Category: Current Events

That Zero is Too Cold for Me

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In the immortal words of Billy Preston in his 1974 song of the same name, “Nothing from nothing leaves nothing.”

Follow me here.  You’ll get the picture.

As is my habit on Friday morning I listened to the podcast of that most suave of demons, the Voice of Saruman himself (aka the ZMan).  And he did not disappoint.  This week he was banging the drum against the Stupid Party (aka the GOP).  And as usual, he made some devastating points.  The gist of his diatribe was that between the Democrats and Republicans in Congress, the districts have been gerrymandered to the point where each party has a death grip on 90% of the districts they currently control.  And because of this partisan lock on particular Congressional seats, the Republican office holders really fear only one thing; displeasing the party bosses.  Because it’s the party that gives them the money they need to run their campaigns and essentially only the party can remove them by primarying them.  And for that reason, the will of the electorate is completely ignored in favor of what the party apparatus decides.

And so, the ZMan declares that the only way to break the GOP’s stranglehold on power is to vote them all out of office.  This is similar to the present campaign to “zero out” the Tories in the British House of Parliament.  If all the conservative voters voted for Labor (and less surely if they all just don’t vote at all) the Tories will be wiped out.  Once that happens the establishment will be thrown into a panic and some kind of reform might take place.  Of course, in the meantime while the progressives are in complete control all kinds of horrors will unfold but without a doubt the stalemate going on in their government will disappear.  Who knows maybe Nigel Farage’s Independence Party might replace the Tories and actually reinstate representative government in England.

So, the ZMan has a similar idea.  Although I’ll give him credit.  He modified the idea enough to allow that conservative voters should split their vote.  They should vote for Trump for President but not vote for a single other Republican.  He reasons that regardless of whether Trump wins or not the huge discrepancy between Trump’s vote totals and the other Republicans will make the point that the Republicans have lost the confidence of the people and the system is completely broken.  He even states that if Trump wins and the Republicans are wiped out in the House and Senate, he would hardly notice the difference in how he would govern.  Now this isn’t accurate.  If the Republicans were almost completely wiped out then the Democrats could easily remove Trump from office by impeachment.  But I do admit it’s a pretty attractive idea.  Vote for Trump but poke a thumb in the eye of Mitch McConnell and Mike Johnson.

Of course, I think about introducing a bit more complexity to this scheme which definitely has its points.  I would hold off until 2026.  In the meantime, I would want some authority, maybe Donald Trump or some independent right-wing group to produce a score card for members of Congress that would decide if they deserved to be re-elected or fired.  This list would be provided to the Republican party with the ultimatum, either replace these lawmakers or have them zeroed out.  And first off, the House and Senate Republicans should be provided with the names that must be immediately installed in their leadership positions to replace McConnell and Johnson and any of their cronies that currently thwart the will of the voters.  And if this ultimatum is ignored then we go straight to full zero (with maybe a few exceptions for anyone I really like!).

Now would this really work?  I think it would if the people completely lose faith in the election process.  And that is why I would wait until 2026.  If Donald Trump wins, this idea could help him tame the GOP.  And if he loses in 2024, I think the backlash would power a zero movement that could completely disrupt the Republican party.  Maybe it might even be Donald Trump who could lead the charge to zero out the Republicans.  If not someone else would do.  Maybe Tucker Carlson would like to organize an investigative team to vet each member of Congress and single out the zeroes for zeroing.  Anyway, that’s my spin on an interesting idea.

A testcase for this strategy is going to take place in the UK later this year.  The ruling Tories are already on track to lose two thirds of their seats in Parliament and even the 24% estimate for their post-election share may be generous.  Nigel Farage’s Independence Party may get a chance to see if replacing a major party can be done in a large modern nation.

Emerging From the Cocoon

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Just finished up a large and annoying project at work.  So, I’m celebrating a day of freedom with a big mug of coffee that Camera Girl made for me.  To paraphrase a line from a movie, “What did people do before they had coffee?”  Someone once told me that the American Century was fueled on coffee and cigarettes.  I could believe him.  Could the decline in American effectiveness in so many arenas be attributed to the decline in smoking?  It’s an interesting idea.

I’m looking out the window at the grass growing and the first butterflies of the year.  Unfortunately, I’m also seeing the first carpenter bees of the season.  For anyone lucky enough to not know what these are, they look like exceptionally large, aggressive bumble bees that burrow into wood (such as the outside of my house) and make a nest in which they lay their eggs.  Camera Girl was picking some dandelions that were in one of her raised gardens when a couple of these destructive bugs started to buzz around her.  I warned her away from the garden and promised to find out where they were burrowing and use lethal force to settle their hash.

May will be a very busy month both at home and work.  And that’s fine.  With the longer days and hopefully the warmer temperatures there will be more time to fix stuff and set things up around the grounds.  Today I was reminded of another piece of carpentry that has intruded on Camera Girl’s sense of how things should be.  And with the price of lumber and hardware reaching astronomical heights, what a wonderful time it is to be a homeowner.

The first hummingbird sightings have occurred and Camera Girl has put up her feeders.  I’ll try this year to do a better job with the 200-600mm lens to get some really good shots of them.  Yesterday I went out to get a few shots of the big elm tree that grows around here.  The leaves were bursting out of their buds and the tree has a very distinctive appearance that I wanted to capture.

Another drama playing out this spring is the epic battle between Camera Girl’s pet crow Moe and his arch-enemy Poe (a newly arrived raven).  She leaves scraps out for Moe in the morning but lately Poe shows up and snatches them.  Just now Camera Girl called me over to the living room window to witness Moe dive bombing Poe and forcing him away from the snack area.  Secretly I’m a fan of Poe.  I’ve always wanted a raven in the neighborhood and this seems like my big chance.  Maybe it’s my fate to become the man who made peace between Moe and Poe.  I mean can’t they all just get along sharing the chicken fat?  Nobel Peace Prize?  We’ll see.

 

I think it’s time for a photo expedition.  I’ll have to make a survey of what the local environment has to offer.  There are usually some antique car rallies and such things but I was hoping for something a little different.  What I think I’d like to get to is a gun show.  I know very little about guns but I think they could make a very good photo opportunity.  I’ve contacted one of the bigger shows to see if they have any qualms about photography.

Well anyway, we’ve finally put the last vestiges of winter behind us.  I saw a spring peeper stumbling around after I raked up some leaves and he staggered away into the woods looking like Mitch McConnell blinking in the lights of the photojournalists trying to confirm that he is indeed still breathing.

This weekend we’re going to a lecture on the latest word on beekeeping.  It’s been more than a decade since my last hive collapsed.  I’ve watched a few videos on the “natural” beekeeping method.  I stopped trying to keep them when the varroa mites devastated the whole industry back fifteen years or so.  I’ve toyed with the idea of catching a wild swarm on the theory that these bees have come into equilibrium with the various pests and will fare much better than the heavily “medicated” hives that exist on the edge of succumbing to the very insecticides used to beat back the mites.  I’ll ask this local expert what he thinks and who knows, maybe I’ll try my hand at beekeeping again.  Although I’ve been warned that between blueberries, raspberries and bees I’ll have every black bear in a fifty-mile radius lined up to clean me out.  Such is life.

Well in the immortal words of George Costanza, “You know, Spring! Rejuvenation, re-birth, everything’s blooming, all that crap!”

Why Did They Lie

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Back in 2020 when the COVID pandemic was beginning, a “tight network of elite scientists soon engaged in a remarkably effective effort to deceive the world. They collectively briefed the U.S. government, World Health Organization, and any media outlets that would listen: The science was settled, this wasn’t a lab leak. Some of them went on to publish the now-infamous Proximal Origins paper in March 2020 in Nature Medicine, ranked as the most impactful science article of that year. “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” the paper’s authors asserted.”

But now we have a much better understanding, not only of how COVID got loose but also why its origin was hidden.

“It was always a lie; one of the most consequential lies of the 21st century. Like all great lies it perfectly inverted the truth: the evidence supporting natural spillover has always been thin. Conversely, the evidence pointing to a lab leak has always been compelling and has grown substantially more persuasive with time.”

And the quoted article concludes that the lies were made for four different reasons:

  1. One group of scientists who lied were direct collaborators with Wuhan in their bat virus gain of function experiments and therefore were directly responsible for the COVID outbreak.  They lied to avoid culpability in this enormous disaster.
  2. A second group of scientists weren’t linked to the Wuhan lab but had strongly supported the idea that gain of function research was safe and therefore would be seen as partially responsible for the risky research that gave rise to COVID.  Also if COVID’s origin is pinned to gain of function research then these researchers would be deprived of this experimental practice for safety reasons.
  3. A third group had financial and reputational incentives provided by Anthony Fauci in the form of grants for research.  They sold their reputations for research dollars.
  4. And the fourth group was anybody who absolutely refused to say it was a lab leak because Donald Trump said it was.  They hated Trump so much that they would swear that the core of the sun is cold if Trump said it was hot.

In a just world, people in the first three groups should go to prison for lying about the origin of a disaster that had such horrific economic impact.  The fourth group should be mocked incessantly and any of them in the media industry should lose their jobs.

But this isn’t a just world.  It’s just the world.

A Reckoning

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Watching the bizarre scenes from the various campus “protests,” I thought, what a strange point in American history.  America conquers the world and then tries to swallow the world.  But in the process, loses its soul.  Or maybe its identity.  Or more exactly its elites try to cast off the European based identity of the western world in order to fool the world into thinking the West equals the world.  And maybe it’s a brilliant ploy that would cement the entire world into eternal subservience to the elites.

But it also means that we, the regular people, become no one.  The New Testament (Mark 8:36) says, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”  And we’re not even the ones gaining the whole world.  We’re just losing the little bit we had.

These geniuses who run everything.  These billionaires playing ten-dimensional chess with artificial intelligence; pulverizing and homogenizing all the human bits of the world into a gray paste that they can sell back to us in a plastic bottle; have it all figured out.  TikTok is the new rock and roll.  They hypnotize the kids by selling them this vapid product by the minute or the fifteen second, whatever happens to be the attention span they’ve reduced their audience to.

And this is nothing completely new.  The mass culture has been selling this since the invention of the phonograph and the motion picture.  What’s new has been the removal of anything resembling the original American or even Western culture.  What’s left is pathetic.  Childish at best.  More like infantile.  Dysfunctional and ranging into deviance in multiple directions.  It’s as if the intention is to divert a whole generation into a dead end where they will be dependent on the government to keep them alive but completely helpless.

And I think they’ve been successful.  Most of the next generation are doomed to a marginal existence that will not include marriage, home ownership or children.  They are a termination.

So, the important question is how to pluck your own family and friends out of this dead end and put them on the path to life?  I guess you have to do it every day.  You have to preach the good word of normalcy.  Tell the kids that the real secret of life is to make yourself a useful, capable human being and then find a mate and build a family.  And try to encourage them to strive for the things that are hard to do.  And by all means provide moral and financial support and advice when you think you have information that they lack.

Watching those morons on the campuses act out their Che Guevera pantomime has been a fascinating reminder that since the Occupy Wall Street movement back in the Obama era we have been watching a lost generation demanding that the government pick them up off the playground floor and give them their pudding cup to soothe them for being complete losers.  They want Communism not because they think it’s just but because they’re too lazy and stupid to even try to live.

The red states are going to have to cut off welfare to the useless so that these people will retreat to the blue states where they can be stacked up in two by six cubicles, fed their daily ration of crickets and narcotized with porn and pot as they await the blessed release of death.  All of these people will have to be swept away.  They don’t want to live.  They just want to be plugged into their matrix.

There’s no way to keep this absurd thing going.  There has got to be a reckoning.

The Student Protests

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The news has been full of accounts of students setting up tent cities on the grounds of Columbia University and other elite schools around the country.  They are protesting their universities’ failure to stop the Gaza war.  Well, of course that’s ridiculous.  How exactly would Columbia University stop the Israeli Defense Forces?  How many nuclear weapons can Columbia University field?  At last count I think it is still zero.  To be fair to the cretins in tents, what they want is for their university to divest of any Israeli stocks and any stocks of companies that make weapons that the US government provides to Israel.

All of this angst is reminiscent of the student protests in the 1960s and 1970s over the war in Vietnam.  The same tired playbook is being used.  The radicals are disrupting the education process and garnering as much attention in the media as they can and attempting to get the presidential race wrapped into their cause.

You know it’s a funny thing.  When I see these useless people and hear them speak about their confused take on the Gaza War, I despise them and wish that the police would drown them in pepper spray and tase them into submission, tie ropes around their feet and drag them away.

And in the red states that’s more or less what is happening.  In these states they want the colleges to educate their kids and there’s no room or time for Bolshevik Theatrics.  You can watch the state police drag the wannabe antifa players off to jail.  But in the People’s Republic they beg and plead with their toddlers to eat their vegetables and un-occupy the Bursar’s Office, pretty please.  And I guess we’re supposed to be upset if the mental patients are running the asylum.  “Something must be done!”

But when I think about it a little, I say, “Who cares?”  My family doesn’t go to Columbia, Harvard or Berkley.  We couldn’t afford to and we wouldn’t be accepted.  So why should I care that the type of people they do accept wants to put on this silly passion play?  I sure don’t.  In fact, I’d be thrilled if they burned Harvard, Yale, Columbia and the rest of the Ivy League right down to the ground.  I’d buy the DVD and watch it at Christmas.  It would be a job well done.

And why should I care if they lay siege to the Democratic National Convention?  Let them.  Let them occupy all of Chicago if they want (although I wonder if the gang-bangers will be intimidated by the Zoomer protesters).  For all I know this is like the Summer of George Floyd and will allow the Left to consolidate its hold on the youth vote.

But either way, what it makes me think is how little I have in common with these people who inhabit the Left.  The future I care about will not be decided by the students protesting at Columbia.  The uselessness of those students will lead nowhere.  They will not become leaders or anything else.  Most of them won’t even leave children after them.  The women are unlovable and the “men” are feeble children.

The young people I care about are the ones who are looking around themselves and trying to figure out a way to scratch out a normal life.  Learn a skill, get a job, find a wife, raise a family.  Real life.  Not sleeping in a tent on a college quadrangle and pretending to be a revolutionary while your parents pay that university a hundred thousand dollars a year.  Figuring out how to help these young people, in my case, my grandchildren, is the most important consideration any older person can have.

As for the Ivy League Intifada, honestly who cares?

Talk the Talk

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Regular readers of this site know I tend to make fun of H P Lovecraft’s prose style.  In his better written stories, it has a quasi-nineteenth century sound to it.  But in some of his less ably written material it instead just sounds kind of overblown.  But recently I’ve been listening to a YouTube channel called Horror Babble by some guy called Ian Gordon who sounds a little like the actor who played Jay Peterman on Seinfeld.  He provides an accent that, I guess, is supposed to sound like something between 1920’s Oxbridge English and possibly early twentieth century Boston Brahmin.

After listening to a few of these recordings I’ve realized that this presentation makes these stories incalculably more entertaining.  Let me qualify this statement.  It doesn’t make the stories better horror stories.  But the presentation is just more fun.  I think the accent makes the ridiculousness of the stories seem intentional.  It’s camp.

And maybe it works because that’s more or less the “voice” that Lovecraft was hearing in his own head.  It’s always seemed to me that Lovecraft’s work was sort of an homage to Edgar Allan Poe.  And because Lovecraft lived far removed from the era when Poe’s prose was contemporary and because Poe was a consummately better writer Lovecraft’s language always seems stilted.   But with a spoken word interpreter somewhat bridging the gap with his theatrical reading it somehow works pretty well.

Now most of you probably already listen to audio-books.  The only ones I’ve ever listened to were Larry Correia’s Adventures of Tom Stranger with Adam Baldwin providing the voice talent.  And come to think of it the specific voice really does make a big difference in the enjoyment of that story too.

Well, anyway, this little epiphany has got me thinking about the voice that you hear when you write something.  I mean, unless you’re writing a character that’s more or less you, how do you hear that character or characters speaking.  What do they sound like?  Is it a regional accent?  And that’s kind of a big deal.  If all my characters sound exactly like me that might make it hard for my readers to see these characters as real people.  Going back and reading some of my dialog I would say that there are definitely differences in speech for the different characters.  And this is most noticeable for characters that differ in sex, age and generation.  So, I’m not worried that I have to reinvent all of my dialog.

But it does occur to me that maybe I’d like to add some characters that have very flamboyant speech patterns just to give the story some extra zing.  After all, even Shakespeare added dialect characters to make some of the scenes comical or memorable.  His dialect characters were usually Irish or Welsh or Scottish.  I guess I could throw in a Southie from Boston or a South Asian character for good measure.  But if I really want to get exotic, I’ll throw in a Millennial Social Justice Warrior.  Now that’s a foreign language that’ll take some practice.

Unbridled Enthusiasm 2024 Version

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I must be getting progressively more addlepated.  Even though I’ve seen up close and personal how Washington and the Democrats produce the outcomes they want, even after just seeing Mike Johnson fold like a cheap suit and give the people in charge everything they demanded; zillions of dollars for the neo-cons and gestapo powers for the FBI, somehow, I’ve become afflicted with unbridled enthusiasm.  And the only reason is because everywhere I look, more and more people are looking at Joe Biden and saying, “You’ve got be kidding me!”

Now, this “everywhere” doesn’t include hardcore regime mouthpieces like Morning Joe Scarborough or Rachel Maddow, but even some Democrats are beginning to realize that Joe Biden as a presidential candidate is a travesty.  He’s a walking corpse whose every unscripted speech will include absurdities up to and including the classic, “cannibals ate my uncle Bosey.

Now sure the powers that be don’t care what the consensus is, in the country.  A poll could come out two days before the election that has Trump up twenty points in every swing state and after the obligatory two weeks, they would unashamedly have Joe Biden win by a handful of votes in each of those states.  They can do it, so they will do it.  It’s as simple as that.

But if and when that happens then this will be the 1990s Soviet Union and it will usher in the end of this regime.  When the lies become so blatant that nobody even pretends to believe them anymore then the end is near.  Because with nothing to fear they will begin the full-scale looting of the system and with no value left in it, the supports will collapse.

What will that look like?  If I were to guess I’d say hyperinflation and food riots.  Now why should I be enthusiastic about all this?  Because maybe the powers that be aren’t as crazy as the people they’ve hired to run their circus.  The people in the FBI, the State Department and the IRS are true believers who play their parts but can get carried away.  Higher up in the echelons of power there may be some people with a better understanding of the stakes that are at risk and maybe a better understanding of social and economic factors that come into play when people realize they are being manipulated and lied to.  And they just might back away from the road we’re on.  But even if they don’t reaching the end of this road is a step in the right direction.

I admit there’s nothing very cheering in what is likely to go on during the 2024 election.  I expect massive electoral fraud with absentee ballots.  I expect Joe Biden will be re-elected.  But I think that will be an ending.    No one will be able to take American presidential elections seriously after that.  The whole process will be akin to professional wrestling or television talent shows; strictly entertainment or as people are saying it lately performative.

At that point half of this country will know that their prosperity is in their own hands and will be despite what the federal government does and not because of it.  And that is where we have to get to.  At that point, action by the red states will become the crucial news of the day and what will be discussed and voted on by the citizens who don’t want to be swallowed up by globalists human extinction program.  And once enough people are thinking in those terms progress toward something better will begin.

“My Uncle Bosey was eaten by cannibals.”

Stupid in High and Low Places

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Putting aside Trump (meaning his trials and the Supreme Court’s review of them and the various election stories) I guess the big story this week are all the campus protests for Gaza.    From what I can see, really lame leftists on various campuses across the country are building encampments and screaming obscenities about Israel in particular and the Jews and the military in general and demanding peace or death or both or neither for Palestinians, Israelis, College presidents, soldiers, Joe Biden or everybody.

I watched some pretty hilarious footage of what happens when Georgia, Indiana, Arizona, Illinois and Ohio state troopers are told to arrest really lame leftist protestors.  I tell you it does my heart good to hear these dopey kids screaming and crying and cursing at the police as they’re being slammed to the ground and zip-tied and dragged away.  Even some of the loopy leftist professors got into the act.  One dopey woman who said she was a professor slapped one of the cops in the head and got the deluxe treatment.

So, what can I make of all this?  Well, I’m guessing that anything that makes it less likely that Zoomers will vote for Joe Biden is a very good thing.  I also think that the Israelis had better decide whether they want to finish off the threat from Hamas in Gaza or not.  If they end the fight without taking complete control over Gaza they will be back where they started and can anticipate the same kinds of attacks in the future.  But I admit it’s a difficult situation when the whole world is accusing you of “genocide” and even your main supporter, the United States begins wavering.  My advice to Netanyahu is hurry up and finish the mission.  Of course, that’s easier said than done.  The Israelis are going to have to transfer the entire population of Gaza into a refugee camp and search each person and all their possessions one by one and then purge the Gaza strip of all weapons and contraband and then begin resettling them.  And then they’ll have to permanently patrol the whole enclave to prevent Hamas from returning to power.  That’s a daunting task.  But when you’re dealing with implacable hate, extreme measures are inevitable.

Jewish Americans are finding out how the Left treats their various constituencies.  You think that they’re your friends until some other more important cause or constituency comes between you and them and then they attack you as if you’re as evil as Trump himself.  They’ll attack you personally and vilify you in the public space and allow terrible people to say and do terrible things to you and your friends.  Well, that’s the reality.  We all have to pick sides in this extremely binary political system.  And if you vote for Democrats you can expect at some point to get more of this behavior.  This is what they are, up close and personal.

The talk is about whether the Democrat Convention will be under siege from the same protestors as the colleges.  I have to admit I’d find that immensely entertaining.  Can you imagine if they storm the convention floor and take Joe Biden captive?  Could he regale them with tales of Uncle Bosey and Corn Pop and how he spent thirty years in a South African prison before becoming Nelson Mandela?  It boggles the mind.  Joe Biden and the Gaza protestors in a struggle session.  That much stupid all concentrated in one place would threaten the very fabric of space-time and could trigger a moron supernova.  Sounds like a good time will be had by all this summer.

27APR2024 – OCF Update

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So, Camera Girl is yelling and throwing stuff at me and threatening me with grievous bodily harm if I don’t do some of the things on the honey do list.  Most pressing in her mind is raking and disposing of all the leaves in her flower beds.  Now this is grunt labor because I’ve never gotten organized.  What I should do is rake the leaves onto the lawn and run the mower over them.  Because a lot of it is oak leaves this reduces them significantly down in volume and makes disposal much less onerous.

But I’m just that lazy that coordinating getting the mower ready for use and piling the leaves on the lawn defeats my initiative.  So instead I’ll go out there and spend ten hours going through this ritual of backbreaking stooping and scooping the leaves into a garbage pail and hauling them to the edge and hurling them into the bottomless abyss that yawns below the Cliffs of Utter Chagrin.  So let me be brief.

It’s a third beautiful day in a row.  No rain.  No clouds.  No wind.  The Lord himself is telling me to get up and go outside and

DO SOMETHING!

So thatsa whata I’ma gonna do.

I’ll be back later with something sad or sublime or inspired.

So please enjoy the morning and we’ll see about later.

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