I listened to this interview between a talk show guy in Texas ( Chris Salcedo ) and Daniel Miller, President of the Texas Nationalist Movement and author of the book “TEXIT: Why And How Texas Will Leave The Union.” It was an interesting discussion in which they talked about some of the important details that separating from the Union would involve private citizens in. Like social security and other financial programs. As I said it was interesting but they didn’t mention a date when the Texit bill is supposed to be voted on in the Texas legislature. Guess I’ll have to do some more digging.
Category: Current Events
Sundance at CTH Has a Good Analysis of What We are All Expecting After the Trial
Hat tip to Neil for sending me the link. I saw the text from Politico and didn’t go any farther. Sundance expressed it very well.
I think everyone is waiting to see which way President Trump decides to go after this farcical “trial” is over. I’d love for him to become the leader of a movement that encompassed more than just politics or media or commerce. It needs to be almost a nation within a nation. We need the cohesion to be able to use the strength of our numbers to provide support and protection for the individuals who are bearing the brunt of these attacks. 75 million people could afford to pay for legal and even tactical resources when needed. We need a powerful leader to build a powerful organization to protect us from the Left. I hope he will agree to be that leader. I don’t know who else could do it.
DeceptiCons Perplexed, President Trump Support Not Waning – Retribution to GOP Increasingly Likely
Observations from the Gulag Archipelago Relevant to Today – Part 1 – Show Trials
Solzhenitsyn’s epic history of the Soviet Union’s war against its own people is a crippling experience for the reader. The first ninety pages are a seemingly endless list of purges that went on from 1917 to well into the 1950’s. The scope, the strategies and the tactics that were used to terrorize, imprison, torture and mostly murder these poor human beings is almost beyond comprehension. In Solzhenitsyn’s own words “If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.’”
To try and understand how a government of men would choose to decimate and more than decimate its own people is very difficult. But it is telling that in every society where radical socialism has taken hold it follows the same pattern and causes monstrous suffering. Because this same ideology is now loose in our own society, I thought it would be useful to select specific details from the Gulag Archipelago and elaborate on how they relate to our time and place.
I’ll start off the series with the concept of show trials. Among the many purges there was a period when a decision was made to go after engineers. They were selected because previously they had been given a certain immunity due to their usefulness. Because of the backwardness of pre-revolutionary Russia and because of the agricultural disruptions that occurred due to the collectivization of the farmlands, having men who could manufacture and repair and improve modern equipment like tractors and automobiles was quite important. Sending them to the gulag was quite counterproductive. But at a certain point logic ceased to be strong enough to prevent the next victim group from being fed into the maw of the meat grinder.
And it was quite easy to incriminate engineers. By definition they were intellectuals, a classic category of counter-revolutionaries. Also, most of them had studied at the universities during the czarist period so there were all kinds of associations and attachments to people and organizations that had already been condemned and consumed in the earlier purges.
But the technique that the authorities wanted to most use was to find someone innocent of any real crimes and tell him that if he would denounce himself and all his fellows of some absurdly improbable crime in a public exhibition then he would get a lighter sentence. And so, we got the show trial.
At the trial the accused had to go through the full histrionics of denouncing himself and confess to all his crimes and accuse all of his co-conspirators. In the best case all of the other equally innocent men would also confess to their inhuman crimes against the collective. And finally, they would finish off by demanding their own deaths as the only fitting punishment for their atrocious crimes. And ironically, despite the assurances that they had received of a lighter sentence, often death was awarded to them. But either way this theater of the perverse was conducted and make-believe crimes were punished and more fodder was fed into the killing machine.
Amusingly, these trials came to an end when during the show trial against the ceramic industry the defendants as a body decided at the last minute to deny all charges. And since the prosecution had no actual evidence to produce against them at this very public trial, they were exonerated. It just goes to show sometimes courage is rewarded.
Currently, examples of show trials in our country are only the thinnest of ghosts of what the Stalinist regime could perpetrate. A recent example is New York Times science writer Donald McNeil Jr. He was denounced for the use of the black ethnic slur that shall not be repeated unless you are black. He was on a trip with students in Peru, for some reason, and one of his students finked out another of the students for having used the black ethnic slur that shall not be repeated unless you are black (tbestsnbruyab). When McNeil said tbestsnbruyab in the context of condemning the use of tbestsnbruyab he was reported by those present of using tbestsnbruyab. He was condemned by his colleagues and the incident was forgotten. But two years later the retroactive punishment for this offense became capitol and his colleagues demanded his firing. And being the good progressive that he is, he made a statement applauding his professional lynching. Now admittedly this is poor stuff compared to shipping him off to a labor camp or putting a bullet in his brain. But it’s a rousing start when it occurs in the so-called land of free speech.
I expect there will be other examples of looney lefties denouncing themselves. And I think we’ll also see that after the fact they’ll be heard caterwauling at the gates of the Emerald City claiming that they weren’t given a chance afterward to be re-educated and rehabilitated. But it’s a funny thing. Once you’ve been cast out into that void it’s really hard to get the “good” people to take your calls. Contamination from bad thinking is much scarier than COVID. They’re going to have to get back to you sometime in the future. And that future sure isn’t tomorrow and chances are it’s never.
So, as you can see, we are only at the very beginning of the great revolution that the Russians perfected. But I will continue this series and I’m sure we’ll use our Yankee ingenuity to innovate and who knows even show the masters a thing or two. So, stay tuned comrades.
Stupid Super Bowl Commercials 2021
Larry Correia apparently wasn’t too thrilled with Jeep’s Super Bowl commercial. His send up of it is pretty damned funny so here’s the link. I’ll let it speak for itself.
Guest Contributor – Jack Strawman – Old White Guy Wins Another Super Bowl
Editor’s Note: Not that the readers here need the warning and reality gets scarily close to parody, but for any folks from the Left, THIS IS SATIRE!
In an era marked by extraordinary, if not completely manufactured, racial tensions, the NFL once again finds itself in the spotlight as a 43-year-old white guy won his unprecedented seventh Super Bowl title last night. Reaction was swift on Capitol Hill, where the yearly festival of cavorting with underage prostitutes that coincides with the Big Game was cut short so Congress could quickly form a Special Committee to investigate the issue. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has tapped Adam Schiff as the Committee Chairman; but while Schiff has never engaged in an actual sporting event, it is said that he used to enjoy watching pee-wee football games from the parking lot in his car.
The white guy in question, Tom Brady, was finishing his first season with his new team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. His former team of 20 years, the New England Patriots, immediately put out a press release, signed by the two egregiously wealthy old white guys who both own and run the franchise. “We are aghast at what transpired this evening. With each successive title Brady won here, we grew more horrified by what this meant to a country whose entire history is marred by systemic racism. After the sixth title, we knew we could no longer retain Mr. Brady; we relinquished our rights to his services, and will be content to now take our place in the middle of the pack for the foreseeable future.” New England is also hoping that their fan base will be content with the new Participation Trophies intended to assuage the feelings of the other 31 teams that do not win the title each year.
The NFL itself has also opened an investigation, led by their Chief Executive Panderer, Roger Goodell – another old white guy under contract for some $35 million/year. “The NFL is simply horrified by tonight’s results. We have done everything in our power to level the playing field; not the least of which has included overlooking every instance of domestic abuse and violent crime committed by our players. In addition, we have mandated that each team practice solidarity kneeling throughout the season, and continue to pay for the choreography lessons required so every physically gifted black player can relentlessly showboat after basically doing what they are paid to do.” Goodell went on to say that the NFL is now considering adopting the Golf scoring system, where the lowest score wins.
The outrage has also affected Brady’s wife, top fashion model Gisele Bündchen. Within an hour of the game’s end, all of her contracts were canceled; the majority are being awarded to Aunt Jemimah, who has been out of work for a number of months now after her lucrative high fructose corn syrup-laden pancake syrup deal was abruptly canceled with the PepsiCo Corporation, which also sponsored yet another Luciferian Halftime Show. PepsiCo had no comment.
photog’s Corner – Surviving Winter – Exercise – Rower
Normally Camera Girl and I like to go for a daily hike through the local State Park. It’s pretty scenic with a lake, pond, streams, tree covered hills and wildlife. But in the last week or so we have returned to the usual New England winter condition. There will be a foot or more of snow on the ground for the next few weeks so that will put a damper on our hike. And that hike was more than just recreation. It was part of the exercise that we really need this time of year. Snow removal is less harmful to your body if you maintain good muscle tone.
We have a treadmill and an exercise bike but I despise both of these devices passionately. I have a lat machine and I’ll do calisthenics but it’s hard to get a meaningful aerobic workout this way without some pretty serious exertion.
Many years ago my father had told me that rowing was a good aerobic exercise that didn’t wear out the knees and hips. There was a rower at a gym that I had access to at work at one time. And it was a good machine to use but using it at work was inconvenient. So I was pretty sure that a home rower was the right choice for me.
A couple of months ago I did a search into what rowing machine would be a good choice. After looking at several types and several manufacturers I settled on the flywheel air rowing machine type and the Concept 2 brand as the best quality out there. The problem was that they were only made in one factory in Vermont and the COVID madness had effectively slowed the output to a trickle. So there was a two month waiting list to get one.
Well last week it finally showed up and I was like a kid at Christmas assembling it.
It didn’t take much time or effort and before I knew it I was using it and I was very, very pleased with the experience and the results. The unit is well made and sturdy. It really is a painless workout and it eats up calories relatively quickly and painlessly. Where I’ve set it up I can look out onto the yard and relax my mind. Next I’ll set up some music in the area and I’ll be in nirvana. I even got Camera girl to try it out and she was unexpectedly very interested. So it looks like we’ll come out of the winter hibernation more or less intact.
If you’re looking for an aerobic machine for the home and can afford the relatively hefty price tag ($900 plus tax and shipping) I can recommend this model. If you are cautious wait a few months and I’ll update this review for any possible problems.
Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are
I’ve been writing this blog for almost five years. And now that I’m providing enough content to warrant people keeping up with it it’s begun expanding its following, which is of course very gratifying to me. And I am especially grateful to those of you who have passed along the site address or the link to a particular post. I think this is the real “organic” growth mechanism as opposed to a Google or even a DuckDuckGo search link. The opinion of the target audience is the only meaningful measure of the success of a journal.
But I must take the time to ask you all for a favor. I am not looking for money or more clicks from you. I’m not even looking for compliments, although praise is a wonderful narcotic that I crave as much as the next man. What I’m looking for is feedback of some sort. And it doesn’t even have to be agreement, in fact, disagreement combined with your opinion on the subject at hand would be splendid. And I’m certainly not looking for histrionics and mock squabbling. The last thing I think we need is more Jerry Springer theatrics. And I’m not looking for people to make declarations that they consider dangerous for them to make. I am quite aware that government and corporate busybodies are everywhere attempting to imitate the KGB on a Keystone Cops basis. What I’m looking for is a real dialog with the audience.
As much as I like hearing my own voice and as much as I enjoy the scintillating brilliance of my every captured thought, I still believe that there are other people out there in the universe who have something that they can add to all this marvellousness. I hold to the idea that there is intelligent life in the universe besides me. And my goal is to discover it and make contact with it and learn something from it and even enjoy the camaraderie of shared humanity. I feel like that character from the Pink Floyd song saying, “Hello, hello, hello is there anybody out there?” But I know there are many somebodies out there. I’ve met some of them. And they are fantastic people. But what would be more fantastic would be to reach a critical mass where the conversations become self-sustaining and I become almost an insignificant part of the dialog.
Think of all the brilliant and thoughtful and experienced people that are out there. And they’re being thrown off social media by the hundreds of thousands and they’re rooting around on the internet looking for a community. Some have probably found some good ones. I’ve done it myself. But many of these places are extremely odd. Maybe it’s the times we live in. Maybe it’s some artifact of the monetizing system but there is just too much anger and confusion. Even the ones that seem to have a lot of good information on what is going on are strange and sort of depressing. I’m looking to build some kind of community that at least can function in a way that allows information and some kind of dialog to go on.
I think that with the stalinesque woke purges going on almost everywhere in our society; in social media, in corporations, in government, in schools, in churches, even in the military; it’s necessary to have a place where we can go and be able to say what we want to without having someone tell us that we’re not allowed to. That’s actually the origin of this site. I got tired of being censored on photography web sites when I disagreed with the ridiculous leftist slant to everything on those sites.
Now, I’m sure there will be plenty of readers who will find that their views fall so far to the Left and the Right of where I am that this site will be uninteresting to them. The woke will think I’m just a hateful racist. In fact, I’ve been told that repeatedly. And there are people way out on the edges of the dissident right who will find my beliefs hopelessly naïve and useless to their taste. And that is reasonable. I have no desire to straddle hopeless opposites. It can’t be done. But I know that there is an enormous swath of people that exist in the spectrum of conservative thought that would benefit from a chance to talk to people like themselves without being lectured to and hectored and treated like bad children or criminals.
So, if you have anything at all to say. Say it! I don’t need your name or even your actual e-mail address. Put down whatever you like. But pitch into the conversation with me. It’ll help me. It will help other people who are shy. And who knows, you might really enjoy talking to other intelligent and like-minded people. So come out, come out, wherever you are.
And if you like what you read here, tell a friend or two or three who are like you and might enjoy it too.
Back in the USSA, Not Quite
The downside of reading the Gulag Archipelago is that you become dismissive of the power of the FBI. I mean compared to the KGB and its precursor the NKVD our secret police are pretty lame. Of course, everything is relative. Compared to the unimaginable freedom that we used to enjoy here, the present police state is very repressive and upsetting. A generation ago we would have laughed at the idea of the government spying on all of the phone conversations of the American people. And the idea that political opponents would now be the targets for re-education camps would have been the subject of science fiction dystopias that sane people would have found too far-fetched to be interesting.
But getting back to the USSR, the Soviets didn’t do anything half way. They were so zealous and thorough that they would arrest random people just because their quotas hadn’t yet been met. I was reading a story about a landlady who went to the police station to ask about what to do with a nursing infant whose mother was one of her tenants. The mother had been arrested by the NKVD and now the child needed milk. She wanted to know where she should bring the child. They brought the landlady to a waiting room and after a delay of a few hours they decided to arrest her just because she was already there and the quota needed filling. She disappeared into the gulag and was never seen again. Now there’s an action that would bring tears of joy to Jim Comey’s eyes.
I guess my point is that as maddening as it is to see the freest country ever imagined devolving into a police state the reality is that we have a lot of latitude to communicate our ideas and information with each other. After all I can call Joe Biden, Dementia Joe and Kamala Harris, Willie Brown’s Ho. And so far, I haven’t been dragged away to Siberia (or even Minnesota) or been shut down by the thought police. Sure, they’ve shut us out of Twitter and Facebook but honestly those things were overrun with Leftists anyway and from what people on them have told me they weren’t fun anymore anyway. Larry Correia is one of my favorite fantasy authors partly because he is not a Leftist. On his blog, Monster Hunter Nation, he wrote a recent post that chronicled his decision to abandon Facebook. Apparently, they didn’t shut down his very popular page but instead blocked him from writing to it.
I have a Gab page, but honestly, I’ve never really gotten any traffic from it. The short-short form of writing doesn’t really seem to suit me. Maybe it’s a skill I need to learn. But I like writing on my blog and if I can get some visibility from folks like Whatfinger, Disturbed Deputy and MaddMedic then I’m happy to communicate that way. Lately I’ve been getting some organic search traffic but it’s still quite limited and is restricted to very specific posts that have little to do with the majority of my content.
What I’m getting at is that although I’d love to suddenly go viral and have millions of readers, I’m not sure that was ever a realistic thing. Are there really that many people interested in the things I am? Maybe I’ll never know. But if the people who like my stuff tells some of their friends that’s probably the best way for my site to grow and right now, I don’t think the FBI or even Google is interested in my nefarious writings. If I do get hurled off my platform, I guess I’ll change my tune but I think what I’d do is what Gab did. I’d make my site completely bullet proof. I believe I’ve found a hosting plan that avoids all the vulnerable infrastructure and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.
Circling back to the beginning. We have lost a lot of freedom but compared to real totalitarian hell like the Soviet Union or that madman in North Korea we have enough wiggle room to say what we want, to whom we want. And right now, that’s good enough.
So spread the good word, send all your conservative friends to Orion’s Cold Fire and spit in the eye of Google and the FBI. Free America still exists here and I’m not feeling pessimistic today.
05FEB2021 – photog’s Friday Finds
Powered by Whatfinger News, the nervous system of Free America
Just a few links this week and only one that’s actually political.
Politics
Nebraska County GOP Votes to Censure Ben Sasse; State Party to Hold Meeting on His Anti-Trump Votes and Comments
By Debra Heine (American Greatness) (I hate Sasse almost as much as I hate Mitt Romney. Seeing him censured and hopefully primaried does my heart good.)
The Culture
First Steps for Surviving What’s Coming Our Way By Michael Devon (American Thinker) (This is sort of a prepper’s primer on what you might want to have on hand over the course of the Biden reign of terror. Admittedly this is more of a worst case scenario point of view but there are some interesting items on the list that might make you think.)
TBT: Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony by (The Portly Politico) (Something to get our minds on that’s more pleasant than Washington)
Strip Away the Rot and Build on the Strong
Living as I do in the land of fungus it’s important to look for where moisture has seeped into wood and rotted it away. This is critical because structural members can be compromised and your whole house can come crashing down. You have to look for the telltale signs and when the long horrible winter is over you have to figure out how the water has been getting in and remove that vulnerability. And then you have to remove the rotted wood and replace it. And it’s expensive and difficult. Things have to be shored up while replacing structural supports and if you don’t identify the point of water infiltration you may have to do the whole painful repair over again.
Based on what I’ve observed I’d say that the Republican Party is pretty much rotted away. To continue the analogy, the question remains whether it’s best to demolish the structure and build a new one or begin shoring up the structure and ripping out the rot. I’ll leave that decision with whoever thinks he has the budget to build a new party.
But this post isn’t really about rebuilding a conservative party. It’s about discarding the thoughts and actions that have become useless and redirecting my actions to things that are useful. Writing endlessly about Washington and the atrocities of the dementia patient in the White House is not only useless, it’s debilitating. Thinking about the daily assaults on us is like a drip of water that slowly over time erodes your mind.
I have to find positive activities and they have to have some measurable results. That goes for both my personal activities and the things I choose to write about. And maybe I’ll be writing less, at least here. I have my own writing that I want to do. Blogging takes up a good deal of time. I intend to make sure I have something that is worth people’s time reading.
What I think I will concentrate on for the blog are things that I have found that are useful. I like to think that the reviews of music, movies and books are of that sort. These are things that can be useful to people looking for entertainment. I’ll try to provide similar factual posts about other aspects of living. Maybe it will be about a company that provides a product or service. Maybe it will be an organization that supports the values that I believe in. Maybe it will be an activity that I have heard about that is useful or enjoyable for families and communities on our side of the cultural divide. And sometimes it will be a politician who seems to want to help.
Another aspect of the blog that I intend to change is interaction with the readers. I really need a lot more feedback from you all. I confess I haven’t figured out yet how to do this yet. I think that the site would benefit from having people express their opinions. I especially am interested in people who disagree with my opinions. Not progressive trolls who just want to disrupt the proceedings but people on our side who think we are making mistakes either tactically or in a more fundamental way. And I am especially eager to hear your thoughts about how we can thrive during these dark times. A one-way conversation can be frustrating. So, here’s to a new day and a new direction. Out with the old and in with the new.