Just look at that smile. How could the rich worry that a state that twists the law into pretzels to bankrupt its enemies could possibly turn on them? Just do exactly as we say and shut up and we’ll only bleed you dry a pint at a time. We won’t go for the throat like we did with Trump. At least not this week.
As the rich head for the exits Kathy Hochul can figure out how to keep MS-13 from pushing her aside and planting its flag in Manhattan. It seems they don’t respond to subpoenas from Letitia James except with automatic weapons fire.
In the last week or two Donald Trump has been found guilty of civil crimes that added up will cost him $438 million dollars. And that does not include the ban on doing business in New York State that will cost him untold amounts of money in addition. And both of these trials are on transparently trumped-up charges that have been railroaded by criminally partisan prosecutors and judges.
I can’t say that I’m surprised by any of this. But I do think it is notable that federal and state officials are nakedly using fraudulent means to attack Donald Trump’s fortune in addition to his person. Not only are they trying to imprison but they also want to bankrupt him. What I’m curious to see is whether this is completely without consequences for those in charge of these bogus prosecutions.
From where I stand, I think they will get away with it. It’s possible that higher courts may reverse some of these decisions based on the outrageous procedures that were used. The case that involved the allegedly overvalued assets is a complete sham that has no precedent. An honest court would have thrown it out on the face of it. But I don’t foresee any blowback to the New York Attorney General or the judge that oversaw the trial.
And the fake rape civil trial is a complete farce over supposed events that happened over fifteen years ago and never had any credibility in the first place. Once again, if the decision is reversed there won’t be any negative consequences for the Manhattan District Attorney or the judge. None.
Probably the only tangible effect of these witch-hunts will be on wealthy New Yorkers who think they might have Democrat political enemies. Being stripped of their fortunes now probably seems a lot more real and incredibly frightening. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them start to rethink living and doing business in the “Empire State.” Maybe there will be a stampede of billionaires heading for the borders out of New York. Suddenly that name Empire State takes on a new meaning. Empires exist at the whim of the emperor. Justice isn’t a blind goddess in an empire. She takes her marching orders from the boss.
And that’s what we’re seeing. Justice is now doled out in Washington, Colorado, California and New York according to whether you belong to the right party. If you don’t genuflect to the pieties, if you won’t burn incense to Caesar then you can expect that knock on the door and maybe you lose your money or even your freedom.
More than ever it’s important to think about the United States as separate states. Some of them still seem to possess equal justice under the law. But definitely not all. Being a business owner or even a parent is a lot different in Florida than it is in California or New York. And something like Trump’s railroading will make that crystal clear.
I guess it seems odd, me pitying Donald Trump. He’s very wealthy (so far), has been President of the United States and is famous and popular with over a hundred million Americans. I’m nobody. Even if Trump has to pay off these bogus fines, he’ll still be many thousands of times richer than I am. But I think of the spectacle of the supposedly “last best hope for humanity” rounding on one of its most important citizens and using the same tactics that you’d expect Saddam Hussein would have used against his enemies.
I think of what I would do in his circumstances and I have to admit I’d be overwhelmed. Look at what the FBI has done to those people who were in Washington on January 6th. None of the courts in DC are fair. The jury selection is rigged. Once government uses a partisan mob against its citizens, we’ve reached bottom. This is no different from Robespierre ginning up the mob to “judge” anyone and everyone who fell into the hands of the Committee of Public Safety.
It’s not justice. It’s just being fed to the lions in the coliseum. And the knowledge that any of the elite can be subjected to this same treatment will alter the reputation of the United States as a safe haven for the rich and their money. And that alteration will weaken the United States a great deal. Something to think about.
“We’re not voting our way out of this.” This is the mantra of the Dissident Right. And at this point it seems essentially correct. The powers that be can rig the elections and use illegal immigration to create a permanent electoral advantage to frustrate the will of the majority of Americans.
Well then, so be it. The real strength of the dissident right isn’t the specifics of the things they believe. It’s their escape from the false hope that somehow, we can wrest control of the government away from the elites. “The truth shall set you free.” And in this case, that’s exactly right. Being freed from a false hope is extremely valuable. It allows you to redirect your energy toward things that are not only possible but optimal. If you see the world the way it actually is then you can make informed decisions about how to navigate through that world. And that is how an intelligent person should live. And if you are perceptive enough your outcome should exceed that of the other choices available.
For instance, take the case of the conservative idealist. Take a concrete example. Look at that poor wedding baker in Colorado. For the last ten years he has been defending himself against various LGBTQ lunatics who are trying to force him to bake cakes for gay weddings, transgender transitioning parties and every other weirdo occasion that the queer community can think of. And the state of Colorado has prosecuted him to the fullest extent of the law. And even after the Supreme Court ruled in his favor, he’s back in court again.
Well, this is not my idea of smart. If his religious convictions forbid him to bake queer cakes then either he should move to a state that agrees with his convictions or he should find a different way to make a living. Living in a lose-lose situation doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
And now look at the other side of the coin. How about the woke true believers. They’re currently living the dream. The federal government has their back. They’re getting everything they believe in. In California. they’ve got green energy, child castration and open borders. So, things are great. Except they have to live with green energy, child castration and open borders. And because they’re true believers they are susceptible to accepting permanent energy disruptions, high cost of living, high crime environment and possibly losing their children to suicide and the likelihood of no grandchildren. That’s not exactly a win-win situation either.
We find ourselves living in a funhouse world where the official policies of those in charge are askew with reality. Well, this isn’t the first time in history when that has been the case. Lots of empires end up that way. What seems most important is the ability to translate what is said in bizzarro world into what it means from a practical point of view and figure out the work arounds needed to avoid the pitfalls.
Now it may be the case that in the future, Post America will make it impossible for anyone outside the elites to live a happy life. In that case the two choices are leave or fight. Fighting is a big deal. It’s been tried before by a large group of states and it didn’t work. Leaving, of course, isn’t an easy or painless course of action either. From my point of view, we’re not near the point where that is an obviously better choice. So currently we have the red states as better places to look for relief and using your own savvy to avoid the worst of woke pitfalls. One of the ways to avoid the pitfalls is to maintain a personal circle of people who think the way you do and that you can trust. Within such a group you can be yourself and have the freedom needed to enjoy life. Admittedly it’s a sad remnant of the freedoms we formerly enjoyed but that’s where we are and pretending otherwise is leaving yourself open to the worst that the government can inflict on people like us.
Avdiivka has become the new Bakhmut where the Russians have ground down their adversaries in a war of attrition. Both sides have probably lost several thousand men and now the numerical superiority of the Russians has won them the city, or what’s left of it.
The next act will be the retreat by the Ukrainian forces down the few roads that can accommodate war vehicles. The Russians have encircled the city and the next day or so will witness whether the retreating army can escape decimation.
This war has been one long series of horrific clashes. With western aid drying up it will be surprising if the Ukrainians manage to continue this war of attrition for much longer.
In New England choosing a snow removal method is kind of like choosing a religion. There’s the mainstream snowblower sect. Then there are those plow guys both the ones that mount it to their family truck and the ones who buy those ATV looking vehicles that zip around after major snowstorms cleaning off people’s driveways. They’re probably pagans or something. Then there are the hardliners who own a tractor to which they can attach plows, blowers, even trailers in which the snow can be collected. These guys are ready for the apocalypse. And finally, there are the fundamentalists; the shovel guys. To them moving the snow is the punishment we all deserve.
A week ago, I was walking in the haunted forests and swamps of Dunwich and observing the first little buds and leaves opening up on all the thorn bushes, briars and poison ivy vines. But now there’s eight inches of snow out there again!
And so, I spent Tuesday and today on snow removal. I skipped Wednesday because, dammit I’m an American. My weapons were the snowblower, the snow shovel and the ice scraping shovel (technically it’s a roofing shovel used to scrape the shingles off a roof, but it’s really good for smashing and scraping ice off a driveway). And I got all of the top driveway done and the lower driveway so-so.
And that’s just in time for tonight’s predicted one to four inches of new snow. Now what kind of prediction is 1-4 inches? When the maximum is 400% of the minimum it shouldn’t be called a prediction. Clueless guess is probably closer to the truth. But the last five hours of snow removal has brought me back to the zen-like state that eventually sets in near the end of a New England winter. And this is even true during extremely mild winters as we’ve had the last three or four years. Because an inch of ice can cause more grief and work than two feet of dry snow. In the zen state you abandon the idea of gritting your teeth and pushing through until spring. It’s too long. There are still seven weeks until snow is unlikely. So, you must embrace the crappy weather and become one with it.
And so there I was, lavishing loving attention on asphalt that needed the snow coaxed off of it with a light, almost delicate touch to the shovel at just the perfect angle to get it to peel off the pavement. I experienced ineffable contentment as I worked down the driveway six inches at a time. I had become a snow clearing zombie. And I loved Big Brother.
As you can tell I’m suffering from the last stages of cabin fever and I’m contemplating warning Camera Girl to abandon the Compound until spring when hopefully I’ll regain my sanity. She knows my weaknesses and it’s just too reminiscent of Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Jack Torrance in the movie version of “The Shining.” If I do go berserk, I won’t use the weapons that Jack Torrance took up (a fire axe in the movie and a roque mallet in the book). I will instead embrace my most formidable weapon, bad puns. The poor woman.
Anyway, I’m enjoying the posting of my novel fragment. It’s cathartic to put it out in the real world and get feedback. I’ve been trying to figure out a strategy to get it in the public eye. I’m thinking about putting it on a crowd-funding site to see how much visibility that would give it. If anyone knows which sites are best for our side of the political spectrum, please chime in.
As you can tell from the photo above I consider myself and Camera Girl odd ducks. But Valentine’s Day is a universal call to action. Today of all days every red blooded American man has to prove to his girl that his undying love is worth slightly more than the cost of a box of chocolates, some flowers and a decent meal. Play Don.
Joss Whedon is a Leftist. Despite his recent fall from grace on account of saying and doing mean things to actors on set, he believes in the cause. All of his cinematic and television creations to some extent, are shaped by progressive concepts. So, it always seemed a very strange thing that he created Firefly. Based, he said, on a book about the battle of Gettysburg he imagined a universe where the elites defeated the freedom loving proles in an interplanetary civil war and these defeated forces maintained an outlaw existence at the edge of a distant new solar system among pirates and barbarians.
In the cinematic finale of this universe, the elites in the “Alliance” send out an agent to eliminate the renegades that have some dangerous secrets about the government’s experiments with controlling the behavior of the ordinary people.
During one encounter the agent recites the title of this essay.
He is portrayed as a true believer. He is making a better world, a world free of sin. And he’ll do this, no matter how many people he has to kill to get there. The agent is polite, intellectual, cultured and completely ruthless. Because he thoroughly believes in what he is doing. In this portrayal I think Whedon was being completely honest in how he evaluated the Left and the Right. The Left is polite, intellectual, cultured and completely ruthless. The Right is crude, naïve, boorish and principled. And for some reason Whedon sympathized with the Right, at least somewhat. Possibly he recognizes the inherent lack of intellectual freedom that the Left always creates. As a creative type himself, maybe he could see how restrictive life under this regime would be.
Well, all of the above is just a long digression because the line from the movie seems to encapsulate our reality. Our rebellion isn’t like Star Wars. It’s more like Firefly. We don’t have any plucky heroes who will save the day by blowing up the Death Star. We’re outnumbered, outgunned, outmatched in money and buried by the media and Corporate America. The elites have a firm hand on the levers of power and we are just outlaws living on the margins trying to avoid being rounded up and chloroformed like some troublesome stray cats.
And if we look back through history all free societies seem eventually to collapse into oligarchies like ours. But I haven’t been able to figure out what is the “smart” way to think and act in this environment. If I had a strong enough stomach I probably should suck up to the elites and try to find a spot among their toadies. But I’ve always had trouble convincing them I believed in their bilge. Something about my sense of humor always gets me in trouble.
But what is the right answer? Is there a way to live in such a society and still have any self-respect? It doesn’t appear to be the case. And what about children? What do you tell them? Look at the mess we have with Gen Y and Gen Z. They’re living in a fantasy world and life will completely pass them by without leaving a trace.
So, there’s my thought. The elites don’t appear to be vulnerable to anything we can do. And waiting for their decadence to finish them off might take centuries. I guess eventually Caesar or Theodoric will appear on the scene and we’ll get a different group of oligarchs and different bread and circuses.
But is it impossible to get a Brutus instead of a Caesar? And not the Brutus who slew Caesar, not Marcus Junius Brutus, but rather his ancestor Lucius Junius Brutus, the one who overthrow the last Etruscan king Tarquinius Superbus and ushered in the Roman Republic. Is it impossible that a member of the elites would side with freedom over power? I think the answer is that it is impossible. And the reason is that no one man, no matter how smart and strong can rearrange an empire once it’s built up. All that can be done is bend its path slightly for a few years.
So I’ll finish by saying that there are plucky heroes and it is the evil empire and that in their prime, evil empires outlast plucky heroes every time. It’s in their nature. Better to look to the fringes of empire for where the successor to that empire will appear.
I’m gonna talk about fun stuff today. I need a break from Biden and his mush-brain.
I was watching a YouTube video by one of the guys who provides me with pep talks on photography and he said when you’re feeling uninspired the best thing to do is grab your camera and look for inspiration. Well, Camera Girl has been haranguing me for the last couple of days about the return of Mr. and Mrs. Mallard to the swamp. Now this is an annual event. The same pair of mallards (I think) return every late winter to the local water and graze on the slime and ooze and raise up a passel of youngins. Some of my favorite shots of the mallards involve heavy snowfall.
At the same time, they are very annoying because they tend to retreat from me and my camera whenever I try to capture them. But this year the battle is stacked more in my favor. I’ve got the Sony 200-600 lens and with its extra reach I can still get reasonably close up shots from what the mallards feel is a safe distance.
So, I went out this morning with my A7IV, the long lens and my monopod and picked my way between thorn bushes and mud holes until I was at a respectable one hundred feet from the ducks and banged out maybe a hundred exposures. I used single shot autofocus and a comfortable ISO 1000 to get the short exposure time I needed with the long lens.
The ducks are kind of funny in that the male and female look totally different from each other.
And they have slightly different behaviors also. The male is more confident while the female seems more cautious. His head seems to be mostly underwater while hers is above.
He ranges around more while she is mostly still. And interestingly, I’ve adopted the idea that they work for me and require my approval in order to feel legitimate. Well today they got the official thumbs up from the king. I provided them with the royal nod and now they can get on with perpetuating their species without fear of their charter being pulled. I told them that I am following their careers with great interest and expect to review their progress sometime in the early spring when the latest cohort is swimming and quacking around the puddle. After all Dunwich must be populated or duckulated or whatever duck increase is called.
I was looking for inspiration today and sure enough, it was fun. And that got me motivated to download all the files on my camera and at least look at the mallard shots I just took. And that is the evolution of a good day. A little research, a little field work and a little work in the office and I have a few nice shots of the neighbors and a nice little illustrated post for the site.
All right. Now I can stand to hear about what mush-brain has done today. Hopefully something harmless like taking credit for the invention of shoelaces or something.
Here is five minutes of Biden battling to speak a coherent sentence and failing completely. I’ll warn you this is harrowing. I think going forward the Dems trying to get him re-elected should just provide him with yes or no questions to answer and nothing else. That should make it at least a 50/50 shot.
The sad thing is I still think the odds are he’ll be the president for the next four years, assuming they can keep his body somewhat animated.
Here are five straight minutes that show exactly why the special counsel noted Biden's diminished mental fitness pic.twitter.com/u1ToosAKyz
Joe Biden has been officially declared senile by a federal special prosecutor. And because of that he’s allowed to break the laws surrounding classified documents. When I heard that, I think I felt like the district attorney did at the end of the courtroom scene in the movie “Miracle on 34th Street.” It’s when the defense attorney reads off the official mandate for the post office to only deliver mail to the correct recipient and then he has thousands of letters to Santa Claus poured onto the judge’s desk. It’s absurdity stacked onto absurdity until it all comes tumbling down.
Look, it’s all too much. Even the Democrats who are running the lawfare can’t keep track anymore of where the landmines are buried. The only thing they haven’t unleashed yet are killer drones with Donald Trump’s face programmed in as the target.
So here is the sad, impoverished remnant of America that the Left and their corporate lackeys have created. Everyone not in the 1% is struggling just to feed and house themselves, with nothing left of the American Dream whatsoever. So now Generations Y and Z will get to see what it means to own nothing and be glad. Glad will just be code for powerless.
I’m very interested to see if they’re really as “with the program” as their representatives on the news say they are. From my point of view living in a closet and eating crickets seems like a fate worse than death. Even in the depths of the Great Depression I think the lowliest American aspired to better than eating bugs. So, I’d like to believe that our descendants haven’t devolved into creatures that eat the same food as our pets.
So that’s what I’m interested in finding out during this election year. Because I guess that Donald Trump might make a pitch to the younger people. If I were creating his commercials, I’d show stock footage of people living during 1980s and 1990s and highlight the fact that they lived in houses and ate meat and drove cars that didn’t have to be plugged in for ten hours at a time. I think he could make the case that living like the generations before them is a relatively simple decision. You just have to vote for people who believe that Americans deserve to live in the modern world and not move back to the medieval period.
Now maybe it’s too late. Maybe the kids have become bug-eaters and they don’t mind living in a box. If that’s the case then very shortly all of the old world will be phased out along with internal combustion engines and freedom of speech. So, it should be very interesting to see what happens in November. I’ll have to say a part of me wants it to happen so I can stop thinking about it. If the Dems take the White House, then only red state residents will still be free and we’ll get to see if they have the guts to finally make a stand.
So, bring it on. Dementia Joe or Gavin Newsom or Hillary Clinton or even Santa Claus. It doesn’t matter. If this direction is the way that the young people want to go then I won’t be able to care about this country because their point of view is just too pathetic for me to consider. Americans, if they had anything they always had pride. Anyone who eats crickets and lives in a box by definition has no pride. So, make your choice kids, are you Americans or some kind of pet lizard.
