it consists of.  Except for asking a question of a guest speaker who’s running for higher state office I kept my mouth shut and listened.  My town is unusual in New England in that the Republicans are the dominant party.  So, it was interesting to see what they saw as the correct strategy to take concerning attacks in the local press on their policies.  It was actually heartening to hear them speak rationally about things like mask mandates and vaccination requirements.  Being embedded in a blue state means that certain things like school health requirements are off the table but it was extremely encouraging that we were sitting closely together in a conference room without any mask nonsense at all.  People even shook hands without naked fear showing on their faces.

There were a number of jokes about the crazier woke complaints that some townspeople had levelled against the town government.  One of my favorites is the calls for all Republicans to resign to atone for the January 6th “insurrection.”  The selectmen were debating whether they should address this complaint by assuring the town that they were indeed in New England on January 6th and doing their jobs.  Inwardly I was thinking that the way to answer something like this would be with snarky humor but I kept quiet.  No need to get myself labeled as an unserious person, yet.

I was interested to hear that the state government is policing speech at the municipal level.  They have outlawed the use of the word “character” when the town describes itself in writing.  They were told that was a dog whistle for “white.”  Amusingly the town folks were looking for synonyms for the word character to allow them to work around this silliness.  I found this approach to short circuiting the typical New England virtue signaling exemplary.  Follow the letter of the law and defy the spirit of it.

There were many mundane items having to do with budget and personnel and I could tell there were a lot of things being discussed that had a lot of history and back story that I wasn’t privy to.  But it was interesting to see how the various personalities and positions asserted themselves in the discussions.  And even though some of the subject matter was dry I found myself interested in the positions that the various individuals took.  The elected officials were extremely anxious that everything possible be done in the short time remaining to shore up their campaigns against Democrat and media attacks.  The committee members wanted to make sure that there wasn’t too much spinning around on things that had already been arranged like print and electronic media press releases.  Obviously, everyone was looking at things from his own point of reference.  But understandable considering what their jobs were.

As I drove away last night, I found myself thinking, “I wonder what will be at the top of the agenda at the next meeting.”  I left my e-mail address and phone number on their attendance sheet and I’m sure they’ll contact me to contribute money to their coffers.  But so far, I didn’t see anything that told me I shouldn’t find out more about this group.  They seemed like intelligent, normal people.  And there was not even a hint of human sacrifice being part of their initiation ceremony.  Of course, they didn’t declare me dictator for life yet but so far so good.

Trump Says He’s Preparing to Enter the Social Media Arena

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Donald Trump is setting up to unveil a social media platform called Truth Social in early 2022.  The company will be a publicly traded entity and will have a some kind of streaming option akin to what YouTube provides.

Well, this is what I said I wanted so let’s see how this goes.  I wish all the success in the world to this enterprise and if it has value I’ll gladly join up.  And if it causes Facebook and Twitter to suffer, then all the better.  Let’s wait and see.

Don’t Depend on a Savior Appearing

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I would love nothing more than for Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis or fill-in-the-blank to rally our people and put a stop to the rot that has gutted this country.  Who wouldn’t?  And maybe he will.  But I’ve reached the point where I think waiting for that is not a realistic strategy.  At least not all by itself.

It’s fine to try and aid such a rescue mission.  I’m not going to tell you not to vote or help to sabotage the GOP Establishment.  All of the tactics that people talk about have their good and bad points.  And I don’t consider myself a political guru.  I’m not.

But what I am saying is you should have a back-up plan based on this thing never getting better.  That sounds pretty bad but I think it’s realistic.  Going back to my standard analysis of the choices available to us in this current situation, namely, fight, flee or fold, what I’m saying is you should have a plan if fight is not an option.  Flee or fold.

Flee or fold which is for you?  Do you know?  Do you know what those things even mean?  My idea is that now is the time to find out what your options are and which one to choose.  And it’s not black and white.  Fold doesn’t necessarily mean having the lobotomy and becoming a Leftist psychopath.  It might mean talking the talk and trying to maintain a secret life as a normal person inside the hive.  How likely it is that such a thing could be done long-term is one of the questions you’ll have to answer for yourself.  And likewise fleeing might be a stepwise process.  First step might be leaving a dangerous city.  The next might be moving to a red state and finally emigrating to a freer part of the world would be the last straw.

So that’s what I mean.  I think it’s necessary to start thinking about what happens if nobody decides to put up a fight to save the free world we used to inhabit.  It’s not a pleasant thought but I think if you wait until they start sending us to the re-education camps it may be too late to figure out what your choices are.  And I’m not saying the sky will be falling in the next fifteen minutes.  Although if you happen to live in Portland or Chicago or Minneapolis and to a lesser extent, anyone of a host of American cities it certainly has fallen in on you already.  Chances are you’re already thinking about or acting on the first part of flight.  You’re fleeing from a city to save yourself and your family.

What I am saying is start thinking very concretely about what you’re willing to do and what you just won’t accept.  If you just plain won’t bend the knee then at some point you will have to leave.  You’ll have to get out and find a better place.  That is unless you want to be a one-man war.  And that can only end one way.

Philadelphia Regains Lead in Race to the Bottom

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Chicago has been giving Baltimore and Atlanta a real run for their money as the most dangerous American city.  What with their seemingly endless shootings and the antics of their mayor and state’s attorney they seemed a shoo in.

But suddenly Philadelphia comes from out of nowhere and proves that they’re devolving to the subhuman level at hyperspeed.  Where else can a man rape a woman on a crowded subway car for forty minutes without a single passenger attempting to stop him or even call 911?

I guess it’s a marker.  I would say that level of callous inhumanity must bring Philadelphia even with either Genghis Khan’s Mongols or Attila’s Huns.  But the exact level is unimportant.  The important metric is the acceleration of the dehumanizing process.  Based on the way that the copycat process proceeds I’m guessing that cannibalism should appear in The Bronx by Christmas.  Of course I’m not taking into account inflation and meat shortages.  That might speed things up to Thanksgiving.

Seriously though, it does give you pause to think of just how violent the larger cities have become.  The way the violence is increasing I confess I’m unable to decide whether people will be shocked into demanding the return of real law and order or will they just give up and flee from the urban areas altogether.  My gut reaction is that it’s too late and these areas will not be revived.  I know it’s hard to believe that New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Baltimore and St. Louis are hopelessly broken and won’t ever be safe for law-abiding people again but when you see and hear what’s going on it’s pretty hard to see how these things can be fixed under the new rules the police have to adhere to.  Maybe when these cities have all-black police forces it will be possible for real policing to occur without screeches of racism from every idiot who has a cell phone.  But that seems like something that won’t happen for decades and by then these places will be so poor and unattractive that it won’t matter to the majority of Americans what happens there.

Well, anyway, this is another marker as I say and another warning to anyone stupid enough to think of living in these places.  Remember these cities have the strictest gun laws and the most anti-white district attorneys in the country.  If you were attacked and attempted to defend yourself with a gun you would be treated the way murderers used to be treated.  You’d get forty years and probably wish it was the chair.  So make sure when you’re looking at where you’ll settle down to check the crime statistics and the voting record.  If it’s a democrat enclave full of crime look somewhere else.  Maybe the salaries are higher in some of these places but it’s just not worth your life or the life of someone you care about.