Category: Current Events

What Do We Keep and What Let Go? – Part 1 – The Family

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The Left’s dominance of the culture and institutions in America has undermined many of the customs, behaviors and attitudes that we once took for granted here.  Things like patriotism, respect for the military and even loyalty to the local ball team have all been tarnished by the changes that the Left has created in these things.  If the military now takes as its mission reinforcing deviant sexual behavior and championing societies that adhere to these beliefs, why would I want to have respect for such an institution?  Or if the local baseball or football team starts kneeling during the national anthem how will that make anyone more patriotic or want to cheer for such a team?

And these are just a very few examples of the many things that have been spoiled through the agency of leftist activism.  And this damage has been done.  What remains for us to do is to decide what things we ourselves value intrinsically and want to maintain for ourselves in our culture going forward.  And which things that we formerly embraced should be abandoned either because maintaining them will be too difficult or because we’ve found that they strengthen our enemies.

I won’t pretend that I have all the answers completely thought out but I think it might be helpful to think about some of these things.

One thing that has been relentlessly attacked for the last century is the traditional family.  The “liberation” of women has done the most damage in this attack.  The dislocation caused by women working outside of the home has been the largest factor in the diminution of happiness and mental health in our society.  Specifically, the damage done to children has been the worst.  But the effects have been all-encompassing.

Other attacks on the family come from the role school has played in undermining the authority of parents and in propagating harmful doctrines on such subjects as deviant sexual behavior, critical race theory and so-called gender ideology.  Currently the whole practice of transgenderism being introduced to grade school children is a criminal enterprise that should not be tolerated.

And finally, the laws in this country with respect to marriage have also done untold damage.  Divorce laws make it easy for parents to break up their marriages when small children are depending on them for security and direction.  Also, the tax laws must change.  The state and federal governments need to make it possible for a man and woman to raise a family with the mother staying home while her children are young.

And in the same way that the government puts a brake on the cost of drugs by acting as the largest provider of medical insurance through Medicaid and Medicare they can put a brake on the costs of college tuition and other expenses.  Instead of just passing along the absurd tuitions that these colleges charge, they can cap these costs and force the colleges to compete for the government backed loans.  Most of these colleges have become havens for bloated administrative bureaucracies that add nothing to the education process but waste and leftist ideological indoctination.

But just as important as the financial help that the government needs to give to families, it must also return sovereignty to the parents over their children.  No more bureaucrats and teachers should be allowed to challenge the authority of the parents to protect their children from the dangerous influence of those who want to proselytize them on behalf of ideologies like feminism, homosexuality and various other aberrant beliefs.  One thing that would help is a school voucher system that would allow parents to avoid the problematic public schools that now infest out country and instead find a school that respects their values.

Now in all these things, the federal government has been a disaster.  It might turn out to be the case, that the only way any of these things get done is if they are relegated to state government to make them happen.  But among the things that need to be restored to our world the restoration of the conditions that allow family life to survive are fundamental.  Without healthy families our society is doomed.  So this should be the first priority when we try to restore life in this country back to normal.

Getting Rid of Dark Energy and Dark Matter

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A theory has been proposed that allagedly explains the missing cosmological dark energy and dark matter by instead invoking the non-conservation of energy associated with the so-called expanision of the universe.  Some physicist in Russia named H. R. Fazlollahi has written a paper that outlines his idea on how this non-conservation would account for the missing energy.

Now, my tensor calculus is more than a little bit rusty (in point of fact, it’s extinct) so I won’t pretend to know what the details of his math show.  Instead I’ll fall back on my contempt for scientists that invent a universe where 90% of the mass and energy are invisible and indetectable in order to explain the data they observe.

So two cheers for Fazlollahi and here’s hoping that some of the brighter lights in the physics community start to look a these discrepancies with a more discerning eye.  Either that or let them go find jobs in something they’re more qualified to do like delivering the mail.

FISA Law Coming up for Renewal

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“FISA Section 702 allows intelligence agencies, mainly the NSA and FBI, to surveil foreigners without a warrant. This extrajudicial power inevitably sweeps in vast troves of information on American citizens in the dragnet that can then be tapped by federal authorities, despite a warrant never being served. The FBI alone engaged in over 200,000 of these “backdoor searches” in 2022, including on political activists. Additionally, government authorities also obtain information on citizens through data brokers, because of a legal loophole in how the Fourth Amendment is implemented.

In December, a temporary extension of Section 702 was inserted into the National Defense Authorization Act, but it is set to expire in April.”

There is enormous pressure on Congress to re-authorize this law.  And if it were allowed to sunset, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the FBI arranged for a terrorist attack to occur on American soil just to blame it on the Republicans for trying to stop the intelligence agencies from spying on us.

So, I can see how Mike Johnson would be on the spot when it comes to a reauthorization.  But I’m very interested to see which way this goes.  From my point of view, I see more benefit from letting the law die and taking the hit politically if the FBI allows an attack.  But I’m an extremist at this point and don’t have to stand for re-election.

But think about it; 200,000 searches in a single year.  These people spy on us relentlessly.  Taking away this tool would do a great deal to reduce their power against us.

Tell me in the comments what you think should be done and what you think will actually happen.

Civilizational Identity

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I was listening to the ZMan today and he was talking about Russia which is an interesting topic but the thing that got me thinking was the end of the hour where he discussed a type of society not based on ideology or even national identity but instead based on civilizational commonality.  So instead of talking about democracy or communism or British or French nationality we think about the civilization we adhere to.  So, countries with nationalities as different as Arabs, Persians, Afghans and Berbers all recognize a civilization based on the traditional Moslem world view.  And similarly, parts of the world with a long history of common culture like medieval Europe or Latin America have a similar ability to interact naturally under the same system.

Now the ZMan said an interesting thing.  He said North America was such a place.  It was different from a national identity such as exists in European countries but rather is a sort of generic society based on the common customs and stable institutions that exist in both Canada and the United States.  His point was that the liberal democratic system in place in the United States was not the only type of governance that could work here.  In fact, in a sense it really isn’t a democratic system currently.  But it masquerades as one.  Another system that provided continuity for most of the services and functions of modern life would serve just as well, maybe better.  After all, the current system is actively disrupting things like families, religion and communities.

He was comparing this situation with what exists in Russia which is a society that incorporates about 20% non-Russian peoples in its society but manages to maintain the Russian cultural and civil activities for the whole of the society.  The idea was that a similar condition could exist here based on the common culture that currently exists but without the liberal democracy running things.

Well, all of that is fine.  But I think what’s going on is already a civilizational system.  The order that runs North America is also the one that runs Europe.  The Global American Empire is a civilization.  It intends to infiltrate all areas of the globe and it has a very definite culture and ethos.  And it is doing a very thorough job of indoctrinating people of European descent and also the people that live with them in the countries where they are in control.  So, clawing control away from the people currently controlling the empire is much, much harder to do than to say.

Now maybe certain areas have a culture that can successfully resist infiltration.  Sub-Saharan Africa seems to be one and the Moslem world has so far been another.  But Europeans and their descendants are absorbed by it effortlessly.  If some competing culture is going to wrench away the Left’s grip on America it will require a call to action that can motivate the younger generations out of their lethargy.  I have to admit I can’t imagine how this can be done other than to say that it will require a charismatic man of their own generation to come forward and inspire their imaginations with a vision of the future that overshadows the woke orthodoxy of self-hate and decline.

But I see no indication that anyone like that exists or might even appear.  But we are living in an age where things seem to be coming to a head.  Eventually the times will make the man.

 

“Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.”

 

“The darkness drops again; but now I know  

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,  

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,  

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Our Roller Coaster

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The times we live in seems to induce a manic-depressive mindset where we balance out our despairing reaction to the horrors of our political reality with an almost hysterical glee over the absurdities all around us.  So, one minute we’re nearly suicidal over the complete destruction of the constitutional freedoms we’ve lost but the next minute we can be rolling on the floor laughing at Joe Biden’s imitation of a sleezy, stupider version of Forrest Gump.

And so yesterday I considered the case that 2024 will be another stolen election.  Today let’s lighten things up a bit.  All of us got to laugh at the nakedly manipulated logic that forces the algorithms that control Google’s “AI” Gemini to generate black female popes and Chinese Vikings whenever confronted with a request to render some historical category of people from European history.  Admittedly it’s a pathological situation.  Trying to erase the legacy of a billion people is pretty twisted.  But the absurdities that it creates when, for instance, it’s asked to draw a medieval knight are just too hilarious to neglect.  For this particular imaging there was an Asian woman wearing an armor breastplate shaped like something made by Victoria’s Secret for one of its bustier models.

Admittedly the Left provides many more groans than belly laughs for us.  Most of their agenda involves harm to us and our society in a systematic and relentless fashion.  But still, when we look around the examples of laughably warped fruitcakes abound.  Many of these people are so hapless that you almost feel sorry for them.  But not quite.

Personally, I like to make fun of the zanier cases I see.  And it would be nice if someone arranged an annual awards ceremony for the various categories of people on the lunatic Left who can provide us with mirth.  Someone with a talent for classification could divide the various categories of mental illness into an entertaining show.

One of my all-time favorites was back on election night 2016 when Miley Cyrus had her post election meltdown.  She was weeping and wailing about how unfair it was for Hillary because, “It was her turn!”  And another oldie but goodie is the picture of some androgynous lunatic kneeling outside in a winter coat emitting some kind of despairing primal scream because of some unknown kind of leftist defeat.  Maybe it was Trump again.  In fact, there could be a whole category just for his victims.

And even all these years later these classics still cheer my heart.  The sheer nuttiness on display reinforces my belief that just based on Darwinian selection these people must soon disappear from the Earth simply because the societal breakdown they espouse will certainly finish them off.

So, yes, I know that soon enough another assault on sanity and decency is due to explode on the scene during this Bidenian annus mirabilis.  Dementia Joe will give away another trillion dollars to windmill vendors and itinerant terrorists of one sort or another.  And I will shake my fist and growl at the injustice.  But it would truly be a shame if I lost sight of the upside to living in a mental hospital.  And that is laughing at the clowns on parade.

Now Gutfeld is Stealing My Best Gags

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Here’s a Claudine Gay / Urkel gag from Gutfeld’s show last night

 

And here is my post from Dec. 21st 2023.  Below is the photo from the post.

Claudine Gay Accused of Stealing Steve Urkel’s Look

Coincidence?  I don’t think so!  Damn you Gutfeld!  The Urkel meme is one of my best.

Ah, fate is cruel.  Well, at least he steals from the best.

 

 

Update:

I’ve called Gutfeld out.  I’ve demanded on-air attribution.

https://x.com/orionscoldfire/status/1760764495721271703?s=20

Google AI Hates White Men

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Google has an AI called Gemini that can generate images.  People have been trying to force it to create pictures of white men but it’s almost impossible.  It will make black people or any other race but white without a problem but white people are a big problem.  So you can get black vikings and a pope that’s an Indian woman or any number of interesting anachronisms like a 16th century French King who’s Chinese but no white men.  Fascinating.  Google says they’re working on it.

School Committee Calls for National Guard in Massachusetts

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The Bay State, the center of DEI has finally evolved public school to its final form.

“Members of a Massachusetts high school committee sent a letter asking their mayor to deploy National Guard troops to rein in violent chaos on campus — ranging from daily brawls in the halls to frequent drug use and fornication in empty classrooms.”

But this is probably the quote that captures the reason for the request for troops:

“Another BHS math teacher, Cliff Canavan, had his arm broken in December when he was attacked while trying to restrain somebody who was kicking an unconscious student in the head.”

Brockton is a crime-ridden hellhole that somehow hasn’t been turned into a paradise on earth by the wise policies of Massachusetts politicians.  Very strange.  The city is 51% black and 27% white.  So I assume most of the students are non-white and most of the teachers are white and they just don’t know how to restrain their white privilege and lack of empathy for students just trying to break up the monotony of the day with some fentanyl and and … uh … coitus.

I think the school committee is on to something.    A platoon of soldiers with drawn bayonets could probably maintain order in the corridors between classes and possibly limit the amount of drugs and sex going on.  Or at least they could give it a try.  But I see the danger in some kid trying to shoot or stab a guardsman and the kid ending up dead.  Then the BLM contingent would show up and the Governor would mandate that the city of Brockton voluntarily burn itself to the ground and hand over its assets to the rioters.

Well, that’s the only way progress is made.  Let the kneeling and bootlicking begin.

Pravda is Worried.  The Proles Have Caught On.

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There is a fear growing.  Donald Trump has been consistently leading Joe Biden in national and state polls.  And the lead isn’t going away.  And the leads in some of the critical swing states have him ahead in some cases by almost ten points.

The fear exists because even with this lead and with people sensing this lead, the Democratic party is gearing up to use bogus absentee ballots to steal another election.  And they fear the consequences.

The January 6th protest was a result of people’s outrage that rampant voter fraud was perpetrated and approved by the political establishment.  And four years later the knowledge that the fraud happened is widespread.  And the numbers for Trump are even stronger now than they were four years ago.  The fear is that if they steal another election, it will finally snap the last threads providing any sense of legitimacy to the federal government.

You might rightly ask does it matter at all?  Ultimately, I think it does for them.  A large part of the strength of the United States as a great power derives from the consent of the governed.  Americans have been willing to fight in great wars and small because the benefits of living in a free country were self-evident.  Even the urban poor in the United States felt that they were in possession of privileges that even the rich inhabitants of other countries were denied.  We could say what we wanted.  We could move around a continent-spanning nation and find a new job and a new life just by willing it to happen.  We could start a business and make as much money as we wanted and no commissar would come down the street and take it away.  We had fair and free elections.  And if the bums we elected did a lousy job we could kick them out four years later.  We were called an exceptional nation and being an American was a special thing.  And we had found that to be true.

And now none of those things is true anymore.  Obama told us there is nothing exceptional about us.  And Biden says that third world invaders are better people than we are.  And the freedoms we were given can be taken back.  Say the wrong thing and there will be a knock on the door, or a battering ram, and away you go to the gulag.  No one is particularly proud anymore.  And precious few want to fight in their wars anymore.

And when we try to throw the bums out of office, they print up fake ballots and stay in office and tell us to mind our business, or else.

But the people running things are nervous.  The economy is not doing so good.  And the wars aren’t going so well.  And no one wants to join the military.  China, Russia, India and Saudi Arabia have been using other currencies instead of the almighty dollar.  The crime-ridden cities are even starting to scare the Democrat mayors running them.

I can tell that they’re nervous because their scribes are starting to write things like this.

“In the spirit of my argument in this column, I should concede that things do get trickier when we are dealing with a deliberate lie that has been concocted and spread as a political weapon, and is now believed by a large number of people, such as the “stealing” of the 2020 election. We don’t want to legitimise disinformation. But even in these circumstances, it is important to find things to agree on. No, the election was not stolen, but yes, there were a tiny number of instances of voter fraud (just shy of 475 possible instances, according to an AP report).

If we can show we have taken all of the facts — no matter how unpleasant or inconvenient they are — into consideration, not only does it make our arguments more persuasive; it also allows us to get closer to the truth (which we often have less of a grip on than we might like to admit). And doing so makes disagreement less toxic and more productive. In my experience, when you give someone an inch, they often end up giving you an inch, too.”

You see how the writer is bending over backwards to be fair to us poor benighted proles.  Read how she admits that there were a tiny number of frauds.  The Associated Press said so!  How can it be false?  That extra week or two of counting votes?  Why what’s wrong with that?  Who ever heard of counting all the votes in one day?  Crazy talk.  So, they kicked out the Republican poll watchers?  Why shouldn’t they.  They were making the poll workers nervous by being there.  And the precincts that came in at over 100% voter turnout?  Why that’s just democracy fortified.

A few other nervous sentences in the article:

“A Monmouth poll last June found that only 21 per cent of Republicans (but 93 per cent of Democrats) believe Joe Biden won fairly.

We can see similar gulfs on all sorts of issues, from the effectiveness of masks and lockdowns in preventing the spread of coronavirus to America’s migrant crisis and the war in Gaza. We are talking, here, not just about divides in terms of what is morally wrong and right, but what is real and what is not.

The stakes are too high to continue in this splintered way. A 2022 poll found that more than two in five Americans believed a civil war was at least somewhat likely in the next decade, thanks to political divisions.

And a report by the Eurasia Group in January said the upcoming US presidential election represents the biggest political risk to the world in 2024. “The United States is already the world’s most divided and dysfunctional advanced industrial democracy,” analysts wrote. “The 2024 election will exacerbate this problem no matter who wins.””

Yep, they’re nervous.  And that’s because they plan to steal 2024.  And if four years after 2020 got us to where we are today, I think they know that another stolen election is going to finish off whatever good is left in this once exceptional nation.

And how will these scribes find a Starbuck’s after the fall of the empire?

Great Caesar’s Ghost!

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Long ago, there was a tv show called the Adventures of Superman. Perry White, was played by the well-known character actor John Hamilton. And in one episode, after all of his reporters run out of the room before he can tell them what he wants them to do, he sits there staring into the space in front of him and says, “I know people say you’re crazy when you talk to yourself, but by Great Caesar’s Ghost, there’s no one else around here sane enough to talk to!”

Well, now I’m in the same situation. I’m talking to myself in order to use this program that Microsoft has on Windows called Voice Typing.  It works quite well. But what I notice is that it’s difficult for me to get used to the fact that I’m talking to myself.  I mean, when I type typically, I guess I’m silently talking to myself but this is a completely different thing. Uh, you have to think on the fly. Because I can speak a lot more quickly than I can type. So, I don’t have enough time to think of what I want to say.  If you see what I mean.

So, look at those last few sentences.  They’re pretty stilted.  That was me trying to dictate to the computer.  It’s not pretty.  And so, I’ll have to see if this works for me.  I’m guessing I’ll have to practice with it until I can think comfortably at the speed of my speech instead of at the speed of my typing.

But one interesting thing has come out of this experiment.  I can see now how some of the mistakes I’ve seen on other people’s blogs happen. They’re using a dictation program. That seems apparent.  The machine is mistaking certain similarly sounding words for others that have a completely different meaning.  And then afterwards, when the human edited it, he’s missed some of these problems.

So here we have a technological change.  Dictation replacing typing.  I remember reading that the ancients when they read something, they read it aloud.  I think it was something about Julius Caesar I remember, that he was able to read silently and at the time this was considered a radical departure from normal behavior.  Great Caesar’s Ghost!  Maybe I’m too old and inflexible to change how I produce text.  Maybe my brain is too canalized to change.  Well, it’ll be an experiment.

This has been an interesting week.  All the coverage of the Trump verdicts and the fines has further revealed the clear divide in the United States.  Once again there is no middle ground.  The Left has abandoned all pretense at objectivity.  Any and every attack on Trump is justified and reasonable in their eyes.  Even when the result of this thinking frightens even their allies.  The enormous fine against Trump’s commercial interests and the obvious fictitious nature of the “crime” has frightened other businessmen in New York.  The realization that prosecutors and judges can easily fabricate charges that will basically allow confiscation of all their wealth has panicked many of these ultra-wealthy individuals.  And Governor Hochul reacted by trying to soothe the nerves of the rich.

But if there’s one thing billionaires hate is the threat of confiscation of their wealth.  Recently Elon Musk was denied a huge payment from Tesla because the State of Delaware stepped in and forbade it.  Almost immediately Musk had the incorporation of Tesla moved out of Delaware.  I fully expect to see similar moves by many public and private corporations to preempt any possible chicanery by Letitia James or any of the other bloodsucking ghouls in New York State.

And this is on top of an already desperate fiscal situation in both New York City and New York State.  Things like the feeding and housing of illegal aliens is starting to put a real hole in their budgets.  So, could the lawfare against Trump hasten the unravelling of the Empire State?  Great Caesar’s Ghost!