Category: Current Events

“Mr. Chairman, I Nominate President Joe Biden’s Reanimated Corpse”

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I think a consensus is growing that Joe Biden is one of the “walking dead.”  Okay, maybe technically he’s still alive.  He hasn’t equilibrated to room temperature or anything but essentially he’s a mindless zombie, animated by some occult power that is directly or indirectly tied to voodoo.

And with this consensus comes the necessity of renaming him.  Currently all newscasters make a point of referring to the president as “President Joe Biden.”  It’s never “President Biden.”   It’s as if they’re afraid we might confuse him with some other President Biden.  Perhaps they’re leaving out hope for an eventual President Hunter Biden.  Who knows?

Well, fine, now I want to give him an even more specific name.  I want him designated as “President Joe Biden’s reanimated corpse.”  I think this formulation captures perfectly all of the facets of Biden.  He’s not only Biden, he’s not only the president, but he’s also a zombie in good standing.  Just watching him shambling along moaning, falling down and befouling himself upholds the finest traditions of the classic zombie profile.  And the deathly pallor, vacant stare and incoherent muttering calls up flashbacks of George Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead.

And in honor of Biden’s homage to this classic film I want to urge that all of Joe’s voters show up on election night dressed as zombies in order to signal their solidarity with our Undead Guy in Chief.  Show up disheveled, spattered in blood and dirt and clutching a half-eaten forearm.  Proudly support the ghoulish incumbent and feel free to gibber and moan when asked which district you’re from.  But at least have the decency to have your driver’s license when you show up.  Don’t be a jerk and waste everybody’s time.

Hopefully the media will have the good sense to arrange a third presidential debate on October 31st.  Only on Halloween will the reanimated corpse of Joe Biden truly reach his full potential and perform at his full capacity.  My hope is that the moderator will be Don Lemon and Undead Joe lives up to his full potential by wandering over to the moderator’s table and devouring Lemon on live tv.  Honestly I think that would be Lemon’s finest hour and it couldn’t hurt Biden’s numbers either.

Regardless of your opinion of Joe vis-a-vis the whole breathing and heart beating thing, you’ll have to agree that we’ve moved into a whole new era with respect to presidential candidates.  Even during Bill Clinton’s time in office we expected the candidates to be lucid, somewhat eloquent and healthy enough to stand on their feet for an hour or two without collapsing or losing control of their sphincters.

Those no longer seem to be necessary.  Anyone who’s watched any of the Biden “glitches” knows that at any moment he can start spouting gibberish or lock up while some normally autonomic function of his body fails and leaves him frozen in place like a mannequin.

I guess what has happened is that president is now a figurehead for the Deep State that runs the executive branch departments and decides on the policies that control the nation.  Okay, let’s say it out loud.  Joe doesn’t really decide anything.  The people who pull his strings do that.  Maybe that makes it easier to pull that lever.

Agenda of the Possible

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I have found that accepting my status as an outsider in the American system is a fairly liberating experience.  I’ve reconciled myself to being a pariah and it’s done me a world of good.  No longer needing to fix the socio-political framework of the United States is an enormous relief and clears my mind for tackling problems that I can address and that directly benefit me.

Instead of worrying whether the Democrats will rig the Pennsylvania vote in November, I’m spending my time looking for ways to improve the website and increase my visibility with the people who interest me.  Instead of worrying about what will happen to Donald Trump I will worry about what’s going to happen to Camera Girl and her kids and grandkids.  Instead of worrying about the southern border I’ll worry about my relations with the neighbors here in Dunwich.  All of these are things I can influence and that better my situation.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I’d be ecstatic if Donald Trump beats Dementia Joe in November and then somehow dismantles the Deep State.  I’d be doing cartwheels for months if that happened.  But what if it doesn’t happen?  Do I wait around for another four years hoping that we’ll get another chance the next time?  No thanks.  Been there, done that, don’t have the time to wait.  So, the time to start getting on with my life is right now.

After all, when the Roman empire fell in 476 AD the local Roman stone mason didn’t say, “Well that’s that.  Without the emperor handing out contractors’ licenses I’m out of business and I’ll just have to wait until Charlemagne get things going in 800 AD.  No, he just cut a deal with the Visigoths or the Ostrogoths or whatever Goths he could find to pay them his contactor’s license and just stopped chiseling SPQR onto the work he installed.  Instead, he just wrote, “Hurrah for Alaric” or something.  Now maybe in his heart of hearts he hated Alaric’s guts.  And probably he had hated his local Roman tax collector too.  But reality has its own logic.  If the Left has permanently outmaneuvered the Right, then I need to concentrate on outmaneuvering the local bureaucrats and stop waiting for a savior to set me free.

If the people of this country are stupid enough to believe in global warming and pediatric trans-affirming surgery then they deserve everything they get.  For me it means I have to figure out a way to survive stupid.  And now that I’m fully aware of just how dysfunctional and hopelessly broken our political system is I will make it my business to negotiate this minefield of social rot to the very best of my ability.

So, there it is.  My gospel of the red-pilled normie.  I’m going to stop following all the pollsters and Washington watchers.  I’ll leave that to the people who are still trying to arouse the silent or the sleeping or the just plain stupid majority.  I’m looking for those who are already getting things done and for those who have an agenda of the possible.

Andrew Klavan Inteviews Mamet

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David Mamet famously declared he had ceased to be a “brain dead liberal” back around the time of the 9/11 attacks.  And the Left has been attacking him ever since.  And since he is a playwright and a movie script writer that has had an enormous impact on his career and life.

Here Andrew Klavan talks to him about what that’s been like and why it’s okay.  I find it interesting to hear how those on the inside of the matrix describe the process of being attacked by the antibodies of the collective.  It’s like an autoimmune disease or more closely it’s as if these people have become cancer cells and have now been detected by the immune system.

Toward the end Mamet speaks very enthusiastically about what will be happening while Hollywood is dying.  “You don’t need a lot of money to make a movie.  You need a phone and a good idea.”  I find that very hopeful.

 

The Great Debate of July 2024

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“Hello my name is Anderson Cooper and you are tuned into the first presidential debate between our beloved President Joe Biden and “convicted felon” and cartoon super-villain Donald Trump.  Jake Tapper and Dana Bash will be presiding over this incredible spectacle.

CNN has gone to great lengths to be both totally impartial but also relentlessly opposed to misinformation.  To that end Mr. Trump’s microphone is programmed to shut off whenever the moderators decide he is guilty of misinformation.  There was a debate about also attaching electrodes to Mr. Trump that would apply a punishing electric current in the event of multiple attempts at misinformation but it was decided that wouldn’t be legal, so you know.

I’ll come back after the debate with reactions from a test audience but right now let’s go to the debate as it begins.”

Dana: Good evening gentlemen, and you too Mr. Trump.  Our first question is for President Joe Biden.  Mr. President, out of all the amazing successes that you’ve had as president; conquering COVID, restoring the economy to incredible vibrance, fixing climate change, destroying racism and transphobia and curing cancer, what do you think is your greatest accomplishment?

Biden:  That’s a great question Dana.  I remember that time I was at Potsdam with Churchill, Truman and Stalin.  I had just beaten Stalin in an arm-wrestling contest and he had agreed to dismantle the Soviet Union in 1991 and I was feeling kind of good.  But I think all of that pales in comparison to that time I taught my son Hunter how to run a Ukrainian energy conglomerate.  He had been having some slight troubles with crack cocaine and I knew that learning the ropes of drilling and extracting oil and gas in Easten Europe would clear his head.  It’s like my Uncle Bosie always used to say, before he was eaten by New Guinean cannibals, “Always tell the truth and don’t take any guff from dog-faced pony soldiers.

Dana: Inspiring words to live by Mr. President.  Well, Donald Trump, you don’t have any accomplishments to name so instead let’s hear what you have to say about your high crimes and misdemeanors.  Are you most ashamed of your hush money conviction, your January 6th insurrection or your attempts to steal classified documents?

Trump: I’m most ashamed of having agreed to this charade.  You nitwits are going to try to sell the American people on the fantasy of Joe Biden being in his right mind.  That’s not going to work.  He’s delusional and barely able to speak coherent English for more than two minutes at a time.

Biden: Now hold on you dog-faced pony oldier, I’ll ake you hind the arn and ock some sense int ou and moulbi woudle foad mobe saiden ray.  Come on man!  You know.  The thing!

Trump: You see?  What the hell is a moulbi woudle?  The man is one step away from the memory ward at Happy Acres.

Jake: Listen Trump, we all recognize the incredible courage of President Biden for being America’s first zombie president.  Many of the recently deceased suffer from the prejudices and misinformation that unenlightened individuals such as yourself spread about them.

We’re here to make sure he gets an even playing field.  With the correct translation programs and subtitling “moulbi woudle” becomes, “set the record straight.”

Trump: Alright that’s enough.  You can do the rest of this without me.

Jake: That’s right and we will.  Our AI video program will provide us with an accurate version of what you would have said if you had stayed.

Trump: Deep fake?

Jake:  Potato, puhtata.

Trump: That’s about right.  Joe is some kind of vegetable anyway.  Well, I wouldn’t have lasted the whole ninety minutes anyway.  That smell is more than I can stand.

Summer Solstice 2024

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So today is the longest day.  I believe it.  Hot, hot, hot and sunny too.  Beautiful.  Well, the pessimist says from now on the day is getting shorter all the way to Christmas.  Well, sure.  But, so what?  It’s a beautiful ride.  And right now, only a fool would begin sighing and whining about decline.  The Earth is reaching the greatest tilt of the North Pole toward the sun and we can feel the giddy spin as it starts its long descent.  What a gaudy act to follow, perched here in the dead zone of Dunwich.  Watching the stars wheeling on midsummer’s night and the lightning bugs dancing around the swamp makes me smile to think that some people think all this was the act of random chance.  The 10300 required factors needed to make life, any form of life, happen in this universe along with all the other astronomical, physical and chemical precursors for life line up to give us lightning bugs.

No, I’m sorry.  This world was made so that I could exult in the splendor of this yearly crest.  The top of the Ferris wheel, the top of the roller coaster.  What a fine time to be alive.

Juneteenth Failure

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Today Camera Girl entrusted me with a job she calculated I was capable of performing; renewing the licenses for the dogs.  And yet I failed.  Turns out the town hall is closed on account of Juneteenth.  Well.  Juneteenth can really sneak up on you.  All my preparation, anticipation and concentration undone.  Ah well.  There’s always next year.

Another beautiful day.  Blazing hot sun and hardly a breath of breeze.  Well, we wait all winter for this so why complain about what we said we wanted?  So, soak in the heat and feel the energy.  But all this heat has already got my gardens way ahead of last year’s awful summer of rain marathon.  Based on what I can see I’ll have raspberries this week and blueberries next week.  And that’s just in time for Princess Sack of Potatoes beginning of summer visit.  She’ll be here tomorrow and Friday and she loves raspberries.

The early summer flowers are all over the place.  Black-eyed Susans, cone flowers, Shasta daisies, daylilies, clematis, digitalis, roses and Serbian bellflower are blooming all over the place.

 

The hellebores, rhododendrons, peonies and irises are already finished and the lupines are down to their last gasp.  Last year everything was late and stunted.  And the Elecampane I put in two years ago is already about six feet tall even before it’s flowered.

Of course, all this fertility hasn’t gone unnoticed by my neighbors.  The rabbits and the deer have been enjoying the raspberry and blueberry bushes and also nibbling down some of the outlying hostas and Solomon seal plants but as Camera Girl reminds me everybody’s gotta eat.  Yeah, but why here?

But not everything is sweetness and light.  Massive repair work is in my future.  Contractor negotiation and management is upon me.  Oh, the pain, the pain.  Well, the money pit is well named.

I haven’t noticed too much about the election in November that’s worth discussing this week.  Biden is falling apart and various groups of people are beginning to notice and the Democrat upper echelons seem to be circling like sharks waiting to put him out of his misery.  But there’s not that much for us to say until they pull the plug or the ripcord or whatever the correct metaphor is for this termination.

But whoever and however the Democrats run their race it is the ballot harvesting and drop box stuffing that will probably determine the winner in Pennsylvania.  My hope though is that there will be enough video and other documentation of the fraud to convince the great majority of Americans of the truth about our “election integrity.”  If that is accomplished then a real threshold will have been crossed.  Hopefully enough people will stop trying to force reality to correspond with their idealistic conception of how our leaders are “elected” and move onto concentrating their energies on protecting themselves and their families from the regime and its destructive practices.

A friend in town has donated a large collection of books on Shakespear to me.  So of course I’m a kid in the candy store.  One of the best types of books in the collection are paperback copes of individual plays.  This tends to be much handier than my large heavy “complete works” volumes which are large and heavy and tend to have small print!  I especially want the tragedies and some of the better comedies in that form.  Let’s start with Hamlet, King Lear and Much Ado About Nothing.  That should keep me busy for a while.

I Envy the Brits

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Nigel Farage is about to gut the Tories.  His Reform UK party is currently stealing away so many votes from the Conservative Party that with just a little luck he may finish it off as the opposition to the Labor Party in Parliament.

And this is huge.  That would be as if Donald Trump started his own party; the Big Beautiful Trump Party, and it reduced the Republicans to less than half of the seats they currently hold in the House and Senate.  It would be explosive.  It would throw Washington into a panic.  Business as usual would cease to exist.  All those Republican power brokers would in one stroke become powerless.  Of course the Democrats would run roughshod over everything.  The country would overnight become like a continent sized version of California.  Fossil fuels would be banned and the only religion would be some kind of LGBTQ cult.  It would become a hell on Earth but we’d never have to hear Mitch McConnell lie to us about why he allowed some Democrat initiative to pass in the Senate.  And we’d never have to listen to what a noble democracy Ukraine is.  And within four years the Republicans would be extinct.  Now wouldn’t that be splendiferous?

So, yeah, I’m envious of the Brits.  The Tories screwed the pooch so hard that no one on the Right will believe them ever again and that provided the opportunity to replace them.

I know, I know.  Allowing the Left a supermajority in the government is suicide.  They’ll do things so horrible that life as we know it will cease to exist.  But that’s already happening.  All that differs is they currently do it one drop at a time instead of just pouring out the whole bucket at once.  As far as I’m concerned, the accelerationist strategy is the way to go.  Let them do their worst and then let the country react to that.  Sure, they’ll approve slavery reparations, aircraft carriers with 6,000 mile extension cords, transgender surgeries in the womb and any number of other horrible policies.  But at least we’ll kill the Uniparty.  That game will end once and for all.  And then we can finally have representatives that actually want to represent us.

Bottom line is I’m ready for the next step.  And that is what the Brits seem to be doing.  In the words of Winston Churchill, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

I’m thoroughly sick of the make believe government that the Republicans represent.  With respect to being betrayed it’s never if but always when.  And that when will always be when they could do the most good or the most harm.  So hail to you Nigel Farage.  Perform the end of the beginning and lay the Tories in their well-deserved grave.  And may we follow your example and do the same to the Stupid Party.  They wildly deserve it and it will warm my soul to see them out on their butts.

Laugh, Clown, Laugh

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Dyspepsia doesn’t strike me as a particularly attractive flavor for a pundit to emit.  I mean listening to someone like me carp about all the things that are going wrong or will go wrong sounds like the height of boredom.    But it’s also kind of the world we live in.  I guess that marinating that flavor in humor might make it more palatable for the audience.  And I do try to add gallows humor and mockery of all the truly awful villains we face whenever I can.  But sometimes it’s almost impossible to paint a smile, even a wry smile, onto my face, when considering the catastrophically damaging events that seem to happen more and more frequently every day.

But we must laugh.  Despite the fact that it is very likely that Joseph Biden will be re-elected president of the United States, or maybe because it is so likely, we must laugh at Joe Biden.  All of the gaffes, the incoherent mumbling, the lies about everything from COVID to cannibals eating his uncle, to his creepy personal interactions with everyone from small children to the Pope.  All of this needs to be mocked and laughed at.

Because we need catharsis.  In ancient Athens, comedians like Aristophanes would rail against the politicians and accuse them of all manner of dishonest and even scurrilous behavior.  And the politicians had to take it with no recourse to the law courts.  Because the Athenians believed in the almost sacred right of the people to mock their elites.  And they were right.  There has to be a place where the high and mighty get taken down a peg.  It’s necessary, it’s healthy.  If that doesn’t exist you end up with Soviet Russia where the legitimacy of the state is slowly lost to cynicism and eventually when the social capital reaches zero everyone just ignores the leaders and wander away to become bandits.

Now maybe that is our fate.  With Donald Trump being stripped of his money and his freedom by kangaroo courts it won’t take long before even comedians will be hauled off to the gulag for mocking Joe.  I fully expect in the next Biden administration laws against disinformation will probably begin to mushroom around the country.  Maybe we’ll all have to refer to Biden as “the dear leader” instead of Dementia Joe.

But in the meantime, I intend to continue mocking these turkeys whenever they do something especially absurd.  And that’s bound to be any minute.  Why just today I read that during the White House briefing Haitian Shirley Temple claimed that videos of Joe Biden staring in the wrong direction from the parachutist that landed practically at his feet at the G7 conference was a “deep fake.”  We watch as the Italian Prime Minister takes him by the arm and turns him around to see what everyone of normal intelligence has already seen.  Karine Jean-Pierre is sort of like the voice of the Wizard of Oz bellowing, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”

And who knows?  There’s always the slimmest of chances that something goes wrong and Trump gets elected.  And that would be the funniest joke of all.  Can you imagine if Trump actually did drain the swamp?  Hilarious.

How Many Macromolecules Can Dance on the Head of a Pin

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Here’s a very interesting discussion of Levinthal’s paradox.  In a nutshell, the paradox is related to the almost infinite possibilities in the ways that a macromolecular protein can fold into its primary, secondary and tertiary shape versus the effortless way that proteins function in living thing.  The author says the degrees of freedom inherent in a large protein molecule have been modelled and there are supposed to be 10300 different shapes that the protein could assume.  Now the point is that this number is so absurdly large that the chance of any particular protein molecule assuming the shape it needs in order to perform its biochemical function in a living cell within a short enough time to sustain the metabolic requirements of life seems impossible.

Well I must admit that is a ridiculously large number.  Someone did a guess at how many separate atoms there are in the observable universe and he came up with 1082.  So that gives you a feel for the absurdity of 10300 .

Basically this argument is supposed to demonstrate the unlikeliness of the genesis of life occurring again elsewhere in the universe.

I guess I’m not sure what I think of this.  While the large size of macromolecules render their physical properties subtle and hard to predict, nevertheless, they do possess these properties and these are exactly the properties needed to sustain life in the world we live in.

If they occur on Earth then they could occur elsewhere.  Now the point really is how could life occur in the first place if the exact sequence of amino acids and nucleic acids needed to make up the macromolecules of life are so absurdly complicated and the random forces involved in creating these exact molecules would be so blind?

It seems what the paradox is hinting at is God.  Well, I won’t argue with that.

Father’s Day – 2024 – Crashing Plaster and Pancakes

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And the rolling year has once again brought us back to that most equivocal of fake holidays, “Father’s Day.”  When I say fake, I mean that it’s a manufactured occasion that has no long history of celebration.  Its equivocal nature is owed to the mixed feelings that everyone in a family feels about dear old Dad.  Well, at least that’s my own point of view.

And this is based on my own father and the way he raised his six sons.  Basically, it was like some kind of anthropological experiment that was started out with the best of intentions but then went horribly off the rails and eventually completely overwhelmed the investigators and had to be recast as a cautionary tale for all involved.

A more beleaguered man has never walked the face of the Earth.  He was always outnumbered, outgunned, behind the times, short of resources and out of patience.  I don’t remember him getting through a single day in that house without screaming and hollering at several or all of us.  We were terrible kids.

We broke everything he owned.  We lost every tool he possessed and we caused at least one disaster a week.  His house was perpetually on the edge of crumbling into something resembling the debris piles seen in old footage of London after the Blitz.  When leaks would develop in the house’s flat roof his solution was to use a hand drill on the ceiling to direct the leak and put a bucket under it.  His idea was that by tapping the leak it would prevent it from soaking the whole plaster ceiling and have it collapse onto us while we were sleeping.

He had a steam heat system which perpetually leaked at all of the radiators.  And he battled this problem by attempting to use string and grease to seal the threads of the pipe joints.  But the threads were so stripped that this never accomplished much of anything.  But he soldiered on with the hope that one day he’d catch up with his expenses and have a plumber come in and replace it all.  Finally, the ceiling in the living room underneath the leakiest radiator on the second floor collapsed.  All the plaster crashed down on the living room floor and exposed the wooden laths in the ceiling.  One of my younger brothers was overjoyed and he said aloud, “This will finally force him to fix the ceiling once and for all.”  Well, no.  That ceiling remained in that condition until after my father’s death a number of years later.

So, my example of fatherhood was definitely idiosyncratic.  And as for Father’s Day, if my father could have had his wish on that day, it would have been to lock us all out of the house for the whole day and leave him alone to watch baseball, horse racing and boxing on his tiny, pathetic, black and white, constantly drifting television set.  But that was an impossibility.  We were an omnipresent reminder of his status as Dad.

So, on Father’s Day he often fell back on his only real domestic skill.  He could make pancakes and French toast by the imperial ton.  And in that house, he had to.  He bought the cheapest pancake mix and syrup he could find in bulk containers.  I always imagined that he got it from war surplus.  And when pancake day arrived, he’d cover all the burners on the stove with griddles and he would cook and we would eat stacks of pancakes until we couldn’t move.  It was probably the high point of our lives together.  For that brief time, we were all happy simultaneously and we were all well fed which rarely otherwise occurred.

So maybe Father’s Day should be like that.  A day when Dad should find something he knows he can do that makes the whole family admit that he’s good for something other than paying the bills.  Anyway, it’s a thought.