Tag: photog’s Search for the Promised Land

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 26APR2023 – Ranking the World

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(Editorial Note:

This post is in reaction to this linked post: We’re Better Than That

that stated that determining whether America was still the “best” place to live based on available freedom was a worthwhile exercise.

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Problem is, the ones who say that other places are worse are pretty much right. Singapore is wealthy but they’ll cane you for chewing gum. Australia, NZ, Canada and the UK are all serfs to their mega-parliament. Disarmed, cowed

In Scotland it is an arrestable offense if you walk too closely behind another at night. In England, carrying a Gerber or Leatherman multitool is fairly serious arrestable offense. In the UK you can be arrested, held without council, interrogated, have your kids dragged off to social services, then released without charge (in other words, political terrorism) for owning or distributing pamphlets supporting a legal political party, UKIP. And they’ll do it a couple times a month until you are sufficiently subdued.

Look at what Trudeau has been up to the past couple of years. Japan and South Korea are xenophobic. Mexico is now a failed narcostate. Argentina is normally ok but they have coups and other issues on a regular basis. The entire continent of Africa is screwed. Western Europe is woke as hell.

Eastern Europe is attractive but too close to Russia who will not be satisfied with Ukraine. The Caribbean is as rife with crime as when the pirates ran the place. Ecuador isn’t bad if you can handle the climate and altitude. Costa Rica is okay but its crime is rising. Most of the rest of South and Central America is second world.

Brazil is becoming quite crazy. Great beaches and attractive women, though, but I doubt Camera Girl is going to go for that. Israel is the only sane place in the Middle East but of course they are embattled. If I had to move I believe I’d choose either Argentina or Romania/Czech Republic despite their issues

Then again, you and me both have cherished family in the States. I would not want to remove myself from their proximity. My last act of love may be to die defending them if things go bat-crap here. If so, I will sing my death song and die like a warrior going home.

We’re Better Than That

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Some people I talk to think I must be kidding when I talk about leaving the United States.  They say, “You’re kidding yourself if you think you can find a better place to live.”  Or, “America may have its problems but everywhere else is worse.”  Or, “All you’ll accomplish is to make yourself poorer.”

And maybe they’re right.  I have barely begun doing my analysis of the best place on Earth to live.  But I think it’s important to understand the reason why I feel that Present Day America is not only quantitatively worse than Old America but also qualitatively worse.  And it’s hard to measure qualitative differences.  I mean what is the value of freedom of speech?  How much would you pay for freedom of association.  These things can’t be easily equated to additional dollars on your paycheck.  But they’re real.  In fact, freedom was the original reason that many of the colonists came in the 17th and 18th centuries.  They came to escape the religious persecutions in Germany and England.

And now here we are three or four hundred years later and the state has decided to take back those freedoms.  You can’t say or believe or even think what you want anymore.  Those decisions are being made for you.  And now it’s even worse.  You can’t even raise a family anymore.  There’s a village doing that for you, complete with CRT and transgender affirmation protocols to mold your offspring into something you can’t even recognize as your own flesh and blood.

There’s a lot at stake.  Just how much affluence are you willing to lose to be free?  I think the answer should be quite a lot.  After all the green new dealers already are looking to take away gasoline and replace it with windmills.  And take away eggs and milk and meat and replace it with meal worms and cricket paste.  So, who’s to say whether places in the “second world” might not be at least an even swap for the subhuman, Untermensch, bugman, great reset future that Davos has planned for us.  But we should consider it.  Here’s why.

We’re better than that.  Simply put, we’re mostly very decent people who are being treated like dirt.  The very government that is supposed to be looking out for our interests is systematically subjecting us to psychological attack to destroy our ability to decide our own future and ultimately to destroy our will to live.  And it’s working.  Birth rates are plummeting.  Suicides and drug overdoses are skyrocketing.  Mental illness and depression are endemic.  They’re killing us.

If there is a place where this death cult isn’t in charge, then even if you were living on the cutting-edge of poverty, it might still be a very good trade off.  So that’s why figuring out where the best place to live isn’t as easy as comparing GDP and crime statistics.  Maybe there is a freedom index out there that you can evaluate to see where you’ll have the ability to say what you want and be with the people you like.  Then you’ll have to figure out how much that’s worth.  Personally, I think it’s worth a whole heck of a lot.

I’ll confess that living in a rich country is very comfortable if you’ve managed to find a good job and even put away a few bucks.  But I’ll tell you the truth.  Seeing the place America has turned into and knowing what it will do to my grandkids and their kids sickens me and makes me want to find a better place.

We’re better than this.  We deserve better than this.  We deserve to be treated as the decent human beings we are.  We followed the rules and paid our taxes and tolerated all sorts of strange and unhealthy things because we wanted to be “fair.”  And in return we’ve been victimized and demonized and made to feel like strangers in our own home.  And now we’ve been disinherited.  They’ve taken away our history and turned our heroes into monsters.  They’re even re-writing our books.

Well, it’s enough.  Maybe we can reclaim some of the Red States and live free lives there.  But if not then it’s worth looking around.  We’re good people.  We’re very desirable stock for a place that wants to grow and prosper.  We’re smart and hard-working (well not me, but most of us).  If they don’t need us here, we should make an honest effort to find someplace where they do.  If this is no longer the land of the free let’s find out if it’s moved someplace else.

How Do We Get From Here to a Better Place? – Part 1

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Lately I’ve been thinking that it’s time to stop complaining about how bad things are and instead try to figure out what practical steps I can take to change my environment for the better.  This is a talking paper that I’m using to organize my thoughts and try to logically analyze the problem and come up with a path forward.  A way to get from here to some place better.

Well, the first step is to change our thinking about our world.  Instead of thinking of ourselves and our enemies as Americans we must begin distinguishing our environment from ourselves.  The US government and those that support it are the problem and we need to figure out how to minimize its harmful effect on us.

The question immediately occurs whether the best way to achieve this would be to emigrate from the United States.  It’s a fair question.  And in order to answer it you will have to do a comparative study of all the countries on Earth that seem to possess the minimum acceptable conditions for a good life.  And that criterion should allow someone attempting this analysis a fairly easy way to eliminate the vast majority of potential new homes.  For instance, if you rated physical safety as a very important characteristic for your home then places like Yemen or Somalia would be out of the question whereas this criterion would increase the desirability of places like Iceland or Singapore.  And in fact, just based on safety you could eliminate almost the entire list of third world nations, which is to say the majority of countries on the planet.  And likewise, criteria like opportunities for employment, standard of living, levels of taxation, currency stability, availability of quality healthcare, educational opportunities, various freedoms like freedom of religion, speech, the right to bear arms, cultural norms like gay marriage and other particular items of your choice.

I think it would turn out that the list of places that equal the score of even a degraded version of the United States of America is a pretty short list.  But the exercise is well worth performing for the sake of the clarity it will provide on what the true situation is in which we find ourselves.  I think it’s likely that the “calculus” here will be a question of how much material prosperity should be sacrificed for real freedom.

For example, right now, I’m fairly certain that Hungary far outstrips the United States in actual freedom of speech and religion.  Add to this Hungary’s stance in defying the globalist mania for sanctifying homosexuality and suddenly that country becomes extremely attractive to someone who values traditional family values.  In fact, in and of itself, this position elevates Hungary to the level of a gold standard for protecting children from the harmful propaganda that has infiltrated almost every corner of western civilization.

But I digress.  In one of the later chapters of this study I will specify the parameters and factors I will use to rank countries in relation to the United States and each other.  Next on the agenda is producing this ranked list.  And further I will also add into the mix various red states in the United States and rank them too.

This seems to me to be the correct path forward.  By performing this analysis, I will satisfy my need to know whether emigrating is a viable and attractive option or not.  And that is a question that should be answered earlier rather than later because later on that path may be blocked by government policies that aren’t currently in place.

I’ll try to break this effort down into manageable “bites” in order to show some progress and to keep myself from getting distracted.  Hopefully the information and the methodology will be interesting and useful for others who may be thinking the same things.

What’s a Twentieth Century American to Do? – Part 2 – Are There Alternatives to the U.S.?

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In the first part of this series of posts I identified two separate questions associated with whether The United States was still the freest place in the world to live.  The first question was to answer whether the U.S. still the freest country to live in.  The second question is contingent on the first answer being yes.  If it is the freest place then the second question is how do you live in this new America in a way that maximizes your actual freedom here.  Because without a plan it is unlikely that it will feel very free.

This post is meant to answer that first question.  I looked around at some of the other places in the world and asked whether they were more or less free than the U.S.  And I think I’ll have to say that there are other places that would feel freer than here.  I’ll try to explain how I came up with this answer.

One of the first thing I decided was that if the standard of living of the country in question was close to first world conditions, then I would not fault the “freedom” quotient on that account.  For instance, I would rate most countries in Europe as an acceptable economy to compare to the U.S.  whereas some place like Haiti or North Korea would be unacceptable.  Looked at this way, places like Argentina and Chile and even Costa Rica might be acceptable places to live because the infrastructure exists to enjoy a decent life.

The next question is whether a country enjoys freedom of speech.  And it is understood that this is relative to what currently exists in the United States.  Though we technically have complete freedom of speech in the United States that is far from a true statement when you take into account the effects of woke practices on employment and the “hate speech” laws that although technically unconstitutional are unchallenged in multiple jurisdictions throughout Blue America.  Looked at from that point of view there are plenty of places that have the same or more freedom of speech as the United States.  Certainly, there are many places in Europe where the woke thought police are even more rabid than in this country but places like the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary, for instance, are not among them.  And these countries are not in the clutches of the LGBTQ mafia.  And they are all opposed to illegal immigration.  And finally, the Czech Republic even has gun rights that come close to what we have in the United States.

So, my cursory survey of other countries that might provide a freer environment than the U.S. seems to say that there may in fact be choices.  And it is understood that none of these places are as prosperous as the United States or possess all the advantages that this country possesses.  But what they do have is a less leftist outlook and a lack of woke public policy.  And since this is just a cursory examination, my next step is to look at these Eastern European countries to see whether the reality matches the appearance.

And if anyone out there has information on these three places and other candidate countries, please leave information in the comments.

Why Write This Stuff?

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As D3F1ANT commented yesterday “But saying this, again, is ALSO akin to standing on deck with water at your neck. We’ve known this for as long as we’ve known the ship is sinking.”

He’s right.  There’s nothing more to say.  We already know what must be done.  But is there anyone willing to do it?  Maybe a DeSantis or an Abbott is willing to take on Washington.  I don’t know.  I’m watching and hoping but I’m not sure.

So why do I post this stuff?  I’m looking for other people who think like me.  I want to be a part of anything that could help.  And if it turns out that nothing will happen then I’m looking for a place to go.  I’m looking for a corner of the world where I can go to live with people that are like me.  It’s pretty awful in the blue states.  You feel like a zoo animal and you get tired of being an outsider.  One of these days I’ll convince Camera Girl that the grandkids can come visit us for a change.

So I talk to folks in other parts of the country where things aren’t as bad and I think about how I might fit in somewhere else.  Florida, Texas, Utah, Idaho, Oklahoma, Arkansas.  I think about lots of places where I could settle in and have neighbors and live in a town where my beliefs wouldn’t make me a pariah.

I write the political posts about what the latest outrage is from Dementia Joe or I talk about some positive result by a guy like DeSantis to keep my own spirits up.  And I put up my entertainment posts on books and movies and anything I find interesting like photography.  I try to do my part to provide something on-line that isn’t the garbage that the Left mandates.  Sometimes it’s discouraging because there’s just bad news as far as the eye can see.  But I think of what kind of odds there were against guys like Solzhenitsyn and Havel back in Russia and Czechoslovakia and I think things are nowhere near as bad here.  And I feel it’s worthwhile to keep writing and holding out for some kind of breakthrough.  Maybe somewhere someone will take a stand and give us all something to rally around.  I think that someone will say no and then make it stick.  And once it happens people will light a million fires and it will be too big for Washington to stamp them all out.

That’s what I hope will happen.

Something to Raise My Spirits

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I was writing a post about what might be going on this year.  It was coming out pretty depressing and so I put it aside.  As I mentioned yesterday the Mid-Winter Blues have reached me.  Adding depressing predictions is just something I can’t justify at the moment.  I need something light to move me through my day.

So, I checked my almanac and sure enough we’re over the hump of winter. There are approximately thirteen weeks in winter and we’re in week eight. and the days are about 90 minutes longer than they were at Winter Solstice.  So, by any measure of sidereal momentum, we’re on the upswing.  In honor of this milestone, I will put all doom and gloom aside.  After all, the human soul needs hope and light to carry on.  That’s what I’ll do.

Here’s a video that lists the ten most conservative cities in the US.  The narrator is a little bit snarky, probably a liberal jerk but I still found it interesting.  I’m sure there are alternate lists but it’s a good starting point.  If you want to add a city to the list leave it in the comments.

And because I’m always looking for good science fiction movies here’s a video that claims to do that.  CineFix Top 10 Science Fiction Films of All Time  I agree with some of these picks disagree with a couple and have never seen a few others so I’ll check them out and maybe find something good.  If you disagree with any feel free to say.

And this just in, the idiots in the Senate have finally finished the farcical impeachment theater with seven cretinous Republicans voting with the Democrat creeps.  These were Sens. Richard Burr of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.  Burr was a bit of a surprise.  I wonder if he’ll join Romney and Sasse in being primaried out by their states when they come up for re-election.  Let’s hope.

Well, look at that.  Now my spirits have lifted.  I’ll get on with reading the accounts of the farce and wait for President Trump to comment on it and then tell us what the future will hold.

Well see there now, seek and ye shall find.  Ask and ye shall receive.  A nice reward and we can hope that serious people will now step forward to start discussing what our side can do to sidestep what’s going on in Washington DC and begin to return our lives to something resembling the better world we lived in just one long year ago.  I only hope the smart and powerful decide to come to our aid.  They can make this easier and less ugly.  If the little people have to do it ourselves it’s going to be very painful and so ugly that I don’t even want to imagine it.  No one wants the United States to go through something like the fate of Yugoslavia.  But more and more it’s looking like that is how it will play out.  But that’s a discussion for another day.  Today I’ll just bask in a good ending for a mid-winter day.

Update:  Now it can begin.

07JUN2020 – OCF Update – Which is the Best State for a Social Conservative to Live In

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Yesterday was a very busy day on the site.  According to the Slimstat Counter there were 1,778 pageviews and 1,482 unique visitors on the site and the large majority of them were here to read the post “Which State Will Grovel the Least to the Looters?” and 216 of these readers voted on the poll and 33 of them left more or less detailed information about why they voted the way they did.

Here is some of the raw information.

Votes State Votes
Texas 42
Wyoming 38
Other 28
Idaho 24
Tennessee 16
Montana 13
Alabama 12
North Dakota 11
Oklahoma 11
Arkansas 7
Arizona 7
Utah 5
Mississippi 2
Total 216
Comments State Votes Comments
Idaho 5
Texas 3 Fredericksburg
South Dakota 2
Oklahoma 2
Wyoming 2 Stay away from Teton County
Alabama 1
Missouri 1 Southwest MO
Tennesee 1
Nevada 1 Northeast Nevada
West Virginia 1
Florida 1 Northeast Florida (Jacksonville)
South Carolina 1

You can view the comments back at the post.  But I’ll give a few general impressions I gleaned from reading the comments.  First off, there are an awful lot of good people left in this country and there are lots of places where people are breathing air that’s a lot freer than what I breath here in the gulag.  Just reading how the armed citizenry of Idaho repulsed the Antifa scum trying to invade from Spokane Washington was absolutely inspiring.  And I found out there are other places that weren’t on my “list” that are also free.  Places like South Dakota and West Virginia should have been, but even purple states like Missouri, Florida and Nevada have vast areas where life is still free.  And I learned that even if Texas has some enormous cities full of progressives there are millions of red-blooded conservatives there.  And finally I must say that Wyoming may have one of the smallest populations among the fifty states it had the second highest vote count in the poll.

I’ll have much more to say about the results but I wanted to put out a quick update and say thanks to all the great folks who responded so enthusiastically.  You certainly gave me a lot to think about.

Which State Will Grovel the Least to the Looters?

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This is not a rhetorical question.  I am involved in a thorough search for a new locale where the state and local government won’t go out of their way to violate my first and second amendment rights on a daily basis.  After the events of the last week or so I am more motivated than ever to come up with an exit strategy.  Let’s call it “Escape from New England.”

The three states I’ve inhabited in the northeast over the course of my relatively long life have taken fiendish delight in singling out my race and sex for punishment and humiliation.  Although I am still tied by bonds of employment and family to this part of the country, I foresee that imminent retirement and the maturing of the next generation will allow me to escape.  In fact it is partly for the sake of the grandchildren that I want to relocate to a place where their chances for happiness will be better.  Camera Girl is a reluctant participant due to her grandchildren but I feel confident that I can provide her with plenty of access to the kids through visits and trips.

Back in November of 2018 I first started considering the move.  I looked at a list of the ten most conservative states.  They were Wyoming, North Dakota, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Louisiana, Montana, Utah and Tennessee.  Based on climate I pared it down to Oklahoma, Arkansas, Idaho, Utah and Tennessee.  But this is just rudimentary sorting.  Living in an already crappy climate like New England I want to base my decision on more important things than climate.  If it turned out that Wyoming was a conservative paradise, I’d bite the bullet and pack up my snow plow and move there in a heartbeat.

In that spirit I am opening up consideration for any location.  Texas and Arizona are rumored to be turning purple.  But maybe that is an exaggeration.  I’ll listen to what people living in these areas have to say.  I want to cast as wide a net as possible and then use the best information available to sift through the results.

So, help me out all you fellow deplorables.  Where is the promised land?  And just as valuable where isn’t it?  Even in red states I’m sure there are plenty of places where the liberals have got a stranglehold like in Austin TX.  The last thing I want to do is travel half way across the country and end up in the same situation I’m in now.  Feel free to warn me off anyplace like that.

I’ve put a poll with a list of the reddest states.  I’ve also added a choice other if your choice isn’t there.  then just leave it in the comments.  And even if you pick one of the states I’ve listed feel free to elaborate in the comments section.  I’m critically interested in real information from our side of the fence.  As you are aware the stuff that Google elevates in its searches aren’t exactly accurate for our side of the aisle.  If I think that this poll provides enough information I’ll organize it and maybe it can be a resource for others caught behind enemy lines in the deplorable hating blue states.

Update:

Thanks to all that read and participated in the poll and comments.  I have a short update on the results with some thoughts about the results.

Which is the Best State for a Social Conservative to Live In?

View Results

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06JUN2020 – OCF Update

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The poll on yesterday’s post Which State Will Grovel the Least to the Looters?  has already accumulated over 150 votes and dozens of useful comments.  When the link to whatfinger expires sometime tonight I’ll review the results and add some comments of my own to say what I’ve learned and what I’ll do next to use the info.  But thanks to everyone who has contributed so far.

The Search Begins

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For an American man with traditional beliefs living in New England or for that matter anywhere in the Northeast is depressing.  In an earlier post I described it as living behind enemy lines or in occupied territory.  So, for a long time I’ve been contemplating a move.  Much is linked to employment, of course.  But equally important is ending up in a place that maximizes the improvement in quality of life.  I did a search and found a 2016 survey that listed the top ten conservative states.

Wyoming             +35

North Dakota     +31

Mississippi          +31

Oklahoma           +30

Alabama              +30

Arkansas              +28

Idaho                    +28

Louisiana             +27

Montana             +26

Utah                      +26

Tennessee          +26

In order to narrow the search, I added the climate requirements to the mix.  Living in New England has hammered home the disadvantages of living in an area that has frequent and deep snowfalls.  And in general, very cold climates are a definite negative selection factor for me.  That eliminated Wyoming, North Dakota and Montana.  And while not completely eliminated I give lesser preference to extremely hot, humid areas that are also prone to hurricanes.  Until further consideration, let’s put aside Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.  That leaves Oklahoma, Arkansas, Idaho, Utah and Tennessee.  Five seems like a manageable number of choices.  Generally speaking, that gives me two southeastern choices, two western choices and one somewhere in the middle.

This is a very rudimentary beginning to my search but it seems to be moving me off the mark pretty quickly.  I was interested in getting some feedback from the OCF audience to help evaluate these five states or any other candidates that maybe I should add to the list.  I intend to make this an ongoing process and I’ll return back to folks here to get additional information if it exists.

And just to make sure it doesn’t get buried I’m giving it a category of its own and a spot on the front page.