Category: Current Events

16JUL2021 – OCF Update – Busy as a Bee

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Camera Girl is a harsh mistress.  Like some kind of antebellum field slave I’m in the trenches finishing up my chores.  What I have discovered is no matter how many times you buy a tool if you need it you’ll find it has disappeared.  This is the second time in a week I’ve needed a 5/8″ socket and it’s been gone.  I think I’ll buy two dozen of them and sprinkle them around the house like seeds on a field.  Maybe they germinate and a 5/8″ socket tree will grow for me.

I’ll try to get back to work on the site later today but even tomorrow will be effected because of the barbecue.  Apologies and hand wringing.

Wayne’s World

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Ah, the joys of domesticity.  Today, in anticipation of the weekend barbecue, I am working my way down Camera Girl’s list of chores.  I have swept and mopped the front deck, washed the windows, cleaned the lawn furniture, bought a new toilet seat, bought some stuff I needed to install a couple of air conditioners, bought some stuff to clean the cars and dug out my ladder to clean the first-floor gutters.

Yesterday unexpectedly, the roofer, Wayne, showed up out of the blue after three weeks of radio silence and said he was ready to look at those couple of shingles that had come loose during an EF5 tornado that had moved the house onto my neighbor-across-the-road’s property.  The neighbor’s been real good about us living on his land.  Of course bringing the plumbing and electrical services under the road cost me a good deal but I was looking for more interaction with the neighbors anyway so it’s been a great experience, all in all.

Anyway, Wayne (by the way all roofers in my experience are named Wayne) came over with the ricketiest wooden ladder I’ve ever seen and set it down against the house.  Now, the spot where he wanted to climb slopes at about a 45-degree angle and he proceeded to even it out by piling a couple of boards under one of the ladder’s feet.  I’m looking at this and thinking, is this guy insured?  Wayne’s assistant has the job of putting tension on the rope attached to the ladder.  Looking at this I’m trying to form a diagram in my head of the forces at play in this little scene.  Wayne’s weight, Bob’s tension on the line, the frictional force between the boards and the soaking wet grass underneath them and the absurd angle of the ladder and the ground and the force of my blood pounding in my veins watching this insanity.  I felt like I was participating in a Three Stooges routine in real time.  I suspect I was Moe but I wasn’t completely sure.

Miraculously every one walked away alive and intact including my repaired roof shingles.  Wayne charged me a paltry eighty bucks and I felt like I had gotten off easy in the lottery of life but vowed to find another Wayne in the future.  Unfortunately, Wayne’s perambulation on top of my house woke up my granddaughter who was taking her mid-day nap and this didn’t endear either myself or Wayne to Camera Girl.  We already had a previous roofer named Wayne that she despises due to various offenses against the code of acceptable contractor conduct.  So this only reinforced her hatred for contractors in general and specifically roofers named Wayne.  I will say in defense of the earlier Wayne that he is a staunch fan of Donald Trump and even placed an enormous Trump sign on the side of his work truck.

Of course the danger with outside work in New England is you invariably discover some new and worse damage to home and environs.  I am always fighting a losing battle against snow and moisture damage.  I recently replaced and painted some external woodwork (stairs and railings) and already I saw rotted sections.  But not being someone who quits easily, I am formulating a plan that involves wrapping these areas with waterproof tarps during the winter months.  This seems kind of crazy but the alternative is to replace the wood with something impervious to snow and rain.  I’m guessing concrete or stainless steel are the only sure bets and that would be very expensive.

And walking around the yard I noticed the deer finally put me out of my misery by eating every last one of the daylily flower buds that were growing in one of the more remote beds.  Blah, blah, everyone has to eat, blah blah.  I’m going to move those damn things this autumn and put them within stone throwing distance of my house.  I hope they bring wolves back to New England and they eat these deer into extinction.  Yes I do.

So today was a useful day.  And doing outside work kept me from thinking of Dementia Joe and how badly our country has been damaged.  Tomorrow I’ll return to contemplating the end of western civilization.  But today I got the chores done.

The ZMan Doesn’t Hate J. D. Vance!

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I suspect the FBI has swatted the ZMan, spirited him away to an underground, under-volcano lair for torture and replaced him with a robotic imposter.  How else to explain this post where he more or less declares that J. D. Vance might just not be an establishment fink.  Be still my beating heart.

Well, good for the ZMan.  Being a protege of Peter Thiel I imagine Vance is a very smart guy who has one foot in the cloud world but with still one foot dragging wistfully on the dirt side.  Let’s call him an ally for now.

14JUL2021 – City Journal – Why Cops Are Quitting by Charles Fain Lehman

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Here’s an article where the writer interviewed policemen who had either just resigned or were preparing to.  He gets their read on why policing the blue cities is no longer worth the personal risk.

A newly retired Minneapolis officer said, “And the fundamental conclusion that I reached was that following Derek Chauvin, it no longer matters if what you were doing was legal, trained, the morally right thing to do, reasonable under the circumstances, the best effort of a reasonable human being in a marginal circumstance, which is basically what cops do. None of that matters. What matters is the outcome, and if you become the next spark in a viral firestorm.”

Basically the officers know the mayors and the police commissioners don’t have their backs, “There’s not a single leader that steps up for the regular cop, the regular street cop,” a now-resigned Chicago officer said. “They have the power, they have the ability to get up there and say why this was justified, and then they can sit there and explain it if they want, but they don’t know how to, or they don’t want to, or they don’t care.”

Reading the comments I found several readers who have my opinion.  Let the voters of Minneapolis and Portland and Chicago stay in their cities and defend themselves once the police are no longer there to protect them from the mob they’ve created.

 

 

 

 

14JUL2021 – OCF Update Mid-July Report

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This will be an outrage free day.  Even though Bastille Day is not my idea of a holiday worth celebrating today is a joyous occasion in my house.  I will therefore accentuate the positive.

I think I will initiate a series of posts devoted to various facets of Western Civilization.  I’ll range over history, culture, ethnography and geography.  I’m tempted to start from ancient historical and geographical facts about the region and then move forward through time introducing the various actors as  they appear on the scene.  Now do I start with the Neanderthals?  Finding out they were red-heads means the Irish may want to claim then for their own.

I will include information on the Yamnaya who appear to have been the mythical proto-Indo-European tribe that expanded East and West and spawned the languages that now dominate half the planet.  Not bad for a bunch of bronze age horsemen from the steppes.  I’d like to touch on especially some of the lesser known nations of Europe, the Georgians, the Lithuanians, the Letts, the Finns and others.  this will serve the dual purpose of allowing me to produce interesting and upbeat content and at the same time satisfy my curiosity about things I’ve always wanted to know.

But just to show I’m not an Indo-European chauvinist, (well actually I am), I’ll include information on the Basques.  These seem to be the descendants of the oldest inhabitants of Europe from a time before the Indo-European ancestors came on the scene.  Or at least before their languages began to dominate.  And I won’t neglect our neighbors to the east.  The river valley civilizations of the Near East were the source of agriculture that was the basis for organized human life on the planet.  So I’ll throw the Sumerians in just to show I’m a sport.  Do I have to include the Egyptians?  I guess I might.  Without them we wouldn’t have had those mummy movies.  Well, we’ll see.

And I mean to trudge on through the third season of Star Trek.  I’ve been dragging my feet because it is a terrible season.  But I’ve promised myself I’ll finish it.  As I’ve mentioned I intend to review Jackie Gleason’s classic 39 episodes of “The Honeymooners” series.  But I probably need to at least start into the Star Trek work to allow myself the reward of watching something fun like the Honeymooners.

The endless rain here in New England continues.  I’ve adapted to the annoying reality of it but I do hope that the second half of July returns to the normal hot dry summer I prefer.  Well, we’ll see.

So this may be a slow day.  I’ll write what the mood provides and enjoy a dinner out for once.  I’m bringing Camera Girl to our favorite Chinese restaurant and we’ll embrace the Orient for a change.

My Definition of the Right

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We talk a lot about the Right and the Left and who is on the Right and who is on the Left.  For instance, a large part of the 2016 fireworks was over people who said Donald Trump was not a Republican.  And a large contingent of these people were neoconservatives and libertarians.  To them Trump was just an opportunist who had seized on nativist talking points to appeal to the worst instincts of the working-class White Americans and would lead the Republicans to disaster in the general election because his policy priorities would be rejected by the wider American electorate.  As it turned out they were dead wrong.  “Making America Great Again,” and putting America first resonated with the majority of voters.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since 2016 and the neocons have become the NeverTrumpers and have self-ejected from the Republican party and the Right in general.  They are now indistinguishable from Woke Leftists except in their enhanced emphasis on all things anti-Trump.

And this is the crux of the point of this post.  The Neocons were never conservatives.  And it should have been obvious from the beginning that if you are not socially conservative then you are not of the Right.  And that goes for others “on the Right.”  Being in favor of market capitalism makes you a capitalist.  It doesn’t make you a conservative.  You can be an enthusiastic capitalist and compete ferociously in the free market and still be in favor of deconstructing the United States of America, the Family and Western Civilization all at the same time.  So, the former dichotomy of Right and Left being capitalists versus communists doesn’t really apply to today.  The Woke Left is spearheaded by Silicon Valley billionaires who print money by the metric ton but want to turn America into a digital gulag.  So, defining the Right isn’t what we thought it was back in Reagan’s day and never was.  Somehow Donald Trump knew that the Right wasn’t the Right and he was able to seize the high ground and overturn the establishment Republican’s narrative.  He became the Right.  But Donald Trump will not always be around and we need a definition of what the Right is or represents so that we can measure other leaders and other policies to see if they align with our interests.

So, what is the Right, what is conservatism?  As far as I can tell, conservatism is the Right and what it means is conserving the things in life that have value, things that give life meaning.  And so, it comes down to individual judgement.  But I think if the “normal” opinion on what gives life meaning is assumed then what we are talking about are the rock-bottom requirements to making life human.  And I don’t think you can get any more fundamental than the preservation of the family.  A man and a woman raising kids is just about as basic as it gets.  All that needs to be added is the framework for raising them which we call religion.  So, God and Family.  And because this is America, we add in the Constitution of the United States to allow all the families to interact without having to kill each other.  In fact it’s probably one of the finer blueprints for running a country.  God, Family and Country.  That’s it.

For the most part what we have to do is see where a particular policy or leader aligns with or hampers these things and we’ll know whether it’s of the Right or not.  For instance, the Supreme Court has declared gay marriage a Constitutional right.  This makes it very difficult for a politician to do anything about eliminating it.  But if a politician says he’s a conservative and he also espouses gay marriage or transgender rights then you know that he’s a Leftist.

There, that’s easy.  Look at what politicians say they agree with and you’ll know what side they are on.  If a politician says he’s anti-communist but his idea of capitalism means sending all the jobs overseas and importing low wage laborers into this country then guess what?  He’s a Leftist.  He may claim he just believes in free markets and capitalism but what he really believes in is globalism and therefore he doesn’t believe in the United States of America.  If a politician says he believes in God but says that you aren’t allowed to object to sexual deviancy being taught to your children then guess what?  He’s a Leftist.

Now how easy is that?  Try it on any politician who waxes poetic about conservatism but never seems to get any results.  Find out what he’s actually said about specific policy points like illegal immigration or bringing jobs back to this country or tariffs or “free trade” or transgender rights or freedom of religion.  It should be pretty easy to sort the wolves from the sheep dogs.

I’ll try to put together some further examples to try to refine my thoughts on the definition of the Right and the various groups like libertarians and social conservatives and socialists but I hope this makes clear what I think conservative means.  It means pro-family, pro-religion, pro-America.  In other words pro-normal.

12JUL2021 – OCF Update – This ‘N’ That

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Another very rainy day!  But I decided to make necessity a virtue.  Camera Girl has given me a list of chores to get done before the party on Saturday (or else!) and first thing was bring out the trash pails to the road.  Apparently, the holiday weekend caused us somehow to miss the pick-up last week and a mistake now would be catastrophic, so out I went.  I had rain pants, rain coat and rubber boots.  After moving the trash and putting the mail in the box I was free (for the moment) and outside of the reach of the female of the species and took the grand tour.  I have never seen the grass and the shrubs so green in the middle of July.  I feel like I’m somehow in Brazil along the edge of the Amazon jungle.  I half expected a caiman or an anaconda to spring out of the undergrowth and clamp its jaws on my shin.  The world smells warm and alive and I expect the rabbits and the deer will take this occasion to eat some more of my daylilies even in the middle of the day, curse them.  I went looking for that young mantis I saw near the pool, but he was gone.  The rain seems to be keeping the deer fly from attacking me or maybe that’s just the rain gear.  Either way it was peaceful and invigorating to be out in the pouring rain.  Camera Girl’s vegetable gardens are lush and growing.  Some of the plants could probably do with a little more sunshine but so far nothing has drowned.

My attempt to grow elecampane (Inula helenium) from seeds three weeks ago may not have failed after all.  I put a packet of seeds in two different gardens and in five or six cardboard flower pots in a raised bed.  None of the seeds on the ground did anything and I presume they are dead.  But I think two or three of the little pots may be growing something.  It’s a big yellow (of course) flower that I’ve wanted to add to the garden for years but could never find for sale.  But with the advent of the internet, things like obscure plant seeds are just a mouse click away.  It turns out elecampane is a “medicinal herb” that can cure evil humors if applied to the patient by a Gaian shaman or crone.  “¡Ay Chihuahua, cuantos Apaches, cuantos Indios sin huaraches!”  But anyway, they may be growing after all.

The blueberry bushes are actually weighted down with unripe berries.  I fear that the deer are just waiting to swoop down and devour the whole crop just as it ripens.  Ah well, as Camera Girl says, “Everybody’s gotta eat.”  Whatever.

I was reading the ZMan’s Monday posts at his site and Taki’s.  They were depressing takes on bugmen like David French and their pernicious embrace of critical race theory in the schools.  It made me think that what will be needed is instruction in the true story of Western Civilization.  Parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts who are interested can point children to older books that reflect the actual story of how we got here.  The history books from two generations ago are full of the true stories of our ancestors and the adventures and tragedies that make up western history.  The Greeks, Romans, Celts, Germans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings and the other peoples who have collided and mixed and fought and produced Michelangelo and Mozart and Newton and Maxwell and Edison and all the things that they have created.  Biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, medicine, electricity, engines, nuclear weapons, space travel and computers.  Imagine being ashamed of the people who made these things.  The absurdity of the midgets who want our children to prefer the cultures of people who lived in mud huts and ate each other for dinner.  We should be ashamed of ourselves for even tolerating these people who are ashamed of the civilization that made their lives rich beyond the imaginations of people only a hundred years ago.  I’ll have to start identifying old books that can be used as resources for teaching the young.

Anyway, it’s going to be a busy week.  As I say I have a list of chores to perform before the party and Camera Girl will brook no nonsense from me.  She’s not concerned with my crusade to save America.  She wants the porch swept and the chairs cleaned off.  My ambition is to clean off the grill.  I have some rib-eye steaks to cook on Saturday and I’d like them not to taste like old hamburger grease.  But I promise not to neglect the site and I’m sure I’ll have outrages to comment on and sage advice to distribute to the world at large.

Praying Mantises, Children’s Books and Pa – Part 3 – Dr. Livingstone I Presume!

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So the first survivor has made his appearance in the yard.  This one found his way into the stella d’oro daylilies in the swimming pool area.  May he be the first of many that show up.  My little granddaughter will find out that praying mantises don’t talk like they do in her Eric Carle books but they are very exciting for an insect.

 

 

Good hunting little fellow.

 

Praying Mantises, Children’s Books and Pa – Part 1

Praying Mantises, Children’s Books and Pa – Part 2 – The Arrival

Preying Mantis (photo study)

 

10JUL2021 – American Greatness – Post of the Day – Return of the King by Josiah Lippincott

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This fellow Josiah Lippincott takes Angelo Codevilla to task for his essay, “What is Trump to Us?”  His point is that despite whatever failures Trump had in his term in office without him there would be no populist movement.  He does a pretty good job of defending this idea and reminds us of who would be the conservative political team if Donald Trump hadn’t appeared on the scene, guys like Marco Rubio.

One of the more interesting ideas that he presents is the idea that Trump should run for Liz Cheney’s house seat and then become Speaker of the House if the Republicans recapture the House of Representatives.  That’s a pretty wild idea.  I like it.  Can you imagine Trump mocking Nancy Pelosi from the Speaker’s lectern?  Anyway I like his point of view.  Sure I’d love to see DeSantis step up and start to push our agenda forward but until he does something revolutionary we still have to remember that without Trump none of this would even exist.