Category: Current Events

The Mass of Men

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Henry David Thoreau said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”

Well, I don’t know.  I’m not sure I’m the quietest (or the loudest) of individuals.  And as for desperation and resignation that seems a bit much.  For most people work can be a rat race but, is what we do just resignation?  I hope not.  Now, sure, we all have to reach that endpoint and when that gets a lot closer, desperation and resignation start to sound more fitting, more apt.  But Thoreau said the mass of men.  Well, most men aren’t about to face death.  We get a decent shot at a pretty decent span; “three score and ten” the Bible says.

And even when the end is in sight isn’t there any consolation in reflecting on the fact that you spent your life doing what you thought was best?  Maybe it’s a matter of temperament.  I guess Thoreau was a product of Yankee New England upbringing.  And those people have always seemed a little cold and humorless for my taste.  Maybe it’s a combination of puritanism and bad weather but they always seemed like they just bit into something that tasted bad (or maybe it was their reaction at seeing me).  Maybe I’m just naturally cheerful.  Call it my Mediterranean predisposition but I just think that every story has a happy ending.  And this even though I look around me in every direction and I see wrack and ruin out to the horizon.  And sure, when it’s time to start hauling away the wreckage I’ll swear and grumble and complain.  But I’ll still look forward to a lunch break and quitting time.  And then there has to be some human joy somewhere in that mess.

I know some people who live the other way.  And they are quite a bit better off than I am.  That grim determination has its advantages.  You can stuff a 401k plan with quite a lot of money if you’re grimly determined.  And maybe they will have an easier time of it at that last stand knowing that everything is paid for.  I guess it’s kind of the Cheops or Ozymandias option.  But it still feels kind of grim to me.

So, I like to think that most of us try to live lives of quiet or not so quiet inspiration mixed with perspiration.  I think the guy who said, “Where there’s life there’s hope” had it right.  While there’s still blood pumping through your veins and air being sucked into your lungs there’s hope and more than hope.  There’s at least a little excitement.  Even if you’re a hundred there’s still the challenge of trying to get on your feet and remembering what it is you have to do to keep breathing that day.  And until that gets to be too much for your spirit you have a reason to greet the day.

And if you still have anyone in your life who cares whether you live or die you’ve got a world outside yourself to think about.  Maybe people call that quiet desperation.  Or maybe I’m the exception.  Maybe I’ve just been blessed with much more than the mass of men have.  But I kind of doubt it.  I’m just an average guy with the average life.  Well, except for Camera Girl.  She’s pretty great.  But don’t tell her.  She might demand a better contract.

A Million Miles Away

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In the last week or so there have been a number of reports about large drones flying over New Jersey and New York City.  When reporters have asked the Department of Defense and the FBI about this they were that the drones are unidentified.  But at the same time there was no sense of urgency by these agencies to calm the civilian population by assuring them that an investigation is in effect.  It was more or less a shrug of the shoulders and the comment that local law enforcement would handle these mysterious craft.

A congressman from New Jersey posited that there was a rumor that the drones were Iranian and that they were associated with a “mothership” based off the east coast in the Atlantic.  The Pentagon spokesman denied this and said there was no indication that the drones were foreign or controlled by adversaries of the United States.  But at the same time there was no indication how this could be known if the drones were unidentified.

So, then what is going on?

Well, of course I can’t prove anything.  But it occurs to me that Iran makes a lot of military drones and Russia uses an enormous number of military drones in the Ukraine war.  And both those countries are looking to make trouble for the United States because of military actions we have currently going on in their neighborhoods, in other words Syria and Ukraine.

Maybe they’re sending a message that they can retaliate for the attacks going on in their world.  Or maybe they’re scouting around to find the easiest or the most valuable targets to hit.  Well, isn’t that something!

And, of course, all of this is in response to US initiatives that were activated after the Democrats lost the November election.  After November 5th the United States gave Ukraine permission to use long range missiles in the Russian homeland.  And of course the toppling of the Assad regime by American proxies just occurred in the last week.  So, the State Department and the Department of Defense unleash chaos around the world and the blowback from it will hit home about the time President Trump is inaugurated.  Isn’t that something!

For me this just reinforces what kind of psychopaths we have running our foreign policy.  Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland play their color revolution games with foreign countries and the blowback will be felt by innocent Americans and especially by our military that shouldn’t be put in harm’s way for egregious adventures that only alienate the rest of the world and benefit no one except the military contractors that feed off of the arms buildup that follows after these obscene plans are put in action.

Well, there’s basically nothing that can be done until that undead creature is finally packed into his mummy case and carted away from the White House.  Maybe we’ll get lucky and the other shoe doesn’t drop before January 20th and Donald Trump can inform our adversaries that sanity has reasserted itself over US foreign policy and that all ticking time bombs will be deactivated and we can start from a simple position of mutual hatred but without the added factor of sociopaths with delusions of grandeur running foreign policy for the world’s deadliest weapons stockpile.

Well, anyway, I’ve got my fingers crossed and I’m usually a pretty lucky guy.  It’s less than 40 days but why does it seem like a million miles away?

Counting Down the Days

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At the rate things are going there won’t be much left of the world by Trump’s inauguration.  Israelis, ISIS, Turks and Iranians are scrambling to claim parts of Syria.  Romania has overturned their elections because the people chose the right-wing candidate.  Belarus, Georgia and Kazakhstan are seething with unrest.  South Korea has arrested the head of the military and is investigating their president for treason.  France’s parliament was dissolved through a vote of no-confidence and Trump has told Canada and Mexico that if they want any more money from him, they’ll have to agree to become parts of the United States.  And that’s on top of the usual carnage in Ukraine and the threat of nuclear war if NATO continues to allow their long-range missiles to target Russia.

Well, I don’t suppose that the State Department and the Department of Defense have anything to do with any of these events.  Do you?

I think what the geniuses in those departments don’t realize is that Trump thrives on chaos.  I forget which of Bill Clinton’s psychopathic advisors said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”  But Donald Trump has learned that lesson by heart.  I suspect that he will be using his authority to apply leverage on his enemies foreign and domestic.  The crises he will put to good use are the migrant crisis and the wars in Ukraine and Syria.

This week Trump met with France’s Macron and Ukraine’s Zelensky.  I think he gave both of them the same general message; prepare to make a deal with Putin.  We don’t know what Macron’s reaction was but Zelensky went ballistic.  He was so upset that he declared that Biden must allow Ukraine to become part of NATO before Trump gets into office.  Well, that’s not going to happen.  What will happen is unknown.  The neo-cons unleashed the chaos in Syria in hopes it would deter Putin from continuing his progress in Ukraine.  It doesn’t seem to have worked.  Chasiv Yar, Pokrovsk, Kurakhove and several other major Ukrainian defensive centers are on the edge of collapse and there does not seem to be a pause in sight.  The Ukrainians have decided to drop the draft age to eighteen to provide an additional 200,000 soldiers for the front but there seems to be a significant desertion rate occurring and mass surrenders are also increasing.  I suspect by January 20th things will be increasingly desperate for the Ukraine.

As for Syria, well, I hope Trump will be wise enough to leave Syria to those who want to burn their fingers on a boiling pot.  We have no business there.  And it looks like a trap for anyone who is stupid enough to think that trying to referee a free-for-all of raving religious lunatics is a good idea.  Think of Iraq.

As for his domestic enemies, cutting off the checks to sanctuary states like New York and California should be great sport.  New York especially has gone out of its way to antagonize Donald Trump through lawfare.  The least he could do is return the favor.  Something tells me there is an imbalance between what Albany can do to Trump and what Trump can inflict on the Empire state.

And finally, there is Trump’s main event; waging war on the Deep State.  There is the place where his personal desire for revenge and the country’s interests intersect beautifully.  Any and all havoc he can wreak on those bureaucratic tyrants will lessen their ability to torture us.  I think the DOGE initiative is exactly the way to tame the monster in Washington.  Freeze their salaries, brutally slash their ranks and reduce their power.  Actually, closing down divisions and departments would even be better.

Well, it’s a little more than a month so we’ll continue to hear about the chaos that the desperate minions in Washington are unleashing on the world.  But their days are numbered and they know it.

Michael Anton to Return to a Trump Administration Job

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“Donald Trump announced Sunday his selection of Michael Anton to be the director of policy planning at the State Department under the prospective secretary, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). Anton held a position on the National Security Council during Trump’s first administration, and was also appointed by the president to the National Board for Education Sciences.”

 

Anton to Lead State Department Policy Planning

Anton famously wrote the “Flight 93” essay during Donald Trump’s 2016 run claiming that despite any personal shortcomings Republicans needed to embrace Donald Trump to avoid the disaster that a Hillary Clinton extension to the Obama presidency would entail.  And in retrospect he was very right.

On a personal not Anton once quoted from an OCF post which I found very surprising.  The power of the internet.

Well, best of luck to Anton in his new position.  I hope he remembers the hopes and fears of people who read his words and now hope that Donald Trump’s new administration begins to apply the philosophy that he has avowed and make America great again.  But at the very least they should strive to make America sane again.

That is the Takeaway

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Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny.  What do they have in common?  They’re the two luckiest white men in America.  Somehow both of them managed to get an honest jury in the face of relentless anti-white propaganda and incredibly hostile media coverage.

So, what is the takeaway from what these men went through?  I think the important point is the miraculous nature of their acquittals.  And the fact that clearly innocent men attempting to defend themselves and the public at large from rioters and lunatics that the police have been forced to ignore were brought up on murder charges proves that we have been thrown to the wolves by the governments in the blue jurisdictions.

The truth of the matter is the police in New York City and Kenosha should have been the ones to stop rioters and lunatics from turning the streets of their cities into war zones.  New York City subway cars are now as dangerous to innocent people as the streets of Beirut.  Any day of the week you can see footage of gangs of marauding urban thugs victimizing law-abiding people on YouTube, X or TikTok.  And it’s the thugs themselves who put the video on-line.  They’re proud of it!

After four years of this madness, I’m beginning to hear of voters in blue jurisdictions voting out mayors and prosecutors who are responsible for the carnage.  Even in Los Angeles and San Francisco this is happening.  And a state-wide question in California succeeded in cancelling the recent law that said that shop lifting $900 or less of merchandise was essentially unpunishable.

Could this signify a restoration of law and order in these cities?  I’m going to say no.  The baby steps currently taken will not convince the police that the government has their back and will demand that the crime be throttled back to pre-George Floyd era standards.  That would take a consensus among city leaders that doesn’t exist and maybe never will exist again.  At least not under the present party coalition.  What it would take would be something along the lines of the Trump working class coalition coming into power in the cities.  But it would need to be large and durable enough to weather the blowback that would occur when the prisons would begin to fill up again with the large criminal element among the urban underclass.  There would be video that people would say looked like the George Floyd arrest.  And unless the coalition could stomach that kind of pressure nothing would improve.

No, I don’t think we should expect that kind of turnaround, maybe ever.  The real lesson is that cities and other areas that want to remain livable cannot allow law enforcement to be turned into a chew toy for race hustlers and the media.  They need to be defended against any amount of pressure by their mayors and governors.  And they must be willing to go toe to toe with the Justice Department and the FBI if they come meddling into local jurisdiction.

Florida has seemed to be working in that direction.  I’m sure other jurisdictions are doing the same.  For regular citizens, use whatever evidence you can to live where the crime doesn’t happen.  That is the takeaway.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 09DEC2024 – Machine Efficiency vs Human Boredom

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Valid points. However, social credit is not working for the Chinese very well. Imagine a time when you cannot start your car because you offended someone on social media. When AI doesn’t like your choice in blogs, music and political speech. There are oh, so many ways to silently pressure you to conform. Cranky internet speeds, debit card refusals even though you know you have money in the bank. AI will make a wonderful servant, but an awful master.

Yes, people need work, something to do. I agree that idle hands are the devil’s workshop. I can get into trouble if idle too long. I tend to think “what if I do this?”. Like the time I took a 4 bore rifle and changed out the solid slugs for explosive dumdums when the weather had been gray and gloomy for two weeks.

Or the time the blasting boss at a local quarry was on vacation. Then his second came down with something nasty but temporary. That left the rookie in charge of blasting. The owner, whom I know, was worried about this youngster being in charge of that much BOOM, so I said I would “help” him. It was glorious from my prospective and we shifted twice the rock tonnage and kept the quarry on schedule. However, the seismographs at the major university about 50 miles away noticed the sudden change in activity, triangulated it, and the ATF visited. The owner said to please go back to the old method. So we did until the blasting master returned from vacation.

Idle hands.

The problem is finding gainful work for people. Real work. Not the equivalent of counting the hairs on a caterpillar by touch sort of thing. That will be the hard part. You remember why Henry Ford had to pay such high wages for the time? Assembly lines bored people to death. They would quit if he didn’t. Repetitive work is boring as hell, as I found out pulling mess duty as a private. A common punishment for minor infractions while on mess duty was to peel enough potatoes to feed 3,000 Marines each meal. Or onions. Made you shape up pretty quick. Now, modern messes buy bags of peeled, chopped onions and potatoes.

Solving the problem of machine efficiency vs human boredom is going to be tough. Machines don’t get bored. Machines don’t get into trouble when idle. Humans can get into all sorts of mischief if left to their own devices too long.

H.O.P.E.

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Elon Musk is all over the place.  Everywhere you look he’s involved in any number of important and cutting-edge endeavors.  And this is in addition to his business ventures.  He runs a space company (SpaceX), a satellite communications company (Starlink), an electric car manufacturer (Tesla) and whatever X is.

Most recently Musk has volunteered to assist the nascent Trump administration in taking a chain saw to the federal bureaucracy (the imaginary D.O.G.E. or Department of Government Efficiency).  And considering that Musk fired about 80% of the employees of Twitter to make X less unprofitable, it makes sense that he might be supremely qualified to pare back the Washington payroll.  And based on the favorable results of Argentina’s experiment with government reduction I wholeheartedly endorse Trump employing Musk, Ramaswami and any other tech bros who want to help us get the national debt under control.  Amen.

But if Elon Musk really is a very smart guy who understands how automation and other technology breakthroughs can be integrated into a livable world order then that would be a much more worthwhile contribution to the mess, we’re currently in.  As things currently stand the last fifty years of computer advancement have revolutionized the efficiency of the workplace.  Programs like a world processor and a spreadsheet have allowed on person to do the work that previously required whole departments.  The secretarial pool is a thing of the past.  Even the technical departments have been pared way back because a pc on every desk means that a computation department is unneeded.  At most you need a couple of IT nerds who troubleshoot network issues.  And in the factories, machinists have been replaced by CNC machines.  Well, let’s say they’ve been replaced ten to one with a CNC technician.  And so on and so forth.  Even engineers and scientists have seen the handwriting on the wall.  AI will begin to make them redundant too.  And supposedly it will replace authors, musicians and other kinds of artists.  And finally, AI is supposed to eventually replace software coders too.

If you’re a tech entrepreneur you are probably saying to yourself, “Duh!  That’s what’s supposed to happen.  That’s efficiency and progress.”  And from your point of view, you’re right.  Better, cheaper, faster.  But if you’re a human being and the parent of human beings you’re saying to yourself, “Then what the hell do we do?”

And that is what the big brain guys should be thinking about.  People like Jeff Bezos have been perfecting a way to eliminate ninety percent of the humans who sell us stuff.  And then they want to whittle down that last ten percent forever.  Instead, what we need is a plan to keep one hundred percent of Americans gainfully and happily employed.  If you’re a libertarian you’ll say that competition is a good thing and allowing Amazon to bankrupt every retail seller except Walmart is a good thing that brings down the price of goods and helps everyone.

I disagree.  Machines are more efficient and cheaper to use than humans.  That’s proven.  But we are human beings.  If the machines aren’t benefitting us then they are the enemy.  And we should fight back against them.  In a sense, that’s what this recent election was about.  The people who have been made obsolete by automation and globalization and efficiency voted to throw out of office the people who represent the people who make, run and own the machines.  They want Donald Trump to turn back the clock and bring back a world where they could work in a factory that made cars or toasters or pencils and make enough money to raise a family.

Well, he can try and he can do a lot of things that will tilt the playing field in favor of those that have been left behind.  But in the long run efficiency will triumph.  So instead of a Department of Government Efficiency I think Trump and Musk and Ramaswami would be better off inventing a Human Optimization Planning Effort (HOPE).  And they could use the existing monopoly laws to force people like Bezos to design their processes and systems to accommodate a new parameter; human happiness.  If they don’t, then one day the forgotten men may come visiting the tech lords.  And they may be armed with the proverbial pitch forks and torches.  And despite what we saw in “Terminator,” my money is on the peasants.

LA Times Owner Attempts to Quantify Liberal Bias in His Paper

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This is a wonderful development:

“The Los Angeles Times could roll out an artificial intelligence-powered “bias meter” as soon as January, in the latest shakeup as the paper’s owner tries to reshape the outlet.

LA Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong announced the upcoming AI feature on Wednesday in an interview with conservative commentator and newly appointed Times editorial board member Scott Jennings on The Mike Gallagher Show, which Jennings was guest-hosting.”

 

If this is what Trump’s re-election sparks, it’s a long awaited reaction.  This would drive the “journalists” on the LA Times insane.  Imagine if Californians actually started to get both sides of the story.  Unheard of!

This guy Soon-Shiong sounds like he wants to get rid of most of his employees.  Kudos to him.

Hello, Hello.  Is There Anybody Out There?

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We got five or six inches of really wet heavy snow last night so of course the power goes out and also the cable, internet and phone lines.  The generator faithfully kicked in so Camera Girl and the dogs were warm and cozy while the male contingent was tasked with clearing the snow.  Of course, the snow blower is suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome so the snow had to be cleared the old-fashioned way.

To add insult to injury the electrical failure is less than five hundred feet from my driveway and so there are the trucks and electrical crew and even some fire fighters standing around looking puzzled.  I thought about going and talking to them but reconsidered.  I’m guessing some of my neighbors already have and I figure the more times you bother those guys the slower they’ll fix it.

It’s about eighteen hours in and I’m sort of resigned to a world without connectivity.  The only phone is an old flip phone that we keep around for emergencies.  I charged it up and Camera Girl called the kids to let them know we’re alive.  I called work and said I was declaring a snow day.  When the driveway was clear I went to a wi-fi location and checked to make sure OCF was up today and that has been the extent of our electronic communications for the day.

No news sites, no X, no nothing.  All things considered, it’s not so bad.  I guess if the utility reliability continues to decay out here in the hinterlands of Dunwich, I’ll have to ask Elon Musk to provide us with our own dedicated Starlink satellite, a small nuclear power plant and maybe a spaceport.  Dunwich is located at the nexus of the Terran/Great Old Ones dimensional rift so a small dedicated interdimensional port makes a lot of sense.  If he’s not too busy with his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) role-playing game maybe he could get working on that.

Well, whatever the New England states have done to the power grid it doesn’t bode well for the future.  I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that a generator with a cut-in switch that can handle the full electrical load of a home is now standard equipment around here.  You can be without power for a week in the winter at any time.  So natural gas or a large propane tank is what you need.  Getting enough gasoline might not be a safe bet if everyone is without power and out searching for fuel.

Well, anyway, while I sit here isolated from Al Gore’s world wide web and information superhighway, I think about how the Democrats want to cut away the last links of reliable energy we still have.  The blue states are going full speed ahead to criminalize the internal combustion engine and anything else that uses fossil fuels.  I guess that Trump’s term will be a decision point for some parts of the country.  Without his support, all of the promised charging stations and other green energy rigamarole won’t be there to allow for the fossil-fuel-free-wonderland they envisioned.  It may turn out that their deadlines are not be feasible.  And if they insist on them, there may be some serious blowback from the voters.  It might become quite interesting for Gavin Newsom.  Instead of the bullet-train future he promised he might be leaving on a different rail, one that includes tar and feathers.