Tag: normal life

Wayne’s World

photog Current Events, OCF, photog's Corner ,

Ah, the joys of domesticity.  Today, in anticipation of the weekend barbecue, I am working my way down Camera Girl’s list of chores.  I have swept and mopped the front deck, washed the windows, cleaned the lawn furniture, bought a new toilet seat, bought some stuff I needed to install a couple of air conditioners, bought some stuff to clean the cars and dug out my ladder to clean the first-floor gutters.

Yesterday unexpectedly, the roofer, Wayne, showed up out of the blue after three weeks of radio silence and said he was ready to look at those couple of shingles that had come loose during an EF5 tornado that had moved the house onto my neighbor-across-the-road’s property.  The neighbor’s been real good about us living on his land.  Of course bringing the plumbing and electrical services under the road cost me a good deal but I was looking for more interaction with the neighbors anyway so it’s been a great experience, all in all.

Anyway, Wayne (by the way all roofers in my experience are named Wayne) came over with the ricketiest wooden ladder I’ve ever seen and set it down against the house.  Now, the spot where he wanted to climb slopes at about a 45-degree angle and he proceeded to even it out by piling a couple of boards under one of the ladder’s feet.  I’m looking at this and thinking, is this guy insured?  Wayne’s assistant has the job of putting tension on the rope attached to the ladder.  Looking at this I’m trying to form a diagram in my head of the forces at play in this little scene.  Wayne’s weight, Bob’s tension on the line, the frictional force between the boards and the soaking wet grass underneath them and the absurd angle of the ladder and the ground and the force of my blood pounding in my veins watching this insanity.  I felt like I was participating in a Three Stooges routine in real time.  I suspect I was Moe but I wasn’t completely sure.

Miraculously every one walked away alive and intact including my repaired roof shingles.  Wayne charged me a paltry eighty bucks and I felt like I had gotten off easy in the lottery of life but vowed to find another Wayne in the future.  Unfortunately, Wayne’s perambulation on top of my house woke up my granddaughter who was taking her mid-day nap and this didn’t endear either myself or Wayne to Camera Girl.  We already had a previous roofer named Wayne that she despises due to various offenses against the code of acceptable contractor conduct.  So this only reinforced her hatred for contractors in general and specifically roofers named Wayne.  I will say in defense of the earlier Wayne that he is a staunch fan of Donald Trump and even placed an enormous Trump sign on the side of his work truck.

Of course the danger with outside work in New England is you invariably discover some new and worse damage to home and environs.  I am always fighting a losing battle against snow and moisture damage.  I recently replaced and painted some external woodwork (stairs and railings) and already I saw rotted sections.  But not being someone who quits easily, I am formulating a plan that involves wrapping these areas with waterproof tarps during the winter months.  This seems kind of crazy but the alternative is to replace the wood with something impervious to snow and rain.  I’m guessing concrete or stainless steel are the only sure bets and that would be very expensive.

And walking around the yard I noticed the deer finally put me out of my misery by eating every last one of the daylily flower buds that were growing in one of the more remote beds.  Blah, blah, everyone has to eat, blah blah.  I’m going to move those damn things this autumn and put them within stone throwing distance of my house.  I hope they bring wolves back to New England and they eat these deer into extinction.  Yes I do.

So today was a useful day.  And doing outside work kept me from thinking of Dementia Joe and how badly our country has been damaged.  Tomorrow I’ll return to contemplating the end of western civilization.  But today I got the chores done.

How Do I Decide What Not to Review?

photog Reviews , , ,

Perhaps the only good thing about being a social outcast in your own culture is that you can pick and choose what you build your inner culture out of without having to worry if you’re doing it wrong.  And that’s because you’re already wrong by the definition of the dominant culture so you can’t be more wrong for leaving something out.  For instance, I like old movies.  But I’m not a big fan of musicals.  So even though I’m told that old Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly movies are supposed to be great I don’t see it that way.  Sure, I don’t have anything against these movies but if I’m picking my top 100 movies the only musical might be “The Wizard of Oz.”  So, whereas I won’t complain if someone wants to see some musicals from the 30s and 40s, if someone tells me that West Side Story is a great American classic, I assume we are not going to see eye to eye on most things.

So, I’m going to use my own preferences rather than whatever nonsense gave us such ridiculous things as ballet, Jackson Pollack, performance art and the Beat Poets.  I was discussing film with an old friend and we got on the topic of “Citizen Kane” and he noted that numerous critics have maintained over the years that it is the best motion picture of all time.  And that got me thinking, I don’t think Citizen Kane is even good.  It’s loaded with dysfunction, depression and annoying characters that descend into a world where life has no meaning and isn’t worth living.  And that got me thinking.  The world view that finds Citizen Kane exemplary is a distorted one that is a symptom of the problems we’re facing now.  A philosophy that sees no meaning in life, that denies the existence of good and evil always devolves into nihilism.  And when people with that philosophy create art, no matter how technically adept they are the product always celebrates death as the only reality.  And the effect such a message has on viewers is corrosive.

A distinction can be drawn between a message that is unhappy and one that is nihilistic.  There are plenty of books and films and works of art that are sad but uplifting.  After all death is an inevitable part of life and death brings great sadness to most of us.  And there are a multitude of unhappy things that happen every day in the world.  But life correctly understood is the triumph of the human spirit over all these challenges.  So portraying unhappiness and tragedy isn’t the problem.  The fault with the modernist world view is the mentality that finds no value in human life at all.  Happiness and unhappiness are equally meaningless and the only activity they pursue is to stave off boredom by portraying things that outrage the chumps who still believe in things.  And because every outrage eventually becomes dulled by familiarity each new outrage has to be more extreme and more diseased.

And so, this is the point.  Just because something is fifty or a hundred years old doesn’t mean it’s a “classic.”  And something made tomorrow can possess the qualities that make it exemplary.  The quality is either there or it isn’t and it doesn’t require a college degree in art criticism to recognize it.  All you have to do is see whether the point of view of the book or the movie says that normal life has meaning or not.  It’s as simple as that.

It’s Time for the Normal American Civil Rights Act of 2020

photog Current Events, Trump , ,

In 1964 the United States Congress and President enacted laws that made discrimination against individuals in the Unites States of America on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin illegal.  This supposedly protected everyone against unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools, employment, and public accommodations.

Over the years additional laws have extended the protected classes and added enormously to the federal government’s authority to define obedience to these laws and punish supposed disobedience.  Also, the government has introduced the concept of affirmative action to allow the government to abandon these requirements and practice discrimination along the same categories; race, color, sex; when it suits its wishes.  Also, the government often will play fast and loose if one protected class is pitted against another.  For instance, religious protection has lately often been thrown to the wolves when an LGBTQ case is involved.

What seems clear to me is that it’s time to add another protected class to the constellation of aggrieved groups; Normal Americans.  Think of the actions that have been taken recently by social media, internet commerce companies, even banks and run of the mill Fortune 500 companies.  They can quite literally ban you from the internet, shut down your bank account and fire you from your job just for claiming that men and women are not the same thing.  You can be doxxed, harassed, even assaulted for holding plain old-fashioned beliefs about what is normal sexual and moral behavior.  You can be labelled a bigot, racist, Nazi or terrorist for stating that Thomas Jefferson was a great American or that the Betsy Ross flag is a patriotic symbol of American history.

So, I’ll define Normal Americanism as any belief that was legal according to the U. S. Federal government in 1980.  I’m not even trying to criminalize behaviors or actions that became legal after that point.  All I’m doing is protecting the rights of people who just want to live the way the normal inhabitants of this country took for granted back before we gave veto power to social Justice Warriors and their Tech Billionaire enablers

It’s obvious to anyone who isn’t deeply prejudiced against normal people that this group is being systematically oppressed by a large and powerful coalition of enemies.  And it seems to me that it’s time for affirmative action to be introduced to alleviate the worst excesses of this scourge.  As an example, it would seem fitting that the Boards of Directors of Google, Facebook and Twitter should be tripled in size and all the new members should be selected by Steve Bannon.  Every college should be monitored for discriminatory behavior against students who espouse religious beliefs that don’t align with LGBTQ orthodoxy.  Antifa needs to be handled by the FBI under the RICO laws, its offenders prosecuted and its sponsors bankrupted.

And I will show just how welcoming I am of diversity.  This status, Normal American covers any and all people who are being attacked for beliefs that even ten years ago would be considered sane and respectable.  So if you’re being attacked because you’re a black community leader who believes illegal aliens take jobs from underprivileged kids or a radical lesbian feminist who thinks “trans-women” are men taking advantage of a loophole to rob women of their ability to compete in sports or a Latino Catholic who is horrified that his kindergarten age son will be read to by a drag queen, you are covered under the Normal American Civil Rights Act.

Sure, all these scenarios should already be protected under freedom of speech or Title IX or freedom of religion under the 1964 law but obviously the only way to get action is to obtain majorities in Congress, and the Supreme Court (or in the case of the Supreme Court, supermajorities) and employ the same tactics today that were used in the 1960s and 1970s.  This would require the federal government to deploy legal challenges to any state and local jurisdictions that resisted the federal law and even go as far as ordering troops to enforce statutes that were ignored locally.

With respect to this latter action I can envision troops being sent to Portland to rein in the excesses of Antifa when the local government shirks its responsibilities.  In fact, suing Portland to compel equal treatment would be a wonderful exercise of such a Civil Rights Act.

So, obviously I’m being facetious.  I don’t want even more unconstitutional law, I want less.

What I’m saying is it’s time for the Federal government in the persons of the Justice Department and the Supreme Court to finally put an end to all unconstitutional laws at the federal, state and local level that deny normal Americans their rights.  How many times does the same wedding baker have to get the Supreme Court to rule in his favor before Colorado’s kangaroo court is shut down by federal law?  How many times does Google or Facebook or Twitter get to shut down or hamper a conservative entity for an action that it would ignore if a liberal entity acted equivalently?  Maybe it will take one additional SCOTUS conservative to finally get us off the dime.  But it’s high time.

The Republicans ought to run on this issue.  They should say they’ll eliminate as many unconstitutional laws as they can find.  They’d win back the House and they’d get some respect, which right now they are sorely lacking.  President Trump has already done quite a bit with his SCOTUS nominations.  If he gets his Justice and Commerce departments to investigate Silicon Valley, it won’t exactly be a Civil Rights Act but he’ll be doing everyone a big favor.  Let’s hope 2019 ends with some pain for the Left.  They deserve it for a change.

 

The ZMan Has a Post “The Haunting” About the Disruption of Sex Roles in Western Society

photog Current Events, On-Line Article Reviews, Reviews , , , ,

http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=14329

ZMan talks about the present disruption that afflicts young men and women and how it has led to all the aberrant behavior we see today.  His conclusion is that the society we’ve allowed to evolve no longer functions to bring men and women together to form normal functioning families.  Well, that seems accurate. But it doesn’t go into what needs to be done.  I think it goes without saying that leaving things the way they are will only make the problem worse.  What needs to happen is for the society at large to incentivize young people to get married and raise families.  Lobby for government policies that make families affordable; school vouchers, tax deductions for dependents and a subsidy for married stay at home moms, tax benefits for companies that provide family benefits to their employees.  And on the individual front it’s necessary for all of us to start recreating traditional social organizations to provide a place for young people to meet.  If the churches and the old line fraternal organizations have been converged and destroyed it’s necessary to form new ones.  With the Supreme Court finally out of liberal hands perhaps it’s possible that the right of free association may resurface and we can again organize our personal lives to exclude the mentally ill and the disruptively abnormal.  I think we’re in a bad place but I think it will improve when we have more control over the anti-traditional forces that are continuously attacking the normal roles of men and women in a functional society.  Anyway, that’s my thought.

The Incredibles 2 – A Science Fiction & Fantasy Movie Review

photog Movie Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Movie Reviews , , , , , , ,

The trailer for this movie says it is fourteen years since the original Incredibles debuted.  That must be true but because at that time I had neither children nor grandchildren of an age to watch it I missed its appearance altogether.  Probably four or five years ago I read that it was probably the only Disney film of recent vintage without a truly ponderous social justice taint so I took it out and liked it.  I watched it with the grandkids and they really liked it too.  But when I saw the coming attractions for the sequel I was annoyed to find a bunch of blather about Mr. Incredible being relegated to Mr. Mom and Elasti-Girl (Mrs. Incredible) being the heroic superhero who earns the daily bread.  And so, it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I took Camera Girl and the two older grandsons to the dying local movie palace to see the film.

Well, my fears were unnecessary.  The movie is good.  By the necessity of a sequel being somewhat derivative by its very nature Incredibles 2 may not rate as highly by some measures and to some audiences.  I found it extremely enjoyable.  Aside from any measures of technical or visual excellence the story line is meager as expected for this genre but acceptable, the main characters retain their original charm and the interactions between the family members defines the heart of the movie.  It is a celebration of the traditional nuclear family.  Mr. Incredible is a 1950s Dad.  Elasti-Girl could be Donna Reed and the kids are the usual bundle of sibling rivalry, growing pains and mischief but whenever the chips are down the family pulls together to save the day and each other.

I’ll keep this short.  If you have kids or grandkids bring them to this movie.  And if you don’t, then go see it yourself.  You’ll have a good time.  My personal favorite scene in the movie is Mr. Incredible coming to terms with his kid’s “new math” homework.  His anguished cry of, “Why would they change math?”, brought back such memories of exactly the same scene in my home that I probably laughed out loud in the theater like an idiot.  Maybe there is still some hope for Disney.  I mean I doubt it, but at least they didn’t alter the characters.  They’re still who they were and still a lot of fun.