January 2023

 January so far has gone much as expected.  Interest rates rise, inflation appears out of control (if it really is inflation?), the incompetence of Branden is exposed on a daily basis.  The cackling hen of Branden Junior continues to embarrass. Federal agencies made of unelected member of the civil service publish regulations at will, making millions of citizens unconvicted felons overnight.  Somehow this is done with no repercussions at all. The incredible debt of the country is beyond control.  Thirty trillion dollars.  Mathematically impossible to do anything about. The Left continues to be divisive along racial and economic lines. Branden as completely left the border open for two years. Something like three million illegal aliens cross a year. It seems all nations in the world have sovereignty, except the US. Why? All proposals lead to restricted liberty for all and demonization of those of us who prefer to be left the hell alone.

I truly fear a crisis is on the horizon. There is no reconciliation with the Left. When the ideas you propose are antithetical to individual liberty, where is there room for compromise?  

There were very few good things to come out of the pandemic years with their unconstitutional lockdowns and restrictions.  The greatest of these was that the Left tipped their hand.  Statists in power shut down schools and businesses. People were left in destitution. Statists determined what was “essential” and what was not.  Here’s a Blinding Flash of the Obvious:  all businesses are essential for those who depend upon them. How can anyone not see this and not have a sociopathic desire for power over others. 

There was something else I’d mention. Sending people to work from home served as a proof of principle for many. The company I work for sent us home on 23 March 2020 and we were there for a year with few exceptions.  My wife’s company sent them home on the same day, and that continues now with only one day a week in the office. I could see this upending the real estate market. Sure, with DSL and internet from your local cable provider this has been available to an extent since the dot com bubble burst. However, assuming there was an employer willing to do this, the employee was limited to availability of network access. Enter Elon Musk and Starlink, you have multi-megabit upload and download speeds over a much greater geographic area.  A young couple demonstrated this on the Isle of Skye:  Does STARLINK work in a Remote UK Location?

There is no reason for many jobs to not be dispersed. For all their claim to being the party of progress and science, the Left will despise this, just as they’ve despised citizen journalists since Matt Drudge broke a story about a blue dress. To be controlled, people must first be concentrated. It is my belief that Elon Musk and Starlink has demonstrated the possibility of breaking this forever. 

Uncertainty

 Seasons are turning...

It is mid October and autumn has arrived in full force her in Leavenworth along the  river. The last couple of weeks have witnessed the changing of the leaves, two hard freezes in the last two mornings, and the changing of the light.  There is a discrete change in sunlight this time of year.  Light appears dimmer and there is a different hue in the blue of the sky, foreshadowing the winter to come. I’ve always enjoyed the changing of the seasons and this one is no different. 

Other seasons change as well.  I don’t recall when I first looked in the mirror and saw my father looking back at me. But it does seem I resemble him a bit more every day, in appearance, if not personality. 

My father was a hard man. Born into poverty in the souther Appalachians of North Carolina at the very start of the depression, was the youngest in the family. Life was hard. Grandfather was a stone mason which supplemented the subsistence farming of corn and tobacco along the French Broad.  At fourteen, my father as he put it “had his growth in” and ran away to join the US Army. It was 1944. He was in for a while, until they caught up to him and sent him home.  A few years later he joined again and then stayed for a career.  Hard times make hard men.

However, it was the hard men of that generation that won the war and made for the good times after. The next couple generations did well and could always expect to do better than their parents. Today, I don’t know if that is still true. The communist hippies of the sixties ended up being the elder leaders of the country today. In fact the Democrats of today are little more than communists themselves.  Their party promotes economic envy and racial division, and worship of an all powerful State. Not to mention their unfathomable, absolute disconnection from reality about gender.  

Yesterday I listened to a clip of LGB on the radio. I have no idea what he might have been talking about. I’m not certain he knew. What words he spoke were slurred and not connected in any coherent fashion. He seriously sounded like some of the clients I worked with thirty years ago who were afflicted with serious mental illnesses. There are so many examples of this available on the internet I will not go into them here.  The point is, this is supposed to be the Leader of the Free World, as the position was called in the Cold War. How did this...idiot...end up in charge of the military and executive branch? Someday, I hope to read an insider’s account and see just how far gone he is.

The point is, with this guy nominally in charge, we are not better off as a nation. Inflation is running at 8% or so. Their answer: spend more.  An invasion of illegal aliens across the border. Their answer: “the border is secure” (and spend more). Fighting a proxy war with Russia whose leader now threatens the use of nuclear weapons? Well, I haven’t heard an answer for that.  But spend more, and send weapons. 

The world is more dangerous and the country less safe. I want to think that my countrymen are up to the times ahead. But I am not convinced.

Hard times are coming again. 

Prepare.