Idle Hands

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The first frost is due Tuesday night.  I’ve heard there could be snow or freezing rain.  That’s Halloween, so everyone is hoping it holds off until the kids are home from their candy raids.  Of course, a dusting of snow would be alright but freezing rain would be awful.  I remember many years ago when my children were still small and I walked them through the sidewalks of the small town common where we lived at the time when a freezing rain began.  Their plastic pumpkin candy containers filled up with rain and ruined their treats.  But worse still they were frozen to the bone by the time we walked home.  Truly a miserable end to an exciting night for the young.

I had the family over today for a kid’s birthday party.  Amazing.  Remarkable how much good will and high spirits can be created with some pasta and meat sauce.  Well, there was ice cream cake too.  I guess that could be an extenuating circumstance.  I also learned that a pool table will turn into a Nok Hockey table if you allow for the inventiveness of small children.  Instead of a pool cue they use billiard balls as paddles to shoot the other balls back and forth at each other.  Of course, it was probably a little dangerous.  Some small hands might have been pinched while they played and more than a few times the balls came flying off the table and bounced and banged their way across the room.  But they had a good time.  Later on, we had a couple of normal games with the older kids and I tried to teach Princess Sack of Potatoes how to use the cue to make a shot but let’s just say that her way of clearing the table seemed to make her happier.  So, all good stuff.

And we found an old book of “Scary Stories” that I had read to my kids all those years ago.  And I heard about how scary my delivery had been.  And some approved of those convincing dramatics and some had been too afraid.  And I remembered the occasion so many years ago and it surprised me that they still remembered the details.  And so, I offered the book to the children’s mothers and told them to use their own judgement as to when the children were old enough for the story of “The Big Toe.”

So, kids are still kids.  Even with all the nonsense that’s been introduced to ruin them.  They still enjoy being scared by a ghost story and misusing their parents’ toys and all the same things that we did.  You can still enjoy being a parent and grandparent and a kid.  It’s just a lot more expensive.  But that’s nothing new.

But something has changed in the last fifty years.  Our government doesn’t want any more kids.  At least not ones whose parents were born here.  Nobody is planning for them to have jobs and lives and eventually kids of their own.  Slowly but surely.  Methodically and cold-bloodedly, they’ve strangled off the world that produced all that living.  All the jobs that were located in factories and plants that produced everything from shoes to phones to washing machines no longer exist.  Or rather they exist in China, Thailand and Malaysia.  Our kids and grandkids are out of luck.  They’re not needed.  They’re not even needed as engineers, architects, managers or accountants.  Even those things have been outsourced.  The message is we’re not needed and we’re not wanted.  There’s no room for us and certainly not for any of our kids.

And yet the American people haven’t said no.  Well, some of them have said no.  But there hasn’t been an upswelling of anger at seeing their country chloroformed.  I find this remarkable.  Are we that blind?  Are we that stupid?  I guess we are.  What seems obvious to me is that unless this changes very soon there won’t be much left.  Just the managerial elite and their servants.  And I’m sure they’ll keep squeezing even that fraction down to a minimum.

So human capital is no longer the thing.  Well, we’ve been told over and over again that “our democracy” is a precious thing.  If the powers that be aren’t careful, they may find out what raw democracy means when it goes looking for the hand that shut off the work that used to keep it busy.  Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.

29OCT2023 – OCF Update

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Today will be a great celebration of grandchildishness so there will be a slow period on site.  And the next few days will be especially busy for me in the work world, an enormous amount of to-do-ing will envelop me.  I pray I’ll have the strength to avoid excessive honesty.

I’ve been watching the requisite number of horror movies that the holiday warrants.  Several I haven’t seen in decades.  What I noticed is that in the 1980s a quite generous dose of humor was added to the formula and that gave these movies their distinctive feel.  “Lost Boys,” “An American Werewolf in London,” John Carpenter’s “The Thing.”  It does feel like a time machine watching these old movies.  Even with the gore it feels like a sunnier world than our own.  I haven’t decided which, if any, I intend to review.  But I better hurry or they’ll already be behind the times.

So stay tuned.  The world is bound to dismay us soon and I’ll have something hyperbolic to say about it.

In keeping with the season some wolfbane from the garden.  Something with poison in it.

 

Guest Contributor – GlennW – 28OCT2023 – Reaction to Chucking Pebbles

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Hi photog,

I’ve been watching the comments to your post to see if a discussion breaks out. Well, maybe I should be the first one to jump in and see what happens.

As you may remember, I read and listened to ZMan religiously until the kerfuffle with Michael Anton. After giving it some thought I decided that Anton was a lot more right than the ZMan and I just lost interest. I’m sure ZMan would brand me as a “civ-nat” but I just can’t care anymore. As I get older I find one dimensional labels, including “civ-nat”, worse than useless and try to avoid them when possible.

There are several ideas I would like to throw out there and see what your readers think. It seems to me that the white collar and entrepreneurial community always knew the blue collar folks were getting the shaft. For the most part they thought they were on the “right side” of history so they were safe. Now they are starting to realize they are just the next ones to be eaten by the crocodile. The next couple of years should be interesting.

You are correct that ZMan doesn’t think the races can live together under one set of laws fairly enforced. A big problem for the Dissident Right is they can’t really provide a definition of “race.” White, black, and brown aren’t races. I have heard ZMan say on several occasions that the original colonies should have grouped together into five different countries, instead of one, due to differences in the English immigrants. For anyone whose interested I believe he got that idea from the book Albion’s Seed.

If that’s true, and you multiply that across all European immigration to the U.S., there are literally hundreds of white groups (really clans) in North America. Add to that all the other immigration that’s happened over the years and I am a bit perplexed as to how the Dissident Right would implement a government. ZMan never provides a sketch of what this reconstituted government would look like and I suspect that’s on purpose.

Also, per their theory, I should prefer to live next to other white people (yes, I’m white) over anyone else. I happen to be Christian and find that I have more affinity for other Christians than a generic white person. I would, in no uncertain terms, rather live next to a black family from my church than Richard Dawkins. I don’t think I’m the only one that feels that way and would fight any attempt to cram some form of involuntary segregation down my throat.

In the end I don’t think the Dissident Right will be a majority on the “right”. If they hope to accomplish anything they will have to learn to work with the civ-nats who they love to hate. Maybe ZMan is coming around to that view? I guess we’ll see in time.

How Do You Un-Crash the Country to Win an Election?

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I think a pretty good case could be made that the Democrats and the Deep State manufactured two crises in 2020 to scuttle Donald Trump’s reelection.  The FBI used Antifa and BLM to gin up the George Floyd riots and then the CIA released the COVID virus and the CDC and Fauci orchestrated the destruction of the US economy afterwards.  Now that’s a mighty desperate gambit.  And even with the mail in ballot scam it barely worked.

But you could say it worked too well.  Between the disruptions to life caused by urban crime and the business disruptions caused by everything that went on, the United States hasn’t been able to get back to normal.  But then how do you avoid the stigma of running a circus like this?

Apparently, you don’t.  Joe Biden is as popular as leprosy, even among Democrats.  Even someone as in the tank for the Democrats as James Carville is telling whoever will listen to him that Biden will lose in a matchup with Trump.  Apparently, Trump hatred isn’t enough to blind Carville to the reality of how bad “Bidenomics” is really playing out across the country.  The claims that inflation is in the low single digits aren’t fooling the people paying the bills in American households.  And trumpeting low unemployment numbers doesn’t comfort people working two jobs and still unable to pay their rent bill.

And that’s just the, “it’s the economy stupid” dimension to the state of things.  The total list of problems is staggering.

If you live or work in a city you have

  • violent crime
  • disappearing retail stores because of organized looting
  • squalor associated with homeless encampments
  • dysfunctional schools
  • and race hatred running amok

Drugs and illegal aliens have flooded the country.  And everyone is dealing with corporate and government systemic racism branded as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.  Government agencies are continuously making proclamations declaring the United States as a hotbed of white supremacy and putting out guidelines to remind us of, and proselytize our children against, our various sins.

Well, then how do they win the next election.  Can they just depend on election fraud for everything?  It seems kinda dicey.  And so, I think that explains the various wars.  Dementia Joe has been doing his best wag the dog act now for a year and a half.  But despite pulling out all the stops the only ones buying it are the true believers and the people who make their money off of the war machine.  So then, what’s left to do?  I guess we’ll find out.

Honestly, I’m at the point where I wouldn’t be surprised by anything the Left does to remain in power.  Fraud and kangaroo courts have already made their appearance as political strategies.  Martial law and suspension of elections would be the next logical extension.

But it begs the question, could they have already done so much damage to the country’s sense of normalcy and well-being that they have undermined their own legitimacy?  Of course, it’s hard to know for sure.  The last time we were this far over the edge was probably the civil war.  And back then each side was united in its struggle to win the war.  Currently there is a three-way split of the population.  One third Left, one third Right and one third in the middle.  I guess it’s possible for things to get so bad that the middle third might jump far enough to the Right to even overrule fraud and banana republic tactics.  I’m not saying it will but there’s enough doubt that maybe it might.

Anyway, I think about such things when I listen to the news and watch the various talking heads talk.  I entered the working world during Jimmy Carter’s term in office.  Inflation was so bad in 1980 that the cheapest insurance company in town gave all of its employees a bonus in the middle of the year just because they felt so bad for us.  But the economic conditions today are much, much worse.  I realize that the Democrats in 1980 were loyal Americans and today they’re Bolsheviks but maybe there are enough independents to help us save the country.  I’m not staking my life on it.  I’m just wistfully hoping it could happen.

David French Is Leaving X. Tell Elon He’ll Have to Shut it Down.

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The man who has defined fake conservatism for our generation is flouncing out of Elon Musk’s sandbox.

“I’m leaving Twitter, for the indefinite future. The reason is simple: this site is becoming more like Gab every day. It’s a font of hatred, lies, and harassment.”

Oh, the humanity.

https://x.com/orionscoldfire/status/1718116605442355234?s=20

Who’s next Mitt Romney?  JEB! Bush?