All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
Liz Shield at American Greatness gives us some details on how the House Republican Leader is already promoting left-leaning Republicans into leadership positions and demoting any actual conservatives to curry favor with Nancy Pelosi and friends. After the impeachment theater is finished I think getting on with the business of primarying all the RINOs should be the first order of business for Donald Trump or whoever wants to take on the mantle of leader of the Free America.
This morning the Fatman sent me this link to Glenn Greenwald trying to shed some light on the meltdown that some Reddit investors inflicted on Melvin Capital for their obviously obscenely extreme short positions against Gameplay. And recently he had reminded me of a story I told him about the 1987 Black Monday Wall Street crash that I was involved in. Back in the mid-eighties photog was a young struggling engineering student working all kinds of crazy jobs to feed his family and looking at an economy that didn’t particularly need engineers. So, I got my Series 7 license and went to work at a number of different Wall Street firms, some more and some less reputable. But by 1987 I had been employed at a discount broker taking orders on their options desk for a couple of years and was about to move over to a small specialty firm that handled institutional accounts. In fact, the week before the crash I had accepted the offer and I would be leaving that next Friday.
Now back then if the Dow Jones Industrial Index dropped fifty points that was a really bad day. So, as you can tell on Wall Street numbers have changed orders of magnitude in term of impact on the economy. And the whole Black Monday drop was only 500 points but back then that was an earthquake. But probably what very few people remember is that the Friday before Black Monday the market dropped a hundred points. And that was a very big deal. And for one small investor that first smaller drop was even more important.
Options are a way to bet on the market when you don’t have the wherewithal to buy stock and certainly don’t have the money in your account to be allowed to short a stock. Back then the equity requirements to short stocks were a lot lower than they are now but still you needed at least 25% of the value in your account to short shares of a stock. But options are a way to leverage changes in stock price by paying someone who does have stock to guarantee a buy or a sell at a particular price by a particular date. And as a consequence, a market can then be made in those options. But since these options expire at a certain date, on that last day if the option price is “out of the money” meaning that exercising the option by buying or selling the stock at that required price wouldn’t make the one exercising the option any money then it is worthless and the option itself has no trading value. At that point the option trades for almost nothing.
So, every month when various options expired, we’d see the index options, the OEX options, that traded against a basket of blue-chip stocks reach down to the lowest levels they traded at like an eighth or a sixteenth before expiring worthless. And every month like clockwork we would have a visit from the cabbie. He was a Jamaican cabbie who would come in with his paycheck and put in a buy order for as many out of the money OEX put contracts as he could get for five hundred dollars. Five hundred dollars was his paycheck that he would deposit in his account. And every month he would call up just before the end of the trading day and ask what they were trading at. And every month we would laughingly tell him that they were worth squat.
But on that Friday before the crash, he bought his options for pennies on the contract and then in the last hour the market went down a hundred points. And the value of his puts went from virtually nothing to fifty thousand dollars. And everyone on the trading floor was flabbergasted that the cabbie had pulled off a home run. So, when he called up and asked for the quote on his OEX puts I respectfully told him. He told me to sell them at the market price which I did. But when I asked him if he wanted to have the proceeds sent to him, which I assumed he would, instead he said to buy as many contracts of out of the money OEX puts as I could get. So, I bought him $50,000 of out of the money OEX puts. And then the trading desk went wild laughing at this madman who had just flushed the biggest bonanza we had ever seen down the drain. Because after a 100-point loss, the market would regain the value or at worst hold steady there for a month or two before it continued its way up. Those puts would slowly erode before expiring worthless.
That night Camera Girl and I joined a friend from the office and his wife at an off-off-Broadway play about, of all things, a stock investor who loses his shirt and kills himself and finds himself in hell. It was a pretty terrible play. My friend and his wife were struggling actors who worked other careers to enable their avocation. And after the play we laughed and talked about the cabbie and how foolish he was but I remember saying to my friend, “Yeah, but what if the market crashed on Monday and went down two hundred points, then he’d have the last laugh.” And we all laughed at how unlikely that would be.
So, the market tanked Monday and went down five hundred points and the cabbie made some millions. I didn’t get to speak to him because I was too busy with the fallout of the crash to care about anything but getting through the day. First, I called my new employer and made sure I still had a new job to go to next week. Then I slogged through thousands of calls to former investors who would have to liquidate their accounts to meet their margin calls. It was a crap storm of mammoth proportions that taught me many valuable lessons about the cyclical nature of human endeavors.
But the story of the Jamaican cabbie was an object lesson that combining intelligence and a little luck can accomplish some remarkable results. I hope that guy took that pot of gold and lived a very happy and useful life. That kind of luck and courage deserves to be rewarded.
Now back to the Reddit boys. Regardless of anything else this Gameplay “play” means, it has highlighted just how horrible Wall Street has become. To relentlessly short a company out of existence is so emblematic of the bloodless inhuman nature of our financial system. And now that the governmental and industrial powers-that-be are rushing to the defense of one of their fellow vultures it’s plain for all to see that there are two different systems available. One for the corporate titans that are too big to fail and one for the rest of us who are meant to fail whenever it is necessary to squeeze a little more blood for the vampires to suck. Maybe it’s a case of the vampires deciding Melvin Capital is just one more victim for their feeding frenzy. I’m sure honor among thieves is pretty thin. Or maybe it really is David vs Goliath. Who knows? But what is clear is that America is broken. To the Masters of the Universe in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street we are cattle and slaughtering us is just part of the business cycle. After all you can always get more cattle.
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This is the first installment of a weekly feature that I hope the readers will find useful. Instead of putting up links as I find them I will group them into categories.
Politics
Texas Lawmakers Consider Secession Over Life Under Democrat Marxism — More States Interested (Gateway Pundit)
(I love this first one. It’s a YouTube video with the Representative going over the proposal that will be presented to the texas legislature. And during the interview he mentions that there are other states intersted and that Texas might be able to act as the Big Brother for these smaller states in their journey down this road. Fascinating.)
Clarity in Trump’s Wake (Angelo Codevilla on American Greatness)
(Codevilla is a brilliant guy who has been raising the alarm since 2015 that the Left is finishing the transition from free republic to corporate oligarchy in Washington. He can be long-winded but his words are worth reading.
NYT Begs Court to Dismiss Veritas Defamation Lawsuit; Admits Article Inaccuracies Under Oath! (Project Veritas)
(James O’Keefe at his investigative journalism company Project Veritas is one of the most effective people working for our side. He has uncovered Leftist malfeasance everywhere his undercover cameras go. From Acorn to Planned Parenthood to Google to CNN to Facebook to CBS to NPR his investigators have recorded the Left speaking openly of their real intentions and in many cases their illegal actions. O’Keefe here is suing the NY Times for openly lying about the documented evidence he had of voter fraud during the 2020 elections. These guys are great.)
The Culture
Act Like a Lady (Abby Roth at American Mind)
(Never let it be said that just because I’m the leader of the He-Man Woman Hater’s Club, that I ignore what women have to say. How could I? They never stop talking! I hope Camera Girl doesn’t see this. Abby Roth defines her desire to reclaim the term lady for the culture on the right.
Orwell’s 1984 and Today ( Larry P. Arnn, President, Hillsdale College on Imprimis )
Larry Arnn is the president of one of the only colleges in the United States that isn’t run by and dedicated to the Left. President Trump put him in charge of the 1776 Commission and he has a lot to say about how education must be reformed if we are to save the next generation. Here are some of his thoughts on that)
Faith, Family, and Work (Tyler Cook at the Portly Politico)
(Tyler Cook writes at the Portly Politico and even though he keeps up with the latest news on the blogosphere he can talk about more than just the latest political outrage of the day. Education, music, religion and literature turn up at his site. And seeing as he’s the next generation we better find out what they’re thinking about because they’ll be taking over pretty soon. If there is anything left to take over.)
Working on Our Skills (The Disturbed Deputy)
(The Deputy writes about life from the law enforcement side of things and about life in these United States)
We are a week into the middle of winter and with the recent cold snap and with the snow that will be falling today and tomorrow I’m falling back into the New England mid-winter trance. Luckily without my typical commute a lot of the wear and tear on my body and mind are reduced to a reasonable level. In the past I would have to get up at 5 am and clear the snow for two hours before commuting to work and then drive home and still having to clear the rest of it in the dark before collapsing into bed. Now with my new and improved lifestyle I get up at 7 am, eat breakfast, play blocks with my granddaughter for a little while then leisurely and efficiently go out and clear the snow once it stops falling. I’ll probably break it up into two sessions with a meal in between to relieve the monotony and warm my old bones. Camera Girl has made a really excellent Chicken Butter Nut Squash Soup so I’ll be properly fortified for the second half of the operation.
In my less demanding routine I have the chance to reflect on the unfortunate aspects of this new world that we live in. Here we are almost a year into this absurd lockdown and most people in New England really believe that we are in the midst of the bubonic plague. I half expect to see the cartman leading his pony around with the pile of cadavers shouting, “bring out your dead.” The local tv coverage and the attitude of the people you meet when you do go out is that we are all struggling against unbelievable odds to survive the ravages of the Andromeda Strain. Apparently, we’re all heroes now. It sounds like the nonsense the Soviets used to spout every time the tractor factory came close to meeting the quota. “All hail the revolutionary fervor of Assembly Line B Night Shift!” When a country that did nothing about the virus like Sweden has, after a year, a slightly lower per capita death rate than a country like America, that threw all its small businesses off a cliff, you have to wonder just how detached from reality people are.
Based on the fact that California and New York are beginning to loosen the restrictions on such dangerous activities as opening your front door and breathing in the shower I am hopeful that by the end of winter we will at least be allowed to visit friends and relatives without the neighbors calling in a SWAT Team on us. And that will be big. I found that not seeing my various family members was the worst part of this travesty. And not just family. I have friends that I am dying to see face to face and share a burger and shoot the breeze with. This lockdown is harming us physically. It’s harming us mentally and it’s harming us spiritually. As I’ve mentioned I’m reading Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. And compared to the atrocities the Soviets perpetrated on their people even the lockdown is minor. But it is related to what they did. It is psychological warfare aimed at damaging people’s self-respect. We’re caged animals and they ratchet the punishment up and down just to torture us.
So the cold weather is a perfect symbol of the Gulag that has been built for all of us living in the blue states. Maybe now that Dementia Joe has been nailed up on his scarecrow pole in front of the White House they’ll let us free. Or maybe they won’t.
I have one exceptionally cynical old friend who claims that we right wing folk are just sheep and no matter how much abuse is heaped on us we’ll just continue to take it without doing anything more forceful than complain. He thinks that anything that’s going to happen will have to happen in a red state and even that will be in the nature of orderly and peaceable action. I’m of a different opinion. Even in the bluest of blue states, I think a point will be reached where people will revolt against this abuse. Somewhere a spark will ignite the tinder and a crowd will start a bonfire of these stupid masks and put an end to this idiocy. And I hope I happen to be nearby to join in.
Now that the Democrats have virtual control of all three branches of the United States federal government, many of the reform goals that we knew were necessary have become impossible for the foreseeable future. The Justice Department isn’t going to rein in Google or Facebook or Twitter and force them to stop discriminating against conservatives. In fact, as we’ve seen Silicon Valley is forming a cartel that will try to eliminate any internet entity that doesn’t keep in perfect lock step with every dictate of the Woke Culture. And the other corporate entities are using the COVID and BLM disasters to harass and harangue their employees into submission. So, for many people their existence is hemmed in by all the Leftist institutions and entities that they are forced to use without any possibility of avoidance.
But there are areas where we can effectively have a choice. Sometimes it’s only the choice of refraining all together from participating in an event or industry. But in many cases that is the reasonable or at least emotionally satisfying decision.
I’ll start with the easiest. Sports. I don’t know of a single sport that has resisted the BLM kneelers. I used to watch baseball and football. When football caved in to Kaepernick and company I completely ceased watching it. I think it was last summer that baseball also caved to the kneelers. And I have sworn that until the league publicly apologizes for defaming the National Anthem, I will never watch another minute of their sport in my home. If a minor league team maintains a respectful attitude toward our heritage and honors the National Anthem then I’ll go to their games but I’m guessing that even these teams are polluted by BLMism.
So, there is the first place you can make a difference. Don’t watch sports. Don’t buy cable or satellite packages to follow these sports. Don’t watch ESPN or any of the other sports stations at all either. They are all woke as hell. And for pity’s sake don’t watch the Super Bowl. Don’t watch the game and don’t watch the commercials. That’s just like paying the executioner. Don’t do it. Repurpose Super Bowl Sunday to something that is actually healthy like spending some time with your kids and grandkids doing something they like. If the weather allows take them outside and have a baseball or football catch.
If all 150 million of us stopped watching their crap it would either disappear altogether or at the very least become a pale shadow of what it once was. All those kneeling millionaires would be a lot poorer than they currently are. And Disney will probably close ESPN down and turn it into a porn site to prop up their bottom line.
Next thing we have complete control of is what movies we go to. I used to bring my grandkids to all the Marvel and Star Wars movies as soon as they came out. Now I first read up on what the content and message of the movie is before even considering bringing them. If there is even the slightest hint of wokism, if there is any celebration of female empowerment or multicultural celebration or any anti-white sentiment I stay home. Let them find childless blue-haired scolds to pay for their movies. I have better things to spend my precious dollars on.
And as far as internet news, I go way, way out of my way to do all I can to never click on a left-wing news site. And they must be getting smarter because they hide their site name as well as they can and try to make the article’s title sound less leftist. I always hover over the links and make sure that I’m not providing clicks to the Times or the Post or Politico. Nowadays I even avoid Fox. I make an exception for Tucker or a few others there but the news desk is now infiltrated with creepy leftists. So, do yourself a favor and go to sources you trust. Full disclosure, I get a lot of help from Whatfinger by the links to my posts they put up on their site. But going to Whatfinger is how you can avoid helping the Left. And there are other excellent sites out there too. I’ll be putting together a Friday list of links to good articles I’ve found during the week. At this point there is just no excuse for going to the Left for news or entertainment.
And how about those social media giants? Well, we’re probably not going to kill off Google, Facebook or Twitter anytime soon. But you can do your part. I use DuckDuckGo for my search engine, Brave as my browser and I have a web page on Gab instead of Twitter. My own website is what I use instead of Facebook and I hope someday something like Gab becomes strong enough to become a commercial replacement for Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Admittedly that is a long-term thing but that makes it even more important for people to step up and start making that future happen.
And finally, there are all the other things that we do. The books we buy and the services we use. I make it a point to pass along to any of my contacts whatever I can about people on our side of the fence who we can support. I write book and movie reviews to highlight good things that can be substituted for the poison that the Left controls. And if you know of an electrician or a mechanic that has a Trump bumper sticker or who you know is on our side then give him a plug to your friends. Every little bit helps.
And that, right now, is about all we can do to hit back at our enemies. We can hurt the sports leagues and entertainment companies and the movie studios that hate our guts. And we can start helping to build the social media and news companies that we want to thrive and provide us with the platforms where we can talk and listen to the messages we’re looking for. Right now, that’s all we can do. So, let’s do it.
The good guys at Whatfinger have asked me if I’d be interested in getting them to link up to a Friday feature on OCF where I put together a bunch links to good articles I’ve found. With that in mind if any of the readers here come across any interesting links put them in the comments to this post and I’ll check them out. I’ve also reached out to some other blogs that I am associated with to see if they have anything I might want to look at. So this should be an interesting learning experience for me. I’m thinking of calling it photog’s Friday Finds. What do you think, clever enough? You see, because ph sounds like f it’s alliterative, right right? Anyway I’m still working on the name.
More people are coming to the site and commenting. And yesterday I had a commenter “John Chapter 8,” who took issue with my definition of a what traditional wife was. Okay, so we disagree. He may state things a little more angrily than I choose to but I see the points he’s making. Maybe he saw the point that my reply to him was trying to make. The main thing is there was some dialog. And as long as it doesn’t turn into some insane rant then information has a chance to pass back and forth. And others reading this also can make up their minds about what is being debated. I’m actually supportive of a reasonable airing out of opinions. My way of looking at it is, have your say. If everyone has his say then at least you get that much satisfaction. It’s not like anyone is going to convince everyone even on a small site like OCF to think the same way. But there is value in making your case. Being forced to make a persuasive argument sharpens the mind. You may even have to modify your own beliefs if you look at them closely enough.
I think a significant number of people have found the “Reclaiming the Family” series interesting. I intend to look around at additional subjects under that category that I can think about. In general I think it’s time to start looking at how all this madness in our politics is effecting regular people and write about that. One avenue that could really use attention is the effect on the younger people. And by younger I’m extending that all the way up to people in their forties. As a codger I am sort of trapped in the “boomer mindset.” I get a kick out of the “sure boomer” meme that the zoomers and millennials have adopted as their battle cry. I am not unsympathetic to their position but I also think they are being manipulated to some extent by certain of their peers. For every selfish old guy who is saying “let them eat cake” there are ten oldies who worry constantly about their children and grandchildren and want to help build a brighter future than the bleak dystopia that the Left is making.
Anyway, this should be a busy week and there are all kind of cultural and political things I am looking at. I just started reading Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and it has opened my eyes to just how far we will have to fall before we are anything close to the horror show that Soviet Russia was. And other stuff too. Have a great day.
I heard a funny story. At work a woke guy was virtue signaling to his colleagues and described how he brought his kids to attend a BLM protest in the downtown of his city and how successful the outing was. So, one of his co-workers asked, “Oh? How successful? Did you get a forty or sixty inch?”
I was on a zoom today with some friends that hadn’t spoken all together since Election Night. We had a bunch of stuff to discuss because of just how crazy everything has gotten since November. I won’t go into any details because it’s not my place to and because it’s neither here nor there for this post but suffice it to say that in general it was about how to avoid the worst problems of living in the gulag. And I will say that the tone was surprisingly upbeat.
But what is relevant about that discussion was an attitude. Each one of us had been to a greater or lesser degree angry and dejected by the obvious fraud back in November. But over the course of the following months and the unfolding outrages perpetrated by all levels and branches of American government that led to Dementia Joe being perjured in to office behind razor wire and drawn bayonets, we absorbed that damage from the fraudulent election and shrugged it off. And now we’re openly contemptuous of not only the Pretend President but of the whole Managerial State in all its monolithic putrescence.
The men on that call had only one thing in common. We each grew up in New York City while it was still part of a free America. We remember what things are supposed to be like in this country. We recognize and will deflect the Orwellian practices that the woke fascists have adopted in every branch of their lockstep complex. Their goal, basically, is the suppression of freedom in all its dimensions. They want to memory hole the truth about our world. They rewrite the history books and purge books; movies and even stupid television shows to stop people from having their feelings hurt about who and what they are. But we know that won’t prevent us from living our lives the way we want. We’ll bring our children up to know the truth.
And we traded some good stories about the idiocy that is unfolding in DC. We all got a good laugh over that old, bald, fat guy in a dress and wig that Dopey Joe put in his cabinet. It was emblematic of the whole woke nightmare that we are enduring. A mental patient who can’t tell the difference between being a man and being a woman is put in charge of a major federal health agency and we are the ones accused of being anti-science.
But the other thing we all agreed on was that we’re ready to start making plans to get together this summer. And this time it won’t be virtual it’ll be face to face. By then even if that doddering old idiot hunkered down in the White House basement still wants to make believe that the black death is stalking the landscape, we are going to have a barbecue and celebrate God’s miracle of summer.
So, this was another good day. I spoke to real Americans and mocked the losers who are pretending to be our masters. I made plans to get together with people who believe the same things I do and Camera Girl is cooking one of my favorite dishes. That’s a pretty good day.
I never tire of reminding Camera Girl that in my mind she and I are very close in behavior to the married couple in W. C. Fields two classic movies, “It’s A Gift” and “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.” In both movies Field’s hen-pecked character has a wife played by Kathleen Howard a tall, stout woman who affects the character of a cultured, histrionic scold who constantly hectors and nags at Fields’ character. And Fields’ answer to almost every utterance of his wife is a meek, “yes dear.” And I tell her this not because there is any resemblance physically or temperamentally between her and this shrewish character but because this reminds me of the natural antagonism that husband and wife experience in the course of their wedded bliss. Well, also because I am sort of a jerk.
A few weeks ago, we were sitting down to dinner and she had cooked a soup using the leftovers from a ham we had for the holidays. It was a ham and lentil soup and she decided to make it so thick that we call it a stoup, meaning stew/soup. As I started eating dinner it occurred to me that being married to a woman like my wife is probably the greatest good that a man can have in his life.
A traditional wife makes your house into a home and raises a family. And a family is the only true wealth that any man ever actually possesses. And if she’s also pretty and a good cook like mine then it’s as close to heaven as any man can hope to see on this side of the great divide. That’s the information I can provide to the young guys around today.
But where can you find such a woman today? All the American girls have been sold on the idea that they have to have a career to be fulfilled in the modern world. That is the root of the problem. There are only two solutions, either convince some woman that there is a better option or go outside of the local pool of women.
As far as convincing women to move away from careers I think a man has to have the wherewithal to convince a woman that he can support a stay-at-home wife. Probably that means owning your own home and having a stable income. It would be best if you are up front about your plans and expectations so that you can eliminate the girls that will never work out. I’m too old to know anything about on-line dating services but I would imagine a primary function would be trying to line up marital expectations. Correct me if I’m mistaken that they must have a profile that corresponds to a traditional homemaker.
One thing that might be a starting point is avoid any girl who is planning on going to some very expensive college. Unless her parents have funded her entire education, she is going to have to pay back those student loans and that will make it doubly difficult for you to afford a one income lifestyle. So maybe you should be looking at women who go to the local community college or even better ones working in local jobs that do not require high powered college credentials.
But however you find one, if she has all the qualifications I mentioned in my intro then marry her and never let her work a day of her life outside of the home. Have a passel of kids and enjoy every day of it for as long as you both shall live. Raising a family is a challenging and sometimes a confusing task but as you get older, you’ll find that it really is the only meaningful thing that most human beings ever accomplish. Ray Bradbury wrote a story called the Happiness Machine. In it an inventor tried to make a machine that would make a person happy if he sat in it. It had all the sights and sounds that he imagined could make a person happy. Music, exotic vistas, delicious aromas, everything he thought he would want. But by the end of the story, he discovers the truth when he looks into the window of his own house and sees his family, his wife and his children, performing their routine daily activities together in his own home. That is the true happiness machine. And if a man can’t find happiness in that then maybe he never will.
I feel disgustingly cheerful today. It’s a very bright sunny day here in the gulag. Because of the bitter cold, the furnace is roaring away on fuel oil and the forced hot water is merrily exchanging heat with the air in my living room here at the Compound. Camera Girl has sallied forth in Old Car to Wally World to bring me flesh, and bring me wine, and bring me pine logs hither, sort of. Old dog and not so old dog are lazing near the radiators and I have just finished listening to the ZMan’s Friday Power Hour, his weekly podcast, and despite the predictions of crime waves and government malfeasance it was surprisingly upbeat, I thought.
And I find myself almost ebullient. In the last four days I think four of my posts were linked over at Whatfinger and several thousand extra pageviews were registered and new subscribers joined and new voices appeared in the comments and an interesting opportunity for the site has appeared that may bring still more traffic here. So, a big shout out to Sergeant Pat and the other guys over at Whatfinger.
But in addition, recent events have led me to believe that the result of the fraudulent election will spark changes in this country that are all for the good. The spell is broken. Everyone is paying attention to the man behind the curtain. And he is definitely not the great and powerful anything. He’s just a cheap grifter with a very powerful organization pulling the strings. The problem for him is that, us being able to see the strings takes away a good deal of the effectiveness of his grift. If the suckers figure out that the three-card monte game is really there as a distraction to help the pickpockets in the crowd then it becomes a lot harder to pick pockets. If the Eloi figure out that the Morlocks are cannibals then they’ll stop walking into the frying pan and that will make it a lot harder on the poor Morlocks trying to make an honest living eating Eloi.
And the other part of this whole thing is that I actually feel happier not having to make believe I’m in any way associated with people who either believe or publicly pretend to believe that Dementia Joe is their leader. I want to be in a separate grouping from them. I’m ecstatic if they shun me. I look forward to having different social media platforms, payment processors, crowdfunding sites, even retailers and banks. All those things will be immeasurably better if leftists shun them completely. We should make a point of emblazoning on everything we own some triggering slogan that will send the SJW’s into paroxysms of rage and assure that they will never patronize that site. If I thought it would do any good, I’d emblazon the header of my site with “All Lives Matter!!!!” or something equally scandalous.
Of course, an enormous amount of work is ahead of us to build these new platforms and the Left will do everything they can to torture and attack us every step of the way. But we are still infinitely better off now that the lights are on and we can see the threats. Blundering around in the dark is not only dangerous but it’s also demoralizing. An unseen danger is much more frightening and confusing. For tens of millions of people, the knowledge of who is and isn’t your friend will make avoiding harm a lot easier. Thinking that Mitch McConnell and John Roberts will ride to our rescue is now obvious lunacy. It’s Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown for the millionth time. It’s done for all but the terminally stupid.
We are at last moving on from the grifters.
As I’ve mentioned previously there’s no reason to wait for a superhero to start organizing our people into a new tribe. I want to do my part and provide the foundation for an organization that provides a network to local communities to share information and socialize. Eventually when things really get going that superhero is going to need a sophisticated network with all kinds of capability that the geniuses in Silicon Valley have invented in the last decade but for now Orion’s Cold Fire (OCF) and my primitive internet will have to do.
And in the underground you don’t take names and publish a membership list. Pseudonyms and anonymity make a lot of sense when Dementia Joe is starting to act like another Uncle Joe of gulag fame. I just finished Solzhenitsyn’s “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch” and the idea of snitches pervading the society of a captive nation seems a lot more real now that the Left is adopting the idea of re-education camps and purging non-Leftists from all aspects of public and private life.
Well, all that’s fine with me. The internet is a vast web of people who look for what they need. And maybe what they need is hope. And believe it or not I feel more hopeful in the last few weeks than I have in several years. The endless delays by Bill Barr and the endless betrayals by judges and legislators was so frustrating that I often despaired of ever making any headway. But in the midst of the political collapse after the fraudulent elections I see truth shining through and revealing our enemies for who they are and the eyes of the people finally opening to that truth. That is what gives me hope and it sweeps away the false paths and points to the correct road. We must abandon all the institutions that have proven themselves corrupt and build from the ground up. And part of building up these new institutions is smashing the old ones. It’s not enough to build a new political party. We must destroy the Republican party to do it. Primarying all but the loyal GOP office holders. And any of the disloyal who get through the primaries need to be beaten by their Democrat opponents even in safe red states. Mitch McConnell needs to be powerless and abandoned by his paymasters as a warning to those in our new party that might think of betraying us.
And just to be clear I’m no political mastermind. I’m just a humble scribbler of stories who would like nothing better than to get back to writing stories and playing with my grandchildren. But if those kids are going to have a country half as good as the one my parents gave to me then I’m going to have to try and wake up the sleepers and get them doing something in their local communities and talking together about doing something on a national level.
So here’s my sermon for the day. Go out and talk with five or ten or twenty good men and come back and tell us what they think. Build up a club and accomplish some small thing that feels like a small piece of freedom from the repulsive tyranny spreading out of Washington. And come here and brag about it. No names, no places, just ideas and tips on what works and what doesn’t.