Growing Pains at OCF

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I’m upgrading my plan with my site host.  Of course after I approved the plan I get a message saying it’ll take two day to implement and by the way, don’t modify the site in the interim or the changes may be lost.  If in the next couple of days you notice any monkey business this is likely being caused by “progress.”

Well, what did I expect with AI is “helping” me. I’m starting to wonder if there really are any human beings on the other side of the wire.

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 04FEB2025 – Reasons for Hope

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Points of optimism for you:
You say the Left controls most of the institutions; the schools, the universities, the Media, Hollywood, the book publishers and most of Silicon Valley.
Our schools are failing and school choice is getting bigger every day. Trump may well end the Dept of Education.
The Universities are losing students and power – that means influence as well.
The old media is dying. The new media (Twitter, podcasts, etc) is ascendant.
Hollywood is burning and will probably disperse into other states as CA is too expensive.
The legacy book publishers are becoming more irrelevant every day and will probably go through a period of consolidation and reduction. New publishers are emerging every day and self publishing is a viable option for eBooks.
The Tech Bros of silicon valley are coming over to our side.

Sometimes, all it takes is a leader. Like Trump.

Fear and Pain.  Good.

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So, I was an hour late for work clearing the stupid snow this morning.  Well, because of the snow and because I’m overly optimistic when it comes to estimating snow removal time.  Or maybe I’m too lazy to get up that early.  But it all got done and the world didn’t end and so I can move along with my day and week.

Yesterday Trump ordered sanctions against Canada, Mexico and China.  Today Canada and Mexico came to terms by agreeing to Trump’s border security requirements and got a reprieve of a month on the tariffs to prove their good faith.  And Panama has agreed not to extend China’s management of the canal.

And today I listened to Marco Rubio declaring USAID a rogue agency that will now be brought to heel for ignoring orders to account for who it has been giving money to.

Could this be “Little Marco” sounding more like Donald Trump, or at least an ally of Donald Trump and America?  Has the world gone topsy-turvy?  Or is it just that no one has ever stood his ground against the bureaucrats, influence peddlers and sycophants that infest Washington and waste our money by the imperial ton.  Seeing the progress of Trump’s seemingly endless initiatives I can’t help but think that this is the first man to stand up to the bureaucracy.  Ever!  And it occurs to me that all those impossible things we heard about; defying the FBI and the CIA, and finding out what actually gets done with the defense budget, and reining in the EPA; all of these unattainable goals can be had for the cost of doing the hard work to find out what the bureaucrats actually do all day, and using presidential power to hold them accountable.

I was reading the ZMan’s post today comparing Trump to Isaac Asimov’s character the Mule in his classic science fiction series Foundation.  The Mule was an outlier because his mutant psychic talent was not predicted by Hari Seldon’s “psychohistory.”  And so, he blew up all of the best laid plans of the Foundation.  ZMan thinks that Trump is the destructor laying waste to the managerial state (aka the Deep State).  Well, I don’t disagree with that analogy.  But maybe he’ll be more than that.  Maybe he’ll be like the child who wasn’t afraid to say that the emperor has no clothes.  And imagine if that lesson gets learned by not only JD Vance but even Marco Rubio.  Now, of course, most of these Republican Senators and Congressmen are crooks and they want the payoffs from the defense and pharma lobbyists.  But even if it’s only a handful of honest men, Trump has let the American people in on the secret and anyone who wants to inherit his mantle will have to call out the corruption, waste and inefficiency of the bureaucracy and get us our money back from the crooks that infest Washington.

I’m starting to get hopeful that Trump is going to take a chainsaw to the budget.  And he has several incentives.  Reducing government excesses will lower the debt, rein in inflation and lower taxes.  But it will also starve his enemies of funds with which to attack him.  They won’t be able to hand out millions of dollars to left-wing crazies.  And the NGOs are where most of Trump’s enemies work when the Democrats are out of the White House.  Losing their cozy perches and lucrative salaries will frighten them out of their wits.  And that is exactly when they’ll be least likely to cause trouble.  They’ll be forced to scramble to find a new source of income and they’ll lose the microphones they typically have to organize trouble for conservatives.

I don’t want to sound like a Pollyana.  It’s not as if the Left no longer controls most of the institutions; the schools, the universities, the Media, Hollywood, the book publishers and most of Silicon Valley.  But Trump has show us that controlling the White House can be incredibly helpful in throwing a monkey wrench into the gears of the Deep State.  And since the Deep State at this point is the Left, it’s causing our enemies fear and pain.

Good.

Guest Contributor – Ed Brault – 03FEB2025 – The Dreaded White Stuff

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IMG_20250122_1139589052

Good luck with the snow. I grew up on the MA North Shore and then 40 years on the Northern Tier with the Air Force and Army. Heartily agree about freezing rain. We lost power for 27 days in Plattsburgh NY due to an ice storm back in ’98 (Thank Ghu for wood stoves and oil lamps), and saw a lot of VERY slick road and dead-stopped traffic due to iced pavement. Major reason for moving to South Carolina in 2014. And what happens in 2015? The first snow in 40 years, followed by more of the cussed stuff 10 years later! I tell ya I don’t get no respect!

Now That’s Showmanship

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Ah, Groundhog Day.  When northern America as one embraces a Bill Murray movie and tries to figure out a way to survive until winter gives up.  After a remarkably mild 2023/2024 winter, cold weather has reasserted itself and I have embraced the reality that I don’t live in a rational climate.  The pattern is one day of freezing rain and the next night, zero degrees Fahrenheit.  This is an extremely unhelpful arrangement.  Almost any depth of snow can be removed.  0-4 inches is handled with a snow shovel.  2-22 inches yields, for the most part to a snowblower or plow.  After that it get trickier, but it can still be done.  And the resulting cleared surface is generally very usable for walking and driving your car on.

A quarter to a half inch of ice is a disaster.  If the ground was very cold when the rain fell and then the air temperature dropped quickly and even worse if the wind really picked up, you end up with a layer that is almost impossible to remove unless you put road salt on it.  Unfortunately, I use well water so I don’t salt my driveway.  That’s very unfortunate.  Instead, I take a garden rake or a roofer’s shovel and I abrade the surface of the ice and then I sand it and then scrape it again to lodge the sand in the surface.  This works but it is extremely labor intensive.  So, I hate rain in the winter.  And lately it has become a very frequent occurrence.

Alright, enough whining.

So, what’s new?  Well, tariffs.  Trump has tariffs for Canada, Mexico, China and I assume a lot of other places.  And I hear he’s suspending all aid to South Africa while an investigation of anti-white land seizures and other worse actions is performed.  Wow.  Trump is going full steam ahead.  Every day I ask myself, “What’s left to do?  Nothing.”  But then he does three more things.  One of the things I’m very happy about is that Trump is cutting off the money supply to the NGO’s.  These organizations are funded by the US government but work directly against the interests and sometimes against the very laws of this country.  Here we are spending billions of dollars to eject illegal aliens while charities are spending billions of tax-payer dollars to feed, house and hide these very same illegal aliens.  Cutting off their funds is the most effective and fastest method of combatting the problem.  I’ll give him credit; Trump is proving to be a force to be reckoned with.  I don’t want to get my hopes up too high but it seems to me that there is a very good chance that he’s going to “fundamentally change the United States,” but for the better.  Sort of an anti-Obama.

Kennedy, Gabbard and Patel are up for votes in the Senate this week.  If I were to guess I’d say all three will need Vance as the tie-breaking vote.  And that’s actually me being optimistic.  There are some truly terrible Republicans in the Senate.  McConnel voted against Hegseth because he gets money from defense contractors and they’re worried Hegseth and Trump will end the gravy train.  I think it’s possible he’ll vote to confirm Patel because he doesn’t get paid by any lobby associated with the FBI.  Now there are plenty of Senators that get paid by the pharma lobby.  This might cause Kenedy to be rejected.

Update: Hat Tip to Tom D for the data

top-medical-indust-receip
top-medical-indust-receip

 

 

As for Gabbard, I think she’ll get through but I think Vance will break the tie.  So, I guess I’m cautiously optimistic.  Hopefully that’s more accurate than Democrats being nauseously optimistic on Kamala’s election prospects.

We’re getting 2-4 inches of snow tonight (they say).  I’ll be up very early to clear that before going to work tomorrow.  This will be a hectic week with some travel toward the end.  But I’ll be dutifully following the news coming from the Trump White House (the Greatest Show on Earth).  I keep waiting to hear that he’s declassified the Area 51 files and that he’s going to give a tour of the flying saucer and the pickled bodies of the space aliens.  Now that’s showmanship.