Category: Current Events

A Man, a Plan, Camera Girl’s Pond Project

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The things a man will do for his wife!  This is going to be a very long week.  Monday and Tuesday will be completely consumed in the service of Dunwich.  By late Tuesday night I will be moaning and groaning and repeating that law of nature “No good deed ever goes unpunished.”  And in Dunwich the punishment is always cruel and extremely unusual.

Be that as it may I had promised Camera Girl that I would build her a goldfish pond and so I have been working at it since it arrived off the third-party delivery truck that Home Depot contracted for the job.  Between Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I got to work with pitch fork, shovel, wrecking bar, rake and wheelbarrow.    I measured off the perimeter, removed the turf and started to dig.  And because this is New England (at least the parts of Dunwich which are tethered to our space-time) the ratio of rock to soil is something like 3/1.  This makes the whole procedure slow and exceedingly painful.  The good news was that the temperature was in the fifties and sixties which made the earth moving tolerable but it was still strenuous enough to prove to me that digging ditches is strictly for prison chain gangs and other equally motivated people.  It brought to mind those scenes in Cool Hand Luke.  When Camera Girl brought me out some refreshments I said in a southern accent, “Taking it off, boss!”  I don’t think she got the reference.

But finally, yesterday as the sun was getting low in the western sky, it looked like the whole hole was deep enough.  So, I lowered the liner into the hole and voila!  In fact, it’s slightly too deep and also it will need a slight adjustment to make it perfectly level.  But the fine tuning will have to wait until Wednesday.  After that I’ll start the back filling that’s needed under the parts of the liner that are raised into steps for the placement of water plants and any goofy ornaments that women feel are needed to amuse the fish and frogs.  That will probably take a day or two.  And then we’ll fill the thing up and buy some water lilies and those other little sea-weedy plants that pond supply stores hand out and then onto the fish store to get goldfish or carp or whatever hardy species are available.  Camera Girl doesn’t want koi which is probably a good idea since they’re expensive and the Great Blue Herons around here like those better.

Truth be told I’m interested in seeing if in addition to the numerous and varied frog and toad species around the yard we manage to attract other cold-blooded critters.  Since I’ve seen them in the yard, I’m guessing garter and water snakes will show up.  And the painted turtles don’t have far to go from the real pond.  But what I’m not sure about is whether any salamanders will migrate over to this new water habitat.  There are several species in the area and I’ve always wanted to attract them to the yard.

Before we moved to Dunwich, I had built a smaller pond for Camera Girl in the yard where we lived.  It always made her happy to sit and watch the various wild animals and insects that gather around water.  I’ll have this up and running before summer and she’ll be able to enjoy it the way she used to.  Ah, the things we do for love.

Wheelbarrows and Ogres

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We had Princess Sack of Potatoes over today.  She’s finishing off her Spring vacation from school.  And we haven’t had much of her time in a while.  Sure, she was here for Easter but her cousins were also here so I didn’t get much chance to spend time.  But today we had fun.  I’m installing a 270-gallon pond liner for Camera Girl, so I’m digging a big hole in the ground and working with a shovel, rake, pitch fork and a wheelbarrow so it’s like incredibly exciting for a little kid.  She wants to help and I have to find something that isn’t dangerous or too hard for a little girl but seems useful to her.  So, I told her to rescue earthworms from the pile of grass turf that I stacked up.  Perfect!  She can get her hands covered with dirt and give Camera Girl some worms for her hideous African Clawed Frog and I’m free to move some rocks and dirt.  After about an hour she had enough and went inside to bake chocolate chip cookies with Camera Girl and I continued on until lunchtime when I finished for the day and took a shower.  So, after lunch she wanted to watch the “Minions” movie which I’ve had enough of.  So, we went our separate ways.  But after that she wanted more movie time so Camera Girl suggested “The Princess Bride.”  The little girl agreed to watch it and I decided to join her to see how she reacted to this time capsule of a movie.

And it was pretty funny how her initial reaction to the movie resembled the behavior of the “grandson” played by Fred Savage when his grandfather (Peter Falk) began narrating the story.  Both the real and fictitious grandchildren were annoyed by the story beginning with a love story introduction.  And her reaction also resembled the child character whenever it seemed that the “heroes” of the story were losing to the bad guys.  There was a sense of outrage and the desire to quit the story.  It was only with great persuasion that I convinced her to hang in there after Wesley had been killed by “the Machine.”  And so, I was immensely pleased when by the end of the movie she was very satisfied with the happily ever after ending.

And after the movie I discussed her opinions about the film and she declared that her favorite character was the “Ogre.”  I corrected her by saying that Fezzik wasn’t an ogre but a giant.  And that André the Giant who played the part was a professional wrestler.  She was very interested in how he did some of the stunts.  I explained to her that the “holocaust cloak” wasn’t real and he was never on fire.  And I said he didn’t really have to climb “The Cliffs of Insanity.”  And the reason she liked him best was because he seemed very jolly.

After that she joined her grandmother in several very competitive games of checkers and then it was time for her to go home with her mom.  After she left, I inspected several of the historical photos of the Princess festooning our refrigerator and looking at a noticeably younger me and a tiny little girl in one picture reminded me very powerfully that the clock is ticking at an alarming rate.  But it was a good day to be a grandfather.

The SPLC bankrolls the KKK

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This week the Justice Department has indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center for fraud for paying white supremacist groups very large sums of money to play boogeyman for the Left.  Now, these weren’t undercover FBI agents they were real nazis and Klansmen who were among the leaders of these organizations.  And it was understood that they earned this money for providing the SPLC and other leftist organizations with talking points against conservatives and the Right in general.  And this has been going on for decades.  All the biggest outrages, like the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottsville, were included in the events that garnered funds from the SPLC for KKK and nazi groups.

Well, it’s official.  All the conspiracy theories that have been floating out there for years about false flag/color revolution operations by the Left and the Deep State were true.  If the SPLC was doing this just imagine what else is out there.  I imagine if the FBI could find the destroyed records, they would have proof that their own agents have done plenty of the same things for years.

But it is nice to see that while we still control the federal government some of the most outrageous frauds against the right will be exposed and punished.  The SPLC has one of the worst reputations for mischaracterizing conservative organizations as hate groups.  Last year they put Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA on their hate list and I’m sure that was one of the contributing factors in Kirk’s assassination.

I think it would be wonderful if the SPLC can be bankrupted and its leaders prosecuted both civilly and criminally to the fullest extent of the law.  People like this do untold damage and contribute to the degrading of freedom of speech and freedom of association.

It should be interesting as this develops to see what famous “nazis” turn out to have been on the payroll of the SPLC.  I’m sure many of us remember some of the more flamboyant “leaders” of far right from years gone by, that always seemed to cause more damage than progress for conservatives.  There may be a lot of answers to why every time a conservative moment arose some particularly idiotic leader seemed to surface and discredit the movement with a moronic statement or stunt.

This was something that I remember the ZMan used to speculate about.  For the most part he thought these people were just useful idiots who wanted the attention and gladly acted out the part of boogeyman de jour.  I’m sure this news would not have shocked him but it probably would have explained a number of specific characters and incidences from recent history that conveniently allowed the Left to use their Right-Wing White Supremacy narrative to demonize conservatives in all their favorite left-wing media sources.

Well, good work Kash Patel and the rest of Donald Trump’s Justice Department for exposing this organization for the fraudulent hate group they actually are.  I hope they get torpedoed this year and not later.

Ay, There’s the Rub

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Lately there has been an enormous storm of controversy about AI being used in fiction writing.  Recently it came out that a self-published story that became quite popular was subsequently picked up by a major publishing house and re-issued with the full weight and authority of this powerhouse including professional editing and a new cover.  But then someone looked closely at the self-published edition and saw that not only was it significantly different from the professionally published edition but that the original was obviously a product of AI.  Now, that caused a firestorm and the publisher withdrew the book permanently.

But a cloud of questions swirl around the affair.  Surely the editors who revised the self-published edition must have recognized that they were dealing with a product of AI writing.  Why would they have purchased this title.  It’s assumed the reason was because the book had already found a ready audience and so the motive was monetary.  But there are other factors.  The authoress Mia Ballard is African American and Native American.  In other words, in the world of intersectional identity bingo she was a three-fer!  And so, she was exactly the kind of person that Hachette wanted for their imprint.  But there still remained the fact that she got a bot to write her story.  And that someone blew the whistle on her.  Of course, she claimed that it was an editor who added the AI sections and what she had written was her own.  Oh boy, that’s gonna be a bunch of lawsuits (or it’s just talk that won’t go anywhere).

Of course, the editors are defending themselves by saying that AI detection programs are far from infallible and so they aren’t to blame.  But supposedly the content was pretty obviously terribly written.  Of course, that really makes it interesting that the self-published book was such a hit on Goodreads with over four thousand reviews.  And that would once again jibe with the idea that the “bio” of the writer was one of the big reasons the book was so popular.

The whole scandal seems to show just what a mess the publishing industry has gotten itself into with identity politics becoming the most important factor by which authors and storylines are selected by big publishing houses for their imprimatur.  I guess the same problem is playing out with books that Hollywood is suffering from with their heavy-handed woke propaganda pictures.  People are staying away in droves and the monetary losses have finally gotten so severe that they’ve been forced to drop most of the woke plot elements just to lure paying customers back to the theaters.

Well, now that I’ve had a taste of what it’s like to self-publish a book I can say that a large part of the satisfaction in writing a book has to be because the author enjoys his creation.  Other than the one in a million phenom that finds the sweet spot in the self-publishing universe everyone else is talking to a small audience and in my opinion the only real failure is if you know that your book isn’t good enough for you yourself to read it for pleasure.

But how soon before AI slop is better than Shakespeare?  Ay, there’s the rub.

The Dispossessed – Part 1

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People like me are relics of a bygone era.  What we believed in and how we lived don’t exist in the present day.  We are a shadow presence in a new world made up of people who believe in and exist in a different reality from what we had.

Now we can be angry about that but that does not change the facts on the ground.  The new world has taken hold and will have to play out over the next generation before any meaningful reaction to the status quo takes hold.  The only question is what we will do.  Some folks have just given up and withdrawn into their memories and mark time until their time is up.  Other people rage against the reality on the ground and make a bunch of noise.  Well, those are both understandable reactions.  The present situation is depressing and pathetic.

What I’ve been puzzling about for the last ten years or so is how to exist in this regime but still do the things I like and live the way I want.  And that is not a simple exercise.  I can’t claim to have cracked the code and found the golden way that bypasses the toxic problems that surround us, especially folks like myself who live basically in the belly of the blue state beast.  Now granted it’s not quite as bad as California where the insanity is reaching 1984-like repression but it’s bad enough.

As best I can guess the correct path is to form a network of people like myself and do everything humanly possible to avoid the crazies both in my internal and external lives.  Other than some family who qualify as the Left I avoid any personal relationships with the insane.  Some people enjoy baiting these people and arguing about their crazy ideas.  I get exactly zero pleasure from such activities.  My idea of fun is talking and interacting with non-crazy people.

As far as the outside world, that’s a lot more difficult.  Professionally and publicly, I am surrounded by some of the craziest leftists you could hope to imagine.  This is extremely trying.  Some of these people are looking to push their world view on anyone whom they bump into.  My general rule is silence.  I don’t agree or disagree with their statements.  I maintain an impassive expression and wait for them to finish their tirade.  If they make a point of asking my opinion, I just say I have nothing to say.  So, there are plenty of crazies that become agitated by that tactic but for the most part they eventually wander away sullenly.  So that sort of works for me.

But this isn’t a robust strategy.  What it lacks is a “congregating” methodology.  We are always just a small fringe at the edges of society and we never form a larger society.  Sure, on line we have friends and acquaintances but these are distant groups and they lack the opportunities for local activities that make life interesting.  That’s the part of this situation I haven’t managed to “fix.”  I used to kid about starting the “he-man woman hater’s club” and open a chapter in every town in America.  And I think that is the answer.  And the club definitely needs a women’s auxiliary to make us sandwiches that we can bring with us to the clubhouse where they’re not allowed to go.

And I kid about this but this is what we need.  Clubs for men are exactly what is missing from life for those of us who have no use for the feminist world that has taken over from the world we knew.

Book Writing and Blogging

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Writing “The Sniper” was a massive learning experience for me.  Not only does it take up a lot of time but it also makes it much harder to do other things at the same time.  And vice versa!  Working, blogging and taking care of my other responsibilities really slowed down my book writing performance drastically.  And the time has come to begin writing the sequel.

So, something is going to have to give.  My decision is to cut back on the blogging.  Believe it or not even knocking out five hundred words has been taking a couple of hours.  And when I’m doing it at ten or eleven at night the quality has been way down.  The old brain just doesn’t click like it used to at that hour.

So, what I see happening is the posts will be hit and miss.  I’ll be able to keep the photos and quotes going without much strain.  But if I find myself scrambling for a theme, I’ll let it slide until I’ve got one that makes sense.  Quality over quantity.  It makes sense.

So, my apologies for my laziness but I am a man with definite limits.

Are We Up to the Challenge

photog Current Events, photog's Corner, Reclaiming the Family

With all the strange things going on in our world it’s pretty easy to throw your hands up and say that there’s no hope for things to get better.  You hear about the decline in education and the challenge for young people to find jobs when corporations are using artificial intelligence (AI) to replace most of the work that entry level employees used to do.  And that doesn’t even include all the other madness that’s engulfed our society lately.  I mean, the litany of dystopian phenomena is staggering so I won’t just list them again.  Should we just give up?

No, we must do the opposite.  We must return to basics and approach life by concentrating on the essential aspects of life and avoid as much as possible the “noise.”  So, if all you hear about is kids degenerating into uneducated, psychologically unbalanced basket cases who lay around all day immersed in their cyber-world, then the thing to do is get involved in helping the kids discover what’s “real” in the world.  Teach them real skills; how to work with tools, how to maintain their cars, how to repair things around the house, how to prepare for a job interview, how to talk to a girl in real life.  Stuff like that.

There is no doubt that forces are at work that threaten the stability of our society.  DEI and other identity obsessed programs have done terrible damage to the work place but bewailing this situation isn’t an adequate response.  Young people have to be informed that “giving up” on life is not an option.  Every avenue for advancement must be explored in this most prosperous country in the world.  If only women and foreigners are allowed to be doctors and engineers then become car mechanics or carpenters or buy a small business and build it up yourself.  But whatever it takes young men have to show initiative and the willingness to struggle to survive.  Blaming “boomers” or global warming are just excuses and more needs to be done.  And the way to show the young that there’s hope is by encouraging them and helping them with their struggles.  Share whatever skills or expertise you have and help them discover how to persevere in a challenging environment.

I remember a movie where one of the main characters had a mantra, “Struggle and survive.”  Well, that’s very good advice for our present day.  Giving up seems to be what everyone says is the way forward.  The answer to AI is a universal basic income (UBI) where the government pays you just for breathing and no work is required.  Of course it will have to be the most marginal of existences.  You’ll probably have to live in a closet and eat whatever crap they want to feed you.  But the fact that this is being pushed by the Left shows that it’s a sign that they just want you to lay down and die.  And that is exactly the philosophy (nihilism) that we must eliminate from the young it is basically a death cult and it has infected our society.  And each of us involved in keeping our families alive will have to fight it.

Aloha Fellow Hominidae

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Both the mountain gorilla of Africa and the orangutan of Southeast Asia are critically endangered in their native areas.  The gorilla in particular are down to about a thousand creatures.  And the primary reason for this is that humans in their ranges are extremely poor and look on these creatures as “bush meat.”  The conservation societies have done quite a bit to encourage eco-tourism to produce funds to increase the law enforcement to protect these primates from the locals.  But there are many risk factors that end up adding to the cumulative mortality of these animals.  The pet trade steals young apes for rich collectors and there are various markets for body parts (heads, hands and feet) of the great apes.

Now, these two species are far from unique in the conservation problems faced by rare animals.  Rhinos, elephants and other megafauna are in danger of disappearing from Africa and Asia along with the mountain gorilla and orangutan.  But I think there is an extenuating circumstance for making them a special case.  Namely, they are remarkably close to the human family.  Now the chimpanzee is actually closer.  They really are a close cousin.  But there are a lot more chimpanzees in the wild than either of these two species.  Also, I dislike chimpanzees.  They’re too much like humans.  The level of aggression they demonstrate makes them far from an attractive target for my crusade.  I think the personalities of the mountain gorilla and the orangutan make them a much more sympathetic and interesting subject for my project.

In a nutshell I propose that two small Hawaiian Islands be made into a permanent refuge for each of these species.  Now I will confess I haven’t really worked out any of the logistics.  Are there two islands big enough to support a large colony of each of these species?  Does the US government have sole jurisdiction over any of these smaller islands?  So right now, this idea is a pipe dream.

But I think if it can be organized, it would provide an enormous service for humanity.  The extinction of either of these species would be a terrible waste of biological knowledge about species that are important relatives of humans.  Even from the point of view of medicine and biological science they are priceless resources that shouldn’t be allowed to go extinct just because they currently live in third-world hellholes.  Even from the point of view of neurological research, having two other primates so closely related to humans is something that in the future will provide enormous insights into the evolution of our brains.

And going along with the idea of eco-tourism, millions of people would pay good money to view these apes in an environment that doesn’t expose themselves to the dangers of entering the third world areas where these two species are native.

But from a non-utilitarian perspective, these are magnificent creatures that are fascinating for humans to observe and learn from.  And I’ll bet if they were brought into a safe environment like Hawaii, I think they would start exhibiting behavior characterized by lower levels of stress.  Aloha fellow Hominidae.

Building Ramps and Singing Spirituals

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So, where are we today?

Eric Swalwell, the Democrat congressman who was running for governor of California has dropped out of the race and resigned from Congress after allegations of date rape and sexual assault have been levelled against him by four separate women.  Ah, the Democrats the party of feminism.  Amazing how these things only happen when they want someone to drop out of a race and he refuses.  Up until now Swalwell was best known for his vehement attacks on Donald Trump and for an incident where during an interview on an MSNBC television show he farted so loudly that microphone picked it up magnificently.  Eric we hardly knew ye.  Farewell!

So, the peace talks between the Trump administration and the Iranians have broken down so Trump has said he will take over the Straits of Hormuz.  Now, how dangerous is this situation?  I can’t even imagine something not going terribly wrong.  So, Trump is going to try and break the Iranians by cutting off all their oil money by blocking the tankers heading for China.  This is a hardcore tactic.  I guess it could work.  I’m sure we’ll know pretty soon how this is going to end up.  Good luck Mr. Trump.  You will need it.

Trump is in a war of words with the Pope.  Well, this one’s easy.  I’ll back Trump.  The last couple of popes don’t seem to be infallible.  I’m not sure they were even Christians.  More like the kind of atheists they turn into bishops in some of the trendy denominations.  But I don’t think Trump should waste his time fighting with him.  It’s a waste of time.

Well, we’ve reached the warm weather here this week.  Today and tomorrow will both break the eighty-degree mark and I’ve turned off the house’s heating system for the summer.  Of course, if the weather gods go berserk and send us one last Polar Express that will have to be reckoned with but we think we’ve paid enough for oil this year.  And today I saw a good-sized butterfly fluttering around in the air.  And since the forsythia and the daffodils are both exploding in yellow bloom, I guess it makes sense for some insect to be pollinating them.  And finally, the raspberry leaves have burst from the ground all over the patch where I cut down the canes in March.  From what I can see this will be an even better sized crop than last year’s excellent results.  I’d say that the 10-10-10 fertilizer worked exactly as recommended.

We’re still waiting for Camera Girl’s pond liner to arrive from Home Depot.  It’s two days late and somehow “delayed” less than thirty miles away.  What can I say, Home Depot is not Amazon, that’s for sure.  When it arrives, I’ll bring out the shovel, pick, giant pry bar and wheel barrow.  I’m hoping there’s no ledge where she wants it to sit.  But knowing what I do about this property there will be a few monster-sized boulders below the surface.  Well, I’m sure there’s at least a few drops of ancient Egyptian blood in my Mediterranean ancestry so I’ll bone up on ramp building and practice singing spirituals.  Happy Wednesday!

The Day After the Day After Tomorrow

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In the comments for yesterday’s post on anti-matter there was some discussion about the methodology for interstellar travel; matter/anti-matter annihilation as a form of impulse power versus the use of a worm hole to poke in and out of space as needed.  As was intimated (being turned inside out) the current understanding of general relativity does not present any clear mechanism for human beings to utilize such a phenomenon and remain alive.  And that got me thinking.

Five hundred years ago if you wanted to go from Portugal to India you would get on a sailing ship and circumnavigate the continent of Africa and then cross the Indian Ocean.  And when you returned from this trip thirty months would have passed.  Today, a direct flight from Lisbon to Calcutta would take about twelve hours.  Call it a day for a round trip.  That’s about 900 times faster than the old way.  A trip to Mars at its shortest takes about six months.  Adding in the return trip makes the whole voyage something like 26–34 months.  If somehow, we could increase our speed by the same 900 times we could go round trip to Mars in a day.

Of course that’s impossible.  But only in the sense that we would be trying to improve the same means of travel in the future case.  So, if you told Vasco da Gama he could make a round trip to India in one day he would assume you were either joking or insane.  Because the very idea of a jet plane was an impossibility in his world.  Before you can have jet planes you need Galileo, Newton and Maxwell.  In other words, you need the mathematics, physics, chemistry and engineering of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to know that a jet plane could exist.

What if the mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering of the twenty second, twenty third and twenty fourth centuries conspire to make the round trip to Mars only one day by finding a completely novel approach to travel.  What if wormholes really could be harnessed for human transport?  Then a day long trip would just be a convenience for meals whereas actual travel time would be zero.  But you argue, “wormholes are a theoretical aspect of relativity that have never been observed and if they exist would be as inimical to human life as a black hole would be.  And I would counter that feeding flammable liquids like octane into a machine that produces electric sparks and depends on metal parts rotating thousands of times per minute is much too dangerous a method for transporting humans from place to place.

So, I won’t say I know that we’ll ever reach the stars.  But I think anyone who says categorically that we cannot is making assumptions that cannot be taken as fact.  They are conjecture based on the current understanding of physics and engineering.  So, I guess we’re free to fantasize about galactic empires and worm holes and warp drives and anything that makes us happy.  And some days I want to read about the day after tomorrow and other days I’ll dream about galactic empires.  Why not?