In a Businesslike Manner

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After a little fuss and muss Speaker Johnson is Speaker Johnson again.  Okay.

And I hear the judge in New York City is going to sentence Trump right before his inauguration.  Who knows, maybe he’s going to try some dirty tricks like locking him up for the inauguration ceremony.  Maybe the Supreme Court Justice will have to swear him in from Ryker’s Island.  Yeah, yeah, whatever.

Okay, so we’re dealing with mental cases everywhere we’re supposed to have sages and scholars.  Well, what can I say.  These are fallen times and we have to expect idiots to drool on themselves quite a lot of the time.  But things continue to fall apart apace.  Some percentage of our veterans harbor homicidal tendencies toward the United States.  Well, they have lowered the standards for mental fitness so this should be expected.

But this is going to continue while Donald Trump begins to assemble and deploy his cabinet and they get to work terminating the deep state.  I won’t be surprised if some disgruntled former FBI agents decide to take pot shots at him going forward.

But I have bigger fish to fry.  Camera Girl was complaining about the foaming soap dispensers that I bought a bunch of years ago.  It seems they weren’t working smoothly.  The pump would get jammed.  So, I took one apart and tried to figure out what was wrong.  Well, there wasn’t much there so I washed the components and put them back together and tried it out again.  Well, now it wasn’t jammed but the damn thing didn’t work.  Nothing came out.  So now I was getting mad.  I took another one apart and cleaned it up and still couldn’t find anything wrong.  And when I put it back together it didn’t work.  Nothing came out.

So, I stopped taking them apart and since the internet is our friend I did a search for foaming soap dispensers and found this cool exploded view of the mechanism and noticed something.  There is a tiny ball that acts as a check valve.  This ball allows soap to be sucked into the valve but not pushed back out.  And I couldn’t remember seeing such a thing in the two pumps I disassembled.    Well, the stupid thing is only an 1/8th of an inch in diameter and transparent plastic so when I cleaned out the pump, I must have washed it down the drain both times.

Now this was very annoying.  I have since ordered fifty 1/8th inch polypropylene balls and a tube of food grade silicone grease.  With these invaluable supplies I intend to restore the two dispensers back into functionality.  Moreover, I will grease all of the pump pistons with the silicone and thereby satisfy Camera Girl’s original complaint about my equipment choices for the various sink areas of the house.  There are currently six of these dispensers in the place and each one will require this overhaul.

I wonder if she appreciates how lucky she is to have a technical individual of my caliber at her disposal twenty-four/seven?  I doubt that she could have gotten the quick response and analytical acumen that I provided in this foamed soap crisis from just any regular husband.  Far from it.  The only thing I regret is that because of the critical nature of the crisis there was not time for me to send out RFQ’s (requests for quotations) to three qualified bidders on the project.  Business, after all, should be conducted in a businesslike manner.

04JAN2025 – Quote of the Day

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[Isaiah’s Job; The Atlantic Monthly (June 1936) (Part 11)]

If a prophet were not too particular about making money out of his mission or getting a dubious sort of notoriety out of it, the foregoing considerations would lead one to say that serving the Remnant looks like a good job. An assignment that you can really put your back into, and do your best without thinking about results, is a real job; whereas serving the masses is at best only half a job, considering the inexorable conditions that the masses impose upon their servants. They ask you to give them what they want, they insist upon it, and will take nothing else; and following their whims, their irrational changes of fancy, their hot and cold fits, is a tedious business, to say nothing of the fact that what they want at any time makes very little call on one’s resources of prophesy. The Remnant, on the other hand, want only the best you have, whatever that may be. Give them that, and they are satisfied; you have nothing more to worry about.

Albert Jay Nock

Guest Contributor – Milo Mindbender – 03JAN2025 – It’s Her Turn … Again

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Even if the Dems run Kamala as a candidate, never underestimate the Republicans ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The best thing the Dems could do is continue to scold the Americans who disappointed them by not jumping on the EV Kamala bus, and voted against them. They have 4 years to bitch and moan about how they were robbed, and it’s all racist. That would make Vance have an easy run by building up a reservoir of resentment among the undecided. All Trump need to do is hold the stated course of deport, reinflate, and drill baby drill. This could swing the pendulum back to the right, the last election was indicative of a tidal shift against the left wing agenda.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 03JAN2025 – It’s Her Turn … Again

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war pig

Hillary has a better chance than Kamala. But I can see the attraction for Kamala for the lefty bigwigs. She will do absolutely as told. Shove your hand up her butt and make her a puppet. She is mixed race so can claim to be Black. She is nominally a female and the left wants a miority woman in the Oval Office so bad they can taste it. Problem is, she is a terrible campaigner. This time around, when she got the marshmallow-soft question about her differences viz Dopey Joe, she froze like a possum in the headlights. She was roadkill. She HAD to know the question was coming, the media lefties would be sure to tell her campaign manager what questions would be asked. She still flopped. At least she doesn’t terrorize young girls and fall down or walk away with an extended hand pointed toward…nobody.
At least not yet. She has three years to practice, but my belief is they’d rather run AOC than Kamala. Some candidate may rise who is charismatic enough to lead the party and win. A lefty version of Trump – all piss and vinegar. But then, maybe not. Maybe the left has gone plumb loco, as Yosemite Sam would say.

It’s Her Turn. …  Again.

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Ah, the joy of virtuous living.  Today I spent the morning (well, a good chunk of it) reviewing the novel and my notes on the shortcomings of the present outline.  And shockingly, it wasn’t painful at all.  In fact, it was refreshing to be making some progress and making some concrete changes at last.  And sometimes, all it took was a sentence or two over here and maybe a word or two over there.  Yes, very gratifying.  This program is the way to go.

So having done my duty as a serious-minded slave in the salt mines of literature, I can turn my attention to my other vocation.  What do I want to talk about today?

Well, apparently the FBI has discovered that some people expect them to do something to prevent terrorism and failing that, arrest the terrorists and maybe prevent the next terrorist from following in their footsteps.  Well, apparently the biggest mistake is to jump to conclusions; like terrorists could be motivated by radical Islam.  Here we are in 2025 and that outdated post-9/11 islamophobia still exists!  Crazy! Right?

Well, between the anarchists killing CEOs and the Islamists killing whoever they can find grouped in one place, it looks to be a busy time for the new administration.  But honestly, the solution to these problems is the same as for our other problems; shut the borders and deport the crazies and criminals as soon as possible.  Luckily, I think Trump knows that.  If this was Bush or even Obama, they would be asking the Pentagon and the State department which countries to bomb and which regime to color revolution out of power.

I read several leftists bemoaning the fact that the powers that be in the Democrat party don’t think they should change the strategies they used in the 2024 campaign.  Apparently, identity politics is so baked into the coalition and its leaders that “throwing trans people under the bus” is unthinkable.  And apparently so is reducing crime in the cities.  That idea has been declared white supremacist.  Now that’s what I call true believing!

And finally, polls are appearing that show Kamala Harris ahead of JD Vance for the 2028 presidential election.  This is so exciting.  I feel that the Republicans should support this direction with everything they have.  As much money as can be raised should be poured into convincing the Democrat voters that Kamala is the one; the new Obama.  They should stress that she only had a hundred days to get the people on board the Kamala train.  Now they have fifteen times that much to build the wave that will sweep her into the White House.  After all, look at Trump.  He lost in 2020 and still managed the 2024 win.  Just think of what fifteen hundred days of Kamala’s unencumbered futures, yellow school buses and Venn diagrams speeches would do to the American voters’ opinions.  I feel sure they will get to know exactly how smart and sensible she truly is.  But I’m going all out.  Maybe I’ll even switch parties to support her in the primary.  Whatever it takes, I’ll be there, Kamala.  It’s her turn!  Again!

03JAN2025 – Quote of the Day

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[Isaiah’s Job; The Atlantic Monthly (June 1936) (Part 10)]

Isaiah, on the other hand, worked under no such disabilities. He preached to the masses only in the sense that he preached publicly. Anyone who liked might listen; anyone who liked might pass by. He knew that the Remnant would listen; and knowing also that nothing was to be expected of the masses under any circumstances, he made no specific appeal to them, did not accommodate his message to their measure in any way, and did not care two straws whether they heeded it or not. As a modern publisher might put it, he was not worrying about circulation or about advertising. Hence, with all such obsessions quite out of the way, he was in a position to do his level best, without fear or favour, and answerable only to his august Boss.

Albert Jay Nock

New Year’s Resolutions – 2025

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At this dawning of the rolling year, it is more than normally desirable that we make some slight provision for improving our behavior.  Some people try to lose weight or stop smoking.  Others look for a better job or start a hobby.  I’ve vowed to finish my book.  And to accommodate that effort I will be clearing the mornings for writing and editing the book.  This may impact my posting schedule (from time to time) but I think it’s necessary.  Time slips by too quickly if there are too many competing priorities.

Now I don’t intend to abandon the website.  OCF will have its daily photo and quote.  And whenever something needs my approbation, scorn or explanation I will promptly respond.  And I will link to anything that I think interesting or thought-provoking.  But when there’s a slow news week and I’ve already gassed off about the usual suspects I may just take a pass.  On days like that maybe I’ll link to a song I like or a clip from a movie that makes me smile.

And from time to time, I’ll put up a chunk of my story to get feedback from the readers here.  And I’ll write about writing sometimes!

So, none of this is dire.  With Trump entering the White House in a couple of weeks I’m sure I’ll have all kinds of stimuli for posts that will make it impossible to do my fiction writing work.  After all, the world is drifting into troubled times and that is sure to goad me into taking to my little soap box and barking out condemnations and propounding simple-minded plans of action.

But I do see that I’ll have to prioritize writing if I ever hope to finish that darn book.  I do think there is some writing in me.  And I won’t know how hard or easy selling books is until I give it a good old American try.

As for the news today, we’ve all been watching the attack in New Orleans and then listened to Biden try to string a few dozen sentences together without sounding like Max Headroom (and failing).  I love how he tells us the guy is a follower of ISIS but not to jump to conclusions.  So, because he’s a Moslem whose parents came from the Middle East and he’s declared jihad on America we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that he’s an Islamic terrorist?  Would that be insensitive to the various followers of the religion of peace?  Well, never mind.  Biden is so laughably irrelevant that he might as well have started to read from a Dr. Seuss book as the words of that speech his handlers handed him.  More interesting would have been a statement from Trump advising the federal law enforcement agents not to destroy any of the evidence before his team has a chance to see what really went on.  Well, this is a small part of what I expect at the border for the foreseeable future.  So, it barely merits comment.  Let’s pray nothing bigger is in the wings.

 

And just to show that my heart is in the right place, I’ll put together a few things that might lighten your day.

 

 

02JAN2025 – Quote of the Day

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[Isaiah’s Job; The Atlantic Monthly (June 1936) (Part 9)]

If, say, you are a preacher, you wish to attract as large a congregation as you can, which means an appeal to the masses; and this, in turn, means adapting the terms of your message to the order of intellect and character that the masses exhibit. If you are an educator, say with a college on your hands, you wish to get as many students as possible, and you whittle down your requirements accordingly. If a writer, you aim at getting many readers; if a publisher, many purchasers; if a philosopher, many disciples; if a reformer, many converts; if a musician, many auditors; and so on. But as we see on all sides, in the realization of these several desires, the prophetic message is so heavily adulterated with trivialities, in every instance, that its effect on the masses is merely to harden them in their sins. Meanwhile, the Remnant, aware of this adulteration and of the desires that prompt it, turn their backs on the prophet and will have nothing to do with him or his message.

Albert Jay Nock