Category: Current Events

ArthurinCali Fisks Jamelle Bouie’s Diatribe Against Trump

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Arthur has dissected the NYT leftist’s screed complaining that Trump is not being persecuted enough!

Good long form analysis of all the Left’s talking points against the man they love to hate.

https://arthurincali.substack.com/p/the-left-burns-down-every-institution

My favorite line:

“Keep in mind that you do not have to be a fan or even a supporter of Donald Trump to be able to see the different set of standards currently being deployed against him, and how that is a danger to the entire faith and allegiance to our political system and institutions.”

Guest Contributor – Jess – 27MAR2024 – Woke Work Ethic

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One of the contributing factors for my retirement was the lack of competent human resources. With the Covid fiasco, and the availability of a steady paycheck of unemployment benefits, it was much easier for many to just stay home, not pursue work, and in many situations, the amount of money received was more than could be made due to weather affecting construction. To aggravate the problem, suppliers faced the same problem, which could lead to expensive delays. Although the problems I faced were gradually becoming more apparent before Covid, everything snowballed and even good employees became less interested in performing quality work. The younger generation that was needed to be trained to replace the older craftsmen were woefully unprepared for the environment that construction demands, and I found I was more of a babysitter than a superintendent.

In my later years of construction, I had to deal with the newer engineers that, in my opinion, didn’t have the skills needed to design quality work. Plans wouldn’t fit site conditions, pointing out anticipated problems could lead to either bad decisions, or avoiding decisions. In one situation, even though the specifications demanded additional work, the engineer refused to pay for the work. I did it anyway to prevent an accident and bigger problems. Their ridiculous reason for not paying for the work only proved they were not only a coward, they had no integrity.

Is it too late to demand excellence, honesty and a good work ethic? I don’t know. I do know things won’t change much until DEI, EEO and other bizarre ideas of equality are abandoned. Nobody is equal, and pulling everyone to the lowest level of competence with policies only makes things worse.

Things Fall Apart

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My absurd schedule continues to leave me perpetually scrambling to keep up with the website.  But even after putting up that sarcastic post on the FSK Bridge collapse I feel I must make some comments on it.  Whether the crash was the result of equipment failure, sabotage or somebody doing something unbelievably stupid, we can’t ignore the fact that our country seems to be slipping into disorder.  The systems and protocols that allow a complex society to function are no longer functioning correctly.  Jet planes are falling apart in mid-air.  The power grid is failing over large swaths of the country because of too much rain or too little rain or no reason at all.  Things are beginning to break down.

And it’s not as if people in positions of responsibility haven’t noticed these things.  For the last ten years safety has been one of the holy words in corporate America.  I was involved in a Fortune 100 company’s engineering planning and all they ever talked about was multiply redundant systems.  The planning was scheduled twenty years in advance to replace and enlarge all the important equipment and systems.  These weren’t people who ignored the big picture.  But what they seemed oblivious to was the human factor.

They had built up this highly complicated, highly precise way of producing very valuable materials but what they ignored was who they had running these systems.  They had felt no compunction about shedding the people who built up this machine and replacing them with diversity hires who really didn’t get the job done.  And slowly over the course of a dozen years they hollowed out the human capital they had working for them.  Then the pandemic threw a monkey wrench into the works and all hell broke loose.  Suddenly their competition was poaching what was left of their upper management and even the few diversity hires who were halfway competent left for big signing bonuses and salaries.

And as they scraped the bottom of the barrel serious problems began to erupt.  Key production personnel called in sick during critical operations and the people left were essentially useless and caused the loss of millions of dollars of product.  The C-suite was not amused.  Diversity is our strength but if local management starts losing money, heads must roll and it won’t be the CEO’s.

So a hatchetman will be despatched to punish the innocent, promote the guilty and declare victory.  But once the rot is too far advanced the parent company will probably prefer to shut down the operation and buy a new smaller company whose IP and human capital is sufficiently attractive and valuable to raise the quarterly dividend and allow them to forget those losers they fired out in the sticks.

So that’s how it works in corporate America.  But what about just plain America?  All those blue cities are beginning to discover that allowing the complete breakdown of law and order is really, really bad for business.  Today I went through a run down New England mill town.  It’s a depressing place where police cars are always clustered like angry wasps around some local affront to normal life.  There used to be an enormous Rite Aid store in the middle of a strip mall in that place.  All the other stores have long ago closed down.  Now they have removed the sign letters from the side of the Rite Aid building and the big windows looked in on nothing.  And that’s blue city America 2024.  Hollowed out and dead.

Adam Smith allegedly said “there’s a lot of ruin in a nation.”  That may be true but we’ve reached a tipping point in a lot of these places.  Companies are abandoning leases and even mortgages on buildings in places like San Francisco and New York.  Certainly, even the captains of industry may be wondering if it’s time to pull the plug on the progressives.  And that may be the only reason why Donald Trump might be allowed to regain the White House strictly on the grounds of self-preservation.

But is it too late?

 

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre  

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst  

Are full of passionate intensity……”

(The Second Coming

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS)

OCF Drought Warning – The Curse Has Come Upon Me

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Folks, the next nine days will be terribly busy ones for me.  I’ll be away from my desk and a virtual prisoner for most of the day during this period.  I will attempt to keep the quotes and photos stocked if I can.  And I’ll try to have some content available if time and circumstance allow.  But truth be told, things will be kind of quiet here at the site while I do penance for a decision that I am already regretting.  No good deed ever goes unpunished.

The Future History of the People’s Revolt

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Writing my sniper story has been an interesting project.  I’ve recently realized that it provides me with a way to escape from the repressive environment that we find ourselves in.  I can imagine a world where people find a way to escape from the Left’s stranglehold on our lives.  Science fiction was often described as escapist fiction; an escape from the real world.  Dreaming of a trip to the Moon or Mars was a highly enjoyable pastime.  I remember as a kid going to the library and taking out the Heinlein juveniles one by one and wishing there were a hundred instead of a dozen or so.  I guess it’s human to dream about a richer or more exciting or a better world.

And when I was a kid, we then got the Apollo program and we really did go to the Moon.  Well, maybe we actually will revolt from the Left.  After all, it’s been done.  The Soviet Union fell.  Communism or Wokeism or whatever anti-freedom regime we find ourselves under is no godlike entity.  It’s just people who crave control over others to enrich themselves.  Surely such an enterprise can be swept away if it ceases to provide the population with a reason to keep it going.

So, I don’t flatter myself that whatever MacGuffin I invent to carry my story forward; whether it be nuclear powered drilling equipment or fusion reactors or giant lasers; has any special rationale for really coming true.  But that’s not really important.  Just as the terra-forming capability that Heinlein’s stories are based on, is completely fictitious and the Earthlike conditions on his Mars and Venus stories are completely erroneous does nothing to ruin the enjoyment that these stories afforded and still allows a fan of these stories to imagine that actual planetary exploration is an exciting and worthwhile human endeavor.  After all, a manned mission to Mars is something being seriously discussed and planned.

So, I plan to write a series of stories in a fictitious future where a band of plucky heroes upset and upend the oligarchs who currently run our world and make a fight out of regaining their freedom.  As with Heinlein’s Future History, not all of the stories may be aligned with each other.  I can always cover up my mistakes by pleading alternate realities in the “multiverse.”  Sure, why not?  If Marvel can have multiple spidermen then why can’t I play fast and loose with the future?

Now I’m not doing anything that isn’t already out in the world.  In about two weeks a movie is opening up called “Civil War.”  And this movie has the United States broken into warring factions and a ground assault on the White House.  So, my stories will be well within the mainstream.  The only difference is that probably this movie and any other movies or “best sellers” that come out will cast the Left as the heroes and the Right as the awful traitors.  Well, that’s alright.  To each his own I always say.

So, thanks, to Uncle Bob Heinlein for his inspiration.  I’m officially in the future prediction business.  But in the words of L. Sprague de Camp “It does not pay a prophet to be too specific.”  So, I better learn to be vague.

New Identities and Myths

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The Left has gone to great lengths to tear down the American Identity and its Myths.  By foisting identity politics into the center of the culture and openly destroying all the historical icons; The Founding Fathers, various heroes and even the institution of the family; they’ve snapped the bonds that united the people living here.  Now this was done intentionally to encourage strife between people based on race, sex and sexuality.

And to a very great extent they’ve been wildly successful.  I can attest to that personally.  They’ve managed to make patriotic allegiance to the current regime in Washington look like a sad joke.  And they’ve drained the joy out of sports, fraternal organizations and even the Boy Scouts.  Even many mainline Christian denominations have been infected with woke hatred for what this country used to be.

Wildly successful.

So, all that’s true.  They’ve smashed the culture down to the ground.  But at the same time, that means we’re free to build from the ground up.  We can keep whatever we want from the old.  We can toss out whatever no longer suits us and we can add in whatever helps us to build a new identity and new myths.

And I’m sure it’s already happening.  When the Left rejects the Fourth of July and embraces instead “Juneteenth,” it allows us to take ownership of the Fourth and make it what we want it to be.  Maybe it can have a double meaning.  It looks back to the original founding of the country but now it can also stand for a new declaration of independence.  We can declare ourselves independent of the coercive guilt that the Left tried to force on us.  We can begin to build our own organizations and platforms and companies that serve our needs.  Eventually we’ll build a new political party that will replace the Republican Party too.

But most important we’ll create new myths to replace the old ones that have been shown to be obsolete.  These things will be the hardest of all to replace.  The hardest one to lose was the myth that all Americans were brothers.  That despite all of our differences and squabbles when the chips were down, we would all band together to fix problems and strive to make America the shining city on the hill where our children would inherit a better and richer world than we had.  But the Left has burned that dream in the streets of the George Floyd insurrection.  We are not one nation and the Left is not under God and liberty and justice is not for all but only for the favored ones that the regime elects.

So that’s what we’ll have to do.  We’ll make our own rules and our own ways of working with each other and against those who hate us.  And we’ll come up with stories that explain how things work in the new world we now live in.

Maybe it won’t be a single new identity.  The days of a single culture or even a couple of cultures may give way to a host of different identities.  I could see the Hispanic people dominating the Southwest and the Northeast remaining as the old New England identity mixed with a hodge-podge of things added.  The Old South might rise again.  But what won’t happen is a return to what was.  You have to believe in a myth to keep it alive and the old American myth is as dead as a dodo.  And no amount of flag waving or exhortations for God to bless America can bring it back.  The Left buried it and they’ll have to live with the consequences.

Guest Contributor – Glenn W – 23MAR2024 – Smartest Guys in the Room

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Like the other readers of this blog I have been watching our culture slowly disintegrate over my lifetime. I am certain that the oligarchs have ran many simulations (remember the Club of Rome?) and are certain that they have the winning hand. That being said I think they have made a very basic logic error which is human beings have agency. Anyone who has a science or engineering background usually views every process as being a mix deterministic or random, it’s drilled into us. However I don’t believe that applies to human beings who have agency. A steel beam doesn’t evaluate the torsion being applied to it and decide how to react but a person does evaluate the forces being applied to him and reasons about how he should react. I think that’s why we constantly hear about how those stupid so-and-sos didn’t do the “rational” thing. Actually they did, it’s your model that’s stupid.

Time will tell but I don’t think the “smartest guys in the room” really know very much.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 22MAR2024 – Monkey Joe

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war pig

Maybe the geniuses chose Joe deliberately. Plans within plans. Joe is a distraction while the deep state makes itself irremovable. Joe is the screeching monkey distraction while the real work goes on surreptitiously. Rush Limbaugh was the distraction for GW Bush. He was the MAGA type of super-patriot distraction that allowed Bush’s people to work quietly building power. Bush was decried by the left as a yokel, all the while he beat them twice in a row and got the great majority of his legislative aims passed.

Guest Contributor – Milo Mindbender – 22MAR2024 – Rule Over Ashes

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Sun Tzu refered to the evil men who would burn their homeland to rule over the ashes.

I think the wheels are going to come off the US/Petrodollar deal that Nixon carved out over 50 years ago. Pull on your tinfoil beret, I personally believe the gold in Ft Knox bought that deal with the House of Saud, and they are now getting ready to after 50 years of meddling in our foreign policy mostly to their benefits, to dump us on the rubbish heap. Explain coherently why before the OPEC deal was signed that the tours to Ft Knox depository were shut down, and nobody has done an exact counting and inventory since ’72, at least one publicly available. I smell shenanigans, and am worried about the BRICS+ currency because it is gold backed, and has a large portion of both the worlds population and real estate to back it. By being gold backed it has an advantage over the Euro, or the Dollar, both of which are now straight up fiat “We Say So” bucks, only good because we say so.

I do not believe the oligarchy realize how few they are, and how many disillusioned and increasingly angry, bitter people are looking at them wondering why the WEF, and all the other asshats who fly in private jets to eat catered meals served to them by their underlings while they lecture us about our carbon footprint, and recommend we learn to downsize and enjoy “Micro Livestock” so they can shepherd us towards their brighter happier future.
The unelected enviro-nazis do not have any authority over me that I do not grant them, but somehow their wants are translated into the laws governing the US, and Europe while the “Poor unfortunate Asians” like India and China get a pass on all the environmental BS.

We have reduced our environmental impact and are decreasing our utilization of coal, oil and natural gas, while they build a new coal fired plant every 2 weeks. The Clinton administration locked up one of our supplies of low sulfur coal in Utah to help out campaign donors from Indonesia who coincidentally also export low sulfur coal, kinda cozy.
I know I am rambling, but that happens, I don’t think the US people will go gently into that long dark night without a struggle, and would prefer it to be sooner rather than kicking it down the road for my grandchildren to deal with.