Category: Current Events

My Thoughts on Afghanistan

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Approximately the last third of my life has been lived out in the shadow of September 11th 2001.  What I thought I knew and what I believed about this country seems like a different world from today.  And the biggest change is how I feel about George W. Bush and the people he led.  I thought he was one of us or at least I thought he was on our side.  Looking back, I see that believing that was the biggest mistake of my life as an American citizen.  Bush was the one we trusted and he used that trust to destroy us.  He handed us over to our enemies and they cut our throats.  Bush then Obama.

Afghanistan is the exemplar to point out the betrayal.  America was reeling from the 9-11 attacks and Bush said he would revenge us.  We gave him whatever he asked for and we supported him in everything he did.  And after all the dead and wounded Americans and the waste of trillions of dollars what was the plan that they executed?  Bush was trying to make Afghanistan into a country safe for transgender Muslims.

The bitterness of this pill is hard to exaggerate.  Creating a global progressive nirvana on the corpse of our nation was their plan.  He sent our sons and brothers to die in those hellholes while his policies sent our jobs and industries to China.  And his judicial appointments set the stage for gay marriage and transgender rights and every other betrayal imaginable.  And the cost of the wars hollowed out our economy and set the stage for the financial crash in 2008.  And all of this misery ensured that Obama would happen.  And he finished what was left to do.

What Afghanistan is to me is a reminder and an object lesson.  The lesson is that the establishment Republicans cannot be trusted at all.  They despise us and they only use us to provide them with the privileges that their positions provide.  Labels like conservative and Christian don’t mean anything.  Words don’t mean anything.  The only thing that means anything is results.  We need our country back and that means there is an enormous amount of work to do.

If we find a man who can get things done and plays straight with us, we should follow him.  But no blind faith.  Trust but verify.  Don’t follow the flag.  Don’t listen to the pretty speeches.  No bipartisan nonsense, no reaching across the aisle.  No talk of the conservative case for gay marriage or transgender special forces or gun control.  No excuses, no extenuating circumstances, no nonsense.  Produce results and we’ll let you collect your fee.  Do a good enough job and we’ll name a bridge or a highway after you.  Fail us and we’ll drop you like yesterday’s garbage.

And if your name is Bush and you want someone to fight a war go fight it yourself.  You’ve killed off enough Americans to last your family until the end of time.

Michael Anton Provides an Analysis of Bush’s Wars and How Stupid They Were

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Anton was a part of the Bush administration and he knows the thinking that went into the awful idea of turning Afghanistan and Iraq into democracies.  He lays out the mindset that went into it and then describes how all that played out over the last twenty years.  Once again we see the fear of admitting that not all people are exactly alike causing untold damage.  Saying that Arabs and Afghans don’t care about democracy but do care about their traditional beliefs might have saved us from wasting thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.  Hopefully the next president will hold up the Bush and Obama administrations as examples of how allowing nonsense to be the basis of foreign policy is too dangerous to allow.  Trying to turn Afghans into woke westerners who fly rainbow flags and believe in transgender rights is just about the stupidest thing imaginable.  All our experiment is going to achieve is cause untold thousands of young Afghans to be whiplashed by the change from American progressive mindset to medieval Muslim practices.  Many of them will be lucky to get off with some whip marks on their backs.  The unlucky ones may get stoned or beheaded.

Curtis Yarvin Muses on the Lessons of Afghanistan, But Not the Way You Think

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Yarvin isn’t thinking about the strategy that brought us to Afghanistan and kept us there for twenty years.  He’s thinking of what it means to have a Deep State that would prefer to stay there forever because they want to endlessly expand their influence and scope to include the whole world.  Yarvin’s take on what could be done about this boils down to the American people providing the President and his party with a mandate to take a wrecking ball to the executive branch and reconstitute it at a much, much smaller scope.

And who disagrees with that on our side?  But how exactly do we get a majority of honest men in the Congress?  It seems impossible.  I think the only way it happens is if a President declares a state of emergency and using extralegal action fires the whole executive branch and uses the military to keep the government functioning while he rebuilt the government on a sane basis.

It’s nice to talk about draining the swamp but to do it would require an army and a general without fear.  Mr. Yarvin needs to provide the plan for how to do something that we all agree needs to be done.

In Search of a Myth

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During the lifetime of the Greatest Generation the powers-that-be created a myth of what America was.  FDR and Hollywood and everything under their control built up a story of who we are and what makes us special.  And it was a beautiful story and it was poetry.  And that myth was good enough to help them survive a Great Depression, win a World War and create everything from atom bombs to the internet.  We were the good guys.  We stood for truth, justice and the American Way.  Sure, we had some ugliness and pain in our past and we hadn’t banished poverty and crime but we were working on it.  We had a war on poverty and a war on drugs and we believed in color blind justice and we loved everyone.

But somewhere around 1960 a new generation of elites decided we needed a new myth.  The grown-ups wouldn’t buy into it so they started selling it to the kids.  And it was a depressing story and it wasn’t going to fuel a bigger and better tomorrow.  In fact, it was a blueprint to demolish the American Way.  It was about murdering America and creating a world that would feed on the carcass.  And amazingly after sixty years of selling it this new myth is the reality.  And if you think I’m exaggerating just look through the headlines of the last few years.  The majority of young people believe that America is evil and the only way to fix things is to take away the freedoms and money of the people they don’t like and give it to the people they like.  And it’s happening in real time before our eyes.  I can’t imagine that we are going to convince these people that they’re wrong.  They believe their myth.  It’s what they grew up on and it’s very real for them.  And they’re not going to convince us.  So, we’re in a new world where two peoples are living together inside one political entity.  Somehow, we’ll have to separate.  That’s a long story and we’ve been talking endlessly how that will happen.  But one thing that we need is a new myth.

We can’t keep the old one.  They blew that one up.  They polluted it and destroyed its basis.  The people who defiled it are the descendants of the Pilgrims.  They invalidated their own ancestors to destroy our myth.  We have to write a new story.  We will have to take our parts in the original story and write out the usurpers.  We have to make their betrayal a central thread in this new tapestry.  Overcoming their treason and building something new and better is the purpose of what needs to be achieved and that will be how we come up with a new myth.  We need an inspirational story of who we are and what makes us special.  And we’ll have to see who will be the heroes of this epic.  We know that Donald Trump will be in it.  He’ll be like one of the earliest chapters.  He’ll be like Samuel Adams or Thomas Paine.  Maybe Ron DeSantis will be there too.  And Barack Obama and Joe Biden will be in the story too.  They’ll play the part of Benedict Arnold or some other traitor.  And since Google and Facebook and Twitter and the rest of the Silicon Valley boys are silencing voices on our side of the fence maybe our myth will be recorded on websites like this that haven’t been silenced by the powers-that-be.

A lot of people will say that myths aren’t a thing anymore.  That people in the information age work with facts.  A lot of people would be wrong.  All we have are myths nowadays.  Reality is manufactured in newsrooms, government agencies and corporate offices.  The truth can be censored or photoshopped into anything or nothing.  We need to create our own truth.  It needs to be something that nourishes our souls.  It needs to be what will help us survive Antifa, BLM, anti-white hate, equity, diversity, inclusion, LGBTQ nonsense, transgender madness and a hundred other things that the other myth is using to destroy us.  So, with no disrespect to Thomas Paine, consider this to be my daily dose of “Common Sense.”

16AUG2021 – OCF Update – Late Summer Status

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Suddenly you can sense that people are rushing to get their bit of summer before it’s gone.  Folks are streaming onto the roads to reach the beach and up to the lakes and mountains.  But this year we aren’t doing much travelling.  Just a few day trips.  So I’ll enjoy the quiet for the next week or so.  I’ll start putting together my fall maintenance list.  There’s always plenty to get repaired before winter sets in.  In fact I never get everything done.  I’m much too lazy for that.

I’m seeing the early growing plants begin to die and the goldenrod is taking over from them.  The trees have more and more yellow leaves on their branches and the bugs are going through their last stages.  The butterflies are starting to look very tattered, the dragonflies are wearing out too.  A difference from most years, there aren’t as many bees as there should be.  Maybe all that rain took its toll somehow.

I packed up the Sony rental gear; the A7R IV A camera and the LA-EA5 adapter.  I’ll put out a final long report with all of my observations and conclusions.  It turned out I learned a lot of important stuff.  And some of it wasn’t things I was looking for.  I’ll start using the continuous autofocus a lot more than I used to.  It comes in very handy for things I didn’t expect.  And I have new found respect for the 200-600mm Sony lens.  It is much sharper for close-up stuff than I expected.

The political world is a shambles.  But that’s not news.  What will be interesting is how Ron DeSantis uses his current high visibility and growing popularity.  What goes on with the schools will be very important.  If they can tame the teachers’ unions in Florida that will bode well for ending the COVID scam once and for all.

Afghanistan is an object lesson on what happens when the United States abuses its armed forces and indulges in political theater.  Short of nuking the Pashtun areas of Pakistan we were never going to control the Taliban.  Why we’re there ten years after bin Laden was executed is just another indication that the people in charge don’t know what they’re doing.  But let this be a lesson for all of us.  Never trust anyone named Bush or Cheney.

Well, gotta go cut the grass.  stay tuned.

Science Has Nothing to Do With the COVID Cult

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When a Harvard Medical School professor tried to alert the general public that locking down schools but leaving nursing homes open to COVID patients was completely backward he was silenced.  In this article he described what he knew and how he was stopped from telling it.

What seems to be happening is the establishment is grudgingly retreating from the lockdown mentality as places like Florida and Texas demonstrate that it makes no sense.  But they have dug in their heels about schools because the teachers own the Democrats and there are plenty of old teachers who probably should retire because they really are at risk from COVID.

I hope the schools that are open are able to prove the foolishness of locking down the schools for another year.  These young children don’t deserve to be tortured for the sake of saving a few old bats who should retire if they’re afraid.

Camera Girl Saves the World One Guinea Pig at a Time

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When I was a kid if you wanted to get a pet, you went to a breeder or a pet store and looked in a few cages or fish tanks and picked one out and passed a few dollars across a checkout counter and your pet was handed to you on a leash or in a small box with some holes punched in it.  And this time-honored arrangement served me in good stead for countless pets of almost every description.  Maybe sometimes the box was a plastic bag if it was an amphibian or a fish.  If it was a snake, it would be a cloth bag with a knot in it to prevent it from trying to squeeze out of a flimsy box.  But if it was any of the several types of rodents that I have owned; mice, rats, gerbils, hamsters, guinea pigs or chinchillas; there was no fanfare and definitely no discussion beyond what it ate and how to keep it from escaping.

Today I journeyed with Camera Girl across state lines to an obscure and truly annoying animal “adoption” center to be allowed to purchase two guinea pigs.  The fact that guinea pigs couldn’t be found at our standard pet store was inconceivable to me.  Guinea pigs like all rodents procreate at the drop of a hat.  They seem to be almost literally born pregnant.  How there could be a shortage of them sounded like a science fiction story plotline.  But being the mild-mannered and supportive modern husband that I am I only scoffed a little and agreed to travel to the ends of the earth to procure these rare and legendary beasts.

When we got there, I had my first nasty shock.  The nudnicks who ran this establishment required us to wear face masks to enter the sacred precinct.  Apparently, we had entered a medical facility where lockdown protocols were in place.  I asked Camera Girl if we should scrub up and put on our surgical gowns too.  She nervously shushed me and we moved on.  The surprising thing was that none of the highly trained animal adoption specialists were wearing masks.  I found this more than a little annoying.  This was the first of the little hints that I picked up that told me I was participating in a passion play.  We were performing a religious ritual where the High Priestess would coach us through our roles and provide the sacrament which in our case were overweight rodents.

The various stations of the cross included discussion about why we wanted said rodents.  I was tempted to relate a story about how a voice out of the sky told me to find the guinea pigs while I was mowing the lawn but I didn’t want to crab the deal.  So, I let Camera Girl describe her maternal fervor to save a poor orphaned guinea pig from a life of crime.  Then we had to prove that we could afford to care for these two new dependents.  I wanted to say that if the present menagerie had no complaints about the regularity of meals these two new freeloaders should be willing to roll the dice with me.  Once again, I bit my tongue.  I cautioned myself, “Patience, patience.  It will all be over soon and Camera Girl will be proud of me for being so tolerant.”  So, I held my peace while she answered all questions.  Credit reports were submitted, bank account statements were handed over, COVID vaccination papers were displayed.  Finally, it was all over.  Camera Girl followed the high priestess into the checkout area and I was left to commune with the rats while payment was made.  I felt virtuous for being a compliant chump through this embarrassing and absurd ritual and the payoff was imminent.

But after twenty minutes I was still sitting there with the rodents.  We had stared at each other a very long time and I could tell they were even less impressed with me than I was with them.  So, I cleared my throat excused myself to them with the alibi that I would make their space in the car more comfortable and went looking for Camera Girl.

I found her at the counter with the thirty bucks still in her hand.  But instead of grabbing the receipt and being on our way she was filling out a stack of paperwork and chatting amiably with the high priestess (HP) about the cutesy things that guinea pigs do when you give them human food.  So, I sidled up to her and gave her a quizzical look.  What I noted was that HP was handing out these forms one at a time with copious and completely unnecessary instructions on the minutia of how this information would be used to further the continuous improvement of rodent adoption.

I started glaring at Camera Girl to make it clear I was out of patience and needed to exit this building before I told HP what I really thought of the idea of “adopting” rodents.  I could tell that Camera Girl guessed that I was getting close to announcing to HP that most of my rodent associates were deep frozen rats and mice and even several hamsters that I would use to feed various snakes that I have from time to time kept and that if I wasn’t allowed to get on my way Rodent A and Rodent B were in danger of ending up as dinner for some future serpent inmate at my home.

And as hoped the pace of checkout speeded up acceptably and we were out of there in another couple of minutes.

On the way out I gave Camera Girl a very detailed lecture on what was wrong with allowing women to run anything and more particularly what was wrong with allowing women to confuse animals with children in their priorities.  Seriously a whole industry has grown up around the idea that dogs and cats and rats need to be rescued.  But what is actually happening is that suckering these women into “fostering” animals and then suckering some other women into “adopting” them had become a scam.  The shelters were hooked up with rescuers who were breeding the dogs either themselves or through some fellow scam artists and then charging the saps hundreds of dollars to save them.

I cautioned Camera Girl that from now on all rodents we purchased would be from people who didn’t name them but calculated their value by how much grain they had consumed during residence time in the system.  I just don’t have the stomach for dealing with scam artists and I don’t want to encourage Camera Girl to humor these maniacs.

Dementia Joe’s Post-America is a Mess

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Let’s count the ways:

  • Rampaging Taliban preparing to shish-kebab the Girl Power NGO workers that haven’t been airlifted to safety yet.
  • Gavin Newsom wetting his pants over ungrateful black voters who dare to think Larry Elder is blacker than Gavin. And by the way, being Italian American and therefore almost white myself I feel entitled to say Gavin really needs to get some kind of tan going.  It is California and it is summer.  He looks like some kind of gay vampire model or something.  It shouldn’t take more than twenty or thirty seconds of direct sunlight to neutralize a little of the blue for pity’s sake.
  • Biden’s own border guy is saying that the horror show at the border can’t continue.
  • Inflation is now approaching double digits.
  • Gasoline prices are through the roof.
  • Supply chain issues have reached the point where prices on things like janitorial supplies have gone up by an order of magnitude because the Chinese have got us by the throat. We don’t make any of this stuff any more and they can charge whatever they want.
  • The Delta Variant is a bust. The “spike” of deaths in places like Florida has already peaked and it’s a small fraction of last year’s August peak.  People are running out of patience for the mask and vaccine shuffle.  Even scientists are starting to say there’s no benefit to the charade.  COVID is a part of the human condition and the sooner we move on to looking for effective treatments the better.
  • Parents are mad about what’s being forced on their children. CRT or whatever they want to call it is unwelcome.  And they don’t want their kids forced to wear masks either.
  • The cities have become violent hellholes where career criminals and gangbangers rob and kill with complete impunity. The cops are bailing out and the mayors are either letting the madness happen or desperately trying to figure out a way to put a fig leaf on reversing course.  Idiots like de Blasio and Lightfoot are claiming that dismantling the criminal justice system will bring on a new era of racial equity and harmony.  But even the black residents are horrified by the levels of violence and just plain gang war that has erupted unchecked in their neighborhoods.
  • The FBI has declared anyone who speaks out against the COVID propaganda or any other facet of the regime’s agenda as domestic terrorists. It should be interesting to see if they intend to go after the governments of places like Florida and Texas that are resisting the various suicide programs that Dementia Joe’s regime is pushing.  I tend to doubt it.
  • The economy has to some extent revived from the COVID lockdowns but with high unemployment and soaring inflation, consumer confidence has cratered.
  • All even semi-honest polls admit that the Dems will take a beating in the mid-terms. Not that this is very important.  By then the despicable Republicans will have sold us out to the Dems for their thirty pieces of silver and fraudulent elections will be a permanent feature of our lives.  But who knows, maybe even white women will finally wake up and realize that they’ve locked themselves into a cycle of impoverishment and racial subjugation to a criminal regime that hates them.  Anything is possible when things get this bad.

So, as you can see things are all for the best in this best of all possible worlds.  And we have so much to look forward to.  Hunter Biden is sure to have some wonderful new obscenity unveiled for the tabloids to propagate.  Joe may lose control of his bodily functions on live tv.  The Taliban is likely to take control of The Bronx sometime this fall and make that the most livable part of New York City.  Stay tuned, the end of the Silly Season is sure to bring in new days of miracle and wonder for us all to enjoy.

Give the Black Guy a Chance

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Come on Black and Brown folks of California it’s finally your big chance to really stick it to the man.  Gavin Newsom is dissing a black man, Larry Elder.  It’s your big chance to kick the white man to the curb and put one of your own in charge.  White privilege, whiteness, unconscious bias, whatever you want to call it.  Here’s your shot at putting one of your people in the big chair.  And from my point of view he couldn’t possibly do any worse than Gavin Nuisance.  So take your shot.  His term would be very short.  You’ll get to vote again in a little while so what have you got to lose?

And wouldn’t you love to not have to look at Gavin’s face ever again?