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Those who follow the banners of Reason are like the well-disciplined battalion, which, wearing a more sober uniform, and making a less dazzling show, than
The United States Congress, acting with large bipartisan majorities, at the urging of the President, enacted as the law of the land that all children are to be above average.
Wow, was I in a black mood yesterday. I shouldn’t dwell on the motives and the just desserts that our insect overlords have and deserve respectively. It’s not good for my soul.
So today Camera Girl and I were walking around the yards looking at what Fall has done to the place and we saw some interesting stuff. We checked out the garden and there were some ripe raspberries left on the plants.
So we ate them as we walked.
We picked three butternut squashes that were still on the vine, even thought their color wasn’t very hopeful looking. But the vine leaves were dying so it made sense to pick them.
I snapped a few foliage shots
I checked the Montauk daisies and they had bloomed.
I went over and checked the wolfbane and sure enough it was opening.
Then we went by the wall and I took a shot of the opened seed pods of the milkweed
And then on a whim Camera Girl checked under one of our reptile and amphibian tins and even though almost nothing showed up there all year except for crickets she found this.
That’s the only spotted salamander I can remembering finding all year. She really has a knack for finding good stuff out of nowhere. In May I will have known Camera Girl for fifty years. And our association has been very satisfactory. I applaud her parents for raising such an excellent daughter. I hazard to say that she is one in many millions in term of her qualities. And not just at finding spotted salamanders!
So today was much better than yesterday and my mood is much improved. Insect overlords, do your worst!
I was talking to a very smart guy recently about where we are now. He was of the opinion that the American Empire was a natural consequence of America taking up the global mantle from Britain after the First World War and we had no choice but to let the federal government grow into the monster it has become to prevent any other emerging power like China from overtaking us in any of the various arenas that we compete in; military power, technological prominence and financial and monetary control. And I sort of see what he means.
But I also know that what America has become is only a good thing for a miniscule fraction of Americans and I can’t imagine how most people wouldn’t be horrified to see the world become the reductionist inhuman dystopia that the people in charge more and more openly espouse. To see the grandchildren of the men who fought World War II programmed by their teachers to think that their duty was to die childless while living in a cubicle sized enclosure while eating dried crickets and watching their phones, is a sickening spectacle. This is just the replay of the Roman Republic collapsing into an empire where the patricians buy up all the land using the spoils created by the plebian legions and then flooding Italy with slaves from these same wars to bankrupt the last of the small farmers and turn them into paupers that could only become soldiers to survive.
You know, I don’t think I care if the dollar loses its reserve currency status and all the masters of the universe have to give way to Beijing. In fact, maybe I would prefer it. If all the American and European billionaires were suddenly impoverished and became just plain old millionaires and suddenly none of us could afford the newest smart-phone made in China or whatever the latest status symbol was, I don’t think I’d be sad at all. If all the guys working for the big investment banks, hedge funds and pharma companies suddenly had to lose one or two zeros from the end of their paychecks, I think it would make me smile. I really wish someone like Donald Trump really would raise enormous tariffs against the foreign manufactured products that all those American companies sell to us. Hell, I’d even buy lousy American cars if they would benefit Americans working in those lousy plants.
And to be honest, I’m not even mad at the Chinese workers or the Mexican workers or even the Vietnamese workers who presently make all the stuff we have to buy. I’m mad at the American globalists who set up this zero-sum game that basically sucks up all the middle-class prosperity that was built up in this country over the course of hundreds of years and transfers it to an oligarchy that figured out how to monetize that middle-class right out of existence.
Even the commissars in the old Soviet Union didn’t want to eliminate the Russian people. They still wanted them to survive and have children. But our modern overlords have a new model where their human serfs are replaced to as great an extent as is technologically possible with computers, robots and drones. Only a small cadre of actual humans will be needed and even this residue will be reduced from iteration to iteration of the plan.
Populism is now the name of what we must espouse. Expansion of the middle class should be the goal of any politician that wants our loyalty. And busting up monopolies now sounds like a wonderful idea. And the first company I would bust up into a thousand pieces is Google. The second would be Amazon. And after taking on the Silicon Valley billionaires I would want to see the FBI shut down permanently. And the CIA would be put under a very tight control and if they interfered with American citizens the perpetrator should be punishable up to the death penalty.
Now all of this is just pipe-dreaming. We are about to find out if we are now permanently out-voted by the new serfs that the overlords imported. If so, the only thing we can do is look for some local infestation of populism that some renegade leader cobbles together and rush to it and hope for the best. Or just wait for the World War III that the neo-cons are pushing for and hope your location on the targeting grid gets missed by enough to allow survival. Then in the post-apocalyptic nightmare that will ensue we might eke out an existence that might at least be free. Ending bitter rant.
Update:
War Pig commented:
Teddy Roosevelt was shot on the campaign trail. He got elected then became the Trust Buster. When the Arabs kidnapped an American widow and her children, he basically invaded the nation and got them back. He built the Panama Canal and used the Great White Fleet as gunboat diplomacy. He was Trump before Trump. I agree, we should give the internet lords the Ma Bell treatment. Increase competition and keep costs down. You and I can remember when Bell ruled communication. We remember usurious long distance tariffs on calls. We also remember the initial wobbles as the baby Bells got their footing, but eventually came into their strides and began exploring new technologies. Competition is everything. It is what drives humans to excel, to innovate. We need more of it, to include taking away unconstitutional powers the feds have siezed and let private industry show how most government agencies are inefficient and rampant with graft and political favoritism.
Educational romanticism asks too much from students at the bottom of the intellectual pile, asks the wrong things from those in the middle, and asks too little from those at the top.
And now a return to form. Whereas Charles Laughton can make a “horror” movie into a semi-legitimate film, putting Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi into a movie ensures that the full Universal horror treatment will ensue.
The Black Cat was such a pairing. Bela Lugosi is a German medical doctor who was taken prisoner by the Russians during the First World War and eighteen years later he is looking to take revenge on Karloff who was the German commander who sold his troops out before the battle. Also, while Lugosi was in prison Karloff stole away his wife telling her that Lugosi was dead. Lugosi comes back to the scene of the battle where strangely Karloff has built an art deco palace on the site of the fort that he had commanded. Later on, we learn that the whole hill is still booby-trapped with dynamite. Well, you never know when that might come in handy.
There is a young American couple honeymooning in this Hungarian locale (sure why not) and Lugosi befriends them and then because of a motor vehicle accident during a rain storm, Lugosi is forced to bring them both to Karloff’s house where the doctor performs minor medical procedures that require putting her under a powerful sedative that makes her somewhat prescient upon meeting Karloff.
While the Americans sleep that night Lugosi and Karloff have a conference and we find out that Lugosi’s wife died of “pneumonia” years before. Unsurprisingly Karloff decided to have her embalmed and put on display in his basement. Well, sure, who wouldn’t! And if all that isn’t bad enough Karloff tells Lugosi that his young daughter also died. Next, we find out that Karloff is a satanic priest and the next night is the new moon and he will be celebrating a black mass at which he wants to sacrifice the American girl to Satan or something. Lugosi objects and Karloff offers to play a game of chess to see whether she will die. And Lugosi loses. Darn. Meanwhile we discover that Lugosi’s daughter is not dead but is married to Karloff and living in the house they are in. The American girl meets her but somehow Lugosi still hasn’t heard about her.
A lot of goofy stuff happens with Lugosi’s servant pretending to obey Karloff and the American man being trapped in a room that eventually he escapes by just opening the door. And even though the satanic mass is quite crowded Lugosi somehow easily manages to rescue the American girl. And then everyone heads down into the basement for the climax.
So, let’s see. Lugosi stumbles on the dead body of his daughter. Karloff and Lugosi get into a fight that ends when Lugosi’s fatally wounded servant helps him over power and chain up Karloff to a dungeon wall (yes dungeon). Then Lugosi decides to finally revenge the deaths of his wife and daughter on Karloff by skinning him alive. But when the American girl sees this going on she screams and her husband finds their location and mistaking Lugosi’s intention he shoots the doctor. Lugosi calls him a fool but tells the American couple to rush out of the building and get away from the hill because he is about to set off the timer that will trigger the dynamite to blow up the satanists, Karloff and Lugosi. And in the last scene the happy honeymooners continue their railway journey to Budapest.
This movie has so many hokey things going on. Why would Karloff believe that Lugosi’s loyal servant would do his bidding instead of his master? Why would Karloff still have the timer and detonator for the dynamite not only intact but on prominent display in his basement? Why wouldn’t Lugosi have killed Karloff as soon as he saw his wife stuffed and mounted in Karloff’s basement? Are all art deco architects, satanists? Or are all satanists art deco devotees? What did Lugosi’s morbid fear of black cats have to do with anything else in the movie except the title? So many questions.
The strange thing is I enjoyed the movie. Sure, it made no sense. But there was a style and an energy to it that was fun. You sort of knew the American couple would emerge unscathed so really, we were watching the duel between Lugosi and Karloff and we knew that some kind of justice would prevail. And those lousy satanists would get blown up.
In a way, with its modernist architecture juxtaposed against the medieval stonework of the underground fort it was a perfect way for the modern (1930s) world to intrude on the gothic horror that is the stock in trade of the Universal horror movies. Art deco horror. Well done Bela and Boris.
Somewhat more than thirty years ago I worked as an engineer for a company that was very important in the petroleum and petrochemical industries. They had an enormous amount of experience, technology and patents for extracting oil and gas from the earth and turning it into everything from gasoline to plastics to primary organic feed stocks. They were heavy hitters. Unsurprisingly they were very well represented in Venezuela. They worked extensively with the companies that produced oil in that country. And equally unsurprising they often employed Venezuelans on many different projects both in Venezuela and elsewhere. But what was surprising to me was how many of these “Venezuelans” were Germans. Apparently, at that time, there was a sizable ex-pat community of Germans living in Venezuela permanently and working in the petroleum industries.
I became friendly with one of them. A younger guy named Karl who looked extremely German but who spoke English with a very odd accent. It had hints of Spanish, German and British English. I asked him about this and learned that he had been educated in an International German school in Venezuela. I got the distinct impression that Karl considered himself a German not a Venezuelan. But at the same time, he had never spent any considerable time in Europe in his life. He was a cultural German who lived in South America. And he was fairly well travelled in the various countries of South America and had very definite opinions about these countries. In particular Karl was very vocal about the attractiveness of the women living in these various countries. He seemed to favor the Argentinians most highly, liked the Venezuelans and was most uncomplimentary about the girls from Brazil.
At the time I thought all of this very odd but I assumed it had to do with the lack of opportunities in Germany after the war. But now that I reflect on it maybe it’s more of a cosmopolitan strategy to avoid being at the whim of the economy of just one country. After all, maybe Germany has always produced more chemists and engineers than it can employ locally and so emigration may be a common choice for Germans.
I haven’t thought about Karl for at least thirty years but I was thinking about what it would be like to live in America after the addition of a hundred million third world immigrants. How would people whose families have lived here for generations and grew up as Americans cope with an “America” that more resembled Brazil or South Africa?
Well, maybe the strategy to consider is creating the equivalent of ex-pat communities in this country. We could build enclaves where we speak standard English and the kids go to “American” school and are taught our history and culture and cultural events are planned and there would be churches and cultural organizations that catered to the ex-pat population exclusively. And a network could be built between these communities across the country and they would serve as a larger community to help preserve the American culture and way of life.
It seems a little sad and pathetic. Being a stranger in your own land. But maybe it’s better than the alternative. Currently the public schools in all the big cities and lots of smaller places are becoming useless as far as the education they provide. In fact, many of them are now dangerous for non-immigrants who are victimized because of the popular culture stigmatizing them as racists. And the culture that will emerge in these “melting pots” will be antithetical and hostile to the culture we recognize. Unless you want your children indoctrinated into this third world ghetto culture you will be forced to send them to private school.
So that’s my thought. We will live in this country because we were born here. But if we want to keep our culture and identity, we might have to build ex-pat enclaves and be strangers in our own land.
Update
War Pig commented:
Given the democrats’ inclination to oppose school choice, they will go after such schools. They want all youth indoctrinated by their lackeys in teacher’s unions. A no-politics school opened in Colorado after lots of fights in the courts. The school is now producing test scores outstripping public schools by a wide margin. Don’t think the left is done with them, either. ANY resistance to Marxism must be crushed. No school which opposes leftist ideology can be allowed to flourish and embarrass Karl’s teachings.
