Category: Current Events

09JUN2024 – OCF Update – It’s a Rainy Morning Sunday, That’s Got Me Without Knowing What to Write

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A rainy Sunday at the Compound.  I’m stuck in the house and getting on Camera Girl’s nerves, I can tell.  Next week will be very busy.  Tuesday will be a marathon of work until the wee hours.  I will be with the people, in all their gritty and idiosyncratic splendor.  So, I must get some things done today.  I’ve got photos and quotes to get uploaded and scheduled.  And I’ve got some scheduling things to figure out for my writing.  I’ve been so busy lately with work that I haven’t been able to do any fiction writing at all.  And that bothers me a lot.  As you get older the number of creatively productive hours in a day or a week decreases.  So, I need to make some time budgeting decisions to maximize my results.

But life rolls on.  And the now incredible increases to the cost of living are biting ever harder at my meager resources.  I was looking at some repairs on the swimming pool and wondered if outright replacing the lining might make some sense.  But when I heard the estimate, I was gob-smacked.  Yikes!  So, I’ll pay the piratical repair costs for patching for this year and decide about replacement next year when I get rich.

But just to assert our rights as Americans to waste money we went to the Chinese restaurant for dinner.  Sure, the cost was up about 50% from what I remember it to be.  But it made Camera Girl happy and it spared her having to cook last night.  And they have really fresh and delicious food at this place so it was a treat.

I was reading how McDonald’s might be pulling out of California all together.  And on one of the talk shows the socialist pundit was putting a brave face on it and saying that this would open up opportunities for Mom and Pop shops.  I was thinking, “Sure mom and pop get a really good deal on food prices compared to a behemoth like McDonald’s and they’ll definitely be able to outcompete McDonald’s on rental costs, utility costs and paper and plastic consumables.  Oh yeah!  It’s gonna be a paradise for small businesses in California.

Something that TomD commented about my Here and Now post.  He stressed that our present ruling class is not just more of the same.  He stressed that they’re really working to destroy us, “The progressives want us disarmed, private vehicles gone (except elite), and everyone on the dole and living in huge Soviet style arkologies. Males castrated.”

And I agree with that characterization.  They differ from the past in what they are attempting to accomplish.  Our former elites wanted us as factory wage slaves.  The new elites just want us gone.  And they think they can get the job done quietly and efficiently by eliminating our means of livelihood.  They impoverish us and then weaken us with drugs, illicit and prescription, that they flood the environment with and stupefy our children with a digital narcotic.  We’re being eradicated with poison like roaches.

Well, it won’t be easy but we have to learn how to avoid the traps and organize to assist each other in surviving.  Alright, enough of that.  Finish with something good.

 

I was watching the Coen Brothers version of True Grit the other day.  They’re a couple of nihilistic film makers but they did a remarkable job with this film.

 

Guest Contributor – TomD – 09JUN2024 – Not Your Grandpa’s Elites

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Tom | Flickr

TomD

I don’t know.

I do agree that crooks, incompetents and charlatans have been in American politics forever but I suspect that they had no real interest in destroying the society in which they lived.

The progressive Dims? Not incompetents, that’s for sure. But I do believe that they largely hate the US and wish to tear it down to replace with a socialist authoritarian utopia. Utopia for the elite. For you and me, not so much.

The progressives want us disarmed, private vehicles gone (except elite), and everyone on the dole and living in huge Soviet style arkologies. Males castrated

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 09JUN2024 – When the CO’s In a Skirt

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war pig

 

They poisoned the well and they also shot themselves in the foot. The US DEPENDS on mostly White, hetero teenagers to fill our military. That’s the majority demographic in the US. Sponsoring combat video games and financing and supporting Top Gun movies can only go so far. The gender agenda is indeed poison. I can imagine the reaction if any of my commanding male officers had shown up at formation in a female officers skirt.

Those who do still join rapidly become disillusioned and leave after their first enlistment. Fewer and fewer make it a career. Reenlistment bonuses are high but that’s not enough. Most of them cannot stand their current C-in-C. They saw running from Afghanistan with our tails between our legs as betrayal. Making the Taliban the best equipped military in the region with our abandoned weapons was close to treason. All Biden taught Russia, China, North Korea and Iran is that if you string it out long enough, America will quit. Even if America wins all the battles, the enemy can outlast our cowardly and self serving politicians.

Israel Frees Four Hostages in Raid on Hamas Captors

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Four Israeli hostages were rescued alive by troops from Hamas captivity in a daring operation in the central Gaza Strip earlier today, the military announces.

The rescued hostages are named as Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv. All four had been abducted by Hamas terrorists on October 7 from the Supernova music festival near the southern community of Re’im.

Special forces had simultaneously raided two Hamas sites in central Gaza’s Nuseirat. At one location, Argamani was rescued, while Meir Jan, Kozlov, and Ziv were at the second location.

The rescued hostages are all in good condition, according to initial medical assessments. They were taken to Tel Hashomer Hospital for further evaluation.

Amid the operation, heavy airstrikes were carried out in the area against Hamas sites and in support of the ground troops. Hamas health authorities reported a “large number” of casualties.”

Most of the mainstream media sites are playing up the Palestinian casualties incurred during the rescues.  Yeah, I guess being a kidnapper or a kidnapper’s neighbor isn’t the safest decision you can make.  Pro-tip, live far away from Israeli captives.

Kudos to the IDF for pulling off a difficult mission.  Regrettably there was one IDF death.

The Here and Now

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Upon reflection I’ve decided that more than half of my mental anguish over our current situation is due to my own gullibility.  Without a doubt, those running our country are terrible people.  They run roughshod over the laws that we supposedly live by and the decencies that allegedly define our public morality.

But on closer inspection, hasn’t this always been the case?  Haven’t there always been political bosses who manipulate our politics and government, to profit themselves and their cronies and haven’t they used immigration from time immemorial to control who came to power and what the terms of life for the common people would be?

Whether it was Tammany Hall in 19th century New York City or Mayor Daly in mid-20th century Chicago hasn’t hypocrisy and dishonesty and just plain graft been the rule and not the exception?  The only thing that has changed is that today the things they teach children as regime propaganda is much closer to suicidal than in former days.

Believe it or not, this realization has brightened my mood substantially.  Knowing that the evil regime I live under is more or less representative of the historical norm for these things gives me hope that most of us can figure out a way to negotiate our trek through this gulag.

Certainly, it doesn’t make it a more wholesome place than it is.  Our children are certainly being pumped full of poisonous lies about themselves and the world around them.  Certainly, we are being discriminated against by our own government and the elites that control almost everything around us.  But if you consider that it’s always been this way (more or less), then it stands to reason that we can find a way to survive and thrive in this environment too.

If after all, my own stupidity convinced me that a better world was the norm then educating myself to the reality should afford me the advantage I need to mitigate the damage done by the noxious aspects of the system and also allow me to see where I can get the best return on investment from my efforts.

In general, selecting friends and associates carefully to avoid entanglement with woke zealots and other crazy people is highly important.  And children will need to be schooled by sane teachers.  Later on, children will have to learn how to carefully navigate their way through cancel culture by very judicious use of silence.

All of this is sad and inspires a feeling of indignation when thought about in the context of the supposed basis of American liberty and values.  But if the reality is that those values have never been in force for the last hundred and fifty years then the rational approach is to figure out what is needed in the here and now.  Banging our heads against a wall that will not disappear is foolish and even dangerous.  After all this is a wall that is just as likely to open up and unleash a platoon of FBI agents with an arrest warrant.

So, I’m actually cheered by my new way of looking at things.  What I’ll be looking for are groups and individuals who are writing the book of how to survive and thrive in the here and now, not in the perfect world we wish were here.

Cannibals Ate My Debate with Donald Trump

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Donald Trump has agreed to a debate Joe Biden with every possible unfair advantage going to Biden.  It will be on CNN with no live audience and the moderators will be his worst enemies and they will be able to cut off his microphone if they don’t like what he is saying.  It’s as bad as it can get in terms of stacking the deck against Trump.

So, you have to ask yourself why Trump would agree to this.  My guess is that he believes that Biden can’t get through the proceedings without an embarrassing health problem of one sort or another.  Based on all of his latest attempts at outdoor personal appearances, it seems like Biden has become alarmingly incontinent.  In addition, Biden’s memory is now completely unreliable.  And so, he is dependent on teleprompters to get him through routine speeches and question and answer events.  Between these two conditions it seems highly likely that in a stressful and unpredictable event like a debate with Donald Trump, really bad things could happen.

It seems to me there is a definite risk that Trump could end up “losing” these debates.  If the people running the debate control the feed, they can obfuscate any number of embarrassing moments and could even hide certain unfair practices that they allow Biden to benefit from.  For instance, by controlling what the camera is showing they can hide the fact that an outside source could provide Biden with a tele prompted or voice in ear answer to a statement by Trump.  Now Trump and his people know this.  So, they are taking a chance that Biden’s team which includes both his own handlers and the CNN technicians could manipulate the video enough to make it seem as if Joe Biden won the debate.  And yet Trump’s willing to go down this road.  I have to assume he thinks the potential upside of a Biden catastrophe is likely enough to risk the probable downside of a successful manipulation.

I’ve got mixed feelings about the whole thing.  I would have demanded, if not an even playing field, then at least one of the moderators being from the Right.  Tucker Carlson would have been the obvious choice.  But I’ll be watching the debates hoping to see Joe Biden break into tongues or fall over his feet or run off the stage to have his diaper changed.  I may be sorely disappointed.  Maybe Joe makes it through unscathed or maybe the moderators manage to make Trump look bad by stacking the deck against him with Stormy Daniels and “convicted felon” non-questions.  But if Donald Trump is willing to buck the odds to score a knockout blow against the already wobbly Dementia Joe, then I should invest the time to watch this crazy bit of stagecraft.

Who knows we all might be watching a bit of history where fate steps in and decides the outcome.  I’ve got the two hours to spend.  I might even make some popcorn to make it fun.

06JUN2024 – If This Goes On

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Another D-Day, another milestone that has lost its connection to the current day reality.  Imagine if Joe Biden wanted a draft to fight the Russians or the Chinese.  Would the Zoomers show up?  No.  They’d walk away.  Every particle of pride and patriotism has been vacuum-sublimated right out of them.  D-Day is just a subject for a first-person shooter video game.  Dying for their country or for freedom doesn’t have any meaning.  Now they’ll protest for climate change or against oil or to save the Palestinians.  They’ll block streets or occupy the Registrar’s Office or riot if they think the city or state will let them.  But if someone has a gun and is likely to fire it, they don’t want any part of that.

WE live in a different world.  The government has perfected a formula for controlling the populace through perpetual crisis.  COVID or bank failure or economic meltdown or border crisis or race war or terrorist attack or overseas war or, or, or.  They’ve got a crisis du jour to keep the people scared and docile.

So, the only question at this point is:

Can this go on forever?

They’re bankrupting us and making it impossible for us to live a middle-class life.  They insult and threaten us with ever more repressive infringements on our rights.  They lie to us about everything they say.  And now it’s clear they want to replace us with third world serfs that will work for nothing.

Unfortunately, I think the answer is that it can go on forever.  What they’ve done is replaced independent-minded free Americans with impoverished third-world peasants who will do anything not to have to go back to hell.  It would take an army of people determined to resist impoverishment and with an organized and well-thought-out plan of action that could push back the federal government in a wealthy state with enough resources and liberty-minded citizens to push back the feds and make them go home to Washington.

I’d like to believe that such an organization will appear.  But I’m very doubtful that it will.  There have been some individual actions in places like Florida and Texas that gives me glimmers of hope.  But there’s a big difference between that and an army of people united in an effort to free themselves from the tyranny of the managerial state.  I hate to harken back to the great man model but it always seems to come back to it.  All of these ideas come back to someone with money, power and guts organizing the effort and providing the energy needed to organize the effort and keep it going for years.

And of course, the federal government won’t be doing nothing while this “revolt” is taking place.  They’ll be playing hardball including imprisoning anyone they can.  It will begin to resemble a war and there will be plenty of casualties.  And that is the biggest reason why I hesitate to think anything will be accomplished.  Will even a great man risk prison or worse for himself and his family?  Donald Trump is giving us a taste of what that will be like.  Will his example inspire imitators or act as a cautionary tale to warn them off?

What do you think?

What Will Come of the Resistance to the Leftist Federal Government?

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Michael Anton Reviews Glenn Ellmers’s “The Narrow Passage”

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I just read Michael Anton’s review of Glenn Elmer’s book “The Narrow Passage.”  The book is an attempt to identify the origins and reasons for the degeneration of Western society that currently is described as “woke culture.”

I won’t attempt to paraphrase his paraphrase of Elmer’s argument but it will be enough to say that Elmer’s thesis is that woke culture is the result of the same tendency that destroyed fifth century Athens.  Basically the elites of that time and place rejected religion based on the rational arguments of the philosophers and the moral relativism that replaced religion proved too nihilistic to sustain a healthy society.  Now this is my cheap and dirty version of Anton’s essay but it gives you the idea.

And truthfully it sounds about right.  When you displace God in a community’s life what’s left is pretty awful.  Anton’s review looks at all of the historical precedents for this theory from Plato to the Straussians.  But the overarching concept is pretty clear.  Pushing God out leads to the woke mindset.  Sometimes not directly but eventually as everything normal and decent is questioned and rejected for the sake of freedom.

Interesting essay.  I’m tempted to read the book but we’ll have to see.  There’s so much to do.  Time’s short.

Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 05JUN2024 – Clown World Headline

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https://x.com/ArthurinCali/status/1798371419270898166

Meanwhile, institutional media such as The Washington Post continues to try and curry favor with the administration by putting out headlines like, “Biden seeks to cast Trump as would-be authoritarian.” Really? The same Biden & Co. that disregards SCOTUS decisions, abdicates their duty to defend our nation’s borders, has his political opposition charged and convicted by sycophant allies in multiple US states? A Hollywood screenplay couldn’t be written this good as a political thriller.

Do the Right Thing

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The Washington Post lost $77 million last year.  Now the paper’s owner Jeff Bezos spends $77 million on having his bald head waxed every month so the amount of money is almost inconsequential.  But the fact that they lost half of their subscription base was just too embarrassing and so Bezos brought in a hatchet man as publisher and now he has given the paper’s first female executive editor; Sally Buzbee the boot.

Well, the newsroom is very unhappy.  And what is there number one worry?  Loss of diversity!

  • “I don’t think she deserved to go out this way,” the first staffer told me, noting that in conversations with their colleagues, people “don’t feel good about the fact that the first female executive editor of The Washington Post got a one paragraph goodbye note at 8:30 p.m. on a Sunday, and that she’s being replaced by more white men we don’t know.”

 

  • “Everyone was pretty shocked with your email last night,” one reporter said at the meeting, according to a source present. The reporter suggested that “the most cynical interpretation sort of feels like you chose two of your buddies to come in and help run the Post, and we now have four white men running three newsrooms,” and expressed surprise at this development given Lewis’s prior commitments to diversity.

 

  • Later in the meeting, another reporter asked Lewis whether “any women or people of color were interviewed and seriously considered for either of these positions,” a question that prompted applause.

Unfortunately, their boss is a little more concerned with the lack of readers wanting to read the written product produced by this much vaunted diversity:

  • At one point Lewis was asked whether he was intentionally bringing in people who come from a different culture than the Post. “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore,” Lewis said. “So, I’ve had to take decisive, urgent action to set us on a different path, sourcing talent that I have worked with that are the best of the best.”

 

  • “Don’t we need our brilliant social journalists and service journalists as embedded in our core product to make sure that people are actually reading the thing that’s out at the center of the mission of the Washington Post?” one staffer asked, to which Lewis replied, “You haven’t done it. I’ve listened to the platitudes. Honestly, it’s just not happening.”

 

  • “The fact that Will Lewis keeps going to his network rather than plucking Washington Post leadership implies that he finds everyone lacking, and I think that’s kind of the most disturbing thing,” a second staffer told me.

 

So, the Washington Post is no longer selling something people want to buy, threatening the jobs of everyone working there and all the drones working there care is that the people being sent in to save their jobs are white men!

It might almost make you wonder if maybe this fixation on race and gender clouds their judgement in terms of their writing.

I guess there’s some hope in the fact that the publisher they brought in openly tells his employees that they are failing at their jobs and things have to change.  Of course, what he probably really has to do is lower his costs by reducing his staff to an absolute minimum and pay them as little as possible.  He’s probably thinking he can buy an AI that will write, “Orange Man bad” for a small fraction of what he pays his Ivy League diversity hires.

The truth is that the whole news business has been upended by the impact of Google on the advertising model and also the ubiquity of news and opinion across the internet threatens the very existence of the print news industry.  Well, some of them will make it.  Apparently, the New York Times has stabilized their subscriptions by adding digital accounts successfully so it can be done.  But maybe there’s no place for another New York Times.  Maybe the Washington Post will have to go.  As I said, Jeff Bezos can pay to keep open or close down the Washington Post without changing his profit statement even a single percent.  But what will be interesting is how the delicate snowflakes react to the news that diversity doesn’t pay the bills or give the owner a reason to keep the place going in the absence of profits.

Now Christopher Rufo has become interested in the trials and tribulations of the Washington Post’s attempt to return to profitability.  And he’s come up with a recommendation.  Fire Taylor Lorenz.  You may remember Taylor from the time she doxed the woman who runs Libs of TikTok.  Because of this she is a very unpopular with a pretty good part of the American public.  Rufo’s point is that if the Washington Post wants to increase its potential reader pool maybe they should eliminate the more ethically challenged staff members.  And that’s the real reason for me writing this post.  I just think it would be hilarious if they gave Taylor the boot.