Category: Current Events

Bring Back the American Mom

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Today was the last family party of the Christmas holiday season.  The kids go back to school on Monday and everybody else starts their diets to scrape away all the fat we’ve absorbed since Thanksgiving.  And it has been a fun season.  What with the Trump election win and the gob-smacked silence of the leftist crazies there has been a veritable aura of peace and calm.  Well, relatively speaking anyway.  After all you can’t eliminate terrorist attacks and brutal war news completely.  But all in all, the last month and a half has been pretty nice.

So, two weeks from Tuesday Donald Trump will be sworn in.  As is his way, his every word and deed will stir up a hornet’s nest of outrage in the establishment media and political communities.  He will be fought tooth and nail every step of the way in courts, in Congress and in the agencies, he is attempting to reform or destroy.

Well, that will be a long story.  The coming months will tell us if he can make any headway in ending illegal immigration through deportations and border security.  And his other reform goals will take just as long to implement.

But tonight, I was just trying to put into perspective where our society is and where it has to go if we’re to last as a nation.  And I would say the most unsettling problem is the current baby drought.  Specifically native-born American women are not having children at replacement rates.  Now, why is that?  Currently the blame game ping pongs back and forth between blaming young men and young women.  But I would say the true culprit is the culture that has enabled a world view by young people that includes the following “facts”:

  • Women are better off in careers than as mothers.
  • Employers should prefer hiring women rather than men, especially white men.
  • There are too many people on planet Earth.
  • Bringing children into this world is a crime.
  • A middle-class lifestyle that allows for the raising of children is no longer within the reach of young adults.

Looking at all these statements I see a dystopian version of the world.  The only statement there that has any basis in fact is the last one and that situation needs to be rectified by our government if they hope to prevent this country from disintegrating into a sad, hollowed-out vestige of the dynamic, prosperous place it was a century ago.

To do this, each of those “facts” needs to be refuted and policies enacted to reverse the opinions and their effects that are currently laying waste to our society at all levels.

The first change needed is to convince young women that getting married and staying home to raise a large family is the most valuable and meaningful “career” they can have.  This is the key change that makes restoration of our society possible.  And the only way these young women can be convinced is for the government to put in place policies that subsidize couples forming and sustaining families.  Specifically, the policies should specify that men must remain employed and women must remain at home during the childhood years of their children.  Ideally these mothers should stay home until their children move out at eighteen years of age.  After that, mothers moving into the workforce shouldn’t be too detrimental to family life.  Although I wouldn’t force them to go.

Now this idea is anathema to modern feminist views.  That isn’t surprising since feminism is anathema to family life.  But it is absolutely vital to maintaining the health of the nation that women be convinced to resume their place in the home; not as part-time mothers of latch-key children but as moms.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 04JAN2025 – Vegas Bomber

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war pig

The Vegas bomber was active duty Spec Ops. Highly decorated. Even Tim McVeigh had a Bronze Star for Valor in battle.

The standards and selection process for Spec Ops is high. He (Vegas bomber) made Master Sergeant. He had seen a lot of combat. But being the best means you get more than your share of work/grief. Eventually it adds up. PTSD is cumulative. It can be sneaky. Each day we lose 44 active duty and veterans to suicide. Actually likely more as several can be called “accidents”. After the various 20th century wars, GIs would self medicate with booze.

When I returned from Vietnam I was called a baby killer and spat upon by a hippy. I had to spend the night in a holding cell until the judge, a veteran, turned me loose for self defense. If I had instead been jailed and discharged less than honorably, no telling what I may have become or done to myself.

This Vegas guy was with 10th SF I believe they said, in Germany. That means he has likely seen “advisory” roles in Ukraine. It also means he has likely seen close combat, been a throat stabber.

Eventually it all adds up. Some of the stuff I have seen and done still keeps me up at night occasionally. I don’t drink much, hardly at all. No drugs. I’m known as either Coke Zero or coffee at the VFW hall. But we do talk, drunk or sober, and talk among equals helps.

In a Businesslike Manner

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After a little fuss and muss Speaker Johnson is Speaker Johnson again.  Okay.

And I hear the judge in New York City is going to sentence Trump right before his inauguration.  Who knows, maybe he’s going to try some dirty tricks like locking him up for the inauguration ceremony.  Maybe the Supreme Court Justice will have to swear him in from Ryker’s Island.  Yeah, yeah, whatever.

Okay, so we’re dealing with mental cases everywhere we’re supposed to have sages and scholars.  Well, what can I say.  These are fallen times and we have to expect idiots to drool on themselves quite a lot of the time.  But things continue to fall apart apace.  Some percentage of our veterans harbor homicidal tendencies toward the United States.  Well, they have lowered the standards for mental fitness so this should be expected.

But this is going to continue while Donald Trump begins to assemble and deploy his cabinet and they get to work terminating the deep state.  I won’t be surprised if some disgruntled former FBI agents decide to take pot shots at him going forward.

But I have bigger fish to fry.  Camera Girl was complaining about the foaming soap dispensers that I bought a bunch of years ago.  It seems they weren’t working smoothly.  The pump would get jammed.  So, I took one apart and tried to figure out what was wrong.  Well, there wasn’t much there so I washed the components and put them back together and tried it out again.  Well, now it wasn’t jammed but the damn thing didn’t work.  Nothing came out.  So now I was getting mad.  I took another one apart and cleaned it up and still couldn’t find anything wrong.  And when I put it back together it didn’t work.  Nothing came out.

So, I stopped taking them apart and since the internet is our friend I did a search for foaming soap dispensers and found this cool exploded view of the mechanism and noticed something.  There is a tiny ball that acts as a check valve.  This ball allows soap to be sucked into the valve but not pushed back out.  And I couldn’t remember seeing such a thing in the two pumps I disassembled.    Well, the stupid thing is only an 1/8th of an inch in diameter and transparent plastic so when I cleaned out the pump, I must have washed it down the drain both times.

Now this was very annoying.  I have since ordered fifty 1/8th inch polypropylene balls and a tube of food grade silicone grease.  With these invaluable supplies I intend to restore the two dispensers back into functionality.  Moreover, I will grease all of the pump pistons with the silicone and thereby satisfy Camera Girl’s original complaint about my equipment choices for the various sink areas of the house.  There are currently six of these dispensers in the place and each one will require this overhaul.

I wonder if she appreciates how lucky she is to have a technical individual of my caliber at her disposal twenty-four/seven?  I doubt that she could have gotten the quick response and analytical acumen that I provided in this foamed soap crisis from just any regular husband.  Far from it.  The only thing I regret is that because of the critical nature of the crisis there was not time for me to send out RFQ’s (requests for quotations) to three qualified bidders on the project.  Business, after all, should be conducted in a businesslike manner.

Guest Contributor – Milo Mindbender – 03JAN2025 – It’s Her Turn … Again

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Even if the Dems run Kamala as a candidate, never underestimate the Republicans ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The best thing the Dems could do is continue to scold the Americans who disappointed them by not jumping on the EV Kamala bus, and voted against them. They have 4 years to bitch and moan about how they were robbed, and it’s all racist. That would make Vance have an easy run by building up a reservoir of resentment among the undecided. All Trump need to do is hold the stated course of deport, reinflate, and drill baby drill. This could swing the pendulum back to the right, the last election was indicative of a tidal shift against the left wing agenda.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 03JAN2025 – It’s Her Turn … Again

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war pig

Hillary has a better chance than Kamala. But I can see the attraction for Kamala for the lefty bigwigs. She will do absolutely as told. Shove your hand up her butt and make her a puppet. She is mixed race so can claim to be Black. She is nominally a female and the left wants a miority woman in the Oval Office so bad they can taste it. Problem is, she is a terrible campaigner. This time around, when she got the marshmallow-soft question about her differences viz Dopey Joe, she froze like a possum in the headlights. She was roadkill. She HAD to know the question was coming, the media lefties would be sure to tell her campaign manager what questions would be asked. She still flopped. At least she doesn’t terrorize young girls and fall down or walk away with an extended hand pointed toward…nobody.
At least not yet. She has three years to practice, but my belief is they’d rather run AOC than Kamala. Some candidate may rise who is charismatic enough to lead the party and win. A lefty version of Trump – all piss and vinegar. But then, maybe not. Maybe the left has gone plumb loco, as Yosemite Sam would say.

It’s Her Turn. …  Again.

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Ah, the joy of virtuous living.  Today I spent the morning (well, a good chunk of it) reviewing the novel and my notes on the shortcomings of the present outline.  And shockingly, it wasn’t painful at all.  In fact, it was refreshing to be making some progress and making some concrete changes at last.  And sometimes, all it took was a sentence or two over here and maybe a word or two over there.  Yes, very gratifying.  This program is the way to go.

So having done my duty as a serious-minded slave in the salt mines of literature, I can turn my attention to my other vocation.  What do I want to talk about today?

Well, apparently the FBI has discovered that some people expect them to do something to prevent terrorism and failing that, arrest the terrorists and maybe prevent the next terrorist from following in their footsteps.  Well, apparently the biggest mistake is to jump to conclusions; like terrorists could be motivated by radical Islam.  Here we are in 2025 and that outdated post-9/11 islamophobia still exists!  Crazy! Right?

Well, between the anarchists killing CEOs and the Islamists killing whoever they can find grouped in one place, it looks to be a busy time for the new administration.  But honestly, the solution to these problems is the same as for our other problems; shut the borders and deport the crazies and criminals as soon as possible.  Luckily, I think Trump knows that.  If this was Bush or even Obama, they would be asking the Pentagon and the State department which countries to bomb and which regime to color revolution out of power.

I read several leftists bemoaning the fact that the powers that be in the Democrat party don’t think they should change the strategies they used in the 2024 campaign.  Apparently, identity politics is so baked into the coalition and its leaders that “throwing trans people under the bus” is unthinkable.  And apparently so is reducing crime in the cities.  That idea has been declared white supremacist.  Now that’s what I call true believing!

And finally, polls are appearing that show Kamala Harris ahead of JD Vance for the 2028 presidential election.  This is so exciting.  I feel that the Republicans should support this direction with everything they have.  As much money as can be raised should be poured into convincing the Democrat voters that Kamala is the one; the new Obama.  They should stress that she only had a hundred days to get the people on board the Kamala train.  Now they have fifteen times that much to build the wave that will sweep her into the White House.  After all, look at Trump.  He lost in 2020 and still managed the 2024 win.  Just think of what fifteen hundred days of Kamala’s unencumbered futures, yellow school buses and Venn diagrams speeches would do to the American voters’ opinions.  I feel sure they will get to know exactly how smart and sensible she truly is.  But I’m going all out.  Maybe I’ll even switch parties to support her in the primary.  Whatever it takes, I’ll be there, Kamala.  It’s her turn!  Again!

New Year’s Resolutions – 2025

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At this dawning of the rolling year, it is more than normally desirable that we make some slight provision for improving our behavior.  Some people try to lose weight or stop smoking.  Others look for a better job or start a hobby.  I’ve vowed to finish my book.  And to accommodate that effort I will be clearing the mornings for writing and editing the book.  This may impact my posting schedule (from time to time) but I think it’s necessary.  Time slips by too quickly if there are too many competing priorities.

Now I don’t intend to abandon the website.  OCF will have its daily photo and quote.  And whenever something needs my approbation, scorn or explanation I will promptly respond.  And I will link to anything that I think interesting or thought-provoking.  But when there’s a slow news week and I’ve already gassed off about the usual suspects I may just take a pass.  On days like that maybe I’ll link to a song I like or a clip from a movie that makes me smile.

And from time to time, I’ll put up a chunk of my story to get feedback from the readers here.  And I’ll write about writing sometimes!

So, none of this is dire.  With Trump entering the White House in a couple of weeks I’m sure I’ll have all kinds of stimuli for posts that will make it impossible to do my fiction writing work.  After all, the world is drifting into troubled times and that is sure to goad me into taking to my little soap box and barking out condemnations and propounding simple-minded plans of action.

But I do see that I’ll have to prioritize writing if I ever hope to finish that darn book.  I do think there is some writing in me.  And I won’t know how hard or easy selling books is until I give it a good old American try.

As for the news today, we’ve all been watching the attack in New Orleans and then listened to Biden try to string a few dozen sentences together without sounding like Max Headroom (and failing).  I love how he tells us the guy is a follower of ISIS but not to jump to conclusions.  So, because he’s a Moslem whose parents came from the Middle East and he’s declared jihad on America we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that he’s an Islamic terrorist?  Would that be insensitive to the various followers of the religion of peace?  Well, never mind.  Biden is so laughably irrelevant that he might as well have started to read from a Dr. Seuss book as the words of that speech his handlers handed him.  More interesting would have been a statement from Trump advising the federal law enforcement agents not to destroy any of the evidence before his team has a chance to see what really went on.  Well, this is a small part of what I expect at the border for the foreseeable future.  So, it barely merits comment.  Let’s pray nothing bigger is in the wings.

 

And just to show that my heart is in the right place, I’ll put together a few things that might lighten your day.

 

 

Eeny Meeny Chilly Beany, the Spirits are About to Speak

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[It does not pay a prophet to be too specific.  –  L. Sprague de Camp]

Only a great fool would claim to know in advance how 2025 will end.  Everything from nuclear Armageddon to the return of the Prince of Peace is definitely on the table.  My radius of likely outcomes is slightly narrower (at least on the upside).  I could easily imagine things going very wrong between the United States and Russia or China or Iran in the foreseeable future.  And by wrong I don’t necessarily mean a full nuclear exchange with either of the first two of those nations.  There is plenty of room for low level violence and sabotage that could cause our lives to be much worse.  For instance, an aircraft carrier is becoming an increasingly vulnerable target to any number of new threats.  If a carrier were badly damaged or even sunk it might not lead to a nuclear exchange but it would cause a cascade of actions that will threaten war.

But let’s put war aside for a moment.  At least global war.  Let’s look at what will be going on in North America.  Trump intends to close the borders.  And that will both include Mexico and Canada.  This will change the way things are done in several aspects of life.  It will impact migration (obviously) but it will also impact industry.  A lot of stuff is built in Mexico and Canada.  The transportation of these products will be impacted.  And illegal importation (drugs, sex slaves) will also be impacted.  The Mexican and other gangs that control these illicit trades will have to be confronted head on in what will amount to a war on the southern border.  This alone could be the toughest thing Donald Trump will be faced with during his presidency.  He may have to live in a bunker due to the military capability of these gangs.  It’s a cinch their snipers are a lot more accurate than the ones the CIA found during the 2024 election.  Anyway, if he’s serious he’ll have his hands full with this action.

As for the economy, well, I think by default things will get somewhat better.  Just seeing the Greens pushed out of the White House will encourage the petroleum industry to improve the energy situation in the United States.  Who knows, maybe gasoline will fall below two dollars again.  And if that happens it will have a knock-on effect on the rest of the economy as transportation costs fall and with it the price of most commodities.  Now I wouldn’t exaggerate the extent of this.  Prices don’t usually fall except during a recession.  But if they stop going up it will begin to stanch the economic bleeding of the middle class.

Beyond that Trump can do a lot to encourage corporate on-shoring of manufacturing.  Tariffs can be of two varieties.  You can raise tariffs on the products of foreign companies or you can put tariffs on products that are manufactured outside of this country regardless of the nationality of the company that owns the factory.  This will encourage companies (foreign or domestic) to manufacture here the products they want to sell here.  Personally, if a Toyota car is built in Georgetown, Kentucky I consider it more American than a GM car built in Mexico or Canada.  So, will any of this happen?  Possibly not in 2025.

And finally, will he drain the swamp in 2025?  Well, not completely but he does want to put Kash Patel in charge of the FBI.  I read that they had him under investigation.  I don’t know much more about him than what I’ve read but wouldn’t it be amusing if it turns out he’s a vindictive bastard who took his own targeting personally and wanted a lot of payback.  I think there could be a lot of very amusing things going on in Washington this year.  And from my point of view that’s worth something in and of itself.

So those are just some hints at what might be going on.  Let’s hope it’s more swamp draining and less Armageddon but whatever else it’s going to be very busy and very exciting.

A New Year’s Eve Look Back in Gob Smackedification

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If 2024 had been the plot for a novel no one would have believed it.  The former president is running for the Republican nomination while under indictment in four separate cases in three separate jurisdictions.  He is found guilty in two of them even before the end of the primaries and every time a court case goes against him his popularity grows.  The incumbent Democratic candidate wins the primaries handily but drops out a hundred days before the election because he sounded like a talking turnip during the only debate.  The Democratic candidacy is handed over to the vice president because only she can legally use the multi-billion-dollar war chest but she also sounds like a talking turnip, albeit a slightly higher pitched one.  During the campaign the Republican candidate is put on open display by the secret service to not one but two snipers, one of whom misses a kill shot by fractions of an inch.

The media and the US government conspire to hide the incumbent president’s advanced dementia for his whole term in office, going so far as to claim he is actually some kind of political four-dimensional chess master while video evidence proves he’s forgotten how a door knob works.  When the election can’t even be stolen through massive blue city fraud the media claims that racism and misogyny are responsible despite the large gains the Republicans make among women and minority voters.  And as a parting absurdity the people in charge of the White House start rattling off thousands of blanket pardons including the president’s bag-man son who was already found guilty for various offenses large and small and whom the president had sworn he would never pardon.

And on the other side, the once and future Republican president has allied himself with a whole retinue of unlikely allies and future cabinet picks including the richest man in the world, a scion of the Kennedy clan and other heterodox individuals who would normally be anathema to a Republican administration.  And finally, the greatest absurdity of all is that this president-elect is someone like Donald Trump.  An almost cartoon character.  A caricature of the American huckster.  A modern-day P T Barnum.  But the only Republican to be honest about how the American political system is totally rigged against normal Americans.

And none of that even mentions incipient strains of World War III filtering out of the neo-con madness in Ukraine and with the Middle East in virtual flames as Gaza, Syria and Iran boil over in open war.  Just the other day the explosion of a weapons depot was so huge that some observers mistook it for a tactical nuclear weapon detonation.  And so, with just twenty days left before the end of the Biden presidency there seems to be no pause in the frenetic madness that has engulfed the world stage.

Looking back on this, stuns the mind.  To me this is the result of massive overreach.  When the Democrats unleashed George Floyd, COVID and election fraud in 2020 they pulled out all the stops and ran Washington like some private fiefdom.  And they brought in a collection of misfits and weirdos that couldn’t get out of their own way.  And so, they blew up the economy and unleashed actual stagflation.  They hid the stagnation part by putting everyone and his brother in government no-show jobs.  But the inflation was right out there for all to see and feel.  They tried to tell people that they shouldn’t believe their own lying eyes when looking at their empty wallets but instead bask in the glow of Bidenomics that was making them rich.  Of course, unless you’re an investment banker, tech entrepreneur or tenured Ivy League professor you probably don’t have a seven-figure 401K plan to offset the order of magnitude growth in the cost of housing and eggs but then again poor people should just shut up and vote Democrat.  Right?

So, as it turned out reality really is real.  And now the good(?) guys have their turn at bat.

I think I begin to understand how things speed up during these end of civilization events.  Once instability sets in, unbalanced parts of the system start to randomly knock into each other and catastrophic collapse is more or less inevitable.  Well, I guess this thing has to play out.  Perhaps 2025 will be a chance to do maintenance on the system and get it at least firing on an even number of cylinders.  Who knows?  Maybe Trump will turn out to be a Diocletian-like historical character who comes up with a patchwork solution to allow the empire to limp along for another century or two before complete collapse.

Well, there’s my annual pep talk.  Happy New Years and I’ll put together a look forward for tomorrow.

First Annual Orio’s Awards

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Year end award ceremonies are usually pretentious and subjective.  This leaves the viewers angry and jaded.  Not to be outdone by Hollywood and the mainstream media I am announcing and presenting this inaugural edition of the Orio’s.  Named for the website and embodying the timeless desire of all photographers to fill up space on his blog I am stepping forward and picking the five best photos from the last three hundred and sixty five “photo of the day” submissions.  I have absolutely no objective basis for my selection other than first impressions as I rapidly scanned through the shots from the last twelve months.  Well, here they are.

  1. Two Ducks in Freezing Water

This aptly titled work captures the essence of water fowl floating on a freezing pond.  I will say that Mrs.  Mallard seems to be giving Mr. Mallard the stink-eye for something that he is pretending he didn’t do.  There’s no way he gets away with it.

 

2. Come into my Parlor Said the Spider to the Fly

What is there to say about the visceral appeal of this stunning visual statement?  The drama of a lion bringing down a wildebeest on the Serengeti is (sorta) on display as arachnid faces off against the disgusting metallic sheen of the bottle fly.  Is there really any winner here?

 

3. The Wheel of Time

This fossilized ammonite shell reminds me that most of my life has been spent going around in circles.  Is it really about the journey if you end up in the same place you start from?  Oh well.

 

4.  Oh My Stars

I can’t think of any snarky wise cracks for this one.  I just like the way it looks.

 

5.  Make a Wish

Regular readers probably know that I kind of like the way that milkweed seed pods look after they explode.  Nuff said.

 

So that’s it.  A whole year will elapse before we find ourselves here again to rate and praise the best of the best of the best!  Well, save up your excitement and the seconds will pass like seconds.  Thank you for your attention and hopefully all comments should be equally light-hearted.