The Scatter-Shot States of America

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The Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock four hundred and three years ago we are told.  And those Puritans risked all to escape from the England of religious persecution.  Now it may be that the persecution was based on the annoyingness of the Puritans.  We won’t debate that.  Suffice it to say they wanted a place of their own where they were free; free to persecute unto death, whomever they chose, in peace.

And they succeeded fabulously.  From humble beginnings they spread across the continent and now in every jurisdiction where they were overrepresented; New England, the Middle Atlantic States, the Great Lakes Region and the Pacific Coast they torture anyone who disagrees with their whims.  And they have even set up a coalition that allows them to torture the other areas of the United States by means of federal legislation and executive branch administrative rulings.  They are indeed very organized and very effective at making other people miserable.  It is their whole reason for existence.

And yet, even now as rioting and thuggery turn the streets of once great metropolises into anarchic hellscapes, the greater part of the geographic area of the United States is still a wonderland of modern life.  For the most part we have the advantages of the electric age where appliances and machines provide us with multiples of a horsepower at our fingertips to do everything from transport us to a job located a week’s walk from our home to cutting up a fallen tree in a tiny fraction of the time it would take us with a hand saw.  We heat our homes and cool them using chemical energy derived from carbon-based fuels and we eat food that is kept sanitary by refrigeration.

Now undoubtedly things have begun to degrade.  The electric grid crashes enormously more often than it did even twenty years ago.  The powers that be want a lot of this cheap and convenient power to go away.  But even now with infrastructure degrading around us, our lives are immeasurably easier than our ancestors living a hundred and fifty years ago.  As galling as are all of the lies we are told about why our standard of living has to be lowered, it’s probably true that even after they take away fossil fuels from most of us, the United States will still be more pleasant a home than the majority of the rest of the planet.

One can only imagine what it would be like, living in the Congo or Egypt or Pakistan.  Even Mexico or Brazil would be many times less safe or comfortable.  So maybe leaving here would not make sense.  Maybe we cannot be modern day pilgrims leaving the place of bondage for a land of opportunity.  Unless we can find that promised land right here in the United States.

As much as the busybody Puritans use every power at their disposal to rule over us, maybe we can undermine their control locally and even regionally.  And with the modern abilities to network and organize people across great distances maybe we can produce coalitions of our own and pool resource and regain a large part of the control over our lives that the Puritans have taken away.

For instance, Joe Biden attempted to instate regulations to force cleaning equipment (dishwashers and clothes washers) to work with extremely low amounts of water.  This is supposedly environmentally friendly but what it does is ensure that these devices will work poorly.  And I assume that companies that do not adhere to these standards will be fined or their leadership will be liable to arrest by the environmental police of one stripe or another.  The solution to this is to have the red states provide safe havens for manufacturers who produce non-conforming equipment.  And thus, this equipment could be manufactured and sold within these states.  And similarly for other companies and products that the federal government is attacking.  A major case will be gasoline powered cars.  California has legislated a ban on new gas-cars after 2030, I think.  If Joe Biden is re-elected something similar will be attempted nationally.  That would be a perfect time for a coalition of red states to champion fossil fuel devices of all kinds and draw a distinction between free states and slave states.  Le the free states enjoy all the benefits of cheap power while the slave states try to cut their lawns with battery powered mowers and travel around in their battery powered clown cars.  That is until they stall out.

So maybe we can all become pilgrims within our Scatter-Shot States of America and attempt to wring a free and prosperous life despite the worst efforts of the Puritans to make us as miserable as themselves.  It may be our last best hope at happiness.

Ah Really, Aurelius?

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So here I am in the ems.  And next up (almost) is Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.  Yes that Marcus Aurelius.   And really, I’m a big fan.  Holding back the fall of the Roman Empire for almost twenty years is nothing to sneeze at.  I guess he does have to take a hit for being Commodus’ father and all.  I mean he really should have had him put down before he passed but it’s tough for a father to be objective about his kids.

And I like a lot of his quotes.  They are quite enlightened.  But I think sometimes he goes too far.  For instance:

“Everything that happens is either endurable or not. If it’s endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining. If it’s unendurable . . . then stop complaining. Your destruction will mean its end as well.”

“Your destruction will mean its end as well“?  What the hell!

I mean he was a military man.  How about fighting against both the endurable and the unendurable?  Can’t we ever push things out of fate’s hands?

Well, anyway, he’s going to donate several weeks of quotes to the site so I’m grateful.  But I think there should be a limit to just how much silent resignation even a stoic has to exhibit.  Now I know he was basically an Italian so I can’t claim an exemption based on my lineage.  But I can tell you over the last eighteen centuries there has been a precipitous fall off in stoic tendencies among his descendants.  Most Italians like nothing better than to complain loud and long about just about everything happening around us.  You might say it’s our defining behavior.

I’ll end by saying I’m glad I didn’t have him for a boss.  He probably would have continuously lectured me in soothing terms to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and eventually I would have gone mad and murdered him.

Well anyway, his first quote will be January 14th (showing up the night of Saturday, January 13th).

And he really should have made Russell Crowe emperor.  It would have solved a bunch of problems.

G and G

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So, I read today that we lost that fat tub of lard, Chris Christie.  He finally dropped out.  And probably the only reason he dropped out was to give Nikki Haley a better shot at making it close in New Hampshire.  Well, if there’s a candidate I dislike more than Chris Christie it’s Nikki Haley.  In fact, I despise Haley more than Christie by whole orders of magnitude.  Christie is just an annoying gadfly.  He’s on an anti-Trump crusade because it’s the only way he could think of to even reach the debate stage.

But Haley is an honest to goodness GOPE RINO.  She believes in endless neocon war, unlimited illegal immigration, woke evil like transgender pediatric surgery and anything else that progressive Republicans tell her she should believe in.  Listening to her explain why we need to be involved in multiple wars makes my skin crawl.

Currently the plan is for Haley to either win or come close in New Hampshire by means of unaffiliated voters switching their party affiliation to Republican and voting for her.  Then when the South Carolina primary rolls around the hope is that she will have generated enough excitement from New Hampshire to win.  And you never know.  Stranger things have happened.

So, if she manages to win one or both of those states, she hopes to stay in the race all the way to the convention.  Well, I tend to doubt she can make much of a showing.  But what she’s really hoping is to be the last man standing if Trump gets disqualified by the Republican National Committee and then be appointed the nominee.  Basically, she is JEB II.  No, I take that back, she is Mitt Romney 2.0.  One thing I am sure of.  If Haley is on the ballot, she won’t be getting my vote.  I’ll either stay home or vote for Biden as a protest vote.  I despise her even more than Biden and you know how I feel about him.

So here we have the Republican Party doing everything they can to eliminate the candidate that has been polling over 60% for months.  It’s demonstrably clear that they have no interest in adopting any of the clear policy preferences of the great majority of the Republican voters.  All they want is to force the generic GOPE candidate on their voters and if they can’t do that they’d prefer to lose.

I understand that in the short term the Republican Party is the vehicle we are forced to vote for to provide the lesser of two evils.  But a time has to come soon when a successor party must begin to form around populist candidates who won’t owe allegiance to the donors and lobbyists.

It would be an enormous thrill to have a party where everything it stood for was anathema to the Bushes, the Obamas and the Clintons.  Where Nikki Haley, Mike Pence or Chris Christie would be booed off the stage if they dared show their faces.  If I could name it maybe I’d call it the Normal People’s Party.  Or maybe we could call it the God and Guns Party.  Since these are all the things that Barack Obama hated about America.

But in the meantime, just look and listen to Nikki Haley and know exactly what the Republican Party is all about.

Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 10JAN2024 – The Incredible Empty Suit

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Biden is not the one running this country and the SecDef’s recent Houdini act should convince more of the public of this reality.

The implications of the Secretary of Defense ‘disappearing’ for nearly a week without (allegedly) the president knowing reveals a larger truth that the American public need to understand.

It should be pointed out that the current geopolitical situation in the world regarding global conflicts would require daily briefings between the president and his cabinet. Situational awareness and evolving conditions would prompt multiple meetings daily to stay current on these issues.

Between China, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, the Houthis, North Korea-hell, even the border crisis with its contingent of military assets being deployed would tell anyone with common sense that of all people the Secretary of Defense for our nation would be joined at the hip with the American president.

With them admitting that Biden didn’t know for nearly a week where his SecDef was, or his medical status is a damning indictment on the reality that he is an empty figurehead for the country, and not the Commander in Chief.

The bigger question is, who is running our government?

The Decisive Moment

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Writing about Biden yesterday left a black cloud over my soul.  I must purge it with something less depressing.  So, I did some looking around for things that would cheer me up.  And I found this guy Alex at a YouTube channel called the “The Photographic Eye.”  He’s a Brit and says he’s been a professional photographer for about 30 years.  Which is fine and all that but what I found was a video he had called “Train Your Mind To See Photos Everywhere”.

So, the video is a talk on how to approach everyday items and circumstances to look for the interesting photographs hidden there.  And the images he provides as examples are mostly very mundane things; inside a city bus, a table with a partially unfinished jigsaw puzzle, details inside a restaurant or a construction site.

And the images are indeed mundane and some of them had no appeal for me as photographic subjects and yet others made me stop and look and think, “Yes, that would be an interesting shot.”

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As a second exercise he discussed the classic idea of “the decisive moment.”  Even a lazy individual such as myself has read enough about photography to have heard about the French street photography pioneer Henri Cartier-Bresson and his idea of identifying an optimal or even a unique moment when a photograph reveals some dramatic aspect frozen in time. But here Alex advises us to take this same idea and translate it into a mundane environment.  Maybe a train station or a street corner.  But by studying the dynamic nature of the people in that environment you may find the moment when this situation provides an optimal chance for an interesting image.  Here he says that the skill is to tune into the rhythm of the location and stop ignoring the details that we usually tune out when on a street or in a supermarket.

And his third exercise he recommended that a photographer keep a book or even capture some ideas with his phone, where he writes down ideas for future photographs.  Maybe it is a place you saw as you were driving or maybe it’s a thing you saw on tv or in a book.  His point was that ideas often occur when you haven’t got a camera or you haven’t got the time but if you can build up a list of ideas you can plan an expedition or even an indoor shoot around your neighborhood or even in your house.  But as long as you jot it down you have the chance of following up on this good idea, instead of forgetting it again.

And so, these exercises are away to develop your sense of what makes an interesting picture and at the same time to make photography an everyday activity and make it an active rather than passive activity and finally to make it fun.

And in that final aspect, his advice worked.  I grabbed my camera with my macro lens and started stalking around my living room looking for juxtapositions with nick-nacks, books and random household articles.  And before I knew it, I was having a lot of fun.  Now I haven’t reviewed any of these shots in my post processing software so I have no idea whether I’ll still think they were worthwhile once I have a chance to look at them critically.  But I can say that my excitement about taking some shots was higher than it’s been since the leaves fell off the trees this fall.

So, to hell with Joe Biden and all of his rot.  If we let him destroy this country then we probably deserve it.  But I sure as hell won’t spend every waking hour thinking about it.  Life’s too short.  I’d rather spend it looking for the decisive moment.  Or maybe just getting a really nice butterfly shot.