03OCT2022 – OCF Update – This’N’That

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I find the increasingly surreal reality around me both dizzying and slightly depressing.  So, I’m trying to distract myself from it with more pleasant subjects.  Last week I started listening to some of Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen.”  Unfortunately, the library I’m borrowing it from didn’t have the entire four opera set (Sir George Solti’s version) available.  In fact, all they’ve sent me so far is the third opera, Siegfried.

As promised, there are a lot of people singing at each other in German with extremely powerful voices and what seem like lots of emotional problems.  I confess that my lack of German is hampering my appreciation of the dialog but I found many of the melodic parts of the soundtrack very stirring.  I was disappointed that the library didn’t send me Die Walker (“The Valkyrie”).  I’ve always admired the Bugs Bunny version where Elmer Fudd sings along to the “Flight of the Valkyrie” with the magnificent refrain “kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit.”  It seemed the height of musical sophistication at the time.  So far, the experiment has been amusing.  We shall see how it develops.

After watching “The Northman” I’ve decided to review some of the other versions of the play, Hamlet.  I’ve been a fan of Olivier’s version but I think I want to watch Gibson’s and Branagh’s versions again.  One of the only advantages that Branagh’s version had is that it’s comprehensive.  Olivier left out the characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and although I see why he did it (time constraints) I do miss those sections.  Next summer I’ll try to attend a live performance of Hamlet somewhere.  There used to be a Shakespeare company in the Berkshires of Massachusetts that I sometimes attended.  They were pretty good.  I’ll have to see if they still exist and find out if they’re covering Hamlet next year.  If not I’m sure some place in New England there is a production.  After all it’s supposed to be the best play by the best playwright in the English language.  Surely someone is still doing it.  My only fear is that it will be exuberantly woke and all the characters will be wheelchair-bound transgender vegans.  That’s bound to take away from the dueling scene.

My scorecard for the November elections is kind of encouraging at the moment.  It seems like the Democrats are trying to psych themselves up.  There’s lots of talk about all these women who registered to vote and all the passion about abortion.  But there is a definite sense that even people like Chuck Todd sense a shellacking in the making.  Losing the House is already a foregone conclusion.  And it’s starting to look like the Senate will also go to the Republicans although whether it will be one seat or a handful is hard to say.  What with Mitch McConnell actively working against some of the Republican candidates it’s hard to figure exactly how the numbers will pan out.  Mitch really is an awful man to have as an ally.  But even he may not be enough to throw the Senate to the Dems while Creepy Uncle Joe is undermining what’s left of Western civilization.

As for the Ukraine war, well that rolling disaster is just another example of the dysfunctional Deep State tampering with the world as if it were their personal Frankenstein’s laboratory.  There seems to be no end to their appetite for destruction.  But this one may be the payoff.  I get the feeling even the Germans have had enough winning.  They’re going to go on a low temperature, low power diet this winter and maybe even these true believers may finally say enough.  Who knows, even their died in the wool Greens may beg for some nuclear power this winter when their toes freeze off.

Well anyway, that’s what’s going on today.  I hope your week has begun well.

Economist Jeffrey Sachs Dares to Speak the Truth About the Pipeline

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Sachs is not a conservative.  But apparently he’s not afraid to say what he thinks to the Left.  Here he tells some libs that the whole world thinks we blew up the Nord Stream pipelines and also think that the United States is equally responsible for the dangerous confrontation that may happen between the nuclear superpowers over the Ukraine war.  And I think I detect the western media starting to echo this concern.  Sachs mentions that it is sixty years to the month since the Cuban Missile Crisis but the US State Department is talking trash about their response to nuclear weapons being used.

Well, wag the dog seems to be the tactic that the Democrats are using for this Mid-Term election.  Somehow I don’t think it’s a good idea.  But who knows maybe Joe Biden is a genius.  What do you think?

 

Moderation is a Myth

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Today’s commentary was full of essays telling us that we’re not really so divided (1) (2).  It’s the fringes of both sides who stir up the trouble.  Both sides really want the same thing.  Move to the middle.  Blah, blah, blah.

Probably some of these arguments are well-intentioned.  After all polarization has recently turned to violence among the least stable characters inhabiting the nation.  That mad man who ran over an eighteen-year-old because he had a political argument is a good example.

But the arguments that both sides are the problem is stupid.  The reality is that one side, the progressives, is waging a scorched earth campaign against normalcy with the explicit and coordinated aid of almost every power center in the country.  You would have to be an amnesiac to have already forgotten the George Floyd riots, the resultant breakdown of law and order in the cities, the COVID lockdowns, the sabotage of the energy sector, the transgender assault on children and the anti-white campaign called Critical Race Theory or DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion).

Our side is just trying to survive.  We find ourselves under assault from all directions by the richest and most powerful individuals and organizations.  To claim that this is all some sort of misunderstanding amongst otherwise like-minded citizens is ludicrous and frankly, a lie.  It will take a herculean effort to turn around the situation on the ground in the United States to even barely survive the extinction level damage that has been done to this country.  To tell people that they are overreacting to what we see on our streets is beyond delusional.  It’s either idiocy or dishonesty.

So, my answer to these people trying to have a kumbaya moment is shut up.  What you’re saying isn’t true.  People don’t need to be soothed back to sleep.  They need to be awakened.  If you wake up in the middle of the night and your house is on fire you shouldn’t try to go back to sleep.  Sure, maybe you’re already groggy from the smoke and carbon monoxide but losing consciousness isn’t going to save your life and the lives of your family.  Wake up!  Do what needs to be done to save what’s left of your world.  Don’t listen to the voice of weakness that tells you to avoid the pain of resisting, that tells you that loss is inevitable.  Wake up and do something!

I have respect for those who are trying to organize a resistance and those who are actually doing something.  It’s not necessary for everyone to storm the barricades.  But it is important to reject those weak-hearted or foolish voices that tell us that maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle and all we have to do is reach across the aisle for a compromise.  Reaching across the aisle is what got us here.  We’ve been sliding down the slippery slope so long that we’ve reached terminal velocity.  At this point compromise is defeat.

So don’t tell me that the Mid-Terms aren’t a battle between good and evil.  They definitely aren’t a decisive battle but when you’re down by twenty runs in the bottom of the ninth with two outs and two strikes against you every pitch is a battle.  If you’re selling the story that the Left isn’t the devil, you’re selling a lie.

In the Long Run

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We are living in a reductionist endgame scenario that some bright boys must have thought up for us.  After the collapse of the Soviet Union the brain trusts that advise Wall Street and the US government decided that they already controlled enough of the military and monetary power on the planet to take over everything.  And by everything, I mean total control of the human population of this planet.

They bought out the Chinese by turning their country into almost the entire manufacturing base for the United States.  And they control everything else by distributing or withholding credit needed for the other countries to survive in the 21st century environment.  Sure, places like Afghanistan and Iraq acted up a little twenty years ago.  But once their infrastructure was taken out by the US Air Force the resistance they could muster was very limited.  And we then made a point of inviting people from these countries to immigrate to the United States and Europe just to show their brethren back home that it was better to join us than fight us.  And the biggest success of the endgame scenario was their reducing much of rust belt America into a dead zone with no jobs and no hope.  They knew that if they could break the middle class, they’d be able to steamroll the rest of the world without much of a fight.

Lately Eastern Europe; Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and especially Russia have resisted the culture war that goes along with the globalist endgame.  Shockingly these places have refused to embrace the mandatory LGBTQ indoctrination.  It should be fairly interesting to see if these places along with China hold the line on refusing this nihilistic behavior.  I find it a fairly hopeful sign that there are still some places even in Western culture that haven’t been cowed by the globalists into sacrificing their families and children in order to qualify for first class berths on the Titanic.  Maybe these clear-eyed places will be able to show the rest of the West that the emperor has no clothes.

But let’s assume that they fail.  Let’s even assume that China eventually bends the knee to Washington and joins the globalist bandwagon.  The logical endpoint is a world where climate policy eliminates fossil fuels, curtails human reproduction to a one child per family quota and government institutes almost total control of political speech over everyone on this planet.

It’s not that hard to imagine what this kind of system would look like.  The rudiments of it are already on display right now all around you.  The Green New Deal and tech companies are already instituting large chunks of it and the rest will be rolled out once the pesky MAGA people are rounded up and put through an indoctrination camp or two.  And with everybody on board around the world the people in charge are probably thinking there won’t be any barbarians to invade and muck things up in a century or two.

But they’re wrong.  What they don’t understand is that humans aren’t uniform.  You can corral 99% of them and through fear and routine get them to toe the line.  But somewhere out there is a Napoleon or a Caesar.  Someone with dreams grandiose enough that he’ll knock over the apple cart because he doesn’t like apples.  Now this is cold comfort.  None of this will guarantee that the global American empire will implode in time to warm my heart.  In fact, I sort of doubt it will happen in my lifetime.  But at least I don’t have to despair for the whole of humanity.  I’ve always hated reading dystopian stories like 1984 and Brave New World.  The anthill uniformity of these societies is so anti-human that it repels me viscerally.  And that’s what I resent so much about things like the nonsensical energy policy like battery powered cars recharged from a grid powered by fossil fuels.  The patent illogic insults my intelligence.  It’s like watching a scene out of Idiocracy.  It’s just that annoying.

I like to think that in a century or so, someone will rise up and take control of one of the provinces and provide such a better deal to a few of the provincial governors that they declare him emperor (or let’s say first citizen) and after sacking Martha’s Vineyard and the Napa Valley he’ll shut down the Federal Reserve and send the Deep State home without jobs.  I don’t know if this makes sense to any of you but I felt like expressing my hope for the future.  Whatever the outcome of any particular political struggle I just want to convince myself that I don’t believe in a world where Joe Biden is the template for the future.