I liked this post by Charlie Eastman. At this point probably the most useful thing we can do is identify the traitors and make sure to get them kicked out of office. All of the congressmen and senators who stabbed us in the back need to be primaried and if they make it to the general election we need to give our votes to either a third party candidate that we want in or to the Democrat strictly for the sake of spite. In fact if it’s a Republican who is very secure in his re-election prospects I say after the primary fails go straight to voting directly for the Democrat. I’d rather see a Democrat in the Utah seat than Mitt Romney for the simple reason that ejecting Romney would give me great joy.
Category: Current Events
New Year’s Day 2021 Ruminations
So, I’ve read all the New Year’s predictions, resolutions, discussions, whatevers. Basically, nobody knows much of anything. We’re in uncharted territory and everybody is guessing based on insufficient data. Well, nothing new there. Just more so.
The rain we got last week erased the snow so Camera Girl and I were virtuous today and went for a long walk in the woods this morning just to start the year off right and that gave us a chance to talk. And I think we both feel that the COVID inoculation will at least reduce the lockdown nonsense at least somewhat. Maybe we’re kidding ourselves but that is what we are talking ourselves into at this point. And I’m guessing that most people are also at the point where they are going to be unwilling to let this lockdown nonsense go on much longer. Maybe I’m giving Americans more credit for having backbone than they deserve. But we’ll see.
Going into the New Year I think everyone wants to know how and where the rebellion begins. Or even if. Because let’s face it, it’s possible nothing happens.
What shape will action take? I assume it will be a leader deciding to step forward and begin organizing a movement that changes things. That begins to oppose the actions and ideas from the Left in a demonstrable way. Not just talk, results. To my mind that will look like a governor and legislature of a red state announcing a law that rolls back some unconstitutional action of the federal courts or the federal bureaucracy that penalizes the citizens of that state. Maybe they nullify some of the actions of the federal government that curtail civil liberties. Maybe they look at any actions of the bureaucracy that overstep the powers that the federal government is given in the Constitution. For instance, recently vernal pools have been declared navigable waters as an excuse for allowing the federal government authority over how private citizens treat their own property. Such outrageous overstepping of their authority has become common. A state championing the rights of private citizens being attacked in such ways would protect those citizens from having to take on the gargantuan power of the federal government alone. It would also be wildly popular with the common people and would guarantee enormous electoral success for the politicians smart enough to do it.
Or maybe it will be a business leader who decides to break ranks from the corporate monolith and starts to court the favor of the normal people on the Right. Maybe a tech company decides to become the new PayPal but makes a point of saying that it believes that “all lives matter.” Or it publicizes the fact that it donates a portion of its profits to a traditional religious charity, one that pointedly adheres to biblical beliefs about traditional male and female family roles.
Or maybe it will be some private individual who stands up to the mob. Maybe it has already happened. Maybe it was Kyle Rittenhouse. His trial will be coming up. Maybe he will be the spark that wakes up the sleeping giant in this land.
Or maybe nothing happens.
So that’s what I’ve been pondering today. The new year begins and no one really knows what will occur. I’m an optimist. I think we shall see a leader step forward and try to channel the anger and dissatisfaction with the current situation and build it into something permanent. And I know that’s what we really need.
Here’s hoping that is the way it goes.
30DEC2020 – OCF Update – End of Year Roundup
Well, I’ve posted my New Year’s Resolutions and now I will do a review of the site content and select my favorite photos, quotes, and posts from the last twelve months. There are bound to be some surprises in there. Hopefully I’ll post them today or tomorrow. I’ll try to keep bitter irony to a minimum because it’s best to start the New Year as optimistically as humanly possible. Hope is a flickering candle and should be protected from the cold wind of reality as well as can be.
And just to get the ball rolling on my endeavor here is the photo of the day from last January 1st. This definitely won’t be a best of but it is the first picture of 2020.
New Year’s Resolutions for 2021
I was trying to think of some clever resolutions associated with the election but it all just sounded like rants and raves. I guess I’m pretty much finished shaking my fist at the zombies running on the grass. Let’s face it, unless some pretty high-powered people decide to throw their weight around, the Uniparty is going to get away with stealing the election. But either way I don’t get to have a say about it at all.
So instead, I’m going to think about things that I can do that are meaningful and possible.
I resolve to support my children and grandchildren in every way I can.
I resolve to teach my grandkids all the useful things I know and tell them the truth about the world. I’ll start by giving them some pointers on how to research whatever projects they think they want to accomplish. I’ll also tell them what things I have found to be useless in order to save them some time. I’ll give them the “so you think you want to be an engineer” speech. And I’ll start the conversation rolling on how to attract and identify an acceptable wife. I may recruit Camera Girl’s help in this. After all she is a girl.
I resolve to get into the best shape I can. Healthcare is expensive and the quality of it is decreasing rapidly. The best way to cure health problems is to avoid them. So, dropping some weight and adding some cardio to the weights is a good idea. I’m buying a high-end rowing machine and when the snow makes it impossible to go walking in the woods Camera Girl and I will be pretending to row a boat through a window and across the landscape or something. I was thinking of finding the soundtrack to Ben Hur and making a loop out of the galley slave portion of the movie. I’ll call my workout “ramming speed.”
I resolve to get to know my neighbors at least to the point of inviting them to a cookout. I’m sure half of them are not my political allies but at least knowing something about the people who live around you is worthwhile. Who knows, some of them might be on our team.
I resolve to start doing some of my own home repairs. Winters where I live are very tough on external wood surfaces of which I have an enormous area. If I start doing some of the carpentry repairs, I can save a lot of money and money is hard to come by in the horror show that is post-America.
I resolve to investigate the local (town) Republican party club. Who knows, maybe one of them isn’t a JEB! voter.
I resolve to finish my first science fiction novel.
I resolve to put together a usable handbook of practical rules of thumb and lists of information for people on the right to avoid the petty annoyances and more serious problems associated with living in post-America.
I resolve to increase my web traffic to 1 billion pageviews a day (more or less) and become the source for right-wing punditry. Well, you have to dream a little bit, don’t you?
So that’s what I’ve thought of so far. All (most) of them are easily doable and all of them will make my life better and help people I like. Notice none of it hinges on anything to do with the 2020 election. I will admit that the COVID nonsense will delay some of these things but eventually we will escape most of the restrictions the psychos have burdened us with.
So Happy New Year’s and here’s hoping 2021 will be a hell of a lot better than 2020.
Feel free to leave your resolutions in the comments.
Thoughts on the Nashville Suicide Bomber
Anthony Warner was apparently a guy who thought that telecommunication infrastructure was responsible for his father’s dementia and death. So, he rigged an RV to be a big bomb and blew up some AT&T telecommunications equipment in Nashville along with himself. He is said to have been suffering from some kind of cancer and to have been into conspiracy theories about 5G networks. Warner went to great lengths to warn anyone in the area that a bomb was about to explode. Because of this no one was killed by the explosion except for Warner.
So why should this story mean anything to anybody who doesn’t live in Nashville? Because there are probably at least a million guys like Warner scattered around this country. If the activities of the government and numerous corporations haven’t produced that number of angry disgruntled men like Warner in the last twenty years, I’d be shocked. The only variable is how many of these men are as angry as Warner. But it doesn’t take a genius to guess that the number is a lot higher than one.
Our society is targeting the demographic that Warner belongs to. Older white men are portrayed as the villains of every social meme being pumped out by the media, governments and NGOs. Many of the millions of small businesses that have been destroyed by the COVID shutdowns are owned by these men. They have seen the work of a lifetime destroyed and themselves and their families impoverished by bureaucrats and politicians who are picking them as the losers in the COVID game. And they are also forced to hear the BLM apologists identify them as evil racists who are responsible for all the ills of society. And finally, they just witnessed their votes being cancelled out by widespread fraud that installed a regime that will accelerate the damage that is inflicted on them by the government.
I’m no prophet but I’m sure the real question is why this is the first such suicide bomber to strike. My guess is that the FBI probably has a list of thousands of such men that they think likely to do almost the same exact thing as Warner. They probably monitor sales of explosives and raw materials that can be turned into explosives. They monitor the on-line discussions of angry individuals and look for any signs that anger has been converted to action. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they haven’t foiled many such plans. But it is also certain that they cannot anticipate every one of these attempts.
I think it is safe to say that there will be further cases in the near future. I also think it is safe to say that some of them won’t be as concerned with preventing deaths as Mr. Warner was. And that makes you wonder what will be the consequences of such actions. We currently live in a virtual police state with surveillance cameras everywhere and every communication scrutinized by intelligence agencies. I guess they could begin performing pre-emptive interrogations utilizing water boarding and sodium pentothal on the general population but somehow, I think that might exacerbate the levels of anger already out there.
The interesting thing about Warner is that he doesn’t appear to have been in any way a munitions expert. He was some kind of IT worker. The newspapers described him as a geek which I assume means he had some computer programming skills. So here is this random guy who becomes radicalized by the circumstances of his life and stews over it until he one day decides to cash in his chips while striking a blow for a 5G-free world. What this makes me think is that we have allowed all the normal people in this country to become isolated from each other and from reality, to the extent where alienation is the rule and not the exception. In the old days this guy would have had friends, relatives and coworkers who would have kept him grounded in reality. But he lived for twenty-five years in one place and his next-door neighbor didn’t even know his name. His only remaining family was a sister and nephew who lived half the country away and he worked as a contract IT worker out of his house. He never got married or had children. He left his worldly possessions to an ex-girlfriend who lived in California and probably didn’t even remember him.
In my opinion Anthony Warner is the tip of the iceberg. Much worse things are in store for us in the near future. When a society sanctions riots, looting and arson against its own citizens no one should be surprised when those citizens stop playing nice.
What Will the World Look Like on January 22nd 2021?
According to current US federal law the man who will be President of the United States for the next four years will be sworn in on January 20th 2021. Who that man will be is the subject of the most heated debate this country has seen in the last two hundred years of presidential elections. So far, the electoral college has declared Joe Biden to be the winner of the presidential election. It only remains for the Congress to certify this declaration on January 6th. Whether there is a way to convince Congress to intervene against the Electoral College vote is what is currently holding the entire country mesmerized.
President Trump has stated on numerous occasions that he has sufficient proof of electoral fraud to permit the election results to be put aside. Whether that proof is overwhelming enough to convince most of the American people is the first question. The second question is, even if this proof is convincing, will Congress act on this proof and overturn the Electoral College result? As with everyone else I am waiting impatiently for the event. January 6th is ten days away. When and how will this proof be presented? Will it be broadcast to the whole nation or will it be transmitted to the Supreme Court? Will it be incontestable or just testimony that cannot be verified independently?
The whole situation is so unprecedented that until recently I would have declared the very idea of Congress taking such unprecedented action as inconceivable. But I would also have thought that the fraudulent voting activities that openly went on in the swing states inconceivable too. And the idea that a corrupt dementia patient will be installed in the White House by means of an openly stolen election is so outrageous I would be willing to accept just about any series of events that would prevent that disaster from taking place.
At the same time I think the Left would resist any attempt to prevent Biden from reaching the White House by any means necessary, up to and including armed insurrection. This makes it even more mind boggling to imagine what kind of proof would be so unassailable that spineless politicians would risk their precious necks to do the right thing.
For all of these reasons and because of how many legal challenges have already been shot down by the courts it seems like it would take a certified miracle to fix this heinous crime that is wending its way inexorably toward fruition. But I want to believe that it will happen. Because otherwise it will be an enormous step in the total unwinding of the normal reality I used to believe we inhabited.
If the United States has descended all the way down to banana republic status then everything else that is dependent on the United States being a great and stable nation is also without foundation. Think of the things that rest on the certainty that the United States is the unshakable moorings of our civilization. The mutual defense organizations like NATO are founded on the stability and strength of the United States and its military and economic might. The US dollar is the reserve currency of the whole world. It is based on the integrity that the US government has in the eyes of the American nation. If all of these things are just fairy tales that the American elites tell the peasants and now those peasants have stopped believing them what might not happen?
What if a disgruntled American general decides to hijack a bunch of ICBM silos and declare himself the Emperor of Middle America? How soon before the Russians and the Chinese start to think that lobbing a rogue missile into Manhattan would be an excellent way to get a nuclear civil war going?
We live in very troubled times. And it’s pretty clear that most of our leaders are useless. When you look back in history, times like these seem to breed revolution and then tyrants of one stripe or another. It’s genuinely depressing to think about but it has to be faced. We will need an extraordinary amount of luck to navigate the next few years without crashing on the reefs that these troubled seas contain. But I suppose it won’t be boring.
Shut Up and Sing – 2020 Version
Artists are annoying. I think it’s because they also tend to be locked into the hive. I guess it’s inevitable that people who exist in a world that is suffused in emotion will end up surrounded by and aligned with emotionally unstable personalities. I’ve met up with this often when I lived in New York City. I’d have a friend whom I met in an office job who was also a struggling actor and he would introduce me to his circle of friends and they would be almost without exception at least moderately abnormal. And that’s putting aside that more than half of them were homosexuals. That was the just the baseline demographic of their profession I suppose. But all of them exhibited a whole array of off-putting behaviors. Some of it might have to do with the large percentage of them that admittedly were on anti-depressants. And I guess most of them were recreational users of various legal and illegal drugs.
But in addition to all these lifestyle influences all of these people shared an ethos. They were outsiders who to a greater or lesser degree despised the normal world because it forced them to bump up against reality, when what they really wanted to do was live in their imagined world where being a forty something unknown actor, dancer, singer, musician or painter came along with an upper middle-class income and a deluxe Greenwich Village apartment.
And because of this outsider mentality they also embraced all the other groups and ideologies that also despised normalcy. Back in the sixties and seventies it was communism. Later on, it was whatever flavor of the month progressive name-tag was trendy. Feminism, LGBTQ, Immigration Rights, Environmentalism, Animal Rights, whatever. I have been at a gathering where a strident lesbian told me that once Western culture was deconstructed, women’s rights would flower throughout the much more progressive third world. When I asked her about widow burning in India (sati) she flipped out and started shrieking obscenities. I never found out whether she had just never heard of sati and thought I was making it up or whether the cognitive dissonance short circuited her fragile programming and kicked her into the middle-aged cat lady equivalent of the blue screen of death.
But in any case, the “artistic” community is monolithically embedded into the Leftist world. So much so that even if you yourself didn’t believe in the things that they do, if you wanted to be a musician or other kind of artist you would not be allowed to coexist in their world if you did not mouth the words that they require you to say. You would not be allowed to use their infrastructure, their platforms, their networks. You would not get noticed by their critics and would never be invited onto their interview shows. You wouldn’t exist.
Until recently I thought maybe country music was resistant to this pressure. As a distant example think back to 2003 when the Dixie Chicks were ejected from the country music scene because of their anti-military rants against George Bush during the Middle East Wars. That was a sort of unique situation in the entertainment world.
But I have been disabused of that mistaken belief. Country musicians of various levels of celebrity and of various styles and levels of talent have of late thrown themselves whole heartedly on the woke bandwagon. The latest example that came to my attention is Tyler Childers song “Long Violent History.” I enjoyed Childers’s album “Purgatory.” It had some good songs and his voice is interesting to listen to. I especially liked a murder ballad he wrote called “Banded Clovis” that updated the tradition to our age. His next album wasn’t really as good but I was interested to see what his following album would bring. Recently I read a review announcing that his album had come out as either a vinyl or MP3 edition. So as a CD guy I shrugged it off and figured I’d wait until the later release. The announcement said that the album was an instrumental bluegrass collection. Now that got my attention. I was definitely in the mood for something like that. But then one of the lefty sites had the breathless news that the last song was called Long Violent History and was a BLM propaganda song. And they had a link to a video by Childers explaining why he had written the song. So, I listened to his “explanation.” Well, it was all that “what if you were hassled by the police and in danger of being killed at every turn?” blah, blah, blah. So, there they go again. If they will permit us to buy their music, we have to listen to the anti-white rant too. Some great bargain.
Well, I guess I’ll have to forego Mr. Childers’ fiddle album. I’m sure it’s good and it would be enjoyable but I don’t feel like paying to be preached at by him. I’ll look around and listen to someone who at least hides his contempt for me and just shuts up and sings.
A Normie Basically Admits That Force is the Only Option Left
I found this through a link on a comment on a dissident site. I think this jibes with what I was thinking when I wrote that the deplorables are waiting for a sign. As per the author’s direction, I have copied the text and linked it to the site. It’s long but it is self consistent.
Open Letter from an American Coward
Please save, screenshot, etc., then boost.
I don’t usually ask for my content to be shared. What I am about to say though is perhaps the most important thing I will ever say in public, and in the present landscape of the internet, there is a very high probability that it is being silenced or erased even now as you read it. So, I am asking you to please, save an offline and/or archived copy of this letter RIGHT NOW.
If, once you’ve read this letter, you feel that it has any value or interest whatsoever, please, as a personal favor, send it on through whichever channels, to whichever people you feel safe doing so.
If you think what I say is absurd, please share my letter with your friends so you can all laugh at me.
If you think that what I say is evil, please share it with your friends so you can all rage at me.
If you think I deserve to be punished for what I say, please send my letter on to the “authorities” or to any person you think might hurt me for writing it. At least then, those people will have a chance to read it.
I am
an American, a New Hampshirewoman, a lover of liberty, and a happily married mother of four beautiful children. I have a wonderful life, a bright future, and could not ask for any greater blessing than those I have already received.
My enemies are
in a word, communists. Modern communists do not usually call themselves such. They do not talk about workers rising up and seizing the Means of Production.
Instead, modern communists adopt a rhetorical stance where they assume that all people and all property are ALREADY COLLECTIVIZED, then calmly discuss what WE should do:
– What WE should ALLOW people to own.
– What WE should ALLOW people to do.
– What WE should ALLOW people to say.
– How WE should ALLOW people to use their property.
– How WE should ALLOW people to conduct their businesses,
– … and WHO should be ALLOWED,
– … and WHERE.
– How WE should ALLOW people to raise their children.
– Who should be GIVEN which roles within society.
– etc.
The issue under discussion is always something sympathetic, something most decent people would like to see fixed: Intergenerational poverty, police brutality, environmental degradation, bigotry, violence.
But the solutions modern communists put forward are rarely passive, and they are never liberating. If a problem can be solved by individual action, voluntary charity, by the free market, or by the passage of time, that is never seen as good enough. In fact, nothing that fails to increase the power and control of governments or certain institutions (or to grow the people’s dependence on them) is ever regarded as a solution at all.
The people who do the work of modern communism, debating and voting on these “issues of the day” are mostly not aware of what they are doing. A majority of them are decent people who want real problems addressed. But their thinking is confined to a multiple choice question presented by prestige media and schools where only oppressive proposals are listed as options.
Even those higher up the food chain, the ones who create the policy proposals or set the bounds of debate around them are not usually conscious of the way they are manipulating the public. They are hobbled by a theory of history (care of the school system) where the past is merely a series of dragons slain by government policy, where everything is “systemic”, and where the free choices and conscientious actions of individuals have no meaningful effect.
This is how the enemy operates.
In order for modern communists to have the latitude to execute their plans, they need every citizen to be as weak and dependent as possible. They especially need the middle tiers of management, professions, and bureaucracy to be filled with minimally competent placeholders who owe their position to political and institutional favor. These sorts of people, since they are only able to achieve their present position through the system, are more pliable to coercion and less likely to see freedom in any aspect of life as promising or beneficial.
As a consequence, modern communists wage eternal war against every wholesome and sustainable aspect of life, society, and culture which gives people or communities strength and independence. They see it as desirable to destroy the natural optimum which people discover through freedom and competition and replace it with fragile, orchid-like solutions which could not thrive without government and/or institutional intervention:
– Those with demonstrable skills must be replaced by those with credentials.
– The self-employed must be reduced to the status of employees.
– Property must become regulated or burdened with tax and debt, and wherever possible, wealth must be rendered intangible as abstracted financial fictions constructed of laws.
– People must come to rely on government programs for security where they previously relied on themselves and each other.
– The traditional family and organic communities it forms, such as churches, must be invaded, defanged, and delegitimized to leave people at the mercy of authorities.
To a modern communist, “freedom” means the opportunity for individuals to choose some fundamentally maladaptive way of life and be protected from consequences, encouraged and subsidized by power.
The weaker you are, the more useful you are to those in power. Those who choose to be weak and dependent where they could be healthy and independent are collaborators.
This is what I see happening.
The American public has come to accept all the components of totalitarian states.
– We have come to accept a militarized police.
– We have come to accept ideological indoctrination in schools.
– We have come to accept mass surveillance.
– We have come to accept speech codes.
– We have come to accept the rewriting of history to serve the interests of the ruling party.
– We have come to accept the tarring of political dissidents as “terrorists”, “extremists”, and “White Supremacists.”
– We have come to accept the State telling us when and where we can meet.
– We have come to accept the State shutting down our places of worship.
– We have come to accept the idea that parents should have no special authority over their children.
– We have come to accept the manipulation of thought through the manipulation of language.
– We have come to accept the radical reordering of society by government in the name of crisis.
In the 2016 election, the full-throated manipulation by the mainstream press, academia, and the political establishment was so intense, and so obvious, that many people (myself included) who did not consider themselves “conservative” voted for Donald Trump just to poke a finger in the eye of Leviathan. So many people did so that his margin of victory exceeded the margin of cheat, and he was actually able to become president.
In the intervening years, the modern communists of both parties (though more so the Democrats) and those same media and academia mandarins have only doubled down on their commitment to subjugating the public and clamping down on our personal freedom and political prerogatives. Somehow, in losing electorally, we are to believe that their mandate for runaway collectivism and authoritarianism was strengthened.
Now, in the 2020 election, the fraud and manipulation became so glaringly obvious that, at the time of writing, at least 47% of all Americans, regardless of party loyalty, understand that the election was stolen and Joe Biden is illegitimate. Somehow though, it is still a long shot that Donald Trump, the person who has done more to expose the mendacity and incompetence of the ruling party and institutions than anyone else, will be seated as President.
Every one of those Americans who understands this must realize that this is it. This is the last moment for the American Republic, the last time we will even have a glimmer of a chance of an honest election result, and the last time any opposition to modern communism will be afforded space in the public square. And yet, neither I nor most of you are going to do anything about this situation that might risk our present status or comfort.
This is why I won’t yet act.
Unfortunately for me, the crisis has come either too late or too early. Our family has four young children, a single income, and a base of assets which could be easily lost but probably never replaced. We are maximally vulnerable to the sorts of attacks which collectivists bring against those who fight back.
Even so, if the fight were on, if the majority of Americans who this past election shows are opposed to creeping collectivism were on the march, I would risk it all to join them. No comfort, no wealth, not even life itself is as important as preserving the possibility of human freedom. The hive-society prison which is being built around us must be demolished at any cost.
But when I look around me, I see many people who are paralyzed as I am. We know that the fight for our republic is unavoidable, and that the time is now, but do not see a nucleus of resistance to which we can pledge our lives, fortunes, and sacred honors without it being tantamount to suicide. We are watching and waiting for someone else to be that nucleus.
Most people who have not committed to the cause of freedom are not conscious supporters of modern communism. Some hold out the futile hope that things will all go back to normal, others have convinced themselves that what is happening is inevitable and cannot be opposed. Both are dead wrong. As open struggle against collectivism, communism, authoritarianism, and globalism rises, both of these positions will weaken, and support for freedom will grow.
If you have the courage to act where I do not,
here is what I WILL do:
– If you speak out against them, I will listen.
– If you act against them, I will not stand in your way.
– If they portray you as uncool, cringey, old-fashioned, unintelligent, or low-class, I will not laugh at you or think less of you.
– If they call you a racist, sexist, xenophobe, homophobe, Nazi, granny killer, etc., I will not believe them, nor will I care.
– If they call you a terrorist or an extremist, I will not assume that you are in the wrong.
– When they ask me questions, I will lie, forget, or evade as I am able.
– When they tell me their version of history, I will smile and nod and know they are liars.
– If they dispossess you, I will share what I can.
– If they martyr you, my children will learn your name as that of a hero.
– If you have the courage to be shameless in opposing them, you will be honored in my house.
This is what I will remember.
1. The universities and the class of “experts” and “professionals” to whom they grant legitimacy have no constitutional role in the American Republic. No amount of schooling grants one authority over others, and no consensus among the educated should have the force of law.
2. The guarantee in the Constitution of “Freedom of the Press” is not a grant of authority to the legacy media or to professional journalists. It is, in fact, a right belonging to the people: WE have the right to publish and disseminate views and information the same as those who work for newspapers or television networks.
3. The Intelligence and Defense establishments of the US exist to secure the rights and liberties of the American people. The US has constructed a vast apparatus to deploy force, subvert or overthrow governments, and disseminate propaganda, but these activities are only legitimate when they are directed OUTWARD. When the geopolitical capabilities of the US government do not act to empower the American people and sustain our Constitution, they are just as criminal as the same actions taken by private citizens.
4. Law enforcement and defense against violence is the responsibility of each and every person. Even though we have become accustomed to having these services provided by professionals, they remain our right and our personal responsibility.
- Education of the young is the responsibility of parents and natural communities. Even though we have become accustomed to having this service provided by professionals, it remains our right and our personal responsibility.
- Provision of necessities such as food and shelter is the responsibility of each and every person. Even though we have become accustomed to these goods being delivered by a vast and interconnected economic machinery over which we have little control, it remains our right and our duty to provide for ourselves and those we care about.
7.Though peace, prosperity, happiness, and a long life are all wonderful conditions to experience, they are not what makes a human life worthwhile. Humans have dignity and value insofar as they are free agents struggling and striving to obtain these ends. “Treating someone as a human being” does not mean coddling them and providing for them like you would a child or a pet. It means getting out of their way and leaving them the freedom and latitude to provide for themselves.
8. Whoever relinquishes their freedom to obtain comfort or security is not acting as a human, but as an animal. Because our fates are all intertwined, such a person is betraying all of us, and does not deserve our concern or regard.
— Sarah Chamberlain
25DEC2020 – OCF Update – Merry Christmas All You Wonderful People Out There!
As is now emblematic of 2020, this morning was as weird as any other day of the year. Freight train winds rattled the house and frightened the dogs. Torrential rains melted the foot of snow that was on the ground and roofs yesterday. The little steam that feeds the pond is a raging torrent this morning and is swelling it up beyond it’s normal shores. I wouldn’t be surprised if the spring peepers woke up and started singing. Somehow the power hasn’t flickered and the internet connection is still intact. But yes, it’s more of the good old 2020 pandemonium rolling along.
But Camera Girl is un-phased. Potatoes are boiled and mashed. The roast and the ham are in the oven. The cakes and pies are baked. The kids’ presents are wrapped (I helped with that!). The rolls are baked, the side dishes are cooked and the house is clean. The various Christmas cookies are loaded into cookie jars and the table is set.
And right on cue the winds are dying down and the rain is down to a gentle tapping on the roofs. The kids will be here in a few hours and we’ll have some fun.
Wherever you are I hope you get at least a little enjoyment from Christmas 2020. These aren’t exactly the best of times but they are our times and we have to make of them what we can.
Merry Christmas to all of you folks out there and we’ll take what comes and try to make it better.
23DEC2020 – OCF Update – Christmas Holiday Notes
Well, that last post ( The Deplorables Are Waiting for a Sign ) must have hit a nerve. I think a whole lot of people are just as fed up. And as I said I think they’re right. Words aren’t going to change anything so what’s the use of a lot of talk.
So I think I’ll take a couple of days and enjoy some really splendiferous food out of Camera Girl’s kitchen and spend some time with the family and think a little bit before I pontificate. In the absence of a successful action to send Creepy Uncle Joe back to the cracker factory I think that local actions will be the only things that do any good.
I may have some reviews and maybe some links if anything good shows up but I’ll spend the next couple of days enjoying life. I hope you do too.
Merry Christmas
photog