Tag: act locally

An Example of Someone Who’s Actually Doing Something That Works

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Moms for Liberty was started back in 2021 when the battles over masking kids in school were going on in Florida.  They went on to champion parents rights to keep things out of the curriculum like critical race theory, trans ideology and LGBTQ grooming efforts.

And the proof that they’re effective is who is attacking them:

“But the Southern Poverty Law Center has listed the organization as an extremist group over accusations of harassing community members, advancing misinformation about LGBTQ people and fighting to remove materials about diversity from classrooms.”

If the SPLC is calling you an extremist group then you must be doing something right.  In the linked article we hear how in state after state Moms for Liberty is getting involved at the local school board level and initiating change for the better.

Trump, DeSantis and Haley are quoted praising the group.  And the tenor of this hit piece is that parent’s rights is a powerful issue in the upcoming 2024 elections.  But then strangely toward the end of the article “expert opinion is invoked how maybe it’s really more of a local issue and might not have much effect at the national level.  I think USA Today doth protest too much.  In my opinion parents rights is an enormous winning issue and a cudgel to beat down people like Joe Biden.  His endless showcasing of trans-freaks in his administration and elsewhere is a glaring Achilles heel just waiting to be stabbed.  “Gender affirming care” for children is the place to attack the Left.  It is so criminally harmful that exposing the details to public scrutiny can’t help but destroy anyone who tries to defend it.

So here’s the point.  When you look at the specific abuses being done at the local level by the Left and you fight it at that local level it has benefits both locally and globally.  The hard work of recruiting people locally and showing up for meetings and advocating for people’s rights isn’t glamorous or lucrative.  But it benefits ordinary people directly and they can see that it has value.  It also produces grassroots results and resonates with mothers in a way that reinforces conservative values.  It’s a win/win.

So, in my book, concentrating on efforts that produce actual change at the local level is where we should be.  And these local people will be the source for candidates at the next levels up; state reps and senators.  Ten years from now, God willing, these people could be congressmen and senators.  And that’s how it works.  Otherwise we just get Jeb! an Nikki Haley.

In the meantime, maybe a Trump or a DeSantis might get the ball rolling.  But so far, even when we had a good guy in the White House, there’s always a Paul Ryan and a Mitch McConnell there to make sure nothing useful gets done.

Well, small steps.  There!  I put up a post that wasn’t doom and gloom even in the face of the crap-tastic spectacle that is “Election 2024.”  Maybe there is a sliver of hope for the world.

A Rant for February Twenty Fifth

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Winter has reappeared here in Dunwich.  The estimate is for up to eight inches of snow on Monday night.  Looks like I’ll finally break out the snowblower this winter after all.  But not yet.  Today I look out the window and a light snow is falling.  A fraction of an inch has accumulated and it gives the environs the correct veneer of New England winter to make the picture fit the calendar.

I read the headlines and what do I find?  All the same boring nonsense.  Inflation continues to impoverish us.  The Ukrainian war continues to impoverish us and kill Ukrainians.  Our incompetent federal government continues to impoverish our descendants unto the fourth generation and our monstrous Deep State continues to spy on and entrap Americans in false flag operations of their own manufacturing.  Really, it’s horror and tedium in almost equal measures.

But none of that is my topic for the day.  What I want to write about is the practical course of action for our people.  And that is to find the actions that you can take locally and do them.  Don’t think about doing them.  Don’t talk about doing them.  DO THEM!!!!

If you have children, teach them what you want them to believe.  Teach them by doing, not talking.  Show them how to achieve the things they want.  Help them in school.  Warn them about the propaganda they will hear in the classroom.  Help them to figure out their abilities and counsel them on figuring out what trade or profession they should get trained in.

And teach them patience and perseverance.  Keep them from picking up bad habits like wasting their time on frivolous on-line activities.  And socialize them.  Make sure they are comfortable interacting with their peers, the opposite sex and with adults.  Force them out of their comfort zone.    AND TEACH THEM TO WORK!!!!

Get involved in your community.  Find out how things get done.  Find out who runs the local government.  Volunteer for something with which you have some expertise.  Or if that’s not possible volunteer for something that anyone can help with.  Towns and local governments are always looking for help.  Pick something that can make your environment better.  There are committees for school, zoning, budget, infrastructure, etc.  Meet the local Republican committee and find out if they’re useful or useless.  And maybe even run for some very minor local office or position.  But at the very least find out who the people are who want to run your town or district.  And for pity’s sake at least make sure you vote for the ones who are least bad. Get to know what the problems are in your local area and decide if these are things that can be fixed and figure out whether they will make your life unbearable.

So this is me saying grab a hold of your life and your world and make it change in ways that make it better for you and yours.  You can’t fire Joe Biden or end affirmative action or lower the federal deficit.  But you can give your kids a shot at flourishing in whatever environment they’re in.  You can find out who really runs your town.  You can find out what kind of people they are.  You absolutely need to find out who is running your kids’ school and you damn well better find out what their teachers are like.

So, there’s my cabin fever rant for today.  Ahhh, I feel better already.

A Local Focal Friday

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I was listening to the Z-Man’s Friday podcast while exercising this morning.  Camera Girl informs me that he sounds exactly like our family doctor.  Since I only go for a check-up once a decade, I cannot verify that this is true but she is a very observant and intelligent (if annoying) woman.

Today his topic was about how the dysgenic aspects of our culture were leading to a low IQ population, sort of the Idiocracy theorem.  There was a good bit of discussion about how as society devolves local power centers like local politicians (or call them warlords) and institutions that have control over specific functions or technologies (e.g., Silicon Valley) would begin usurping the place of the federal government as it imploded due to rank incompetence.

It was a very interesting discussion and it pointed to a mechanism for transitioning from the current stalemated political situation to a future where local politics and power structures could evolve to benefit a local concentration of competent and cooperative people.  Of course, it still depends on the crumbling of our society as the moving force to allow this untethering and we’re certainly not there yet.  Even though the beginnings of collapse can be seen in the increase in the frequency of airplane crashes, train derailments (not to mention naval vessels colliding) and the breakdown in law and order in the cities, still, we’re probably decades away from the official fall of the empire.

As I’ve many times stated we won’t have hit bottom until the incidences of cannibalism become too prevalent to make the newspapers (or whatever they call the news purveyors at that point in time).  So, this scenario that the Z-Man is postulating is still in the somewhat distant future.  But it most definitely makes me think that the idea of a Red State pushing for more autonomy is the correct model for the Right to embrace.  And I think that the idea of a Council of Red States is more and more the most effective way for people on the right to affect change.

I was reading an article by Salena Zito about what Ron DeSantis is up to down in Florida.  She talks about the fact that both Biden and Trump are bashing DeSantis because he’s the likely contender that both of them would face.  But then she spends most of the article going over the things he’s doing in Florida.  And even though it’s apparent that she’s supportive of his run for president, what strikes me is that the things he’s doing for his state would be impossible for a president to do without both a veto-proof senate and the house  under his control.

So once again, it makes me think that local control of people’s lives becomes more useful than battling for control of the dysfunctional federal government.  If DeSantis is actually able to enact Florida Digital Bill of Rights

he will be so far ahead of the rest of the country that the rest of us who toil under the yoke of internet tyranny will curse the fate that left us outside his benevolent rule.  Let’s face it, Florida is marching forward, throwing off the culture war shackles of the Left while the rest of us are being dragged backward in our Antifa and BLM controlled hellholes.

I think DeSantis should consider carefully whether he will have more power and more influence as the leader of a group of Red State governors rather than as an embattled Republican president.  And that’s not taking anything away from him as a presidential candidate.  If somehow he ends up as the candidate, I’ll vote for him certainly.  But how he gets there without antagonizing the millions of Trump-only voters is not clear to me.  Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis should be sitting down and talking about this election.  Even if they hate each other, even if both of them want to win above all else, they should look at all the options and decide what they can do to maximize the good outcomes from their campaigns.  In fact, what they should do is agree that whichever wins the other will throw full support to him.  And also offer the vice-presidential spot to his opponent first.  That would be putting country in front of ego.  Although I don’t think DeSantis should leave Florida to be a vice president.  He is so much more effective now; it would be a waste.  And I doubt Trump would accept the largely ceremonial duties of a Veep.  He craves a larger role.

So, these are the things I’ve been thinking about today.  I try to stitch together the various bits of information and find commonalities and synergies.  And maybe it’s all just part of my echo chamber.  But today I heard things that give me a little hope for the future.  And for a Friday that’s pretty good.

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.

Walking the Walk

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So, my ridiculous Dunwich post was an outgrowth of a political meeting I went to last night.  I’m getting involved in town government for the first time in my life and it already looks to be a nightmare of cosmic proportions.  Although I’m happy to say it probably does not include the risk of being eaten alive by a squid-headed dragon from deep space.

But it will involve getting involved with some fairly offensive progressives on a one-on-one basis.  Yeah me!

But I guess if we’re ever going to make progress on fixing things, somebody is going to have to get his hands dirty and why shouldn’t that somebody be me?  I won’t bore you with the details but it will be directly involved in elections so you might say I’m getting right down to brass tacks.

In contrast to my contempt for the Stupid Party in Dunwich, the actual Republicans in my town are good people.  Being in New England means we’re always swimming against the current of blue state government and its toxic agenda.  But we have managed to stave off the worst of their programs and influence.  This off year election will probably not be a good one for Republicans at the state level.  The state employees own the state and runaway tax increases seem to be the default position used to keep the pension bubble pumped up.  When that dam finally breaks it’s going to be a flood of red ink that won’t be fixable.  But until then let the good times roll, I guess.

You know, today I was reading some of the Democrat happy talk about how the “inflation reduction” act would win them the mid-terms.  Is it possible they believe that?  The only two choices I could come up with is:

  • It’s just whistling past the graveyard and there’s no substance to the conclusion.
  • They know that they’ve got the voter fraud thing completely worked out and they don’t have to worry about elections anymore.

I’ll leave it up to the readers to pick which one of these two choices it is.  Or add a third choice of your devising.

I’ve been ploughing through the Yellowstone photos.  I’ve got about three thousand files.  They’re mostly landscape and some wildlife but I was happy to see that a lot of the plant and flower shots look good.  There are some very interesting flowers in that locale and they make good macrophotography and close-up photography shots.  But it’s still going to take me a while to make much progress.  With end of summer activities and all my other responsibilities breathing down my neck it’s slow going.

So, we’re about eighty days before election day.  Joe Biden’s approval rating has soared up to 40%.  And the Democrats are flogging the inflation reduction meme as hard as they can.  I guess they have to do something.  Maybe they plan the October surprise to be an indictment of Trump right before the election.  I’m of two minds whether that would make things better or worse.  Maybe that goes under the same idea that doing something is better than doing nothing.

And finally, I was thinking about how nice it must be to live in a state like Florida or Wyoming where the majority of people are like me and get to have the state government that I would want.  I’d just like to say for the record how much I envy all of you in the solidly red states.  I feel like it would make my life feel twice as happy to not hate my state government and not have to endure the constant bombardment of harmful and maddening government actions.

Well, I better get back to writing my campaign victory speech, “Fourscore and seven days ago …”

Congratulations to Tyler Cook on His Re-Election

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The Portly Politico does his part to keep the tattered old flag from falling to the ground.  Bravo!

It’s inspirational to see someone on our side do more than just complain.  Every concrete thing we do is one step away from the cliff.  If you’ve got a moment go over to his site and leave a congrats as a comment.

2021 Election Day Eve Thoughts

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So, tomorrow I head off to vote.  We’ve got a bunch of local elections, everything from dog-catcher to Selectmen to School Board positions on ballot and I know why I’m voting for each of my choices.  And in my town, most or all of my candidates will win.  I live in a relatively rare place, a conservative New England town.  So, there is sense and satisfaction in getting out to vote in these local elections.

This will be the anniversary of the 2020 Election Day.  Well, sort of.  The whole Tuesday after the first Monday in November thing means the actual date varies but close enough.  Looking back on that night and how I watched an election stolen in real time reminds me why I no longer consider this a legitimate republic.  A cabal of public and private organizations perpetrated open election fraud in a number of key states.  The fact that a number of red states allowed this to happen proves to me that we live in a banana republic.

A banana republic is a country run by a dictatorship of either a single strongman or an oligarchic clique that carries on the pretense of things like elections but controls the outcome of these elections in an openly farcical manner.  I think that about covers our case.  Think of the spectacle of the Philadelphia vote counting operation sending the poll watchers home, covering the windows with card board and then bringing in truck loads of phony ballots to be counted behind locked doors.  Even a moron would know what was going on but we are supposed to shrug our shoulders and pretend we didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

So, tomorrow Virginia will vote for governor.  The latest polls say the republican is ahead by between two and eight percentage points.  That would lead you to believe that he probably will win.  But based on what we’ve seen I wouldn’t be surprised at all if after some number of days after election day the Democrat candidate will emerge victorious by some ridiculously small number of votes.  The fact that it will take a week or so to engineer this result shouldn’t disturb us or lead us to believe that fraud has been practiced.  No, far from it.  It’s just the new normal.

And if by some miracle, the republican wins we know that this is a temporary setback.  After all Dementia Joe’s minions are hard at work transporting hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens to red states all over the United States.  Whatever deficit in the voting rolls might exist today will be made up for with “new Americans.”

So right now, for me, all politics is local.  Because that is the only politics that isn’t rigged.  Maybe some effort will be made to clean up the fraud.  It’s possible.  Places like Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia are trying to figure out how to clean up this mess.  But right now, there is no guarantee that they’ll be able to accomplish what they need to.  What would be a good sign is if we get beyond the current audit stage and get to the point where individuals are indicted for voter fraud and convicted.  That would make it less likely that things like what happened in Pennsylvania and Georgia would continue.  But until then I have to assume that for anything beyond my town’s boundaries, I’m just watching a charade that keeps us in the same club as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Kim Jong-un’s North Korea.  Good luck Virginia.  You’ll need it.

My Intro to Local Politics

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So, I finally went to a meeting of the Republican Party in my town.  Being that the local election is in two weeks it was a pretty long meeting, two hours.  But it was fairly interesting to see what it consists of.  Except for asking a question of a guest speaker who’s running for higher state office I kept my mouth shut and listened.  My town is unusual in New England in that the Republicans are the dominant party.  So, it was interesting to see what they saw as the correct strategy to take concerning attacks in the local press on their policies.  It was actually heartening to hear them speak rationally about things like mask mandates and vaccination requirements.  Being embedded in a blue state means that certain things like school health requirements are off the table but it was extremely encouraging that we were sitting closely together in a conference room without any mask nonsense at all.  People even shook hands without naked fear showing on their faces.

There were a number of jokes about the crazier woke complaints that some townspeople had levelled against the town government.  One of my favorites is the calls for all Republicans to resign to atone for the January 6th “insurrection.”  The selectmen were debating whether they should address this complaint by assuring the town that they were indeed in New England on January 6th and doing their jobs.  Inwardly I was thinking that the way to answer something like this would be with snarky humor but I kept quiet.  No need to get myself labeled as an unserious person, yet.

I was interested to hear that the state government is policing speech at the municipal level.  They have outlawed the use of the word “character” when the town describes itself in writing.  They were told that was a dog whistle for “white.”  Amusingly the town folks were looking for synonyms for the word character to allow them to work around this silliness.  I found this approach to short circuiting the typical New England virtue signaling exemplary.  Follow the letter of the law and defy the spirit of it.

There were many mundane items having to do with budget and personnel and I could tell there were a lot of things being discussed that had a lot of history and back story that I wasn’t privy to.  But it was interesting to see how the various personalities and positions asserted themselves in the discussions.  And even though some of the subject matter was dry I found myself interested in the positions that the various individuals took.  The elected officials were extremely anxious that everything possible be done in the short time remaining to shore up their campaigns against Democrat and media attacks.  The committee members wanted to make sure that there wasn’t too much spinning around on things that had already been arranged like print and electronic media press releases.  Obviously, everyone was looking at things from his own point of reference.  But understandable considering what their jobs were.

As I drove away last night, I found myself thinking, “I wonder what will be at the top of the agenda at the next meeting.”  I left my e-mail address and phone number on their attendance sheet and I’m sure they’ll contact me to contribute money to their coffers.  But so far, I didn’t see anything that told me I shouldn’t find out more about this group.  They seemed like intelligent, normal people.  And there was not even a hint of human sacrifice being part of their initiation ceremony.  Of course, they didn’t declare me dictator for life yet but so far so good.

Not All Politics is Local but Local Politics Has Become Crucial

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Thomas P. “TIP” O’Neill was the Democrat Speaker of the House during Ronald Reagan’s administration and he was an old time Boston Irish machine politician.  He made the famous but not very meaningful statement that, “All politics is local.”  What I think he meant was, “To a politician who wants to be re-elected all political issues better be considered from the local point of view.”

Well, I’m not going to give a lecture on elective politics.  What I wanted to write about is the way I’ve been thinking about local issues.  I think too many people despair of the local political scene without even doing the minimum of due diligence about the actual nature of the political setup.  And when I say local, I’m talking about your town or county.  I live in New England, the land of the woke.  But my town votes Republican.  That alone should tell me that there is some hope of getting involved in something meaningful.  The town government is heavily involved in education, taxes, services and many other things that have a direct effect on people’s lives.  But let’s say your town is hopelessly left leaning.  It’s still in your interest to find out who runs what and how they effect your life.  For instance, suppose you find out that there’s a seat open on the school board.  If you or one of your friends managed to get on the board just that change might be enough to minimize the damage that comes from all of the CRT nonsense that’s going on.  The information you learn might be enough to rally like-minded parents, even socially liberal parents who still would resent their children being propagandized.  Something like that is already occurring in blue-state Virginia.  Often people are a lot less likely to experiment with their kids lives than they are with other people’s lives.

And getting involved with town politics and policies may impact other things going on around you.  Many small towns are voluntarily building and zoning low-income housing.  Knowing that this is going on isn’t something automatic.  And likewise letting your neighbors know about something like that can have a huge impact on stopping it.  After all, the effect something like that has on housing value is very real.  After it’s too late isn’t the time to find out that you’ve lost half the value in your home.

Other important town business is also worth knowing about.  Things like who is being considered as police chief or whether the town is thinking of spending a lot of money on a library or an art center.  These things have a big impact on taxes and town budget constraints.

So, there are several reasons why getting involved in local politics is smart and also effective in making your local community better.  But even if you find out that you are completely outnumbered by raging woke leftists, at least the effort will provide you with that fact and the assurance that here is no hope for a normal life should spur you to get the hell out of the hellhole you inhabit and move to a place where you won’t be surrounded by pod people.  After all contact with pod people for extended periods will turn you into a zombie too.  At least that’s what I learned from watching several versions of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”