Category: Reclaiming the Family

Stopping the Left is Not Enough

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If you look at all the crazy things going on in our country you would be excused for thinking that all that is necessary to fix our problems is removing all of the leftists from power.  You might think that if we had fifty Governor DeSantises and people like him running our cities and in Congress that everything would go back to normal.  I think I used to believe that either consciously or unconsciously.  All we needed was good leaders and everything would revert to a normal world.  I no longer believe that to be the case.

Our world has drifted very far from a healthy pattern.  We could probably spend eternity debating what were the causes of this drift.  Some people would point all the way back to the Enlightenment and the dethroning of religion as the center of human life in the West.  Maybe that’s true.  Other people point to the emancipation of women as the spark that destroyed the family and led us to the place we are now.  I think cases could be made for a number of causes for what has happened to our world.

The point I want to make is that some kind of change is going to have to happen.  And either we are going to make these changes ourselves or nature will fix them for us.  An example of what happens when you let your society degenerate would be the end of the classical world.  The Western Roman Empire was toppled by German tribesmen who realized just how feeble the Roman state had become.  And a few hundred years later the Eastern Roman Empire was almost completely swept away by the armies of Arabia galvanized by a fundamentalist religion that gave meaning and order to their lives.

Something very similar will happen to our world unless we step back and restore sanity to the way we live.  Our institutions have to stop propagandizing our youth as to the value and desirability of living a secularized and sterile existence that eschews marriage and children.  The idea that it is acceptable and even preferred to adopt an identity that puts you at odds with biological reality is madness.  And all the other LGBTQ lifestyles must also be identified as deviancy that doesn’t merit celebration but at most pity and possibly tolerance if it isn’t allowed to corrupt the youth.

And these are just the negative aspects of our society that must be addressed.  At the same time, changes must be enacted to amplify society’s effect on the positive behaviors we want to encourage.  Our government must support the formation and flourishing of families.  If a man and a woman are raising up children the government should be doing everything it can to maximize the odds that they will create good, well-adjusted and productive people.  The tax laws and the social safety net should be primarily focused on these people.  Everything should be done to allow young women to stay home with their children during those formative years.  And this shouldn’t be done just because it is helpful to the child-rearing task but also because raising a family is the most fulfilling occupation that two people can hope to have.  And a young mother at home with her young children is the necessary center of such a family.  Without her it is an incomplete and confused fragment of what a family should be.  A poor family with a mother at home has its struggles.  But even a rich family without a mother at home is unbalanced and often unhappy.  The children feel the lack but don’t know what they’re missing.

And there are so many things about our society that are unhealthy and dangerous.  The complete disappearance of religion from our daily life and the normalizing of unhealthy obsessions like drugs and pornography have destroyed countless young lives.  All of these things are justified by our fetish with freedom.  A re-evaluation on the limits of freedom is painfully overdue.

And if society doesn’t start making these changes very soon, then as I said at the beginning of this rant, nature will do it for us.  Or more accurately, do it for our successors that live in healthier cultures.

Praying Mantises, Children’s Books and Pa – Part 5 – The Final Chapter

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Well, this is the finale of the great mantis experiment.  Yesterday Camera Girl used her hawk-eye super vision to find an adult praying mantis in the jungle-like weeds of her vegetable garden.  In fact, the mantis was on one of her Japanese eggplant plants.  Princess Sack-of-Potatoes will know that praying mantises really do exist although unfortunately they do not talk in an English-accented throaty whisper as they do in an Eric Carle picture book video.  But they are indeed monsters that inhabit the tiny world of our garden.  And that’s a fun thing for a little child to discover.

Camera Girl’s Super Power

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I believe in making marriage into a sit-com.  Camera Girl has said on any number of occasions that I need to write new material because she’s bored with the old stuff.  And she’s right.  But what I have in abundance is mockery.  I mock everything around me because that is how I think.  It’s a family trait that is probably our defining one.  That is how we analyze the world around us.  And because of her proximity Camera Girl is my favorite target.  I mock her choice in books, tv shows, talk shows, her frugality, her ideas about pets, her family, her friends, her rudimentary political ideas, her lack of knowledge about science, history, religion, philosophy and technology.  I make it such a regular practice to call her a poor ignorant peasant girl that she has started saying it about herself to save me the time.

What I never mock are her domestic skills.  Her ability to organize, schedule and maintain a home is remarkable.  Her cooking has kept me fat for decades and her ability to raise and entertain children is well-nigh magical.  And it’s this child-herding skill I want to write about.

This week we are entertaining the two younger grandsons and the granddaughter.  The boys are ten and seven and the girl is almost three.  Someone who doesn’t know kids might not know how hard it is to keep this combination of ages and sexes busy and happy at the same time.  Suffice it to say it’s like juggling chainsaws.  But she does it effortlessly.  She’s even able to integrate me into the trick when she thinks I can be trusted.  For instance, at one point, the next event was ninety minutes in the swimming pool.  But right before the time, the two boys got involved in a race to see who would grab hold of a toy they both wanted, some kind of remote-controlled car.  The little guy ran a little too fast and fell, skinning both his knees badly on the driveway.  After first aid and bandaging was performed Camera Girl informed me that out of necessity I would be drafted into service.  Since the little guy couldn’t go in the pool in his wounded condition, he would be watching a movie about tyrannosaurs (his favorite subject) and I would keep him company.  And she had made the right call.  Whereas I could have taken the other two kids to the pool, what she realized was that if I provided my nerd-like knowledge of prehistoric creatures as a way to occupy him, then my grandson wouldn’t feel so bad about missing the swimming pool which was a sore disappointment to a little boy.  We sat there and talked about the latest research on the most probable speed that a T. rex could run.  We discussed whether the T. rex was really the apex predator of all time and really the greatest creature to ever walk the face of planet Earth.  And even though I might have some theories on T. rex that differed from this dinosaur enthusiast’s I listened very respectfully and tried to enrich the discussion with some other scientific and general interest items.  And when his brother and cousin returned from the pool there wasn’t a single sad face or harsh word from him.  I had performed adequately and hadn’t dropped a chainsaw.

And later on, when the two younger ones were going to play some board game (I think Candyland) I was entrusted with taking the older guy outside for a baseball catch.  It was pretty hot out there but the hour went by like a flash as we tossed around the ball and talked about whatever was on his mind.  And once again I completed my task without incident and tossed the chain saw back to the master juggler.

And so it goes.  Minding a toddler and keeping her safe, soothing a little boy with sore knees and keeping a ten-year-old from getting bored all while cooking breakfast, lunch, snacks and dinner, cleaning the dishes, doing the shopping, washing the clothes and dealing with all my complaints without dropping a stitch.  Then bathing the baby and putting her to bed and before collapsing into bed herself she tries to read a few pages out of one of her books.  I honestly don’t know where her energy and work ethic come from.

But rather than think Camera Girl is a goddess, which she is, I think all women should be like her.  Raising kids is the greatest responsibility any human can undertake.  Sharing their lives and teaching them how to be people like Camera Girl does is mothering.  Plugging them into the television or the computer is what you expect from a zoo attendant or prison guard.  If the human race doesn’t get back to the old standard for mothers we’re doomed.

So, here’s to Camera Girl.  Long may her super power thrive.  I hope to see her someday plying her trade with her great grandchildren.  But I do wish she would do a better job training her dogs.  They’re all spoiled.  And she knows it.

Look For the Good

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We’re in a long war.  Our enemies hold all the high ground and we are dispersed and without leaders.  To think that we should fight all the time is wrong.  We need to live.  We resist by living the best life we can.  But because the enemy owns all the ground, we have to dig to find what is still good and healthy to live on.  It takes a lot of effort to find worthwhile books and movies and organizations and activities and people.  But there is no other way forward.  So, make that your business.  Spend the time to find these things and pass them along to others.

That’s a constant part of my time on this site.  I look for news and opinion that’s worth reading.  I look for books and movies that other people might find worthwhile.  I try to share some of my hobby activities that I think are enjoyable.  Don’t dwell on what’s wrong beyond thinking about how to avoid it.  We already think enough about Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi.  If you pay attention to politics and know who is really on your side then you’re doing enough.  It’s not necessary to obsess about the culture war 24/7.  I’m already doing that for you!

What you’ll find is that you have to devote considerable effort to digging through the muck that is the Left’s America.  If you don’t put in the work, you’ll end up either doing nothing or settling for the books and movies that they force on you.  My advice is to put in the effort.  Spend a little time thinking about how to find what you’re looking for.  And break up the work so you don’t spend your life on drudgery.  Make sure that every day has something that nourishes your soul.  Even if it’s just half an hour.  Read something inspirational or funny or intellectually stimulating.  Learn a skill like a musical instrument or a language or a computer language.  Learn to scan poetry or write a short story.  Buy a cheap camera and look for things around you that you never noticed and make an image that pleases your eye.  Spend a day with your kids or grandkids.  Throw a ball around with them.  Teach them something that they should know.  Tell them a story about your father or grandfather or an old family story that they’ve never heard.  Take them to an ice cream stand.  Take them to a minor league ball club, as long as it doesn’t have any anthem kneelers.  Take them to a movie, if you can find one that’s worth seeing or make some popcorn and drag out an old movie that you liked when you were their age.

There are plenty of things left among the rubble of our civilization that you can use to your own purposes.  We still have gas powered cars and usable highways for the most part and we can navigate around the Antifa and BLM thugs for the most part.  If we’re smart and not lazy we can still live our lives very productively and accomplish what we want to.  Certainly, we know that the Left will continue to chip away at the good things in our world and they will especially attack our children which is more of a reason to spend time with them and teach them the truth.  But spending all of our time screaming at a computer screen is stupid and counterproductive.  The trite old saying is that living well is the best revenge.  Well, it’s true.  It’s not the only revenge.  But it’s the best way to start.  Pushing them into the sea comes later.

Late April in Southern New England

 

Man’s Prerogatives and the Naming of Names – The Power of Words

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And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. 19And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. 20And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. 21And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; 22And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. 23And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

The naming of things is our first prerogative.  Adam was given that job.  On a personal level the men of my family have always had a knack for naming things.  My paternal grandfather was very skilled at providing apt nicknames for his friends, relatives and acquaintances.  Not all of the names were complimentary or even friendly but the odd thing is they were accepted and they stuck.  Sometimes they became the only name that was used for the poor afflicted recipient.  There was a man who lived next door to my grandfather and to this day no one knows the man’s name except as Jimmie Goo.  And, so help me, when you looked at him you thought, “He looks like a Jimmie Goo!”  My father was pretty good at this also.  I have several brothers who specialize in nicknames.  And my grandson has shown a natural affinity for the job too.  Dogs and even brothers with perfectly serviceable names find themselves renamed by him and in a short time the new name becomes established.  It’s a strange gift but its existence seems undeniable to me.  We inherit it from our first father, Adam, and we do it naturally like a baby breathes air.

So that’s why women want to get rid of our legacy.  You even hear idiots like one of those morons in Congress who thought the word “amen” was a patriarchal insult.  Here were people too stupid to know that the syllable men does not refer to male human beings in every language.  A word that goes back to biblical Hebrew is confused with a word in a language that didn’t even exist during Old Testament times.  But this is what the power of stupid has brought us to.  Gibbering imbeciles get to decide how our language will be spoken because we’ve lost the courage to tell idiots to shut up.  And so it goes.  Sexual deviants with strange delusions about their bodies are making up “pronouns” out of collections of consonants that have never existed in English and couldn’t be pronounced if anyone bothered to try.  Cities, buildings, even mountains are being renamed so that women or favored grievance groups won’t take offense at history.

Well, I don’t go along.  If someone is mentioned in a spoken or written account, I say he or she, her or him.  Not they.  I can count.  One isn’t two or three.  It’s one.  One isn’t they.  The royal plural doesn’t apply to Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib.  They’re just meatheads whose existence barely deserves a singular human description.  I’d accept it to describe them because they are a thing.  A very weird unhealthy thing.

Words are powerful things.  Used constructively they convey meaning and provide context for understanding the underlying things.  Pennsylvania meant William Penn’s woods.  New England meant the English had found a new home.  The Confederate flag represented the states that fought a war to maintain their independence.  The District of Columbia was named after the man who discovered the Western Hemisphere.  Washington state is named after the man who led our armies to victory over King George III and refused to be a king.  People who pretend to be outraged that we honor these men and symbols are evil people or idiots.  Neither is acceptable.

Men will name the things they find and invent.  Eve knew better than to get involved in Adam’s work.  The one time she got involved in making a decision she listened to the devil and got the two of them thrown out of the Garden of Eden.  Women should stick to raising children and being sympathetic, the two things they do well.  And the rest of these idiots belong somewhere far away from America.

Tucker Talks About Hungary’s Pro-Family Policies

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Victor Orban is Hungary’s Prime Minister.  He is a populist Hungarian nationalist and he’d rather help his people raise their own families than import third world immigrants to replace them.  Tucker went to Hungary to talk to Orban and the media is very angry about it.  Listen to Tucker’s description of the program.  Grants to families that have three or four children,  No income tax for life for large families.  Tax breaks to grandparents that help with the children.  Sounds good to me.  I hope some of our leaders like DeSantis and Abbott go to Hungary and learn a few things there.

I’ve been thinking about Hungary as a refuge of last resort but not being of Hungarian extraction they probably wouldn’t let me in.  So there is definitely one club I’d like to join that wouldn’t have me as a member.  Take that Groucho Marx.

The Great Contraction

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The more I think about what is going on in the West, the more I’m convinced that the Elites want to get rid of us.  And by us I don’t even mean just conservatives.  I mean they want to get rid of everyone but them.  With the advent of artificial intelligence and the various technologies that it allows I believe they see a future with a human global population several orders of magnitude smaller than the present one.  So instead of six or eight billion people they would like it to be more like fifty million.  And maybe I’m still off by a factor of ten.  I could see them thinking that if there were five million humans inhabiting planet Earth that things would be a lot better for themselves and Gaia.  But whether the number is a million or a hundred million I think their idea is that most of us have to go.

If you look for the evidence it’s there to see.  Look at the causes they champion.  Abortion, deviant sexual lifestyles that produce no children, environmental activism that focuses on humans as a problem to be eliminated, educational programs that cannot qualify the candidates for useful work, “sustainable” energy sources that can only provide reliable energy for a fraction of the current population.  These are not meant to allow for a people to thrive but rather dwindle and vanish.  It’s the equivalent of using a targeted metabolic herbicide that renders the weed unable to thrive or reproduce.  Slowly but surely, it shrinks and withers away.

And I think it’s already well on its way to happening.  The method is; impoverish the middle class, put everybody but themselves into a sub-human existence with a poverty level welfare check, cheap drugs, free internet access and then disincentivize childbearing and childrearing and let the problem take care of itself.  And the amazing thing is a lot of the millennials are willingly going along with it.  The sheep are allowing themselves to be fed into the hopper that leads to the slaughterhouse.

Now I don’t mean to seem hysterical.  This isn’t some apocalyptic battle.  They aren’t going to start building the soylent green plants.  They won’t have to.  It will be a slow painless process of slowly contracting the breeding population to only those who can adapt to the conditions that they are creating.  Anyone who can stomach parroting back the latest mantra of equity, inclusion and diversity can keep living on their treadmill for a little while longer.  You can even raise your family.  Although they are propagandizing your children to think that bringing white people into the world is a crime.  So, the machine is still working on them too.

Meanwhile the Eiltes’ children go to private prep schools and Ivy League universities where it is understood that other than parroting the newspeak when any of the proles are around, they are fated to live in the “better world” that will exist after the riff-raff have been exterminated.

With the resources available to the global elite, it’s not unreasonable to think that they will be at least mostly successful in their program.  After all they’re not talking about eliminating some other race or ethnic group.  No one thinks of genocide involving people by class.  But that’s the plan in a nutshell.  I guess it’s hard to know if the Chinese will get on board such a program.  They have already retreated from their version of this idea with the cancelling of the ill-conceived one-child-family mandate.  But who knows?  As the Chinese become more integrated in the global community perhaps their elites will become integrated with their global brethren and embrace the dream of de-peopling Earth.

Well, where does this leave us?  I guess we have three choices.  We can try to become part of the elite and just let everyone else go down the drain.  Or we can organize our own community and look out for each other.  We can help young people afford to raise families and build wealth.  The question is whether we will be allowed to do this inside the sphere of influence of the global elites.  And that brings us to the third choice, leave.  The developed world is becoming monolithic in its rules and its ability to control the lives of those it rules.  It may be that the only way to thrive as a non-elite community is to move out of the first-world.  Maybe there’s still room in Eastern Europe or South America or parts of Asia where the influence of Cloud People isn’t yet all powerful.  I hesitate to say that we’ll have to head off into the Amazon jungle just to raise families but who knows?

This theory is not original to me.  I think many people have looked at all the trends that the people in charge look at and see that their agenda dove-tails with an effort to decrease the “surplus” population.  Why I think it is important to think in these terms is that any short-term political victories we may have won’t address the long-term strategies that the Elites pursue.  That would only happen if we took away all their money and I don’s see that ever happening (although it is fun imagining).  And it is useful to think in these terms.  It provides you with a way to prioritize what is needed to survive such a program.  Basically, make sure that your kids produced kids and they produce kids and so on.  Whatever you do to make that happen will make a Cloud Person sad.  And that’s good.

27JUL2021 – OCF Update – The Sunflower Photo Session

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Today Camera Girl and I will bring our granddaughter, Princess Sack-of-Potatoes, to see a vast field of sunflowers.

I will take the opportunity to practice my landscape technique.  I’ll use my Voigtlander 10mm lens for widest shots, the Sony 35mm f\1.4 for medium wide shots and the Sony 90mm f\2.8 macro for the close-up and bug pictures.  I think the little girl will be impressed with the height and color of the flowers but most especially with the soft serve ice cream they also sell there.

SONY DSC

In consequence of this trip, posting will be spotty today.

 

 

 

Normalcy Restored

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That lying sack of crap, Anthony Fauci M.D., stole a year from us.  And more than a year.  He smashed millions of small businesses that took lifetimes to build up.  He drained away the life savings of a generation of hard-working people.  He interrupted and marred the education of tens of millions of children.  He imprisoned a nation of 330 million and delayed marriages, births and every hope and dream of a nation.  And the most horrible thing is that it was for no benefit whatsoever.  The same people who would have died from COVID did die and are dying despite all of the useless torture that was inflicted on the healthy population of our country.  He is a tin-pot Pol Pot.  May he roast in Hell.

But yesterday was a renewal.  Almost all the descendants of my parents were gathered together in one place and time and enjoyed a party that included all the familiar and life-affirming rituals of a summer get together.  And even the weather blessed us with perfection.  Eighty-two degrees, bright sun with just a few wispy clouds, bone dry air and a refreshing breeze.  Just warm enough for some people to go in the pool and just cool enough to let the young at heart toss around a baseball or play a few lawn games with their kids and grandkids and even let one person watch her great-grand-children play.

Camera Girl in her culinary wisdom decided that instead of a barbecue she would cook the traditional Southern Italian peasant feast.  Ziti baked with cheese, eggplant parmigiana, meatballs, sausage and to start with, our version of an antipasto.  Huge portions were devoured with zeal and fueled loud and animated shouting about amusing and nonsensical things.  And in my earshot, there was not a moment of political discussion or anger.  Spirits were higher than high.  The highlight of the day for me was a four-way catch with two of my grandsons and a nephew.  I haven’t really had a good long baseball catch since forever.  Even the afternoon sun that was directly in my eyes I found enjoyable.  I actually felt young again.  Maybe today my shoulder is a little sore but it felt fine while we were out in that golden sun.

When my younger daughter showed up with her little 2 ½ year old girl the baby was terrified by all of the old fat strange-looking men shouting to be heard over each other in the meal hall I set up with folding tables and chairs.  After all, she has spent her entire conscious life in lockdown and hardly saw anyone but her parents and grandparents.  A cacophony of sound and strange faces truly frightened her.  But her mother was smart.  She took the baby outside on the deck and then into the swimming pool that she loves and there she was able to meet and play with the other children and slowly by degrees bring her back to the crowded areas where even the loudest old men were, at this point, too gorged with food to make much noise or even move.  So even that residue of the Fauci curse was lifted.  From two to ninety-two everyone was partaking in an old-fashioned family get together.

And I will be honest when I say that the relief to finally all get together made this the most enjoyable, least stressful gathering I can ever remember.  By the time the pie and ice cream and coffee were finished and sun was long below the horizon everyone was satisfied and ready to gather their children and say their goodbyes and head back on the road to home.  But promises were made to get together at the other homes for other occasions and other holidays.  Labor Day and Thanksgiving and Christmas lie ahead.  And we have broken the ice and hopefully we won’t allow that creepy little man to steal anymore of our lives away again.  It’s over and normal life has returned.