Category: Reclaiming the Family

24DEC2022 – OCF Update – Christmas Eve

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I’ll be heading out for a Christmas Eve dinner a little before 3 pm.  I intend to eat too much and spend as much time doing whatever the grandchildren want to do as circumstance allows.  Their parents are hosting the party so they’ll have to do all the work and I’ll get to hang out with the kids.

I haven’t written a political post lately other than the odd comment on the headlines.  It’s just too grim to do on the holiday.  The only rational option is to ignore the horror for a few days to allow some joy in our lives before we have to face the wreckage that is waiting for us up ahead.

And that’s reasonable.  Human beings require joy in their lives every once in a while just to survive.  And Christmas is the prime example of how we attempt to make a recurring ritual of joy in our lives.  So Biden and Pelosi and Schumer and the rest of the vampires will still be there when the holiday ends and we will still be up to our ears in dysfunction and depravity.  But we will have had a few days to feel a little happiness in our lives and remind ourselves that there is good in the world.

So I hope everyone has a good day.  And even if it’s just a day off, enjoy it and forget about the problems of the world for as long as you’re allowed.  I’ll post as time allows and as the spirit moves me.

Merry Christmas.

Wampanoag Lasagna

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It is reputed that at the Pilgrims’ first Christmas dinner the main course was lasagna.  Apparently, some of the Wampanoag Indians learned how to make this dish from Christopher Columbus or one of his friends back in the late 1400’s when they were on a Caribbean vacation and upon returning home it became traditional in the New England area.  Admittedly some scholars reject this time line.  These dissidents claim it came into vogue in the 1900’s with a later wave of Italian influence.

Regardless of which camp you find yourself in it’s obvious that lasagna is a very interesting choice for a Christmas menu.  Now Camera Girl had asked my opinion about the Christmas menu.  I had recommended a roast beast after the Italian wedding soup and she added a ham and then as an afterthought I asked about lasagna as a course.  Surprisingly there was resistance to this reasonable recommendation.  Something about not everyone liking lasagna.  I can’t remember if I pounded my fist on the table and shouted some strangled syllables that might have been, “Heresy!”  Later I calmed down and just swallowed my disappointment.

But Camera Girl is a mysterious creature and without my knowledge or permission she bought the ingredients for lasagna and today she is doing the assembly for later cooking.  There are fragments of sausage and meatball, sauce and various cheeses that go into the layers between the pasta layers.  Of course, I forgave her for her treacherous silence and subterfuge.  Just as Adam forgave Eve for that whole apple thing, I was the better person and put the whole treacherous story behind me and gave my blessing to this lasagna conspiracy.

But this does create an awkward situation for my meal.  I really like roast beef and I like ham.  But lasagna is enormously delicious and infrequently available.  How do I do justice to this dinner without ending up in the hospital emergency room?  Ah, heavy is the head that wears the crown.  Well, I’ll figure it out.  And of course, left over lasagna is a very pleasant situation and I’m sure Camera Girl will distribute it to the households that have children to feed.  Maybe the real concern is that some of it remains for me on December 26th and 27th.

Here is a photo of the intermediate stage of the lasagna assembly process.

And one of the end product.

And here’s one of the Italian cheesecake she’s also got going.

Well, I have to say, Christmas 2022 is shaping up to be pretty remarkable.  It seems that the crazier the world becomes the more special become the personal moments that we share with our friends and family.  In fact, that’s probably why they’re that way.  It’s a defense mechanism to keep our sanity and concentrate on the things within our control and keep the awfulness at arm’s length.  Well even if that’s so it doesn’t detract from the greatness of these special things we do.  Tomorrow we’ll be away at Christmas Eve most of the day so I’ll say Merry Christmas to everyone here.  May you enjoy your time and make the most of it.

Merry Christmas

In Hera’s Kitchen

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Today is the highest of solemnities in Camera Girl’s kitchen calendar.  I, even I, am banned from encroaching on the rituals being performed.  And I’m no fool.  Interfering with the magic going on risks the spoiling of those spells and the blighting of the baked goods being produced; a horror not to be imagined.

Today Camera Girl and her daughters and now her granddaughter will gather like a coven of witches and take their magic ingredients and hover around the stove and drink coffee (or hot chocolate in the case of Princess Sack of Potatoes) and knead dough and add vanilla extract and hand shape the grandma cookies and the chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies and whichever new variants they decide on.

And wondrous aromas will waft through the house and when they’re through there will be a pile of cookies to get us through to New Year’s Day.  Splendiferous confections that turn a coffee break into a feast.  And make watching an old movie into a special event.

But even ignoring the practical results of this activity, this is a primary ritual of our domestic calendar.  The hand written recipes are coming on fifty years.  The paper is beginning to crumble and the writing is fading from exposure to ingredients and wear and tear.  I’ve warned Camera Girl that they need to be copied and digitized, printed out and distributed to her daughters to preserve them from loss.  But if it’s going to be done, I’ll have to take on the project.

I look at some of the recipes and the notes on them and see the names of friends and relatives from long ago.  Only one or two living women are represented.  Most are from our parents’ and grandparents’ generation.  A few go even farther back.

And that’s a comforting legacy.  In these times when fools are trying to deconstruct the meaning of man and woman and sever the traditions that have given meaning to our lives, there still exist people and rituals that ground our lives and make them human and pleasant.  Baking cookies may seem to some people to be a trivial and possibly harmful activity in a world of obese people.  But it’s exactly opposite.  Christmas cookies are a special and specific part of the year.  Once they’re done, we don’t make more.  We move onto the winter months when we subsist on meager fare, far removed from the bounty of summer and fall.  Christmas is a celebration and an ending of the year and needs to be treated as such.

So, I will withdraw from the kitchen and keep myself busy with other things while the women commune with their flour and butter.  From time to time, I’ll find an excuse to walk by the kitchen and see how things are going.  And maybe my granddaughter will come visit with me for a game of Candy Land.  But for the most part I’ll leave them to their industry and their talk.  And before I go to bed there will be the hoard of golden and white and brown cookies in various cookie jars and containers.  And of course, there will be a big mug of coffee and one or two (or even three) cookies waiting for me to enjoy during a holiday movie.  God bless you Camera Girl and long may you bake.

With Visions of Sugar Plums Dancing Over Their Heads

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Christmas Cooking, Sony A7 III, Sony 90mm f\2.8 macro lens

 

The last week before Christmas.  Now Camera Girl must marshal all her powers to coordinate the schedule of buying and cooking the feast.  Today she came home with a ham, chopped meat, escarole and some of the other ingredients of the various courses.  The roast beast won’t arrive until the end of the week.  And the pies and cakes won’t be baked or bought for a few days more.  I was explicit that there must be a good quality vanilla ice cream in copious quantity to complement the pies.  And very good coffee to wash it down.

The mashed potatoes, corn, crescent rolls and the stuffed mushrooms are all last-minute items that won’t be started until Christmas Eve but they’ll add their dimension to the meal.  And finally, I demanded chestnuts and that rope of dried figs that no one ever eats.  Camera Girl, being the frugal woman that she is, complained bitterly that chestnuts now cost $8 a pound.  But I was adamant.  I never liked them as a kid but my father-in-law always had some out at Christmas and after trying them a few times I actually developed a taste for them.  As for the dried figs, they’re so hard that they’re almost inedible but somehow it wouldn’t be Christmas without them lying around on the table so I demanded them too.

And this year I’ll show my little granddaughter the trick with the mandarin orange skin and a lighted match.  The oils in the skin are flammable and she’ll be amazed to see it ignite around the match when I squeeze the skin near it.  And this year I think I’ll try to get the kids to join in a penny ante poker game with me.  Camera Girl has an old bucket of pennies.  There must be a thousand of them and we can play for hours without any serious money changing hands.

I’ve got my favorite Christmas DVDs at the ready and several albums of Christmas music on tap.  And no one should be sick this year because everyone has already been stricken with the Chinese Bioweapon recently.  I don’t know that I’ve ever had a sugar plum but I’m pretty sure there’ll be all kinds of chocolates and mints on the table.

Sure, everything is about twice as expensive as normal and that old dimwit Biden keeps gassing off every few days about Ukraine or gay marriage or trans-something-or-other but I’m satisfied that this will be a good Christmas despite him and the rest of the grifters who run the crime family that fleeces us.

It’s still Christmas, friends, family and food and that’s a pretty good combination.  I can no longer feel any community with the degenerates that surround us and plot bigger and uglier ways to degrade the good things in the world.  But I feel kinship with the normal people that work hard and raise their kids and try to make the world go round.  With them I can hope for a Merry Christmas and we’ll worry about the New Year later.  Where’s that sweet potato pie?

5DEC2022 – OCF Update – More Focus Stacks

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Today I was part of the long chain of knowledge that begins with the “the master of those who know” and extends all the way to my four year old granddaughter.  In the spirit of Aristotle we recreated the dialectic on the various animal classes.  I tried to explain the reason why a grasshopper was different from a mouse.  We talked about the higher animals and the lower animals and I even got around to explaining why dinosaurs are related to lizards and birds.  After about a half hour she’d had enough and we went back to a match game for dinosaurs.  And after that back to Candy Land.  Well I’d still give Princess Sack of Potatoes the intellectual edge over Plato but I think I need to get some high quality color phtots of different animals to make the discussion more compelling for her.

Once Camera Girl led her granddaughter into the kitchen to bake some pumpkin bread I decided this was a good day for some macrophotography fun.

So I took some focus stacks.  I had a tiny old Roman coin and a long dead beetle lying around so they were my subjects.

15DEC2022 beetle stack
15DEC2022 coin face 2 stack
15DEC2022 coin tail stack

The focus intervals don’t seem to have been sufficient to give a perfect stack.  But i’m using a Sony Remote Commander and it doesn’t have any calibration for the focus change.  I have a little program I can use while tethered to my laptop but the A7 IV requires a USB 3 cable and I only have USB 1 or 2.  So I’ll have to go out and get one.  But still a nice exercise.

All in all a day well spent.

The Culture Wars Are Won One Child at a Time

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Legislating morality and thinking that will be enough to protect children is a mistaken idea.  The individuals who seek to prey on young people are working at the personal level and they need to be stopped at the same personal level, one on one.  Excluding these individuals from access to your children has to be done by design and diligence.

Look who has access to your kids.  The biggest pools of access are in the schools they attend.  There you have the school boards who set policy, the principals who oversee the operation and the teachers and other functionaries like librarians, nurses, teacher’s aides and administrators who directly interact with your children.  Figuring out how to evaluate the records and personalities of these people is far from a trivial exercise.  But this is your responsibility.  You’ve got to utilize any and every resource available.  Do a search for best practices in evaluating schools for safety risks like sex offenders among the staff.  Demand to see the curriculum and actual course materials that your children will be studying.  Find out what outside personnel and resources will be used in any enrichment activities the school plans for the coming year.  Talk to the teachers individually and engage them with frank questions about their perspectives about anything that the teachers might try to use to interject their personal beliefs on your children.  Note these teachers’ appearances and mannerisms.  Are they unusual looking?  Do they behave at all abnormally?  Look for danger signs.  An obvious one is an LGBTQ individual.  Worse still is someone who presents as transgender.  If the school is terrible, then look for an alternative.

And the schools are not the only danger zones.  Day care and after school activities such as gym classes, dance classes, sports, scouting, swimming lessons, self-defense classes, art classes, music lessons are all things that must be investigated to feel confident that the personnel are safe and to be trusted.  And even then, remember that other children are also to be taken into consideration from a risk point of view.  Will your child be supervised in a responsible manner by the personnel present.  Or alternatively will you be present to take care of the supervision?

And finally, the other reservoir of concern are your children’s friends and their families and parents.  Leaving your kids with strangers is extremely irresponsible.  Get to know your kids’ friends and their families.  Friends have an enormous influence on growing children.  Peer pressure about sex and drug use are extremely hard to overestimate.  Kids are horribly suggestible well into their twenties.  But do your best to exclude the worst examples among their peers that you can.  And the best way to do this is to dominate their free time with activities and playmates that you have planned and vetted.  One of the best ways for you to do this is to volunteer for the supervision of the activities that your kids will be participating in.  Coaching kids’ sports teams is a great way to see which kids are odd or abnormal.  Also, you’ll get to meet the other parents and try to distinguish the good from the bad.  But remember your knowledge of other people will always be limited.  Always be careful of the situations you leave your kids in when you can’t be there.

And finally come up with a program for making your kids aware of the dangers that they may be exposed to when you’re not around.  Have appropriate discussions with your kids about the strange things that have begun to infect the world.  Somehow, you’ll have to explain some of the abnormalities that have become commonplace in the modern American landscape.  You’ll have to explain things like homosexuality and transgenderism and how they can protect themselves from the people attempting to normalize these behaviors to children.  You’re going to have to find resources to explain these concepts in ways that don’t frighten kids but at the same time allow them to adopt a posture that allows them to keep away from it.  That is far from a trivial assignment.

This is an enormous amount of work.  You can make it easier by living in a state like Florida that is starting to legislate against schools teaching perversion to young children.  But even in a “safe” state the burden is still on you to ensure that dangerous predators don’t manage to get access to your children.  But if you’re a parent, that is your job and if you’re successful you will win the culture war in the most important sense of the term.  You’ll have protected your child from the sexual confusion and nihilism that is the worst damage that the Left inflicts on children.  And you’ll maximize your chances of someday having grandchildren that will need to be protected too.  But then you’ll have raised children that will be up to the challenge of being those parents.

Surviving and Thriving as a Permanent Political Minority in America – Part 1

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As I’ve made clear since the 2022 mid-terms, I no longer expect the Republicans to be able to win the presidency or majorities in congress for the foreseeable future, if ever.  But that’s not the same as just surrendering to the progressive agenda.  I still think there’s a chance that red state governments may take effective measures to protect their citizens from the evils that the federal government is rolling out even as we speak.

So, what this leaves me to do is contemplate what measures I should take as an individual to insulate myself and my family from the worst of the damage.  And this is the correct strategy.  It’s time to stop imagining we’re going to re-take the federal government.  The Democrats gamed the system so thoroughly and for so long that it’s next to impossible for the Stupid Party to win.  And, honestly, I’m pretty sure they don’t want to.  So, the correct mindset is to identify and perform the activities that you can in order to make the best life for you and yours.

And this is not a small thing.  The benefits you can produce and the problems you can prevent are enormous.  Basically, what you are doing is wrenching back under your control things that the progressives have stolen away from you via school-based propaganda and unconstitutional government actions.  You have to intervene either personally or through private groups or both to produce the outcomes you desire.  And you want to put yourself in places where there are more people that agree with you, people who can be allies and possibly friends.

So, let’s look at some of the examples of things that could be done.

  • School

Here’s one of the biggest impacts you can have on your life.  If you send your children to the public schools and don’t involve yourself in what they are being taught then you deserve to be called a member of the Stupid Party.  The first step is to find out what they’re being taught.  Request to see the lesson plans and syllabus for your children’s classes.  Pay attention to both important subjects like math and science and also the soft subjects like social studies and language.  Find out how extreme the problems are and decide whether it’s possible to allow the children to remain there.  Maybe by talking to your kids about the nature of the disinformation they are being fed you can inoculate them from the damage.  If there isn’t a way to change the worst of it then you must get your kids out.  Maybe this means sending them to a private or religious school.  Maybe it’s possible for them to be home schooled.  But whichever way you affect a change you are probably performing the most important service you can for your children.

  • Local Politics

Believe it or not, even in a deep blue state there are things that you can do to improve the local environment.  At the very least, when you are looking to move to a new home or get a new job look at the complexion of the community you are considering.  Without a doubt there are better and worse choices to choose from.  You can look at the voting record of your town.  You can read up on the referenda that the town has voted on over the last few years.  You can look for the telltale signs of a small town being invaded by the refugees from the local progressive stronghold.  Look at the local test scores of the schools and just look around for what kind of signs the town and the local businesses put up.  If you find yourself surrounded by BLM and rainbow banners then think hard and long about moving there.

Find out if there’s a local Republican Town Committee and go to a few meetings and listen to what they talk about.  Hear what priorities they have.  Ask a few pointed questions about any recent progressive initiatives like low-cost housing or DIE programs.  Figure out if you’ll be in the minority or the majority politically.  And consider getting involved on a town committee if you have the expertise or the interest.  Finance, zoning and budget committees are especially useful.  Get to know your neighbors and let them know you.  That’s how you find allies and maybe friends.  Hiding your head in the sand is how we got in this mess in the first place.

Alright I’ll stop at two for this first part.  But you get the point.  Grabbing hold of your life is the only way to limit the damage the progressives do to you and your family.  Applying this strategy across the whole length and breadth of your life is how you take control and deny the Evil Party from ruining your world.

21NOV2022 – OCF Update – We Go On

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Good morning.  The sun is shining the cold has set in and everything is in motion for the Thanksgiving holiday.  And everyone has his part to play.  Even I, the laziest man in Christendom, have chores and errands and must play my part.  Wonderful.

We fulfill these parts even as the edifice of western civilization degrades and crumbles all around us.  And I say, okay!  No more whining, no more railing against the corruption and greed that fuels the destruction.

Play into the storm.  Look for the advantage.  Protect you and yours.  Intelligence and reason are real.  Even if the world pretends they don’t exist, they do. Teach your children that the hot stove burns and poison kills and a loaded gun isn’t pointed at a friend.

There are plenty of things to do.  Ferret out the things that have value and hold onto them.  Find the good people and show them your value.  Don’t waste your time on nonsense.

Do something to make things better every day.  It doesn’t matter if it’s insignificant.  Make each day count in some way.  Even if it’s something you have to do anyway.  In your mind find a positive aspect and accomplish it.

Don’t lose touch with your people.  Reach out to them even if they’re far away.  In our all-encompassing communication infrastructure, there’s never an excuse for losing touch with the people that mean something to you.  Take a moment and say something meaningful to one of them as often as you can.

There’s no need or room for despair.  What’s needed is work.  Find something meaningful to do and DO IT!

The Republicans are useless and evil.  the Democrats are in charge of everything and satanic.  How is that different from 99.9% of recorded history.  Maybe we had Camelot in this country for a couple of hundred years and now it’s over.  Suck it up.  Move on.

Keep your eyes open for something better that comes along.  Don’t give up on politics but don’t expect the good guys to come over the hill and restore us to the 1950s or even the 1980s.  That’s highly unlikely.  Settle for someone doing something that makes things a little less horrible.

Believe in yourself and believe in common sense and believe in the good that you can do for your family and friends.  There is good and evil and there is right and wrong.  Use the brains that God gave you to figure out the difference and make the hard decisions.

And keep your eyes open in case there comes a point where you need to jump out of the way of anything really, really bad.  That’s the one that worries me.  But worrying doesn’t accomplish anything so keep that in the back of your mind and do all of the rest of it today and tomorrow and the day after that.

And that day after that is Thanksgiving!  So, get on with it and there’ll be turkey and stuffing and pumpkin pie waiting for you on Thursday.  That’s good enough to keep me going.

12NOV2022 – OCF Update

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Today is Princess Sack-of-Potatoes’ birthday party here at the Compound and there will be about thirty people and I’ve been elected to grill duty.  After a day of heavy rain and wind we’ve been blessed with sun mild temperatures and a light breeze so everything looks good.

So stay tuned.  I’ll be back with some things to say later on.

Holding Onto What’s Real

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Imagine allowing yourself to be talked into letting your children be neutered.  How exactly does any parent do that?  I get angry just thinking about somebody else doing it.  Exactly how insane do you have to be and how exactly do you get there?

Obviously, it’s a long path that involves allowing your children to be proselytized by the culture and the institutions that we surround them with.  Teachers and administrators are the primary culprits.  But let’s not forget public television, social media outlets and Hollywood’s contributions.

It’s not my intent to try and convince anyone stupid or crazy enough to believe in these things otherwise.  What I think is better is making the practice of neutering children a felony.  I’d say it should be somewhere between murder and aggravated assault.  No, I take that back.  I’d make it a capitol offense.  It’s the most heinous crime imaginable.  It’s not only a crime against the victim, it’s also a crime against the ancestors of those children going back to the dawn of time.  And I would extend the criminality to anyone who even promulgates the idea of transgenderism to children.  For those people I’d recommend twenty lashes with the cat o’ nine tails for the first offense and then up the ante from there.  And I’m only being slightly facetious.  These people who advocate these things are a cancer.

Look, we can’t afford to lose any more of our humanity than we already have.  Men have been cajoled and browbeaten about being men.  We have to speak softly and mince words for fear that we’re mansplaining.  We’re not allowed to notice a woman wearing a plunging neckline or pants so tight they might actually be painted on.  Women have to pretend they’re men.  They are told that if they’re not as good at something as men are like sports or aren’t as interested in something like computer programming then it’s discrimination at work.  They’re lied to and told that they can wait until their forties and then have all the kids they want when the truth is they’ll be lucky to even have one.

Being a man or woman is one of the miracles of life.  And to have a chance to bond with a human being completely different from and complimentary to you is a remarkable experience.  And then to make that the basis for keeping life on this planet going is brilliant.  Anyone who has successfully raised a family knows that it is the most painful, frustrating and ultimately the most worthwhile thing you will ever accomplish.

If and when we have the presidency and the Congress back in Republican control, I think one of the highest priorities should be to make a national law to criminalize the neutering of children.  I don’t see any serious obstacle to getting it passed.  Except in the Northeast and the West Coast all the other states will have a majority of citizens who are horrified by the idea of these mutilations being committed against children.  And guaranteed if someone votes against it in one of those states, he will be tossed out in the next election cycle.

And I think this needs to be part of a larger effort to expand parents’ rights.  Schools need to be held accountable for infringing on parents’ rights to raise their kids their own way.  Sex education and “critical race theory” should never be forced onto children whose parents object.  Once again these are common sense laws that will be wildly popular in most places.

Part of the problem with the way we live is that experts have started telling us how to live.  Worse, they’re telling the people in charge how to make us live these ways.  It’s time we start making some decisions on our own.  We have to find new leaders.  Our lives are short and the things that make them worthwhile can’t be curtailed without rendering them meaningless.  We want to enjoy the simple things, like food, simple comfort and the joy of living in a family of a man and a woman raising their kids.  That’s what we want.