Emerging From the Cocoon

photog Current Events, Guns, OCF, Photography , , , ,

Just finished up a large and annoying project at work.  So, I’m celebrating a day of freedom with a big mug of coffee that Camera Girl made for me.  To paraphrase a line from a movie, “What did people do before they had coffee?”  Someone once told me that the American Century was fueled on coffee and cigarettes.  I could believe him.  Could the decline in American effectiveness in so many arenas be attributed to the decline in smoking?  It’s an interesting idea.

I’m looking out the window at the grass growing and the first butterflies of the year.  Unfortunately, I’m also seeing the first carpenter bees of the season.  For anyone lucky enough to not know what these are, they look like exceptionally large, aggressive bumble bees that burrow into wood (such as the outside of my house) and make a nest in which they lay their eggs.  Camera Girl was picking some dandelions that were in one of her raised gardens when a couple of these destructive bugs started to buzz around her.  I warned her away from the garden and promised to find out where they were burrowing and use lethal force to settle their hash.

May will be a very busy month both at home and work.  And that’s fine.  With the longer days and hopefully the warmer temperatures there will be more time to fix stuff and set things up around the grounds.  Today I was reminded of another piece of carpentry that has intruded on Camera Girl’s sense of how things should be.  And with the price of lumber and hardware reaching astronomical heights, what a wonderful time it is to be a homeowner.

The first hummingbird sightings have occurred and Camera Girl has put up her feeders.  I’ll try this year to do a better job with the 200-600mm lens to get some really good shots of them.  Yesterday I went out to get a few shots of the big elm tree that grows around here.  The leaves were bursting out of their buds and the tree has a very distinctive appearance that I wanted to capture.

Another drama playing out this spring is the epic battle between Camera Girl’s pet crow Moe and his arch-enemy Poe (a newly arrived raven).  She leaves scraps out for Moe in the morning but lately Poe shows up and snatches them.  Just now Camera Girl called me over to the living room window to witness Moe dive bombing Poe and forcing him away from the snack area.  Secretly I’m a fan of Poe.  I’ve always wanted a raven in the neighborhood and this seems like my big chance.  Maybe it’s my fate to become the man who made peace between Moe and Poe.  I mean can’t they all just get along sharing the chicken fat?  Nobel Peace Prize?  We’ll see.

 

I think it’s time for a photo expedition.  I’ll have to make a survey of what the local environment has to offer.  There are usually some antique car rallies and such things but I was hoping for something a little different.  What I think I’d like to get to is a gun show.  I know very little about guns but I think they could make a very good photo opportunity.  I’ve contacted one of the bigger shows to see if they have any qualms about photography.

Well anyway, we’ve finally put the last vestiges of winter behind us.  I saw a spring peeper stumbling around after I raked up some leaves and he staggered away into the woods looking like Mitch McConnell blinking in the lights of the photojournalists trying to confirm that he is indeed still breathing.

This weekend we’re going to a lecture on the latest word on beekeeping.  It’s been more than a decade since my last hive collapsed.  I’ve watched a few videos on the “natural” beekeeping method.  I stopped trying to keep them when the varroa mites devastated the whole industry back fifteen years or so.  I’ve toyed with the idea of catching a wild swarm on the theory that these bees have come into equilibrium with the various pests and will fare much better than the heavily “medicated” hives that exist on the edge of succumbing to the very insecticides used to beat back the mites.  I’ll ask this local expert what he thinks and who knows, maybe I’ll try my hand at beekeeping again.  Although I’ve been warned that between blueberries, raspberries and bees I’ll have every black bear in a fifty-mile radius lined up to clean me out.  Such is life.

Well in the immortal words of George Costanza, “You know, Spring! Rejuvenation, re-birth, everything’s blooming, all that crap!”

Why Did They Lie

photog Current Events, Fake Science, Trump , , ,

Back in 2020 when the COVID pandemic was beginning, a “tight network of elite scientists soon engaged in a remarkably effective effort to deceive the world. They collectively briefed the U.S. government, World Health Organization, and any media outlets that would listen: The science was settled, this wasn’t a lab leak. Some of them went on to publish the now-infamous Proximal Origins paper in March 2020 in Nature Medicine, ranked as the most impactful science article of that year. “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” the paper’s authors asserted.”

But now we have a much better understanding, not only of how COVID got loose but also why its origin was hidden.

“It was always a lie; one of the most consequential lies of the 21st century. Like all great lies it perfectly inverted the truth: the evidence supporting natural spillover has always been thin. Conversely, the evidence pointing to a lab leak has always been compelling and has grown substantially more persuasive with time.”

And the quoted article concludes that the lies were made for four different reasons:

  1. One group of scientists who lied were direct collaborators with Wuhan in their bat virus gain of function experiments and therefore were directly responsible for the COVID outbreak.  They lied to avoid culpability in this enormous disaster.
  2. A second group of scientists weren’t linked to the Wuhan lab but had strongly supported the idea that gain of function research was safe and therefore would be seen as partially responsible for the risky research that gave rise to COVID.  Also if COVID’s origin is pinned to gain of function research then these researchers would be deprived of this experimental practice for safety reasons.
  3. A third group had financial and reputational incentives provided by Anthony Fauci in the form of grants for research.  They sold their reputations for research dollars.
  4. And the fourth group was anybody who absolutely refused to say it was a lab leak because Donald Trump said it was.  They hated Trump so much that they would swear that the core of the sun is cold if Trump said it was hot.

In a just world, people in the first three groups should go to prison for lying about the origin of a disaster that had such horrific economic impact.  The fourth group should be mocked incessantly and any of them in the media industry should lose their jobs.

But this isn’t a just world.  It’s just the world.

A Reckoning

photog Current Events, Reclaiming the Family , , ,

Watching the bizarre scenes from the various campus “protests,” I thought, what a strange point in American history.  America conquers the world and then tries to swallow the world.  But in the process, loses its soul.  Or maybe its identity.  Or more exactly its elites try to cast off the European based identity of the western world in order to fool the world into thinking the West equals the world.  And maybe it’s a brilliant ploy that would cement the entire world into eternal subservience to the elites.

But it also means that we, the regular people, become no one.  The New Testament (Mark 8:36) says, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”  And we’re not even the ones gaining the whole world.  We’re just losing the little bit we had.

These geniuses who run everything.  These billionaires playing ten-dimensional chess with artificial intelligence; pulverizing and homogenizing all the human bits of the world into a gray paste that they can sell back to us in a plastic bottle; have it all figured out.  TikTok is the new rock and roll.  They hypnotize the kids by selling them this vapid product by the minute or the fifteen second, whatever happens to be the attention span they’ve reduced their audience to.

And this is nothing completely new.  The mass culture has been selling this since the invention of the phonograph and the motion picture.  What’s new has been the removal of anything resembling the original American or even Western culture.  What’s left is pathetic.  Childish at best.  More like infantile.  Dysfunctional and ranging into deviance in multiple directions.  It’s as if the intention is to divert a whole generation into a dead end where they will be dependent on the government to keep them alive but completely helpless.

And I think they’ve been successful.  Most of the next generation are doomed to a marginal existence that will not include marriage, home ownership or children.  They are a termination.

So, the important question is how to pluck your own family and friends out of this dead end and put them on the path to life?  I guess you have to do it every day.  You have to preach the good word of normalcy.  Tell the kids that the real secret of life is to make yourself a useful, capable human being and then find a mate and build a family.  And try to encourage them to strive for the things that are hard to do.  And by all means provide moral and financial support and advice when you think you have information that they lack.

Watching those morons on the campuses act out their Che Guevera pantomime has been a fascinating reminder that since the Occupy Wall Street movement back in the Obama era we have been watching a lost generation demanding that the government pick them up off the playground floor and give them their pudding cup to soothe them for being complete losers.  They want Communism not because they think it’s just but because they’re too lazy and stupid to even try to live.

The red states are going to have to cut off welfare to the useless so that these people will retreat to the blue states where they can be stacked up in two by six cubicles, fed their daily ration of crickets and narcotized with porn and pot as they await the blessed release of death.  All of these people will have to be swept away.  They don’t want to live.  They just want to be plugged into their matrix.

There’s no way to keep this absurd thing going.  There has got to be a reckoning.

The Student Protests

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The news has been full of accounts of students setting up tent cities on the grounds of Columbia University and other elite schools around the country.  They are protesting their universities’ failure to stop the Gaza war.  Well, of course that’s ridiculous.  How exactly would Columbia University stop the Israeli Defense Forces?  How many nuclear weapons can Columbia University field?  At last count I think it is still zero.  To be fair to the cretins in tents, what they want is for their university to divest of any Israeli stocks and any stocks of companies that make weapons that the US government provides to Israel.

All of this angst is reminiscent of the student protests in the 1960s and 1970s over the war in Vietnam.  The same tired playbook is being used.  The radicals are disrupting the education process and garnering as much attention in the media as they can and attempting to get the presidential race wrapped into their cause.

You know it’s a funny thing.  When I see these useless people and hear them speak about their confused take on the Gaza War, I despise them and wish that the police would drown them in pepper spray and tase them into submission, tie ropes around their feet and drag them away.

And in the red states that’s more or less what is happening.  In these states they want the colleges to educate their kids and there’s no room or time for Bolshevik Theatrics.  You can watch the state police drag the wannabe antifa players off to jail.  But in the People’s Republic they beg and plead with their toddlers to eat their vegetables and un-occupy the Bursar’s Office, pretty please.  And I guess we’re supposed to be upset if the mental patients are running the asylum.  “Something must be done!”

But when I think about it a little, I say, “Who cares?”  My family doesn’t go to Columbia, Harvard or Berkley.  We couldn’t afford to and we wouldn’t be accepted.  So why should I care that the type of people they do accept wants to put on this silly passion play?  I sure don’t.  In fact, I’d be thrilled if they burned Harvard, Yale, Columbia and the rest of the Ivy League right down to the ground.  I’d buy the DVD and watch it at Christmas.  It would be a job well done.

And why should I care if they lay siege to the Democratic National Convention?  Let them.  Let them occupy all of Chicago if they want (although I wonder if the gang-bangers will be intimidated by the Zoomer protesters).  For all I know this is like the Summer of George Floyd and will allow the Left to consolidate its hold on the youth vote.

But either way, what it makes me think is how little I have in common with these people who inhabit the Left.  The future I care about will not be decided by the students protesting at Columbia.  The uselessness of those students will lead nowhere.  They will not become leaders or anything else.  Most of them won’t even leave children after them.  The women are unlovable and the “men” are feeble children.

The young people I care about are the ones who are looking around themselves and trying to figure out a way to scratch out a normal life.  Learn a skill, get a job, find a wife, raise a family.  Real life.  Not sleeping in a tent on a college quadrangle and pretending to be a revolutionary while your parents pay that university a hundred thousand dollars a year.  Figuring out how to help these young people, in my case, my grandchildren, is the most important consideration any older person can have.

As for the Ivy League Intifada, honestly who cares?