Tag: build your own platforms

How Do Things Get Better?

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Even though it’s clear that Biden’s presidency and by extension, the Left’s management of the blue cities and states, and the Left’s social hegemony are all demonstrably crashing and burning around us, it’s not clear to me how we reverse the course we’re on.

For example, the Supreme Court has ruled against Biden’s corporate vaccine mandate.  Okay, but how do we go from there to getting our lives back from all aspects of the COVID regime.  When can we stop pretending that being forced to wear a mask is a normal part of living in a free country?  When will forcing people to have their children injected with an unsafe vaccine be recognized as a crime?  When will we prosecute government doctors for lying about the actual numbers of people being harmed by COVID?  Currently none of those things seem even remotely close to happening.

I won’t even go into the crime wave engulfing the blue cities.  With leftists firmly entrenched in the city governments, there is not even a possibility of those places returning to normalcy in the foreseeable future.  Those areas will become no-go zones for normal people who don’t want to risk life and limb.

I’m afraid the answer to my question is they don’t anytime soon.  We will have to wait until November of this year to see the first chapter to the road to recovery.  When the Dems lose control of the Senate and House that will deprive Dementia Joe of one of his levers of power.  We will no longer have to depend on Joe Manchin to protect us from unlimited looting of the treasury by pork-filled trillion-dollar bills that line the pockets of “green” lobbyists and their Congressional clients.  And it should put an end to corrupt judges that Biden has been seating on the federal judiciary.  But think of it.  We have three more years of this nightmare.

So, what that tells me is the only way things get better is when we make them better ourselves.  And that begins when we stop pretending that we can depend on the federal government and their woke cronies for anything.  Lies and betrayal are their stock in trade.  Look over your assumptions on how you live your life.  For instance, if you live in or near a blue city do you assume that the police department in your area will keep you, your family and your possessions safe?  In the wake of the 2020 riots and looting is that a realistic assumption?  And if not, what is your smartest realistic option?  Should you move?  Should you buy a gun?  Should you make changes in the way you live your life?

These same questions should be asked about the state you live in.  If you’re tired of wearing a mask and being injected with unsafe medicines maybe living in a place like Florida might make more sense.  And that goes for other problems with blue states.  The high cost of living and the restrictions on freedoms are quite oppressive for some people’s tastes.

Look at who your friends are.  Can you depend on them?  Do they believe in what you do?  If not, maybe you need to find some people who do.  Seek out like minded people and get to know them.

And how about the way you spend your money?  Are you supporting the worst corporate offenders when it comes to Woke capitalism?  Coca Cola, Nike, and a whole host of corporations spit in your face every day.  Don’t you think you should go out of your way to seek out the few companies that at least stay neutral on the culture wars and reward them with your patronage.  Maybe you can make it a goal of finding one good company or website or movie every year and spending your money with that thing.  Here’s something easy.  Stop using Google for your search engine.  Use DuckDuckGo.  That will be helping them, hurting Google (infinitesimally) and helping yourself by avoiding Google’s prying eyes.  And most importantly tell ten conservative friends to check out Orion’s Cold Fire.  What better way is there to stick it to Dementia Joe?

My takeaway is things only get better when you act to make them better.  I’m not saying don’t vote for the better candidate.  You must.  But it’s not enough.  Your life has to reflect the things you believe in and that may mean making some changes.  And then maybe things will get better.  At least for you.

Trump Says He’s Preparing to Enter the Social Media Arena

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Donald Trump is setting up to unveil a social media platform called Truth Social in early 2022.  The company will be a publicly traded entity and will have a some kind of streaming option akin to what YouTube provides.

Well, this is what I said I wanted so let’s see how this goes.  I wish all the success in the world to this enterprise and if it has value I’ll gladly join up.  And if it causes Facebook and Twitter to suffer, then all the better.  Let’s wait and see.

Outcompeting The Left

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Millennials aren’t patriots.  And they aren’t individualists.  They’re mostly sort of like grade-school children.  In fact, grade-school children that went to a really artsy-fartsy grade school.  There’s no way we are going to turn them into revolutionaries, ready to storm the barricades in search of liberty.  They don’t want liberty.  They want a latte.

But millennials will someday soon be the majority of voters in this country.  So even if they don’t believe in what we believe in we can get them to follow us if we can outcompete the woke option.  “What the hell is photog talking about?” you’re probably saying to yourself.  Let me explain.

Currently Silicon Valley is almost entirely composed of woke companies that have been telling millennials for twenty years that they are not only smart but also good.  Google famously had a motto “Don’t be Evil.”  Facebook, Twitter and all the other social sites spend half of their time just banning anyone who won’t acknowledge the need to worship the cult of pronouns.  Undoubtedly that sort of mean girl social selection activity has a definite demographic cohort that will relish that environment.  We call them Karens.  And right now, they seem to be the dominant life-form on planet Earth.  But as powerful as they are, I think there is a very large chunk of the millennial population that would like something more interesting to look at and talk about than Karen’s latest battle against accidental misgendering.

So how hard could it be to come up with a site that’s more interesting than that.  Look at what Substack has recently done.  They provide a platform for (among other things) journalists who are too normal to survive in the woke media environment.  Guys as liberal as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi were hurled into the outer darkness by the likes of Rolling Stone and The Intercept because they thought that journalism should be factual.  Not unbiased mind you, but just not completely fake.  Now they’re making more money than they did previously by committing actual journalism and providing a service to readers who are tired of being lied to.

Other social sites have slowly begun to appear to compete head-to-head with the likes of YouTube and Facebook.  Rumble, Gab and BitChute are tiny players but they provide a service that isn’t available from YouTube.  The market for their product is growing and will continue to do so.  And it is attracting people with deeper pockets like Peter Thiele.

These are the beginnings of competition.  They barely register on Big Tech’s radar.  But that will change.  Better product will draw customers.  And honestly the entertainment value of Facebook and Twitter is pretty low.  I can easily imagine someone monetizing the audience that exists for reality-based news and entertainment.  It will happen and when it does it will attract more than just a right-wing audience.  It will attract everyone except for the left-wing ideologues.  A good example of that is the recent news that Greg Gutfeld was now the “King of Late-Night Comedy.”  Greg Gutfeld isn’t a conservative.  But he’s a libertarian who doesn’t alienate the conservatives who enjoy his humor.  He is vague enough about his own personal beliefs that Trump fans and normies think of him as their guy.  And that’s good enough.  I’d like it better if there were an even more right-wing guy who came on after Gutfeld on Fox News.  Someone a little more edgy but it’s a beginning.  If Fox News were smart, they’d give the Babylon Bee guys their own show too.  Of course, they currently have a YouTube channel of their own but I wouldn’t be surprised if YouTube eventually shut them down.  They’re that funny I assume they’ll be considered a threat.

And that’s my point.  The Left has become “all fake all the time.”  In the long run that becomes quite boring.  It can be outcompeted in a marketplace of ideas.  So, all we need to do is create that marketplace and let reality do the rest.

That photog Guy Was Really Smart

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I was listening to a podcast on the American Mind where Michael Anton is discussing with one of his colleagues, Machiavelli’s ideas and how they relate to our war with the Woke Left.  And he talked about how this was going to be a long war and nobody should think that taking back the Congress in 2022 or taking back the White House in 2024 will solve all our problems.

And that reminded me of something I wrote back a year ago.  So I went back and reread it.  And I’ll be darned if I wasn’t pretty sharp that day.  And that dove-tailed with something I found today.  It seems that Andrew Torba over at Gab is working on his own version of PayPal.  If he can make that happen he will be in line for canonization as a saint on the Right.  Being able to monetize web content without having to kowtow to the Left is sort of the Holy Grail for folks on our side.

So let me end by quoting my younger self and bask in the glow of my former eloquence….

Once you acknowledge where we currently are, you can begin to adapt to your environment and then thrive in it.  Situational awareness is very important.  Never play to their strengths.  Unless you have an armed bodyguard of special forces men you probably shouldn’t show up at an antifa rally in Portland, Oregon and declare your political beliefs.  If you want to start a fraternal society then make it a religious society that has protected status that can’t be shanghaied by social justice warriors and turned into the next Boy Scouts.  But be sure not to do it in a blue state.  In those areas everything will have to be on a clandestine personal basis.  And a personal basis is the best way to live your personal life anyway.  Know your friends and spend your time with them.  And it doesn’t even have to be your next-door neighbors.  You can make friends on-line and enjoy that experience too.  A shared point of view makes a good basis for association.  Nowadays free association only exists on a personal basis but you can make that work very well for many of the interactions you can choose to have.  This website is a perfect example of free association.  It’s very unlikely that Leftists would want to spend much time here since they’re not interested in the things I like and disagree with more or less 100% of what I believe.  Whereas people who hold similar beliefs with me will feel as though they belong here.  By congregating here we get to spend time with like minded individuals and also pass information back and forth.  Some of it is trivial like a book or a movie that’s interesting.  But maybe one day you hear about a job opportunity or a place to live or a politician that’s helping our side.

Boy that young fellow seems really smart to these old eyes.

Hat Tip to Vox Day for this Link to the Boy Scouts Alternative

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Trail Life USA  is a Christian alternative to the Boy Scouts of America.  This article that Vox linked to sounds like a hopeful start to an organization that wants to avoid all the mistakes that the Boy Scouts have fallen into.

But just as with the Boy Scouts parents would be taking an enormous risk if they put their children in the hands of people that they don’t know are 100% reliable.  Pedophiles lurk in the shadows of any organization that has access to children.  Mothers and fathers, guard your children and take the time to get involved with all of their activities.  In fact, the correct way to look at one of these organizations is a way to leverage their organization to enrich the outdoor experience you share with your own family.  You have to get involved.  At the very least you must have someone involved who you would trust with your children’s lives.

Arkhaven Comics – A Review

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Vox Day is an idiosyncratic guy who will be remembered, if for no other reason, because he waged the hilarious Rabid Puppies War against the pink science fiction doofuses of WorldCon in 2015 and 2016.  But he is also the proprietor of a book publishing company, Castalia House and recently he has branched into comics with a company called Arkhaven.

Last month Arkhaven started up a comic site that publishes the various stories on-line for free at  https://www.arkhaven.com/  .  I’ve never been a comic book guy.  I did watch a few of the Marvel tv shows when I was a kid and I did bring my grandsons to watch the Marvel movies until they started getting too woke.

But there are at least a couple of comics on this site that I can appreciate.  One is Ben Garrison’s Editorial Cartoons.  Ben’s editorials are from the right and his drawings are clever.

The other that I just started following is a dark fantasy (supernatural) comic called Chicago Typewriter.  It’s very well drawn and the story so far is entertaining.

Anyway, if you have any interest in comics, check out Vox’s site.  I think he should be congratulated for jumping into a field that up till now has been more than dominated by woke publishers who have made their former readers unwelcome.  I hope this venture is a great success and Vox makes a pile of cash.  Vox is one of the few people on our side who has walked the walk and built his own platform.  Kudos to him.

Are There Any Smart People in the Stupid Party? Build Us an On-Line Town Hall

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Dementia Joe and the forces of darkness are working overtime to reduce what’s left of the United States to rotted rubble.  And although they are doing incalculable damage to millions of good people, they are also convincing the rational remnant of the population that isn’t also incurably evil that something must be done about the present situation.

This presents a remarkable opportunity for someone with something on the ball.  The social and financial leverage available to someone on the right who actually has a workable plan is not unlimited but it is formidable.  Back during Obama’s tenure Americans on the right were looking for a movement to support their dissatisfaction with the political situation.  As it worked out hucksters appeared to grift money from those well-meaning people and dissipated the political energy that existed.

But ten years later we are in an even more dire situation.  The American people are even more incensed by the horrifying reality of the Biden abomination and the Deep State actors that are inflicting a soviet-like surveillance state on them.  Why isn’t there some legitimate right-wing leader to focus that anger and channel it into something constructive.  Are our leaders really all that useless?  Are they just simply as stupid as their reputation says they are?  That is the million-dollar question.

Yesterday a little bit of news came out.  Donald Trump is planning to build his own social network platform.  But what will it be?  Will it be Right Twitter, Right Facebook?  Will it be more than that?  Does Donald Trump even know what it will be?  These are all good questions.  But a better question is what do we need?

What I think we need is an on-line town hall with the alleged Republican leaders plugged in on a regular basis.  We need to be able discuss the issues and we need actual leaders to provide us with feedback and hopefully solutions to the situations we are being subjected to.  It has to be more than just us peons complaining about the horror we are enduring.  We need powerful people to provide us with solutions.  It’s understood that some problems can’t be solved overnight or maybe ever but honest talk about what can be done and what will have to be endured will go a long way toward giving these leaders credibility and backing from their people.

And add into this town hall a place for the pundits and the reporters.  And while we’re at it add in the entertainers and the artists.  That means comics on our side will actually have a place to tell their jokes and mock the Left without being de-platformed.

Well, that should be enough.  That sounds like a combination of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and also the News Media the way it was supposed to be, along with an interactive version of FDR’s Fireside Chats thrown in for good measure.  That’s about what I think we need.  So, if Mr. Trump is going to provide that then he’s hitting the market at just the right time.  I’d be willing to take the $100+ I give to Bezos for Amazon Prime and switch it over to something like what I’m discussing here.  I imagine it would be worth that much to me.  Maybe they could have a discount plan for the poor but eight bucks a month wouldn’t be asking too much to get something of our own that the SPLC won’t be able to shut down.  Oh, and I forgot.  It’s going to need its own online payment service provider and probably a bank to do business with it.  But billionaires can take care of things like that too.  So, get going.

You get the idea; we need a nerve center for the normal people.  The Left has Google and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and heaven knows what else.  I don’t think it’s too much that we have a place too.  So, President Trump and whichever of your friends with money and savvy are out there consider this your golden opportunity to capture an untapped market of about fifty to a hundred million people who are currently unserved and starving for a home on line.

Reframing Our Situation

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I was reading one of Curtis Yarvin’s latest posts on his Substack site, Gray Mirror.  It was about his interpretation of where we are, how we got here and what is and isn’t possible to do in our present-day world.

It’s all very interesting.  He talks about pre-modern and modern and post-modern and sub-modern people.  He talks about Hitler and Stalin and Mao.  He makes analogies about different kinds of forest fires and high and low potential energies for different things.  He talks about monarchy and oligarchy and democracy and a CEO as king of a corporate state and all kinds of jibber jabber.  And that’s not to say that it isn’t all very interesting and maybe a good basis for thinking about what comes next.  But time is limited and I want to think about today.

What I did take away from all this is that I should rethink how I define my place in the new reality.  America is no longer that civic nationalist proposition nation.  It’s a tyrannical oligarchy and I’m certainly not an oligarch.

All men are no longer created equal.  The government will tell you what your value is, based on who they are shilling for this week.

The Creator cannot endow you with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  In fact, they have long ago laughed away the existence of the Creator and now they will dole out life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness based on whatever algorithm they happen to be following that week.

There are a lot of things that can happen in the next few decades but one of the least likely is that we will get back to that America that I used to think I lived in.  For that to happen a whole lot of people in the blue states would have to revolt against their elites and come over to our side.  And I think the event of me winning a billion-dollar lottery five times in a row is a more likely event than that.

So, I’ll start with whose side I’m not on.  That’s easier than describing who is on my side.  Anyone who’s against the statement, “All lives matter,” Is definitely not on my side.  In fact, it’s safe to say those people are my enemies.  But I’ll go farther, anyone who pulls down statues or riots, loots and burns down cities in the name of George Floyd is my enemy.  And moving along.  Any government official who decided to allow these people to victimize their constituents and sat back or even encouraged this rioting is my enemy.  And anyone who believes or says he believes in white privilege is my enemy.  And finally, anyone who thinks for whatever reason that people like me don’t deserve the same consideration and rights as any other citizen of this country is my enemy.  Now, that’s getting to be a pretty large group of people.  But I’m sure if I sat here a little while I could throw some more groups into it.  But let’s stop there.

Who does that leave?  Well, it leaves people who believed in the United States as originally constituted.  Trying to describe that group isn’t completely trivial.  It doesn’t consist of one ethnic group or color.  It doesn’t even consist of all the members of one ethnic group or color.  And the same can be said of sex.  You can say that the largest component is white men.  But there are women too and minorities.  In terms of age, it skews older.  The millennials are extremely propagandized against their country.  So, there are leanings and there are groupings but no hard and fast rules.

But what do you do about forming a community out of such a coalition?  And what are the actions and goals of such a community?  I think what we are trying to do is to first give ourselves an identity and give ourselves a voice and then come up with an agenda and then takes steps to actualize that agenda.

The first step is to give ourselves an identity.  My idea is to commandeer the old American identity.  Everything from before 1960.  The old civic nationalist creed.  Just take it lock stock and barrel.  We don’t throw anything overboard.  We keep the Civil War and the Frontier and everything else, warts and all.  I’ve been calling it Free America but naming it will be part of the founding actions.  Everything we need is already there.

Giving ourselves a voice is wrapped up in forming local chapters and meeting together and finding out what things we are unhappy about and starting to find strategies to address these problems.  And then forming an on-line community to organize above the grass roots level and leverage the scope of our membership on a national level.  And I wouldn’t be surprised if there wouldn’t be people who would want to start chapters overseas.  There are probably millions of people who would want to be in our camp all around the world.  And the other part of giving ourselves a voice is finding gifted leaders who have a vision of what we can do.  And I think there is much we can do.  Organization will allow us to achieve much by buying influence and discouraging attacks.

All of these things are possible once we have an organization that represents us and our values.  And it can’t be the Republicans.  They only represent themselves.  We may be able to use some of them and some of them may join us.  But that is another reason we need a voice of our own.  We need a platform that is easy to understand and by which we can judge whether a politician is with us or against us.  No more George Bushes, no more John McCains, no more Mitt Romneys.

And once we have that agenda we can figure out how to make it happen.  Maybe the first step is commercial.  We’ll need banks of our own who won’t discriminate against our businesses.  We’ll need publishers who won’t blacklist our authors.  We’ll need our own social media platforms.  We’ll need retailers that won’t boycott the products that our members sell.  We’ll need our own schools and our own churches.  All these things we’ll need and we’ll have because the larger society hates us and doesn’t want to allow us to breath free.

But most of all we need an organization just for our own sake.  We are vilified by everyone with wealth and power.  We need something of our own that affirms our beliefs and validates our existence.  So that is how I would reframe our situation.  Regardless of whether we can retake control of the United States we need to organize our own identity and defend it and strengthen it against the attacks from the Left.  They are not part of our nation and we owe them no allegiance.  We will tolerate what we must but we disbelieve all their propaganda and lies.  And we’ll look for our advantage to disrupt and neutralize all of their efforts.

That’s my new way of looking at things.

An Open Letter to the Leaders on the Right

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To: Former President Donald J. Trump, Senator Josh Hawley, Senator Ted Cruz, Senator Rand Paul, Senator Tom Cotton, Governor Ron DeSantis, Governor Kristi Noem, Mr. Mike Pompeo, Mr. Donald Trump Jr., Mr. Tucker Carlson

 

I am writing this open letter to you powerful and hopefully conservative leaders in the hope that somehow it will find its way to you in the real world.  I am not sure that all of you really are on our side and I’m also sure that I’ve left out many conservative leaders that are out there.  But if this message gets through to any of you and you actually find my message important then you have more chance of spreading this information to the rest of the conservative leaders than I do.

And my message is that unless you all organize some kind of effective message to the conservative people of this country very soon it will be too late.  And that’s not hyperbole.  The Left is torturing us in every facet of our existence.

They torture us at work with their various trainings.  We get sensitivity training for racial identity, sexual identity, gender identity.  We get lectured on equity which is just another name for anti-white discrimination.  Now we even get safety training to rat out our friends who say the “wrong” things.

They torture us if we try to watch entertainment.  We have to have overpaid steroid users kneeling during the national anthem while the airheaded “sports analysts” tell us how brave they are to do it.  Every movie and every tv show and even every commercial trumpets the BLM mantra that America is an abomination saturated with systemic racism.  The stupidest people in the world, actors and actresses, line up to preach to us about how evil we are.  They’ve even invented a name for it, white privilege.

They torture our children in every school from nursery school all the way through graduate school.  And if they don’t toe the line, they won’t get to use their hyper-expensive degrees.  They turn them against their parents and ancestors and make them hate the very civilization that created the world that provides all the advantages that everybody takes for granted.

They torture us on-line where they harass and de-platform normal people who want to communicate with the rest of the world.  They will not only de-platform you but they will pressure banks and payment processors to boycott your business.  They’ll even contact your employer and get you fired from your job.  And Silicon Valley acts as a giant echo chamber that gaslights us and even worse, silences us in their search engines and advertising algorithms.

They torture us by making and selectively enforcing laws against us.  They’ll celebrate the rioting and murder committed by BLM and Antifa but they’ll prosecute to absurd levels anything that is done by the Right.  Now they are ramping up their surveillance and prosecution campaign using the bogeyman of “white supremacist terror.”  They punish free speech and they are attempting to invalidate the second amendment by criminalizing guns.

They torture us by encouraging illegal immigration and by exporting all our jobs.  And now Silicon Valley has finished the job by killing the retail businesses with Amazon.  I won’t even bother to discuss COVID and the horrors they’ve inflicted on us for that.

They’ve made our lives hell but other than President Trump’s term in office you’ve all done nothing.  In the last four years there was a glimmer of hope.  That’s been extinguished.  And most real conservatives living in blue states are close to giving up permanently.  I have many friends who were outspoken champions of the Right but after the 2020 election and its aftermath have told me they don’t think there is anyone on the Right that has any fight in them at all.  If you tell them that we must form a resistance they say, “Leave me alone, don’t waste my time, let me go and enjoy my life as well as I can.”  So, if you hope to do something about taking back this country from the Left you all better sit down together in one room and put together an action plan that includes more than talk.

You want to be the leaders of the Right, so lead!   You had better put together a party or corporation to rally the conservatives.  It can’t be the Republican party because they are useless.  Their “big tent” includes squishes like McConnell and Cheney and countless others who wouldn’t know a conservative principle if it walked up to them and punched them in the nose.  And I’m not asking all the Republicans to leave the party.  It’s irrelevant.  We need an organization that’s just for social conservatives, people who believe in the Bill of Rights, who believe in God and country.  A good test is anyone who thinks that the BLM riots were justified doesn’t belong in this group.

Put together an organization and come up with some goals.  Speak to us tell us what you plan to do.  Give us hope.  Give us something to buy into and support that isn’t just us funding your stupid re-election funds!  Build something that we can benefit from.  Find some billionaires on our side and have them build some platforms for us.  Have our own Facebook, our own PayPal and while you’re at it have them open our own bank.  You could get 75,000,000 customers and who knows one day you might have your own Google, YouTube and Amazon also.  Buy a bunch of expensive lawyers and start suing our enemies in every court in the land.  Sue Google, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal and all the banks and other corporations that have been de-platforming and firing people for absolutely no legal reason at all.

And I’m no business genius.  I am aware that it takes business savvy and experience to do this.  But if there is no one on our side smart enough to figure out how to monetize 75,000,000 angry consumers then we deserve to lose.  Give these people a way to channel their anger and they will be glad to pay a little bit to have an organization of their own.

But you had better do it soon.  People can’t hold out forever.  They need hope and they want something to believe in.  Come up with a plan and put it in front of the Right and they will follow you.  Dawdle around and there won’t be anything left.  If you are leaders then lead.  If you’re not then just put out a statement that there is no hope and you’re outmatched.  Then we can decide how to make the best of our lives somewhere else.

Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are

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I’ve been writing this blog for almost five years.  And now that I’m providing enough content to warrant people keeping up with it it’s begun expanding its following, which is of course very gratifying to me.  And I am especially grateful to those of you who have passed along the site address or the link to a particular post.  I think this is the real “organic” growth mechanism as opposed to a Google or even a DuckDuckGo search link.  The opinion of the target audience is the only meaningful measure of the success of a journal.

But I must take the time to ask you all for a favor.  I am not looking for money or more clicks from you.  I’m not even looking for compliments, although praise is a wonderful narcotic that I crave as much as the next man.  What I’m looking for is feedback of some sort.  And it doesn’t even have to be agreement, in fact, disagreement combined with your opinion on the subject at hand would be splendid.  And I’m certainly not looking for histrionics and mock squabbling.  The last thing I think we need is more Jerry Springer theatrics.  And I’m not looking for people to make declarations that they consider dangerous for them to make.  I am quite aware that government and corporate busybodies are everywhere attempting to imitate the KGB on a Keystone Cops basis.  What I’m looking for is a real dialog with the audience.

As much as I like hearing my own voice and as much as I enjoy the scintillating brilliance of my every captured thought, I still believe that there are other people out there in the universe who have something that they can add to all this marvellousness.  I hold to the idea that there is intelligent life in the universe besides me.  And my goal is to discover it and make contact with it and learn something from it and even enjoy the camaraderie of shared humanity.  I feel like that character from the Pink Floyd song saying, “Hello, hello, hello is there anybody out there?”  But I know there are many somebodies out there.  I’ve met some of them.  And they are fantastic people.  But what would be more fantastic would be to reach a critical mass where the conversations become self-sustaining and I become almost an insignificant part of the dialog.

Think of all the brilliant and thoughtful and experienced people that are out there.  And they’re being thrown off social media by the hundreds of thousands and they’re rooting around on the internet looking for a community.  Some have probably found some good ones.  I’ve done it myself.  But many of these places are extremely odd.  Maybe it’s the times we live in.  Maybe it’s some artifact of the monetizing system but there is just too much anger and confusion.  Even the ones that seem to have a lot of good information on what is going on are strange and sort of depressing.  I’m looking to build some kind of community that at least can function in a way that allows information and some kind of dialog to go on.

I think that with the stalinesque woke purges going on almost everywhere in our society; in social media, in corporations, in government, in schools, in churches, even in the military; it’s necessary to have a place where we can go and be able to say what we want to without having someone tell us that we’re not allowed to.  That’s actually the origin of this site.  I got tired of being censored on photography web sites when I disagreed with the ridiculous leftist slant to everything on those sites.

Now, I’m sure there will be plenty of readers who will find that their views fall so far to the Left and the Right of where I am that this site will be uninteresting to them.  The woke will think I’m just a hateful racist.  In fact, I’ve been told that repeatedly.  And there are people way out on the edges of the dissident right who will find my beliefs hopelessly naïve and useless to their taste.  And that is reasonable.  I have no desire to straddle hopeless opposites.  It can’t be done.  But I know that there is an enormous swath of people that exist in the spectrum of conservative thought that would benefit from a chance to talk to people like themselves without being lectured to and hectored and treated like bad children or criminals.

So, if you have anything at all to say.  Say it!  I don’t need your name or even your actual e-mail address.  Put down whatever you like.  But pitch into the conversation with me.  It’ll help me.  It will help other people who are shy.  And who knows, you might really enjoy talking to other intelligent and like-minded people.  So come out, come out, wherever you are.

And if you like what you read here, tell a friend or two or three who are like you and might enjoy it too.