Category: Current Events

Happy Fourth of July 2025

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I learned a lesson about planning.  It should be associated with thinking.  I had an auto maintenance appointment that I wanted to get done before last week’s big trip.  But because I’ve been distracted by unfortunate circumstances, I couldn’t get an appointment on time (bad photog!).  I said, “Well give me the appointment next week.”  So, I pick the day before the Fourth of July!  Well, you know what’s hard to get to work on the day before a long holiday weekend?  Auto-mechanics!  A one-hour maintenance job keeps me waiting there for four hours.  The sad part is I could watch all the lined-up cars sitting there for three hours and then they were all done in the last hour.  A nine o’clock appointment for a mechanic who’s showing up at noon is kind of a sad situation.  Of course, some people started flipping out at eleven thirty and by 1 pm they were demanding the site manager be summoned for the maintenance clerk’s summary execution.  Of course, the site manager was on vacation until next Tuesday but it was a noble sentiment.

Being old I realized my own culpability in the whole idea of scheduling something involving waiting for the day before a major holiday.  I tried to do some on-line stuff over their customer wi-fi network.  But I got bored so instead I watched the people.  It had a certain entertainment value.  I guess the thought that I had was there are definitely two kinds of people.  The kind you would want in a lifeboat and the kind who will get thrown overboard.

Later on, we had one of those thunderstorm/hail storm/minor tornado/mini-monsoon downpour thingies here today.  It had been very hot and muggy and just walking around the yard was a major effort.  Then all hell breaks loose, the power goes off, the dogs go insane and suddenly the air is twenty degrees cooler.  And we’re watching from the window and saying isn’t it great to watch this from inside?  And it was.  The trees were whipping around and the sky was full of water and ice and the clouds were moving fast.  And then in fifteen minutes the sun was out again.  Well, no trees came down and the dogs calmed down so I went for a walk.  The air was sweet and there was a strong breeze.  Just an interesting kaleidoscope of weather.

And now we have the Fourth coming up.  Sitting in the service station watching their television I saw a news item about how some of the more progressive towns and cities were replacing their fireworks shows with a swarm of drones forming shapes in the air and changing colors.  It looked so incredibly lame and so sad I just shook my head.  The newscaster went out of his way to say how much more environmentally friendly and carbon neutral the lame drone show was than a fireworks display.  And I thought, this encapsulates the difference between people who enjoy life and people who do what they’re told is good for them.  These are the same people driving Priuses and getting their fiftieth COVID booster shot.

Well Happy Fourth of July.

I Feel Like a Phoenix Rising Over Arizona

photog Book Reviews, Current Events, Life in Dunwich, My Fiction, OCF, photog's Corner, Reviews, SF&F Book Reviews, Trump , , ,

The suffering is over.  The waiting is over.  The only thing I have left to do this week is get the oil changed on my car.  I can read, write, watch movies, sit in a hammock in the shade (well, if I had a hammock), write poetry (not good poetry), plot the overthrow of the Dunwich town government, laugh in the face of death, learn to play the piano; you name it!

Great Caesar’s ghost!  I’m exhausted just reading that list.

So, emerging from my forced isolation I see that nothing of note has happened in the last five days.  The endless jousting between the press and the Trump administration continues and Trump slowly accumulates small victories from the courts and larger ones from the Supreme Court.  Good!  I’ve declared victory (for the most part) and allow the world to slowly become Trumpified while I get on with my agenda.

I finished my re-read of the last third of my book and came to a few conclusions:

  • I like the writing. I like the way it reads.
  • I like the story line. It moves forward.
  • There is something missing to allow the story to end satisfyingly for all the threads of the book.
  • So, the good news of the first two points makes it worthwhile for me to tackle the bad news of the last point.

As I earlier stated it was weird to read the book after a good long time and read it as if I wasn’t the writer.  Of course, I knew the plot but the writing seemed fresh to me, like I was reading it for the first time.  Now, I did make some edits and even made some small changes to the wording during this read.  But I’m good with what’s already done.  So, I’ll kick around a few ideas to see which one makes the ending most satisfying.  Good.

The summer has gotten amazingly hot and humid.  And this has drawn the grandchildren to want to swim in the pool.  And this year the water is perfect.  Perfectly clear.  No algae.  Good pH.  No leaks.  There are a few small cracks in the liner above the water line.  So, I bought a patching kit and I will attempt to fix them myself.  If I botch it, I’ll call in the professionals and they’ll overcharge me but make the problem go away.  But it’s good to see this expensive hole in the ground get used by someone who can enjoy jumping in and swimming around.  I think in the fourteen years I’ve live here I’ve gone in once.  Oh well.

So, let’s see where Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is in a few days and where the various wars are in a few weeks.  But I’m ready to enjoy the seasonal weather and do some cooking out with friends and relatives and enjoy the only true summer month in the otherwise blighted New England calendar.  Because remember, July is the only month in which measurable snow has not fallen in southern New England.  That makes it sacred.  Enjoy.

O Frabjous Day! Callooh! Callay!

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The mighty wizards of tech-wonder have restored my laptop to full power.  I can once again perform miracles of tech-tacular blunder.  And yesterday provided a fitting completion to my purgatorial labors.  Now I can provide content (such as it is) to the site and its readers.

Now all I have to do is think of something interesting to pontificate about.

Hmmm.

Well, I better start thinking.

Return and Roundup

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I have returned from the Great White North!  I had a quick get-together with the Coffee Walk Brotherhood.  Much booze was imbibed and many cigars were smoked (not by me) and much wet wood was forced to burn using mass quantities of medium length hydrocarbons.  It was a great success with midnight bull sessions and even some very good guitar and singing from the two musicians in the gang.

It ended off with a hearty breakfast while the television aired Caddyshack in all its 1970s glory (“Yo, Lama, how ‘bout somethin’ for the effort?”).  So, after a total of about eight hours of driving I return to the Compound a tired but spiritually enhanced individual after communing, consulting and otherwise hobnobbing with my fellow wizards.

Unfortunately for me I have two very long days Monday and Tuesday so my output will still be constrained but on the positive side I finished my initial re=read of my book and found some clarity for my march to completion and publishing (yaaay!).  Anyway, here I go.

So, the dissident right community has had an outpouring of grief over the passing of the ZMan.  I’m interested to see if his readers find a way to keep their community intact.

I saw that the Supreme Court provided some relief to the Trump administration on the endless lower court injunctions against his immigration and other efforts.  I haven’t had a chance to read much on the details but supposedly it will now require class-action law suits to allow these judges to foul up the works.  Maybe this will slow down the interference somewhat.  But we’ll have to see.  And I saw the good news that SCOTUS ruled that parents of school children can opt out of public-school LGBTQ indoctrination classes and “learning materials.”  Good for them.  It’s part and parcel with the first amendment and freedom of religion.  Hopefully this can be built upon to rein in the blue states.

As for the Israeli/Iran war it looks like Trump may have been able to thread the needle and tamp down the fires.  Anyway, let’s hope so.  Maybe this will force him to end our support for that other war that’s raging out of control.  But I’m not holding my breath.

And finally, here we are almost halfway through Donald Trump’s first year in his last term and it seems he’s starting to make a dent in the “resistance.”  I think it is now apparent that ignoring the Left’s whining and temper tantrums and just going forward with his priorities (like deporting illegal aliens and forcing changes in the trade imbalance and off-shoring of jobs) is a winning strategy both objectively and optically.  Keep it up Mr. Trump!

So here I am at the brink of July but my calendar is cluttered with annoying responsibilities in the short term.  Hopefully by Wednesday the clouds will have parted and serenity and summertime relaxation will be reestablished.  But regardless, we must soldier on.  Okay, I’m halfway back to normalcy and the universe hasn’t exploded around me so I’ll call it a win and move on.  Next!!!

Eulogy for the ZMan

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I have a long trip tomorrow morning and I wasn’t sure I would post tonight but the ZMan’s death seems to require a post.  And interestingly, yesterday my mind was on mortality.  Just a coincidence but a strange one nonetheless.

I guess I’m looking to process the news a little bit to make it feel less strange.  From what I remember, he was in his late fifties.  I knew he wanted to lose a few pounds and was happy that the yard work around a rural property afforded him the excuse to do more manual labor.  I guess with all the excess mortality after the COVID debacle he may be another victim of our regime’s ill-conceived and incompetently handled bioweapons program in China.  I think everyone’s vitality has taken at least some damage from the spike protein saturating our environment.  So maybe that is the primary cause of the ZMan’s untimely death.  Or maybe he had an underlying condition that he did or didn’t know about.  I’m guessing I’ll never know any more about it.  So, let’s put aside his surprise death.

What about his work?  I’ve been reading and (later) listening to the ZMan’s content for about ten years.  I was already reading material from various “alt-right” sources and ran into some of his posts as links from other sources.  And right away I could tell that his insights and his thought patterns were head and shoulders above most of the blogs I was then reading.  Eventually he became my primary source, not for political news but rather for reaction to the news and for his take on what were the motivations for the actions that were going on in the world around us.

And I found his insights very useful.  He could fit the events into a framework that accounted for the various factions and their agendas; the radical Left, the managerial state, the establishment Republicans, the Neocons, the rank-and-file Democrats and all the rest of the clown parade.  He could lay out their machinations and even predict their feuds and friendships.  And he did it in an entertaining and polished manner.  And his Friday podcast added in the benefit of his suave speaking voice that I playfully referred to as the “Voice of Saruman.”  Yes, the ZMan was a quality resource.

Now as much as I respected and agreed with much of his analysis of the political goings on in Washington and elsewhere, I had and have a very different political ideology from the ZMan.  At heart I’m just a red-pilled civic nationalist and ZMan was a full-fledged member of the dissident right.  What that means was that although I agreed with his diagnosis of our ills I disagreed with his prescription for a cure.  I wanted to eliminate things like affirmative action and illegal immigration and restore an America that had existed before the Johnson New Society.  I wanted the government to leave people alone to decide how they wanted to live their lives and let the government be a color-blind referee that only stepped in when a race war or something equally insane appeared in the streets.

The ZMan believed it was impossible to re-establish that kind of America.  What exactly he believed was the radical solution to the dysfunctional condition of the United States he never explicitly revealed.  On a number of occasions, he did state that a civil war wasn’t in the cards.  I assumed he believed that a negotiated settlement that produced some number of successor states, one of which would be more pleasing to the dissident right, was the desired outcome.  Well, I guess I’ll never know for sure now.  But obviously we differed quite strongly on political ideology and for this reason I never commented on his site.  After all, I was obviously not the target audience.  As much as I admired his abilities as an essayist and a student of political history my positions on these matters would only lead to me being hounded off the site.  And what fun would that be for me?

So, I read his content and linked to the essays that I found especially convincing or entertaining and time passed.  I remember when he had that dustup with Michael Anton and that seemed to confirm that moderates would not be dealt with moderately.  And although I said at the time that everyone is allowed to decide who is and isn’t their enemies, I had no desire to be in that position.  So I lurked and enjoyed his work when it agreed with my views and ignored what did not.

But I will say I’m very sad to hear of his death.  He seemed to be a genuinely good fellow.  If I were on a train or plane with him and all we discussed was New England weather, Thucydides and the antics of Donald Trump I think we could have had a very enjoyable discussion.

And I’m going to miss his Friday Power Hour podcast.  I looked forward to it every week and he provided entertainment and matters to contemplate, on a very consistent basis.  And I always did hope that if Trump and his confederates had ever managed to “fix” the country and get back our rights maybe the ZMan would call a truce with the civic nationalists.

But now we’ll never know.  Rest in peace, ZMan.  You were an American original.

The ZMan has Died

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Probably the most eloquent and witty voice on the Dissident Right is no more.  Reports on X by authoritative sources say that the ZMan passed away last night of “natural causes.”

Of course, his most skeptical fans will wonder if the cause was completely natural.  But I will certainly miss his writing and podcasts.  He had one of the greatest speaking voices on the conservative side of the aisle (or “great divide” as he called it).  And his knowledge of political and sociological affairs was impressive.

Although I differed from him on some of the conclusions he drew from his facts I had to admit he was well versed on the mechanisms that had created the dysfunction that he reported on in his posts.

He has a legion of devoted readers who commented religiously on his site and who will be hard pressed to find a new home to replace his haven.

Rest in peace ZMan.

Eulogy for the ZMan

29AUG2025 – The End of an Era

Update:

Comment by ArthurinCali:

Sad news, especially how sudden it was. Zman was one of the inspirations to me to try my hand at writing. His analysis and podcast will be greatly missed by many of us.

https://x.com/ArthurReturnss/status/1938379221157478592

Dunwich Slips Into Permanent Dumb

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Dunwich is a strange place.  Although most humans here appear to be sentient, they’re not.  Many of them continue to breath and move and even talk without even the tiniest shred of gray matter.

First Selectman Cthulhu called a town meeting last night and tried to explain why they should finally vote to accept the 2025/2026 budget during this third referendum.  But regardless of how many citizens he ate, they would not agree to a budget.  Finally after he was developing acid reflux, he asked them why they would not agree.  Their spokeswoman was a vapid forty-something who stood her ground and said, “Why do we need a budget?”

Cthulhu was so flabbergasted by this lack of understanding that he dropped the six Whatleys he was about to swallow and just broke down and wept.  Finally he composed himself and just walked off right through the south wall of town hall and hasn’t been seen since.

In his absence I took it upon myself to explain to this rube just how government worked.  I explained that a budget allowed us a framework for stealing the public’s money and also provide a basis for increasing this theft on a yearly basis.  This actually worked and she thanked me for the clarity of my explanation.

Seriously, this question was actually raised at a town meeting, “Why do we need a budget?”  I think the millennials have reached that point where maintaining a viable civilization is very doubtful

Moon Mining

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This article claims that enough asteroids have struck the moon over time that inevitably there are enough deposits of valuable metals to make mining the Moon worthwhile:

“There might be more than $1 trillion worth of platinum deposits on the moon, according to a paper published in the journal Planetary and Space Science. Of the 1.3 million craters on the moon with a diameter greater than one kilometer, “nearly 6,500 were made by asteroids containing commercial quantities of platinum,” said New Scientist. This “highlights the potential viability and profitability of lunar mining endeavors compared to mining asteroids in orbit,” said the paper.”

This kind of jibes with my recent post where I said a Moon base is a more realistic goal than a manned trip to Mars.  And Now I see why.

 

My future will be as a uranium miner on the Moon.  I will start out with uranium and then branch out into gold and platinum.  Eventually I may be able to concentrate completely on tantalum, my favorite metal.

But seriously, I think there is a lot more likelihood of the Moon becoming economically useful to humans than Mars.  The difference in distance alone makes Mars almost impossibly difficult for manned flights.

The Moon on the other hand was reached more than fifty five years ago by men whose technological capabilities were rudimentary compared to what we have at our disposal today.  Imagine what improvements modern computing power and automation could do to make reaching and working on the Moon safer and easier.

But most important we must go to the Moon because Mt Rushmore is too small and crowded for this: