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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
Today I was thinking about normalcy. I looked through my archives and I have at least six posts that have the word “normal” in their titles. So I read through some of them. One of them was a celebration of life coming back to normal after the COVID lockdowns. But the others were about defying the culture’s attacks on normalcy. Things like celebrating sexual dysfunction and deviancy, especially with respect to indoctrinating children.
And so, it got me thinking about normalcy as a greater good. And even averageness as opposed to either depravity or perfection. Certainly, when compared to the ugly and even deformed there’s nothing wrong with pointing at perfect beauty as its polar opposite. But most people aren’t perfect. They’re ordinary. And in the psychotic world of social media like TikTok, the only acceptable identities are either girls with faultless synthetic beauty (“TikTok face”) or the various mutants celebrating their separation from human normalcy with body positivity (morbid obesity), individuality (face piercings and blue hair) and gender affirmation (amputations and hormone therapy).
Averageness is a hidden strength in the world. Disdaining normalcy is a disease. Even those who actually encompass some extraordinary perfection in either appearance or other characteristic like strength or intelligence rarely find greater happiness in their lives than people who just get on with the ordinary business of earning their bread and feeding their families. Take as an example Bruce Jenner. An Olympic decathlon champion who had immense athletic ability, good looks, fame and fortune. Now he’s a celebrated eunuch who pretends to be an old woman. And his children and step-children are carnies hawking depravity as a product. A more miserable ending for an extraordinary talent I can’t imagine.
Convincing children, especially teenage girls that unless they’re flawlessly beautiful that maybe there is something wrong with them; maybe they’re even transgender, is an example of how the perfect can be the enemy of the good. What we should be telling kids to consider is how they can best utiilize the gifts they have and how lucky they are to be healthy and normal. After all, average and normal leave plenty of room for kids to grow up happy and healthy.
What we should be celebrating are people living their lives in the real world without anyone capturing it for clicks on social media and without anyone caring whether it’s photogenic enough for TikTok. Real life has nothing at all to do with the internet except maybe for the ease of finding a YouTube video on how to replace the battery in your laptop or how to program your camera to shoot on two memory cards. For that stuff it’s actually useful. It shouldn’t be there to tell kids what they need to look like or act like or sound like. That’s how you end up with these idiots on campus with openly gay boys in keffiyehs extolling the virtues of Hamas, an organization that would throw them off of buildings if they happened to fall under their jurisdiction.
And the only way to embrace normalcy is to live normally. And that means in the real world. You need to do things in real life and specifically you need to get out of your house and spend time with people. And that is what all smart parents should be doing with their kids. Get them out of the house and force them to put their phones away and do actual things with actual people. And the best thing they can do is work. Because work is the basis of human life. And work that forces them to come in contact with people is invaluable. Even the most introverted intellectual must learn how to interact with his fellow man. I mean, if you’re Albert Einstein you can end up as a genius in an ivory tower. But even Einstein began as a clerk in a patent office. And he was probably a better man for having done it.
So average looks, average intelligence, average salary. But if you work hard and learn how to live in the real world, then probably you can have a good life. So, forget about Harvard, see if you can get a job fixing dishwashers or troubleshooting a network. Leave TikTok to the beautiful people and the insane.
So, today Camera Girl and I attended a gun show. Well, no. The guy there told me it wasn’t a gun show. And it was described as a Shooting, Outdoor, and Military Expo. And he was right there was other stuff for sure. They had World War II vintage trucks and jeeps and lots of veterans were there like the guys from the Geronimo Foundation who had details of the reenactments they do of D-Day and other paratrooper deployments.
There was a lot of interesting things besides guns. For instance, what the heck is this? I’m sure it made a lot of noise and blew up a lot of stuff but what is it called?
But there were a lot of guns, so to me it was a gun show.
There were all kinds of antique guns and there were a lot of rifles from the World Wars. But there were also countless modern weapons that ran the gamut from hunting rifles to self-defense to just enthusiast favorites. I think most of the machine guns were from World War II but being completely uninformed I couldn’t really say for sure.
But I got a whole load of shots mostly with my Voigtländer 10mm f/5.6 manual focus lens. In tight spaces such a wide-angle lens helps out. Of course, the manual focus aspect is not so helpful but it was still manageable.
I’ll be processing all the files and then I’ll add them to the Photo of the Day rotation to give everyone a break from my close-up documentation of my corner of Dunwich.
And I had some very interesting conversations with the denizens. One fellow was Vietnam era Army and he was telling about his time on the logistical side of that war. He said that if someone made a requisition for any kind of supply it had to be provided. One day someone came in and ordered three helicopters. And they had to provide them!
Well, it was a very interesting time and I enjoyed it. But I’m still as ignorant of gun knowledge as I was before I entered the hangar (it was at an airport). I asked Camera Girl if she wanted to try the helicopter ride that was available. She gave me a very squinky look and I let it go.
I’ve been meaning to get a gun for the house for a long time. I’ve only delayed this long because Camera Girl has Sicilian blood on her mother’s side and providing her with a firearm always seemed like stretching my luck. But now that we saw so many exciting choices, who knows. Some of the young guys at the show were playing around with guns that had the light or laser aiming assist. Suddenly I had the image of Arnold Schwarzenegger showing up at the compound and I thought maybe I’m better off building a panic room instead. Well, maybe I should do both. After all, in the upcoming cannibal interregnum you can’t have too many precautions.
Gun shows aren’t the best place for gun photography. I say this knowing your environment is totally alien to mine but do you have gun clubs there, competitions? The competitors usually love talking about their weapons and showing them off.
Here’s one of my competition rifles, the others are bolt actions. I’ve used this one for F Class matches. Shot from the prone (laying down) position at 600 yards. The target is the size of a paint can lid and, to be in the running, you have to hit it every time, 60 times in a row. No matter what the wind is doing.
Most rifles like this are chambered in .223 or 5.56 Nato (essentially the same thing) but this one is 6.5mm Grendel. It has quite a bit more “punch” than a 5.56, especially at range.
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Pistols too.
S&W version of the 1911
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This one is for home defense.
I live in farm country with no visible neighbors but you can hear them shooting every Sat and Sun afternoon. With the nearest neighbor being a good piece of a mile away and 911 a good 15-20 minutes if you’re lucky, I do admit to a certain degree of comfort of having something like this handy but reality is that I don’t need it.
Everyone here is armed. A burglar would have to be suicidal to try breaking into homes around here and since, burglars don’t tend to suicidal, they don’t.
About 12 years ago, some druggie in Pensacola killed a couple of his “co-workers” and dumped the bodies a couple of miles from my house. The only crime here originates from family members of people known to the victim. And it is exceedingly rare.
The home invasion robbery, the kind that gives people nightmares, does not exist here.
The Benelli Nova shotgun below is modified to contain 7 rounds up to 3-1/2 magnums. I keep it loaded with 3” Buck. I hope I don’t have to shoot it, the recoil is brutal, even to someone not particularity recoil sensitive.
In the immortal words of Billy Preston in his 1974 song of the same name, “Nothing from nothing leaves nothing.”
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As is my habit on Friday morning I listened to the podcast of that most suave of demons, the Voice of Saruman himself (aka the ZMan). And he did not disappoint. This week he was banging the drum against the Stupid Party (aka the GOP). And as usual, he made some devastating points. The gist of his diatribe was that between the Democrats and Republicans in Congress, the districts have been gerrymandered to the point where each party has a death grip on 90% of the districts they currently control. And because of this partisan lock on particular Congressional seats, the Republican office holders really fear only one thing; displeasing the party bosses. Because it’s the party that gives them the money they need to run their campaigns and essentially only the party can remove them by primarying them. And for that reason, the will of the electorate is completely ignored in favor of what the party apparatus decides.
And so, the ZMan declares that the only way to break the GOP’s stranglehold on power is to vote them all out of office. This is similar to the present campaign to “zero out” the Tories in the British House of Parliament. If all the conservative voters voted for Labor (and less surely if they all just don’t vote at all) the Tories will be wiped out. Once that happens the establishment will be thrown into a panic and some kind of reform might take place. Of course, in the meantime while the progressives are in complete control all kinds of horrors will unfold but without a doubt the stalemate going on in their government will disappear. Who knows maybe Nigel Farage’s Independence Party might replace the Tories and actually reinstate representative government in England.
So, the ZMan has a similar idea. Although I’ll give him credit. He modified the idea enough to allow that conservative voters should split their vote. They should vote for Trump for President but not vote for a single other Republican. He reasons that regardless of whether Trump wins or not the huge discrepancy between Trump’s vote totals and the other Republicans will make the point that the Republicans have lost the confidence of the people and the system is completely broken. He even states that if Trump wins and the Republicans are wiped out in the House and Senate, he would hardly notice the difference in how he would govern. Now this isn’t accurate. If the Republicans were almost completely wiped out then the Democrats could easily remove Trump from office by impeachment. But I do admit it’s a pretty attractive idea. Vote for Trump but poke a thumb in the eye of Mitch McConnell and Mike Johnson.
Of course, I think about introducing a bit more complexity to this scheme which definitely has its points. I would hold off until 2026. In the meantime, I would want some authority, maybe Donald Trump or some independent right-wing group to produce a score card for members of Congress that would decide if they deserved to be re-elected or fired. This list would be provided to the Republican party with the ultimatum, either replace these lawmakers or have them zeroed out. And first off, the House and Senate Republicans should be provided with the names that must be immediately installed in their leadership positions to replace McConnell and Johnson and any of their cronies that currently thwart the will of the voters. And if this ultimatum is ignored then we go straight to full zero (with maybe a few exceptions for anyone I really like!).
Now would this really work? I think it would if the people completely lose faith in the election process. And that is why I would wait until 2026. If Donald Trump wins, this idea could help him tame the GOP. And if he loses in 2024, I think the backlash would power a zero movement that could completely disrupt the Republican party. Maybe it might even be Donald Trump who could lead the charge to zero out the Republicans. If not someone else would do. Maybe Tucker Carlson would like to organize an investigative team to vet each member of Congress and single out the zeroes for zeroing. Anyway, that’s my spin on an interesting idea.
A testcase for this strategy is going to take place in the UK later this year. The ruling Tories are already on track to lose two thirds of their seats in Parliament and even the 24% estimate for their post-election share may be generous. Nigel Farage’s Independence Party may get a chance to see if replacing a major party can be done in a large modern nation.
