Tag: Politics

A Golden Fall Day

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich , ,

I look out on the golden sunshine on this summerlike day and rejoice that whatever madness the psychos on the Left have inflicted they still haven’t altered reality.  There are still seasons and sunsets.  The beginning of October means the last of the roses finish off and the Montauk daisies are beginning to bloom and, in a week or two, the wolfbane will open its purple petals and the lycanthropes of Dunwich will assemble to howl at the moon and pull up Camera Girl’s vegetable garden.

But out in the big world all kinds of crazy things are going on.  Republicans and RINOs are engaging in jousting contests to see who will control the Speaker’s gavel.  This is a situation without precedent in the modern age of Washington.  We’re in completely unknown territory and virtually anything seems possible, all the way from incredible disaster to surprising improvement.

Meanwhile, Biden and his handlers are attempting to convince their paymasters that it’s too late to change horses in midstream.  But the rank and file of the Democrat party are seasick from all the turmoil that Dementia Joe’s policies have engendered.  They look at the polls and realize they’re part of an enormous chunk of the country that wants it to stop.  The food and gas inflation, the sky-high mortgage rates, the food costs, the endless billions being shoveled into the Ukraine war, the violence in the cities, the rolling blackouts and the attacks on normal parts of life like gas stoves and gasoline cars, the homeless and the illegal aliens living on the streets and in the parks.  Even Democrat mayors and governors want an end to the millions of illegals flooding their cities.

And the Justice Department and the FBI have made a mockery of justice by their openly partisan and obviously concocted indictments against Donald Trump.  Every week they come up with a stupider basis for attacking the former president.  Now they’re going after him because they say he overvalued his properties when he used them as collateral in a loan application.  As if corporations don’t do their own due diligence when they loan money!  This charge is so absurd, that it boggles the mind that they could find a prosecutor corrupt enough to claim it.

So, as we march on into the fall, the drumbeat of doom and gloom echoes throughout the land.  Well, that’s as much as to say, situation normal.  There’s really nothing much for our side to do except avoid taking any responsibility for the trainwreck the Democrats have created.

The only positive act that can be performed is refusing to feed Zelensky any more money for his minions to steal.  Let that murderous boondoggle play itself out without us taking an accessory role.

Wait a minute, there is one other thing.  Refusing to approve an extension to the Patriot Act seems like the only really important accomplishment that the Republican House can perform.  Let it expire finally.  The fallout will probably be a false flag attack by the CIA.  But what can you do?  Our side can announce the expected attack ahead of time as a likely ruse and assume the American people have seen enough in the last few years to recognize when they’re being had.  After all the CIA is allowed to spy on foreigners.  They should have stopped the 9-11 hijackers before they ever got on those planes.  Any attacks by foreigners, including illegal aliens is handleable by the FBI without the need for the domestic spying built into the Patriot Act.

Well, that’s enough for now.  There are still a bunch of razzberries and grape tomatoes to pick and I’m waiting for the HVAC guy to replace the oil pump on my heating system.  I leave everybody to enjoy the rest of the day and contemplate the “state of the union.”  It should be an interesting season.

We Need a Classier Bunch of Crooks in Washington

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Our regime is pathetic.  And I don’t mean just Menendez.  I don’t consider Obama or the Clintons or even the Bushes as an upgrade.  I mean altogether.  These people are simply parasites that in no way improve the country.  A Pericles or a Julius Caesar aggrandized himself via the power of the state that he ruled.  Even Pericles was accused of stealing some of the funds used to build the Parthenon.  But no one would accuse either of those two men of not acting to improve the strength of their countries.  Each acted in both peace and war to make his nation a stronger and richer place.

It’s inconceivable that anyone could make that claim for George W Bush or Barack Obama.  And as for Joe Biden, when he isn’t molesting women and children, he’s filling his pockets with graft money.  No.  Our ruling class are nothing but vultures picking the bones of the carcass of the United States while they reshape the world into an oligarchic network under the aegis of their control.

So, I guess the question is, can anything be done to recruit a new elite?  It’s not a simple question.  Donald Trump threw his hat in the ring eight years ago and he got bounced out.  The present regime has a pretty tight grip on the reins of power.  And now that they’ve measured the threat from Trump, they’ve pulled out all the stops to neutralize him.

But maybe there will be a second act.

The present regime has done so much damage with the Green Initiative, the COVID debacle and the George Floyd color revolution that things just haven’t returned to anything like a normal state.  The cities are a shambles and the economy is severely impacted by both the high consumer inflation and the deleterious effects of high interest rates for business borrowing.  Many banks find themselves with underwater bond portfolios and uncertainties over bad real estate holdings in the city centers.

With so much going wrong all at the same time it’s possible that even our ultra-corrupt elites might think it was time to put sane people in charge.  Of course, then they’d have to find sane people.  I’m not sure how they’d do that.  And at this point, the Republican voters want Trump to be their tribune.  So, these experts would have to work with and through him.  But this is Trump’s last stand.  Whether he wins or loses he’s done after this campaign.  His vice-presidential pick is a pretty important choice.  He may be choosing the next president after him.

I’m not sure who is the right one.  For lack of another choice, I’d say Ron DeSantis.  In his favor, he and Trump don’t like each other.  I think that’s a good situation for them.  Also, Trump needs a smart decisive guy who can get things done, someone he can delegate jobs to.  I think DeSantis can do that.  I also think he’ll grow in the role and be ready in four years to run on his own.

But whoever Trump picks he shouldn’t select a diversity symbol like Nikki Haley or Tim Scott.  Now, Ramaswamy is interesting but I’ll confess I know nothing about him other than his recent debate rhetoric.  For all I know he’s trojan horse.  But we definitely need someone smart and ruthless.

The problem with all this is the element of control that the administrative state wields against both Congress and the White House.  And the only possible way that this control could be overcome would be if the legislative and executive leadership worked along with the Supreme Court to scale back the power that the bureaucracy has been imbued with.  In fact, it might take more.  It might require military action to wrench control from those men.  And we know that the military isn’t the loyal servant of the people it used to be.

All of this is in the way of musing about things we are already aware of.  What would make a change possible is if some of the elites defect to Trump.  Could that happen.  I think it’s possible.  The destabilization of the country is reaching a level that must be troubling even for the people who live in safe enclaves far from street violence and decay.  When billionaires start fleeing New York and Chicago for Tennessee and Florida that’s a sea change.

And the last problem is what vision would an elite revolution have for our country?  Fixing some of the crazier policies of the Biden administration and cleaning up government doesn’t necessarily herald the beginning of a renaissance for the middle class.  The elites love their cheap labor.  Closing the border may not be one of the things they care about.  This I think of as a real problem.  They may restore law and order in the cities but allow a very loose immigration policy to continue.

So even if Trump wins next year what will come of it?  Only something like an elite defection seems like it would permit the reform that is needed to get us out of the death trap we find ourselves in.

For whatever reason, I currently think it’s possible that such a thing could happen.  Maybe tomorrow I won’t.

Regional Diversity at OCF

photog Current Events, OCF ,

I don’t think I have any regular readers in Hawaii or Alaska.  Every once in a while, someone from the 49th and 50th states show up.  But it’s uncommon.  But in every other region of the United States, I have regular readers.

In the Northeast we have folks from all of the New England States and New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

In the Midwest we’ve got folks from Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.  I see readers from Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota and, every once in a while, North Dakota.

In the South we’ve got readers in Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia and even Washington, D.C.  We have folks in Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas and once in a while Arkansas.

In the West we’ve got folks in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming and less frequently somebody from New Mexico clicks in.  And on the West Coast California and Washington are well represented and Oregon shows up less frequently.

And we have folks from Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, Brazil, Argentina, the UK, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Hungary, Czechia, Serbia, Poland, Spain, Ukraine, Russia, China, Japan, India, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Australia and New Zealand.  Although the numbers are much smaller and many of these places are very infrequent readers.

To my knowledge we’ve never had a reader from North Korea even during President Trump’s attempts at détente.  But as long as they can enjoy a joke about Dementia Joe Biden and respect macrophotography as an artform then I see no reason why we couldn’t trade opinions across the interwebs together.

So, I guess you could say that diversity is Orion’s Cold Fire’s strength.  But I suspect that in terms of political diversity we may be a little deficient.  I remember long ago I had a Bernie Bro reader but I’m not sure he’s still with us.  One thing that is interesting I approximate that the ratio of commenters to readers is about 1/30.  I’ve never figured out how to increase that numerator.  When I do it will make things a lot more lively around here.

So, maybe it’s time to put out a poll and tack it to the main page of the site and find out what people consider to be their political stripe.  If I haven’t given you choice that corresponds to your politics feel free to leave it in the comments.  Maybe I’ll come up with a few other topical questions to find out the opinions of the readers.  And if anyone from the places that I say read less frequently disagrees please leave a note and correct my misconception.

 

What Would You Call Your Politics?

View Results

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And We Keep Getting Richer but We Can’t Get Our Picture

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A photog’s work is never done.  Today one of the many hats I had to wear was Camera Girl’s chauffer.  It seems her car had to go in the shop for a couple of grand worth of maintenance and repairs.  So, I followed her to the garage and drove her home.  Then at the end of the day, the reverse trip.  I mean, what does she think I am, an Uber driver?    And then there was this and that and the other thing and before you know it my whole day, twenty-four precious hours are gone, gone for good!  Well, c’est la guerre.

I was reading a “Rolling Stone” article about the Republican House planning a series of investigations and how unhinged they all were.  Mercy sakes, why would anyone investigate the federal government’s response to COVID?  I mean why would locking down the whole country and forcing experimental drugs into the whole population be grounds for inquiry.  Seems perfectly normal to me.

In addition, this unhappy “journalist caterwauled about investigations into the Disinformation Governance Board, Eric Swalwell’s Chinese Spy, the FBI chasing parents at School Board meetings, the government hiring 87,000 IRS agents and the fed’s collusion with Big Tech to censor conservatives.  I mean I just felt so bad for the feds.  How awful to accuse them of unconstitutional overreach.  Really it was just good old American overachievement.

I really feel this writer’s pain.  She knows how hard it was for the January 6th investigation to get anyone to listen to their hearings and realizes it was because of how boring they were.  Whereas with the Hunter Biden laptop filled to overflowing with videos of hookers and crack smoking it will be impossible to keep it from streaming everywhere.  It’s just too unjust for the evil Republicans to have all this good stuff to work with.  There should be some kind of equity, inclusion and diversity.  Maybe some of the footage can be doctored to include Republicans in the crack house scenes with Hunter.  Maybe for the sake of diversity some of the hookers can be switched out for adults instead of the actual underage sex workers.  And for equity’s sake maybe the “big guy” could be Donald Trump this time.  Isn’t reality so unfair?

You know, it’s funny.  Back in the 1960s and 70s people used to read the Rolling Stone to be entertained.  They’d read about Led Zeppelin, or Queen and find out whether the new album was coming out and whether it was any good.  I’m trying to imagine who reads it now and why.  The lefties reading it back then would have been horrified if the writers were defending some government program forcing people to be injected with drugs they didn’t want.  Or imagine trying to defend the FBI silencing free speech.

Well, the good news is that probably no one reads it at all anymore.  Think about it, I may be the only actual human to have read that drivel.  Millions of bots clicked on the link but I’m the only idiot who slogged through that crap.  Well, my takeaway is that the House Republicans are giving me my money’s worth.  Outraging Rolling Stone writers and embarrassing deep state fascists is the only worthwhile occupation for politicians.  I take that back.  They can also prevent Congress from appropriating any more money.  Now that is worthwhile.

Groovy man.

The Power of No

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It never occurred to me that maybe the anti-McCarthy coup might actually have a chance to succeed but what if they did dig their heels in for a few weeks?  Maybe the rest of the House Republicans might start wondering if maybe there were a few more candidates that almost everyone could easily agree on.

It’s so pleasant to dream about what might happen if our elected “leaders” somehow developed backbone and started acting like leaders.  Of course, in reality most of them are either completely useless or worse.  They vary from hacks and grifters to actual sociopaths.  But maybe there are a few that want to do the right thing.  And if they show some resolve and take advantage of a rare situation where the actions of a few can impact a whole institution like the present situation in the House, then maybe something unexpected and positive might result.

Just for the sake of argument, suppose after a couple of weeks of yelling at each other behind closed doors, it occurs to some of the more moderate representatives that a more productive way of solving this problem would be asking each member to provide a list of names that they absolutely would refuse to vote for.  Taking everybody’s lists, they could then add up the negatives and disqualify anyone who had more than four no-votes against it.  Whoever is left would constitute a pool of names that had the potential to be approved.  Then after a couple of test ballots using that pool of names as the source, they could pretty quickly come up with the four or five names with the largest support and begin to do some horse trading to see who could become the Speaker.

Obviously, my idea would require that most of the Republican House members were reasonable human beings.  And we already know that’s not true.  I suspect at least half of them are nitwits.  But I’m sure that the more intelligent members of the group could persuade their more cognitively challenged brothers and sisters to follow some simple instructions.  Surely there are three or four Republican representatives who are both competent and haven’t sold their souls to Mephistopheles yet.  Jim Jordan is one name that has come up often.  Maybe there are some others.

The point is the MAGA wing of the party has found a silver lining to the 2022 mid-term meltdown.  Their 20-member coalition can wreck the Uniparty’s party.  Short of the GOP establishment letting a Democrat become Speaker, their backs are to the wall.  And if they did elect a Dem then the whole charade would be exposed and the Uniparty would be truly unmasked for all to see.  And from my point of view that would be almost as good as Jordan getting the Speaker’s gavel.

Now, this is all nonsense.  None of this will happen.  McCarthy will whine and hector the dissidents and they will be threatened by the donors who paid for their campaigns and eventually they’ll vote for good old Kevin.  But for just a day or two they did give me something to cheer about.  Listening to all of those politicians screeching apoplectically about irresponsibility and the storied history of the “People’s House” gave me a good laugh.

And who knows?  Miracles do happen.  Very rarely.  But not never.

My Time Was Better Spent with the Gorgon

photog Current Events, photog's Corner, Photography , , , , , ,

Today I intended to do some politics.  I read a bunch of articles I checked the various dissidents to see what was ticking them off and I thought about “what this country really needs.”

And I came up with nada.

Basically, the Democrats are convinced they’ve won everything and the country backs them up 100%.  And the GOP establishment think they’ve shut down Trump so they’re pretty smug too.  Well, they’re both mostly wrong but since nothing works better than to give the people what they voted for I can’t think of a thing to say.  Let’s see how bad they screw up the country this coming year.

So instead, I decided to have some fun today.  I did a couple more of those focus stack macrophotography exercises on Nancy Pelosi’s prettier and more personable younger sister, Medusa.

So, this is kind of a bone of contention between Sony and me.  They’ve never provided their cameras with a focus stack capability so I have to use work-arounds.  There’s a Bluetooth remote “commander” that will send a signal to the camera to move the focus back or forth by a small increment and then I can trigger an exposure and then repeat the process by however many exposures needed to get everything in focus piece by piece.  It works but it’s painfully manual.  I also have a tiny software program on my laptop that automates the process but then I have to lug the laptop around in the field.

Other camera makers have added the programming to shoot focus brackets automatically in the camera.  One camera maker, Olympus even has the camera “stack” the bracket into a single composite file automatically.  Now there’s a company that loves its customers.  Sony?  Well miracle of miracles they just added bracketing to the brand new A7R V.  So now the software exists in Sony’s system.  Will they retrofit it into some of the more recent cameras through a firmware upgrade.  Don’t make me laugh!

So here is poor photog, Sony’s laughing stock with his workarounds and his decade plus of Sony tone deaf customer service.  Will he never learn?

Here are some of the bracketed files.

For the first stack I used six files.  This didn’t quite get everything in focus in the first stack.

Next time I took sixteen files and the final product was a lot better.

What Do the Poll Numbers Tell Me?

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For decades I’ve noticed that political polls in the United States had a very noticeable bias.  Depending on whether they were ridiculously partisan polls or just slightly biased they would skew more or less to the Left.  They were able to produce this bias by overestimating the percentage of the population that is Democrat and underestimating the Republican share.  And it was just assumed by me that we had to throw our own fudge factor in when trying to make sense of the actual political situation from these flawed measures.

But look at Joe Biden’s approval ratings on RCP now.

Polling Data

Poll Date Sample Approve Disapprove Spread
RCP Average 1/10 – 2/13 — 40.6 53.8 -13.2
Rasmussen 2/9 – 2/13 1500 LV 42 57 -15
Reuters 2/7 – 2/8 1005 A 43 51 -8
YouGov 2/5 – 2/8 1255 RV 41 51 -10
Susquehanna 2/3 – 2/9 800 LV 42 52 -10
Politico 2/5 – 2/6 2005 RV 41 55 -14
IBD/TIPP 2/2 – 2/4 1355 A 38 48 -10
CNN 1/10 – 2/6 1257 RV 42 57 -15
Monmouth 1/20 – 1/24 735 RV 38 55 -17
Insider Advantage 1/21 – 1/23 850 LV 40 59 -19
Harris 1/19 – 1/20 1815 RV 39 53 -14

 

These are horrible numbers.  And they’re close to accurate.  Rasmussen is one of the few pollsters that doesn’t favor Democrats.  He’s got Dementia Joe at 42 – 57.  CNN which is perpetually in the tank for the Dems has 42 – 57.  That’s not an accident.  Those are real numbers.  And why are they doing this?  Because Biden’s numbers with Democrats are terrible too.  Or in another way to look at it, a lot of the people who voted for Biden have switched parties.  The proportion of voters who claim to be Democrats has shrunk.  They’ve shifted to the Republicans or at least to Independents.  And they mean that they’ll be voting for Republicans even though they don’t want to be called Republicans because they’re women and they don’t want their friends to judge them harshly.

All this tells me that the midterms are going to be very bad for the Dems.  They will lose the House and the Senate.  I think that’s a given.  Does it mean anything more?  Only maybe.  It’s completely within the control of the Republicans to do what they typically do and blow this golden opportunity.  They can use their control of the Congress to collect fees from the donors and lobbyists, as usual.  They can ignore their duty and not thoroughly investigate and document for the American people the blatant and systematic voter fraud that happened in 2020.  Or they can for once act like the leaders of a free people.

Normally I’d say the chance of them doing the right thing was zero.  But things are significantly different this time.  Donald Trump refuses to let sleeping dogs lie.  He continues to rally the people to support efforts to investigate the 2020 election.  He continues to call out the RINO’s like Liz Cheney who support Democrat lies like the “Insurrection.”  And some of the state leaders are making the right noises too.  They are attempting to safeguard their election processes.

Putting all this together I’d say we’re at about a fifty percent chance of something good coming out of the present situation.  Admittedly that’s not a glowing prospect but compared to how things have gone for most of my life, it’s a reason to hope.

The polls actually give us good information for the first time in decades.  The people are pissed off.  Now it will take the politicians to get their act together.  Let’s pray that some actual leaders will emerge and use the opportunity.

Wanted: Local Political Contributors Part 1 – War Pig on Ohio Governor’s Race

photog Current Events, OCF ,

As the Primary and General Off-Year Elections creep up on us I’m interested in getting posts from readers about their local political scene.  Places like Texas, Colorado, Florida, Ohio, South Carolina, North Carolina, Illinois, Minnesota are represented by readers here.  Even Canada and Australia have local political stories that some of our readers might want to provide.  So if you are interested in sharing your perspective on your local politics, get in touch.  Either leave a comment or send an e-mail to orionscoldfire at charter dot net.  Anonymity is, of course, perfectly fine and if you prefer to discuss local cultural issues instead of or in addition to politics that also is encouraged.  I’ll add this want-ad to the footer of the posts for a while to see if I can entice any readers to write.

 

War Pig:
I believe you’re an Ohioan. Do you have any thoughts on the Mike DeWine vs Jim Renacci governor’s primary? I think I’ve heard DeWine has made himself unpopular over COVID but it’s all third hand info as far as I know.

photog

 

DeWine, or as many call him, DeSwine, is very unpopular over covid policies, many of which were overturned by the Ohio Supreme Court. I would not be surprised to see Renacci make a very strong showing but DeSwine has the backing of the ones who made the most money during the pandemic
. He has the money and he runs the machine. I hope he is soundly defeated but I have so little faith in the current electoral system that I am doubtful.

War Pig

Wanted: Local Political Contributors

photog Current Events, OCF ,

As the Primary and General Off-Year Elections creep up on us I’m interested in getting posts from readers about their local political scene.  Places like Texas, Colorado, Florida, Ohio, South Carolina, North Carolina, Illinois, Minnesota are represented by readers here.  Even Canada and Australia have local political stories that some of our readers might want to provide.  So if you are interested in sharing your perspective on your local politics, get in touch.  Either leave a comment or send an e-mail to orionscoldfire at charter dot net.  Anonymity is, of course, perfectly fine and if you prefer to discuss local cultural issues instead of or in addition to politics that also is encouraged.  I’ll add this want-ad to the footer of the posts for a while to see if I can entice any readers to write.