12SEP2022 – Quote of the Day

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By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms— elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial—but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.

Aldous Huxley

Another Anniversary of a Very Sad Day

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Time passes and perspective changes.  The horror of that day fades and what remains is the damage that was done in the name of protecting the country from danger.  The overarching result was the surveillance state which as we’ve seen doesn’t protect us from foreign threats but instead is a weapon against Americans.  The Patriot Act and all the other measures that have been put in place to monitor our every word, action and even thought is a monstrous law that has changed the very nature of our relationship to our government.  It is literally 1984’s Ministry of Love.  It combines complete surveillance of the citizenry with unlimited power to punish of anyone who objects to it.  And now with the capture of the internet through proxies like Google and Facebook we have the Ministry of Truth instituted too.  Free speech is seen to be non-existent as any attempts to contradict the Ministry of Truth’s pronouncements are erased from the network.

Looking back to where we were twenty-one years ago, we can see that we have lost our freedoms and gained nothing of security.  It was all a lie.  The only question is can we undo what has been done.  There are two mechanisms.  If we had a majority in Congress and a President who both wanted to repeal the Patriot Act it could be done.  Currently even if the Republicans controlled the Congress there are too many Senators who work for the military industrial complex and would never dream of curtailing its power.  The other way it could be done would be to have the Supreme Court find the Patriot Act unconstitutional.  That would work.  I wonder if the Justice Department and the other parts of the Security State would just ignore the Supreme Court and just continue on with their abuses of power.  It might only serve to prove that we are no longer living under a constitutional government but under a junta instead.

September Eleventh highlights that our government relies on the good will of the people running it to keep it honest.  What is plain to see is that Obama and his regime completely corrupted the security apparatus and now that they’ve gotten a taste for unlimited power, they have no intention of backing away from it.

It will take a concerted effort by all branches of the government; President, Congress and Supreme Court to undo the damage that has been inflicted on our freedoms by the Patriot Act and the other surveillance and control methods.  The problem is how do we reach a national consensus to build up that concerted effort?  So many Americans benefit from the current regime.  They’ve been bought off with money and programs that allow them to coast along.

So that brings us to the possibility that it’s already too late to undo the harm.  If that’s the case then the present regime will have to go through the evolution that all diseased states experience.  The discrepancies between reality and the narrative that the government enforces will eventually lead to massive dysfunction.  And without a feedback mechanism to correct these problems the whole titanic structure of the bureaucracy will crumble under its own weight.  It took seventy years for the Soviet Empire to suffer this kind of catastrophic failure.  Maybe the American Empire will take another hundred years.  Or maybe it’s already starting to tear itself apart.  A case could be made for either scenario.

But what I’ve decided is that the 2022 election is the test case for me.  The disastrous consequences of the Left’s agenda are on full display.  If this does not provide enough impetus to the American electorate to throw out the Democrats, en masse, then nothing ever will.  What we’ll end up with is the situation in Massachusetts where the excesses of the hyper-progressive left are balanced off every eight or twelve years with some squishy Republican who pumps out the water from the sinking ship of state and restores some semblance of sanity until the next spasm of progressive insanity sweeps in another madman who proceeds to sink the ship again.

So, I’m looking for signs that people have had enough.  I can see some hope in places like Florida and Texas where Democrat voters are switching sides.  But so far these are isolated cases.  We’ll need to see it spreading to places like Wisconsin, Nevada and Pennsylvania.  So far, the polls are inconclusive.    But it’s less than two months until we’ll know.

A sad day.

Choose Carefully

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Each of us has his own “world.”  It’s made up of all the connections we use throughout our day.  We’re connected to our families by each word we pass, every facial expression we use to communicate.  After that the average man is connected to the world by his phone.  It is the nexus for all the calls, texts, e-mails, YouTube videos, news items, tweets, Amazon purchases, Google searches and on and on and on.  After that we have the relationships we have with our job, with the various government entities and the various corporations that we employ to provide us with goods and services to live our lives as consumers.  All of these connections give us a sense of being connected and grounded to the world around us.

But lately more and more of these connections have started to have a disorienting effect.  The head of the United States, Joseph Biden just gave a speech that declared, specifically that people like you and me are dangerous extremists intent on destroying the United States.  And a while ago the top health expert in the federal government told us that unless we shut down our country and hid in our homes wearing masks over our faces, we would all die of a horrible disease.  And around the same time, we were told that mobs of rioters looting and burning down the commercial districts of our largest cities were completely within their rights to do exactly that.  But if anyone tried to resist them with a weapon that would be prosecuted vigorously by law enforcement as assault.

If you read the news and especially if you read the mainstream media you might begin to believe that the whole world has gone insane and that we’ll be headed for a new dark age any day now.  Without a doubt, the people running much of western civilization have lost touch with reality and are trying to push the world in an unhealthy direction.  I won’t go through the whole litany but looking at some of the worst aspects; green energy initiatives, defund the police and transgender affirming treatments for minors, we can see that dangerous ideas have been mainstreamed by people with great power.

All of this can make it seem like there’s no place to turn for a breath of sanity.  Part of the reason it feels so dire is that for most of our lives we never had to worry about most of these institutions becoming unhinged.  Most of the United States was remarkably well run.  And even the bureaucracies, although they might be incompetent, uncaring or inefficient were never working to destroy us.  Now we can see they are.  And in addition, private companies have jumped on board the project to speed up our destruction.  Once you internalize that perspective it becomes easier to deal with the problems.

Once you change your point of view and assume that none of these organizations is necessarily on your side, it frees you up to begin evaluating your environment dispassionately and systematically.  This goes for all of the relationships you have.  From top down you can start with your country, state and town.  And from bottom up you can look at where you buy your coffee, what news you read and where you spend your entertainment dollar.  Each of these is a choice.  And granted, good options are hard to find in a lot of categories.  But that doesn’t excuse us from at least looking at the options and choosing the least bad choice.  And if you put in the work, you might be surprised at the good options you never knew existed.

Some of them are easy.  Looking at movies and tv just read the reviews and you can pretty easily find out what sounds like woke propaganda.  Another tactic is to buy local.  Small stores are more expensive than megastores.  But if you know for a fact that the owner is one of us then that’s got to sweeten the deal quite a lot and might put a small premium in price in perspective.  And get involved in your local community.  That can pay enormous dividends and will make you more aware of problems that may be coming your way.  And finally, it extends all the way up to deciding what state or even country you should live in.  It may seem extreme to contemplate such a huge change.  But if you look at it dispassionately, it might be the best move you’ll ever make.

Michael Anton Analyzes “The Godfather” through the Lens of Machiavelli

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Michael Anton is a devotee of Leo Strauss who wrote an important paper on Machiavelli.  Naturally Anton will evaluate a movie about power through his understanding of the quintessential champion of immoral power politics Machiavelli.

I thought it was an interesting read.  And I’m not a huge fan of gangster movies in general or the Puzo story in particular.  Your milage may vary.

 

 

 

08SEP2022 – OCF Update – This’N’That

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So, I finally bit the bullet and began post-processing my Yellowstone Trip photos.  I’m surprised at how many nice wildflower shots I got.  I know, I know.  Wapiti and bison and bears, oh my.

But the landscape and flora stuff are good too.  Many of the flowers are very different from the vegetation in the northeast.

And some of the wildflowers are the cousins of perennials that we plant like lupines and monkshood.  It adds another dimension to the trip.  I’ll probably spend the winter looking up the flowers to identify them and then do a post on my favorites.

With the grandkids already back in school Camera Girl is not as insanely busy as usual so I told her we needed to find a new tv series to watch.  I had heard that the “Terminal List” with Chris Pratt was pretty good so we watched the first episode last night.  Well, Camera Girl told me there’s too much killing.    Since Jack Reacher is one of her favorite fictional characters, I found this very surprising.  It turns out that when civilians are the victims, she processes the killings differently.  So, we’re going to watch the second episode tonight.  I suspect she’ll be more comfortable with the violence when it’s just bad guys getting offed.

And at last, it stopped raining.  So, we got out for a walk in the forest.  And the lake has almost reached back up to the spillway height.  The sun was warm but we could feel that the summer heat is waning.  The afternoon shadows are already hiding half the fields from the sun and the butterflies and dragonflies are on their last legs.  But just as a last gasp of summer Camera Girl found a Spicebush Swallowtail Butterfly caterpillar.

I set it up in a net cage with some sassafras leaves and it almost immediately metamorphosed into a chrysalis.

Well, that’s another natural history project for Princess Sack of Potatoes.  I’ve got to hand it to Camera Girl she has sharp eyes.

I was thinking today, it’s almost beyond belief to think that Joe Biden could actually be President of the United States.  I mean he’s a congenital liar, a dimwit and a sexual deviant.  The only answer that makes sense is that we’ve gotten way stupider as a country.  Or possibly we really have reached that tipping point where more than half the country is being bribed by a something for nothing program.  Then again maybe it’s a combination.  Maybe if you add up all the dimwits and all the loafers it’s 51%.

Well, whatever it is, it’s damn discouraging.  I mean he’s such a sleazy crook, that it’s embarrassing to be associated with a constituency that would have him.  I wonder if a good campaign against him in 2022 and 2024 could appeal to people’s sense of shame at allowing such a pathetic loser to be their leader.  What could be the slogan?  How about, “Joe’s a moron.  If you vote for him, you’re a moron too.”  Or maybe, “What grown man showers with his twelve-year-old daughter?  What kind of man raises a son who has sex with his dead brother’s widow?  What kind of man sniffs the hair of women and girls during a White House ceremony?  Is Joe Biden President of the United States or Caligula?  Anyway, it’s a thought.

Well, now that the rain has stopped, I can get some more of the outside projects finished.  Soon we’ll be putting all the yard equipment indoors for the winter.  And Camera Girl has started putting up the Halloween decorations.  I thought it was a little early but she says Princess Sack of Potatoes really likes scary stuff.  I can’t argue with that.  I guess it’s time to bust out the Universal Monster Movies.  Well, there are some consolations to the end of summer.