Category: Current Events

Let the Daylight In

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Supposedly October 1st is the deadline for the latest government shutdown scare.  The Democrats have said that unless Biden’s Obamacare boondoggles are extended and PBS gets funded, they won’t vote for an extension of the present budget.

Now the talking heads on the Left are split fifty/fifty on whether this is a good idea or a terrible one.  The conundrum is that if they allow the government to shut down, they will take a good chunk of the blame in the eyes of the public.  In addition, Trump has indicated that unlike in shutdowns past, he doesn’t intend to furlough federal employees.  He’s going to fire huge numbers in order to reduce the size of the federal government.  And the great majority of these employees are Democrats.  So, the feeling on the Left is that whatever blame Trump gets will not make up for the blame the Democrats themselves will get for abandoning their most loyal voters (federal bureaucrats) to the fate of unemployment and eventual starvation.  After all these aren’t rocket scientists.  Most of these people aren’t qualified to cross the street even with a traffic light.  If the government lets them go, it’s not even a sure thing they’ll make it home successfully.  Like lemmings they may all follow some confused creature into the Potomac where we can only assume they’ll all be washed out to sea.

So, I guess we have to see what Trump plans to do.  If he does plan to eliminate some enormous number of federal workers maybe this is a watershed moment for the country.  And who knows, maybe he also will ask the senate to take the nuclear option and eliminate the filibuster all together.  And if they do eliminate it, maybe they’ll go the whole way and then just enact a real honest-to-goodness budget like they used to before Obama gave up on federal budgets.

So, there is the shiny happy version of things.  What’s the other choice?  Well, firing millions of people, even useless stupid people will have economic consequences.  Bureaucrats have dependents.  Mostly they’re cats but there must be some children too.  And if all of a sudden there are millions of kids falling into poverty, this will have some consequences.  If they’re dire enough maybe it will anger Americans who hate to see poor people suffering.  Maybe this will lead to the Republicans getting pounded in the 2026 midterms.  And that would lead to divided government for the last two years of Trump’s term.

Well, you know, I think my gut tells me that the correct strategy is for Trump to “go big.”  Emptying out Washington DC is a once in a century situation.  Doing it now hurts the Left almost exclusively.  If all these people find themselves unemployed it will have a huge impact on elections.  These are the Democrats’ most loyal voters.  But if they lose those government jobs something tells me they’ll be too busy struggling to survive to bother voting at all.  In fact, firing huge numbers of bureaucrats will change the whole ecosystem around Washington.  Who knows, it might turn Virginia red again when all the carpetbaggers have to go home to mom and dad’s basement in California, Massachusetts and New York.

So go ahead DJT, start up that chainsaw.  Let the daylight in.

They Don’t Make Them Like That Anymore

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Today I watched the old movie “Gunga Din” for like the trillionth time.  And it has all the same silly things going on every time I see it.  The gags are telegraphed, the sentiment is slapped on with a cement trowel, the improbabilities are piled to the sky.  You name it.

But watching the three leads; Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. go through their paces as Kipling’s three sergeants is a never-ending treat that I can watch several times a year probably until they finally bury me.  It’s a joy to behold.

And the picture works as both a comedy and an adventure story.  And the supporting cast (including an elephant named Annie) provide plenty of support and opportunity for our heroes to search for treasure, destroy British Army discipline, romance the girl or save the day.  And you know, I think I like the fact that even when it was being made, the British Raj was already a sore point for the social justice types but this movie plays up the “white man’s burden” aspect of the story even more than needed to match the historical era.

Sam Jaffe’s Gunga Din really is a minor role right up until the critical juncture in the story where he saves the day.  But he does give the regimental bhisti his due.  And the actors portraying the army officers and the officious Bertie Higginbotham, all acquit themselves with the expected amount of British bluster.

So, what makes this movie fun?  Despite the well-acted lead characters, I think the success of this movie is thanks to the unflagging action, both comic and adventure.  The heroes are constantly fighting savage tribesmen, jumping off cliffs into rivers, breaking out of jail by means of elephant powered building demolition and fighting their way through a saloon full of Scottish highlanders.  They only slow down when poisoning Bertie Higginbotham at an engagement party.  Armies of strangling Thuggees are no match for these soldiers three as they roll out their “three musketeers / all for one and one for all” routine to frustrate the Thug Guru’s master plan to defeat the British and restore India to the greatness it had known before Alexander the Great had slapped it around in the fourth century BC.

So, I have to state which of the three sergeants is my personal favorite.  Now Douglas Fairbanks Jr.’s Sgt. Ballantine is never in the running.  He’s the romantic lead and thereby much abused by his fiancée’s humiliating attentions.  And despite the excellent work done by Cary Grant as the ebullient Sgt. Archibald Cutter I have to give the win to Victor McLaglen’s Sgt. MacChesney.  Just on the strength of the facial expressions that he manages when the Colonel confronts him with the prospect of Bertie Higginbotham replacing Ballantine, I’d have to give him the prize.  But there are just so many great scenes where he steals the show.  Even pleading with an elephant using “baby talk” to get it to take medicine always cracks me up.  And it really is McLaglen with his hand in the elephant’s mouth.

So why can’t they make movies like this anymore?  I don’t think it’s the actors.  There are plenty of those who could perform these parts.  It’s the writers and directors.  Either they can’t or won’t give us good stories.  Maybe the producers just won’t allow them.  But whatever it is, that’s where we are.  And I can live with that.  I have my DVD and it’ll last for longer than I will.

“Now in Injia’s sunny clime,
Where I used to spend my time
A-servin’ of ’Er Majesty the Queen,
Of all them blackfaced crew
The finest man I knew
Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din.”

Rudyard Kipling

Another Psycho-Killer, Another Book Lesson

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Another day, another psycho leftist shooter.  As I said the other day, be prepared for an almost endless sequence of these suicidal people.  Their lives are a misery to them so they want the rest of us to suffer too.  Only in addition to everything else that was wrong with this guy he even failed to accomplish what he set out to do.  He wanted to kill ICE agents and instead he killed and wounded illegal alien detainees that were in an ICE van.  Now that level of incompetence and stupidity really does deserve the Darwin Award.  And right there with the shooter’s idiocy, the Left is trying, once again, and to no effect, to question whether the shooter was a Leftist.  Well, give it a day or two and they’ll settle for, “He wasn’t a card-carrying member of a terrorist left-wing organization, which is another way of saying these organizations don’t have cards.  Their badges are the crazed looks on their faces and the social media memes and buzzwords of the left.

Well, enough of that.

Some of the results from the beta-readers of my novel are coming in and the consensus is that this guy photog must be out of his mind if he thinks anyone is gonna read his awful book.  As reader after reader disparaged its characters, plots and even adverbs I was like a cornered wild animal looking for some way to escape the tsunami of negative results.  I yelled, “Nooooooooooo!!!!!!!!”  Well, maybe there weren’t that many exclamation points in real life.  But I was pretty busted up.  So, I took a bottle of Tylenol and washed it down with a gallon of grape Hawaiian Punch and pretty soon I was really sick.  But that took my mind off my book problems while I headed to urgent care.  Now that I’ve mostly recovered, I’m happily in denial and working on an alternate reality where I’ve sold more books than James Patterson and am twice as handsome as Brad Pitt but somehow it turned out backwards.  I’m unfortunately, twice as handsome as James Patterson and have sold more books than Brad Pitt.  You know it really is important to work these things out ahead of time.

I have an appointment to talk with a marketer who specializes in self-published books and I’m trying to put together a list of questions to ask.  At the moment all that comes to mind is, “How can I become fabulously wealthy from my book without putting in any effort at all?”  And I think I’ve nailed it.  That is exactly what I want an answer to.  But I have this nagging suspicion that there may be more to it than that.  I seem to be confusing marketer with the genie from Aladdin.  Well, you can hardly blame me.  Both of them are in my mind, mythical creatures with supernatural powers.  But seriously, this whole book thing has been an interesting experience.  I’ve learned that writing is a craft that requires lots of work and especially in the planning stages.  Writing a story by the seat of your pants seems more intuitive and natural to me but I now understand that building the story ahead of time saves time at the end when re-writing is extremely painful and maybe impractical.  Well, the journey continues.

The Crazies are Out There and They’re Mad as Hell

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I think we’re going to have to get used to mass shootings and assassinations for the foreseeable future.  I’m not saying this rhetorically or to be facetious.  I literally believe we will see any number of school shootings and other psychotic attacks from now on.  The reason I think this is there are a large number of “trans-people” walking around.  And a lot of them are extremely unhappy.  And by unhappy, I mean suicidal and full of rage.  Basically, they realize that they’ve destroyed their lives and their bodies and they want to revenge themselves on the world.  I think that’s the most likely reason.  And so, they’re striking out against those whom they identify as their enemies; basically, normal people and especially those who publicly deny the validity of the trans-identity.

Now this is a horrible situation we’re in.  There are thousands of these people and even if the murderous subset is less than a fraction of a percent that is still a lot of murders to have to endure.  The only positive in this situation is the fact that the frequency of trans-killers is beginning to become apparent to the population at large and this realization will go a long way to making law enforcement begin to track the commonalities of these killers and find any communications and planning going on in this “community.”

I’ve been reading a number of accounts of young men and women who have de-transitioned after realizing that they had made a huge mistake.  Now these people are extremely upset but they have backed away from the unreality of the trans-identity and attempted to salvage their lives in their original identities.  Many are physically mutilated but they are trying to pick up the pieces of their lives and reconnect with their families and friends as their old selves.  And I have enormous respect for their honesty.

But that is not the profile of the trans-shooters.  They may regret their adoption of a trans-identity but they want to pin the blame for their failure on society for not “affirming” their identity hard enough.  They’ve probably seen thousands of bystanders look at them with shocked or disapproving expressions and this continuous denial of their normalcy has finally worn down their resolve.  Deep down they know they’ve reached a dead end.  Their new identities don’t give them the joy they expected.  Quite the contrary, their lives are full of frustration and pain.

It seems to me conservative groups should attempt to put together public service materials to be made available to parents to try and protect children from the inaccurate portrayal of what actually happens to someone who tries to change his sex.  It should speak to the physical dangers and health impairments but it should also address the mental health dangers that are on display by many members of this movement.  Trying to limit the spread of this dangerous cult should be one of the most important public health initiatives in our country.  Hopefully the red states aren’t just depending on bans on pediatric “affirmative care.”  They need to alert parents and make them aware that the schools in certain districts are working against their interests by sponsoring and encouraging the trans-gender movement at school and behind parents’ backs.

So, buckle up.  The crazies are out there and they’re mad as hell.

And I Believe That to be the Truth

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Well, I’m glad I got Thursday’s post out of my system.  Knowing just how deep the divide in this country is can be really depressing.  But today I made a point to stop viewing horrible people saying the horrible things that they believe.  And that has made a big difference.

I looked around and found plenty of good people talking about the constructive things going on all over this country.  I went to the Dunwich Republican Town Committee meeting and we got three new members and we finished the meeting in half the time we usually take and that’s some kind of record.  So, the world isn’t better or worse than it was a week ago.  All that’s changed is we know a lot more clearly just how many awful people are walking around in the country.  There are millions and millions of them.  Some are careful about speaking their true opinions and some are so full of entitlement that they’ll just spew their poisonous hate right out loud.  But regardless, they all hate us and what we value, to a degree that’s hard to exaggerate.

And this exposure, this unmasking is one of the greatest gifts we could hope to receive.  This will awaken the oblivious.  Of course, not all of them.  It won’t awaken the walking dead from the neck up.  But lots of normies have gotten a wake-up call that they’ll remember.  They’re finding out that trans-people aren’t these kind, gentle invalids that we have to handle with kid gloves or they’ll perish of sadness.  No, they’re delusional psychopaths hopped up on drugs and hormones and full of anger and resentment against anyone who doesn’t affirm their psychoses or just wants to avoid them.  And that is exactly what is needed; recognition of reality.  These people are delusional and if you attack their delusion, they and their friends feel completely justified by “defending themselves” by murdering you!

I was also enheartened to hear President Trump has declared Antifa a criminal terrorist entity.  I was listening to some guy on a podcast say that Antifa doesn’t fit the correct definition of a domestic terror organization.  He was some kind of think-tank expert.  Well, that may be technically true but I doubt that it will stop Donald Trump from attacking these people wherever and whenever he can reach them.  And after watching Kash Patel telling the moronic Democratic senators what he really thought of them I’m feeling more comfortable with the FBI’s current posture with regard to domestic terror.  Maybe we’re finally going to see a bunch of black block foot soldiers get squashed.

And jus to round off my improving week, I sent out a bunch of copies of my manuscript of “The Sniper” to some beta readers for comment.  I’m very excited to get honest feedback.  And I told my readers to be as brutally honest as the can be.  I’m very interested to see if they identify the same strengths and weaknesses in the story that I find.  Of course, if they all say it’s boring worthless dreck that may put a damper on my spirit.  But the Good Book says, “The truth shall set you free.”  And I do believe that.

Is Anything Broken?

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If any features or functions on this site seem to have stopped working, let me know.  Today I was having problems with what are called plug-ins and I had to deactivate them all and reactivate the ones I want working.  The problem is over the years I’ve added way too many of them (25) and I can’t even remember which ones were useful.  So unknowingly I may have deactivated something useful.

Thank you for your support!

Boy, That Was Depressing

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The Charlie Kirk murder has revealed just how deep the divide has grown between the Left and the Right.  And the visibility of the hatred is adding to the anger on both sides.  I’m pretty sure we’ve already reached the tipping point.  In other words, we aren’t going to heal this rift, ever.

But that doesn’t make it clear what follows.  After all, the South hated the North for over a century after the Civil War but there was nothing they could do to fight back.  In the same way, up until now there hasn’t been a mechanism for the red states to separate from the blue states in any meaningful way.  All they could do was compete to capture the White House, Supreme Court and Congress to keep the progressives at bay.

But with Trump back in charge of the federal government I think I’m hearing the first grumblings from the Left about splitting up the country into two separate nations; one red and one blue.  I was talking with some of the boys today at our weekly video coffee walk and someone noted this and asked where does Delaware end up.  I answered, ”With whomever gets stuck with it.”  But it’s a real consideration.  If this country gets split there will be tens of millions of people moving to escape the other camp.  And personally, I’ll be one of them.  And I’m sure it won’t be fun.  But it will be a relief in a lot of ways.  The acknowledgement that there are two different societies, two different moralities, two different souls living in these fifty states will motivate the realignment of people into two separate groups as naturally as oil and water separate.

And maybe that’s a good analogy.  If you take oil and water and put them through a high-speed mixer (homogenizer) you can emulsify the oil into the water as extremely small droplets that look like a blended material.  But if you turn off the motor slowly but surely the oil will reform into a separate immiscible layer.  And that’s what’s happening to us.  The forces that acted to bring us together are disappearing and the natural repulsion that each side feels for the other is getting the upper hand and we’re separating into two unmixable masses that repel each other as naturally as oil and water.  That’s what it looks like to me.  And the Left’s open glee at Charlie Kirk’s death just makes it easier to see.

But no one knows how this moves forward.  Fear of the unknown is a very strong force.  Both sides are feeling their way around this new dynamic.  Both sides sense the divide and have begun to attack the other side more openly.  But so far neither side has tipped over into mob violence (yet).  So far, we just have the ultra-psychotics on the Left attacking whomever they can find.  Charlie Kirk was unfortunate to give them such an easy target to hit.  But it could get much, much worse.

I guess the best case would be for both sides to sit down and hammer out a reasonable divorce settlement with each side getting a cut of the assets of “The United States of America,” like some kind of bankruptcy proceeding.

Boy, that was depressing.

Various Kinds of Pruning

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Monday was a good day at work.  Progress was made and I’ve got a much better understanding of what we’re going to be up against in the next couple of weeks.  Sure, madness will break out now and then.  But it’s not just this fog of ignorance.  There’s the beginning of planning and a path forward.

And there’s the situation going on in the world.  Charlie Kirk’s murder is disgusting and the more details that come out the worse it shows the Left’s psychotic fringe to be.  These people aren’t merely insane.  They have ceased to be human.  The assassin was a “furry.”  The fact that his “partner” was trans wasn’t enough.  He also pretended to be an animal.  These people are so far beyond help that simple execution might be the kindest thing we could do for them.

Hopefully Kash Patel is up to the job he needs to do.  Proving conspiracy by all the other members of Robinson’s associates is the first step.  Then he must widen out the investigation to locate the entire Antifa network and trace back their money to the donors and NGO’s that fund them.  It would be nice if Obama gets caught up in that net.  But first things first.  Shut off the money and arrest the ringleaders who call the shots.  Without them and the money, the small fry psychos will wander off and starve on the streets.

I’ve heard Trump is pivoting from invading Chicago with ICE and the National Guard to going to Portland, Oregon instead.  Now that’s an interesting idea.  Portland probably has the highest per capita number of trans weirdos, Antifa thugs and homeless drug addicts of any city in the country.  It would be the perfect place to haul away tractor trailers full of degenerates and psychopaths.  But I hope they’ve planned this carefully to avoid injury among law enforcement and maximize the jail time meted out to the Antifa “community.”  I know they like throwing Molotov cocktails at law enforcement.  Intelligence will be needed.  But Portland is definitely in need of pruning.

I have a feeling I’ll be self-publishing my book.  I don’t think there are many traditional publishers who are brave enough to embrace my dystopian world of armed insurrection against the deep state.  It is pretty radical.  I’m still trying to learn the basics of book marketing; especially advertising on Amazon and elsewhere on the web.  But I have gotten the book out there in the real world now.  I have a friend reading it and I’m very interested in getting his feedback.  My intention is to decide one way or the other about self-publishing and then send out a bunch of copies of the manuscript to friends and associates and see what they think.  It’s pretty heady stuff to even have a small audience read your words.

The weather has been summer-like for the last few days and the forecast is for another couple of weeks of the same.  That should allow me to handle the winterizing chores easily and plan for next year’s spring.  Probably the highlight of the garden season was the thornless raspberries.  I took a chance that they were the kind that mature in one season.  I cut all the canes to the ground and added a bunch of fertilizer and they grew like crazy and spread and produced tons of fruit.  In fact, they’re not done yet.  Next year I’ll do the same (cut down and fertilize) and I expect them to spread to almost double where they are now.  We’ll have to give them away to strangers.  But I’ll eat a ton of them myself.  They’re delicious.

Well, that’s enough talk of pruning for Monday.

 

 

Ending the Woke Madness

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I’m just plain disgusted with humanity today.  We’ve reached a very low point.  The fact that this kid Robinson could come from a good family in a very conservative area and still end up as a far-left psycho involved with a “transgender woman” and at twenty-two years old assassinate someone so that he has ended his own life either literally or effectively, sickens me.  The world has become insane.

What seems apparent is that colleges have now become leftist indoctrination centers.  And the only way out is to set up a network of normal colleges to act as an alternative in order to protect young minds from this poison.  I think that’s the only thing that can be done.

As for those who have already been brainwashed, I think it’s too late for them.  I don’t think there is a “deprogramming” protocol that will work.  Somehow, we will need to protect ourselves from these rabid individuals and find ways to interact with only the normal.  I haven’t thought this stuff out deeply.  It’s just my visceral reaction to what has gone on this week.  But I think it’s important to continue the government program to defund all institutions of higher education that indulge in DEI.  But more than that it’s time to stop funding colleges that have disciplines like Queer Studies.  If a college decides that this is meaningful education for young people then it should find its own money to fund it.  And that goes for any “study” that is essentially a grievance group complaining about the United States or “whiteness” or any other woke hatred subject.

A society, no matter how freedom-loving has to have limits to freedom.  We already draw the line at pedophilia.  I think we’re going to need to revisit the way we look at deviant sexuality in general.  If it is thrown back to the states that should be enough for now.  This will allow certain areas of the country to reestablish normalcy as an operating principle.  And if there are places for deviants to go to practice their sexual preferences like the West Coast and the Northeast then there shouldn’t be a problem deporting these people from the other areas of the country.  That would seem to be a humane way to remove them from the environment.  Win/win.

As I said, I’m pretty disgusted with the current situation in our country (and globally).  It’s going to take a lot of work to make much of an improvement on the current sorry state.  I guess the real first step will be for the Justice Department to uproot Antifa.  That all by itself will be enormously difficult.  But it is such an important job that we should be able to tell very soon whether it’s being tackled or not.  My way to measure whether anything is being done will be whether co-conspirators are named in the Charlie Kirk assassination.    From what I’ve heard there were many people aware beforehand that this murder was scheduled.  It is the Justice Department’s duty to find these people, prove their involvement and indict them for murder.

If that does not happen, things will not improve.