02APR2023 – Spicebush Swallowtail Butterfly – The End of the Experiment

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Back last September I posted on finding a Spicebush Swallowtail Butterfly caterpillar and feeding it on sassafrass leaves until it transformed into a chrysalis.

Well, yesterday it emerged from the chrysalis.

It’s kind of a crummy shot because it insists on staying by a very bright window so everything is overexposed.  But it’s a wonderful harbinger of spring.  and after Princess Sack of Potatoes gets to see it on Tuesday it will be released into the great outdoors and hopefully will be fruitful and multiply.

A small win for the forces of life against the dark powers of death.  I’ll take them where I find them.

Death Trap

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In my post yesterday I said I would evaluate how to know whether it’s better to stay in your blue state or move to a red state or even emigrate to another country.  Well, all of that is a big bundle of work that I’ve just begun to work on.  But one thing doesn’t take much calculating is knowing when you’ve reached the point where you have to leave.  And current trends make that determination clear.  With the situation around “transitioning” children to the opposite sex we have reached that point.  The fact that an industry already exists to provide drugs and surgeries to ruin and mutilate children provides unmistakable proof that we’ve reached that threshold where if this outrage isn’t rejected strenuously and decisively by our elected representatives then we are clearly at the point where Americans need to find a place that does not allow such madness to exist.  Even if this place is poor and squalid and has many terrible things going on.  The fact that it defends its children from monsters makes it a better place to live than a rich, modern, cosmopolitan place that doesn’t.

Think about it for a second.  If you live in a place like California, a grade school teacher or a social worker can decide that your child is transgender and then authorize a transition of that child even against your strenuous objections.  And if you stand in the way of this process, they can take your child away from you to do it.  Now how is that any different from Nazi Germany or Maoist China or Stalin’s Soviet Union?  It might even be worse.  At least those places needed sexually intact citizens to provide the next generation to increase the glory of the Motherland or the Fatherland.  And I never heard of a dictator who tried to change the Motherland into the Fatherland or vice versa.

No, we’ve reached the tipping point.  If transgender transitioning of children holds up in our country then you will officially know you live in a doomed civilization and should flee as fast as you can to a place that hasn’t descended into madness and evil.  I often kid about cannibalism being the marker we can look for to show us we’ve hit bottom.  Well, cannibalism is enlightened compared to this.  That is, assuming they’re not cannibalizing their kids.  Adults, especially, women are supposed to be empathetic about their kids.  In the past there were stories of parents laying down their lives to save children, even other people’s kids.  It’s supposed to be bred into us to favor the small helpless hope of the future that we work so hard for and spend the best years of our lives raising.  If parents allow this madness to swallow up their children it’s proof that our civilization has lost the will to live.

The idea that we would allow the unspeakable harm that they euphemistically call “gender affirming treatment” to be committed against innocent children is beyond criminal.  It’s a crime against humanity.  It’s a blasphemy against everything we hold precious.  It’s monstrous.

So, pay attention to what’s going on.  Yesterday Joe Biden said that transgender Americans shape the soul of America.  This issue should be the rallying cry for every normal person running for office.  They should run on this issue alone.  They should call out anyone, Democrat or Republican who defends this horrific practice against children.  It should be banged like a drum, day and night.  This should be the rallying cry.

And if we lose this one don’t worry about figuring out whether you should stay in this country.  The answer will be to escape as fast as you can from this death trap.

01APR2023 – April Fool’s Day

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Having now lived the majority of my life in New England, I’ve come to associate April Fool’s Day with twenty plus inches of heavy wet snow.  Not because that is the inevitable result on April First but because it is the ironic result that would best capture the spirit of this odd “holiday.”

Well this year’s edition is a less dramatic but more typical version with cold rain and cool refreshing air that I find suits my mood today.  I wandered out of the living room onto the lower balcony and breathed in that freshness and approved of the weather and the day and surveyed the soggy battered appearance of the “estate.”  The forest is full of dead leaves and sodden moss.  The fields are covered in brown grass and sodden moss.  Here and there a few daffodils have blossomed.  The pond is swollen with the rain and the mallards are nowhere in sight.  Maybe ducks are just as sensible as I am and don’t like to get wet.  Maybe they’re holed up in an old coyote den waiting out the rain.  Naturalists would deny such a thing but I like to think that the animals that inhabit my habitat share in my virtues and vices.  Why shouldn’t the ducks crave warmth and eschew getting wet?  Very possibly the drake is often scolded by the duchess for forgetting to take out the trash on time and neglecting to repair the flushometer in the spare upstairs bathroom in a timely manner.  To me all these things seem possible and in some way fitting.  Although I somewhat doubt that the ducks have a spare upstairs bathroom.  Probably just the one.

April First is a pivot point.  For me it is the essential beginning of spring.  Even the rare April First blizzard is a rearguard sally during winter’s final retreat into history.  From now on it will be yard work to repair the ravages of winter and take advantage of the short growing season to grow the vegetables and flowers that we hope to produce.  And it’s the signal for outdoor activities of all sorts; more walks in the forest and the search for photographic opportunities.  It’s a very hopeful time of the year and even impossible hopes seem less impossible after the First of April.

The week ended well.  Today should be a good day to work on the book.  Well, let’s see where that goes.  I look at the headlines and it’s Trump, Trump, Trump as far as the eye can see.  Well, I haven’t got anything interesting or useful to add to that circus.  The only thing worth noting is that the term banana republic is now completely ubiquitous and rightly so.  Later on, something may occur to me and I’ll put virtual pen to virtual paper but for now I think I’ll put on a raincoat and boots and be at play in the fields of the Lord.  But maybe I should take my cue from the ducks and cozy up next to the duchess where it’s warm.  “What?  I said I’ll fix that flushometer next week!  Sheesh.”

How Do We Get From Here to a Better Place? – Part 1

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Lately I’ve been thinking that it’s time to stop complaining about how bad things are and instead try to figure out what practical steps I can take to change my environment for the better.  This is a talking paper that I’m using to organize my thoughts and try to logically analyze the problem and come up with a path forward.  A way to get from here to some place better.

Well, the first step is to change our thinking about our world.  Instead of thinking of ourselves and our enemies as Americans we must begin distinguishing our environment from ourselves.  The US government and those that support it are the problem and we need to figure out how to minimize its harmful effect on us.

The question immediately occurs whether the best way to achieve this would be to emigrate from the United States.  It’s a fair question.  And in order to answer it you will have to do a comparative study of all the countries on Earth that seem to possess the minimum acceptable conditions for a good life.  And that criterion should allow someone attempting this analysis a fairly easy way to eliminate the vast majority of potential new homes.  For instance, if you rated physical safety as a very important characteristic for your home then places like Yemen or Somalia would be out of the question whereas this criterion would increase the desirability of places like Iceland or Singapore.  And in fact, just based on safety you could eliminate almost the entire list of third world nations, which is to say the majority of countries on the planet.  And likewise, criteria like opportunities for employment, standard of living, levels of taxation, currency stability, availability of quality healthcare, educational opportunities, various freedoms like freedom of religion, speech, the right to bear arms, cultural norms like gay marriage and other particular items of your choice.

I think it would turn out that the list of places that equal the score of even a degraded version of the United States of America is a pretty short list.  But the exercise is well worth performing for the sake of the clarity it will provide on what the true situation is in which we find ourselves.  I think it’s likely that the “calculus” here will be a question of how much material prosperity should be sacrificed for real freedom.

For example, right now, I’m fairly certain that Hungary far outstrips the United States in actual freedom of speech and religion.  Add to this Hungary’s stance in defying the globalist mania for sanctifying homosexuality and suddenly that country becomes extremely attractive to someone who values traditional family values.  In fact, in and of itself, this position elevates Hungary to the level of a gold standard for protecting children from the harmful propaganda that has infiltrated almost every corner of western civilization.

But I digress.  In one of the later chapters of this study I will specify the parameters and factors I will use to rank countries in relation to the United States and each other.  Next on the agenda is producing this ranked list.  And further I will also add into the mix various red states in the United States and rank them too.

This seems to me to be the correct path forward.  By performing this analysis, I will satisfy my need to know whether emigrating is a viable and attractive option or not.  And that is a question that should be answered earlier rather than later because later on that path may be blocked by government policies that aren’t currently in place.

I’ll try to break this effort down into manageable “bites” in order to show some progress and to keep myself from getting distracted.  Hopefully the information and the methodology will be interesting and useful for others who may be thinking the same things.