My Latest Favorite X Account

 @shagbark_hick for the win.

How to Be Free

"I'm so disappointed in you, Matt. I thought you were smarter than that."

This is what one or more of my old acquaintances might say on Facebook post, if they saw it, and cared to reply to it. 

The feminization of men results in a men who are super-bitches. They know how to go for the jugular, like a woman, but with the strength of a man. It reminds of what my choral music director in college would say, about the castrati---they took the alto and soprano roles, including all the female roles in opera, because their voices were so much stronger, like a human coronet. The women simply couldn't match that. No we are making new castrati, by telling young boys to cut of their sexual origins. Perhaps taking female  hormones will keep them from become good singers in their prime, that can out-match the young women for the leading lady roles.

The modern feminist castrati of Facebook, which includes many men of my age who fancy themselves smarter than average, would know how to get to me, so the above comment at the top of this post would be a good play against me. 

For I am vain over my intellectual and prideful. Or least I have been, and I still have a tendency towards this. They would see my weakness, because it is close to my mine, and go right for the throat. A one-bullet kill shot, in front of the rest of everyone we know, taking me out of the game. 

No doubt they would indeed make mince meat of me. But I wouldn't care about that. I would confess to being stupid and slow. I would turn it into comedy.

Such fantasies come from ego, and pride. I must renounce such things.

The number reason I would not do that Facebook stunt is that it would probably drive one or both of my sisters back into the "red zone".  They just stared talking to me again, after two years silence. I wouldn't want to make them have to negotiate their Facebook reputation among their own crowd, and their "crazy brother".

I don't mind that at all. Like I have said, we will be ready, on the this side of the wall, with a mini net, like in the circus, where you will land and be caught in a soft landing, and for a moment, you will feel free.

The Frontier Ladies of Facebook

 Somewhere in the recesses of the settings of my web browser are the login credentials for my Facebook account. Ihave not used them, at least consciously, for almost eight years, after being active on Facebook from 2009 to 2016. Before I left I deactivated my account, jumping through all the hoops they make you do before you can leave. I made no announcement to my "friends" before I did. I did not want to. I wanted to make the Facebook version of the "Irish goodbye". I knew my avatar would then just be a grey featureless silhouette on people's friends list. I wonder if any remain. Sometimes I am curious to see who might still have me as a friend.

The temptation today was strong, as it sometimes is, to return to Facebook. I would reactivate my account and make a single post, and see if anyone notices. People might friend me again, as they did long ago, not because they are my friends, but because I am a member of their high school class, or maybe off by one. year. My high school class, which graduated in the perfect town in the perfect state and the perfect peak of civilization, is a cult. 

I compared Facebook to going to a high school reunion where they locks the doors of the gymnasium and they don't let anyone leave. 

In high school, most of my classmates did not care strongly about politics. I probably cared about politics the most of anyone I know. It was rare to meet anyone in my league, as far as awareness of current events, and my passion for America to follow a certain political course. Perhaps Molly, bur she only came to our high school in our senior year, a transfer from our cross-town rival, where all the "cowboys" went (Reagan was probably very popular there, but in the default sort of way). 

Most of the lukewarm ones, the smart college-bound kids, were liberals, like our history teaches, but only weakly so. Everyone "hated" Reagan, except the ones who explicitly liked him. 

It is ironic that the politicization of my cohort, the Class of 1983 resulted in so many of them becoming just the way I was in high school---an obnoxious clueless Democrat fanboys and fangirls. This was clear by the time I left Facebook. It included not only my close friends---the ones I kept in touch with, and stayed in contact with, until I was no longer invited to their get-togethers. The Facebook crowd included plenty of acquaintances with whom I had warm relations in high school.

I had warm relations with everyone in high school, or tried to. I had a very idealized vision of my high school class. It felt at the time like a little utopia. I suffered like any teenage, the usual heartbreaks, etc., but I knew it was all the consequence of my own actions. I loved all my classmates.

I left Facebook because I knew it would take heroic acts of charity on my part to continue loving them--to heroic for what I was capable.

Today I was fantasizing, as I sometimes do, about logging into Facebook using my old credentials buried in my web browser settings, reactivating my account, and making a post: "One thihg to say: Make America Great Again!" 

I would wait for the snarky replies to come in. Perhaps a message like this would from one of the effeminate feminist-truckling liberal men of my cohort, who are the bitchy enforcers of the opinions that everyone is supposed to have, the latter being guarded by the sturdy liberal women, who are the modern day counterparts of the frontier ladies who marched through downtowns smashing windows of saloons. Not much has changed, except in the old days it was done in the name of Christian principles and now it is done in the name of Anti-Christian principles. 

Let's Be Real

 Oh, I love politics. Rather, I love it again. Years I used to love it. Then for a long time I hated it. Now I love it again. I love watching the story of America play out in its politics. I spent a lot of my childhood fascinated by this, which I which I can speak about the mood of the American electorate, as observed from first hand experience, from about 1967 onward. The politics of that era is familiar to me, even though I was three years old. Except in the times I've tuned out politics (like during the mid 1990s, when I was distracted by the demands of graduate school and the decadence of Austin), I have a direct recollection of most of the story. 

The last couple years have felt like a holding pattern in the story of America and civilization, setting up the pieces for the next chapter. Many people have a strange sense of time since 2020, where everything seems to have happened very quickly. For older folks like me to experience this is nothing new, but the young are reporting the same sensation, ones of age who should have a very slow-moving sense of time during the years of childhood. Something has been wrong. I'm intrigued by theories of why this has happened.

The funess of politics, I believe, is completely synonymous with the joy of following the characters of the drama.  There have only been two interesting characters recently, for many years. One character is Donald Trump. The other character is everyone who hates him, who is a mob-lke entity where individuals take utter direction, like a swarm of insect, from the leaders. 

None of the Democrats has been interesting because they are all the same person, repeated over and over without deviation in any expressed opinion. Being a Democrat is about recognizing what you are supposed to believe and say at any given moment. Intelligence is measured by how quickly and deeply one adapts to whatever opinion has been introduced into the "program."

Most Republicans are secretly Democrats. To the rest of us, in the Real Resistance, the Republican-Democrats (not to be confused by the Democratic-Republicans of the era of Jefferson), are the worst of all because they pose as opposition, when in fact they simply want the same thing as Democrats (which is to be admired by other Democrats for their intelligence [see definition of intelligence in previous paragraph]) . Lukewarm. Republicans want to be applauded by Democrats (via the media) for their courage in going against the other Republicans.

Trump broke the paradigm because he was willing not be applauded but condemned by the Democrats.  Being condemned by the Democrats used to be political death sentence. Even Reagan gained their applause by the end of his term, which is why the nation elected his successor George Bush in a landslide, and after that we were thoroughly fucked as a nation. There was no return from his Presidency.

Bush was a dictator, the secret point man of the Global Elite that had reformed in a new internationalist coalition of the wealthy banking and aristocratic classes after the Second World War, during which many of the old Establishment were wiped out. It was great for America because our Elite moved in and took over. Americans led the global Establishment.  America built an Empire and we all lived its benefits.

Now it's coming apart. in part because the designers and creators of this order have long since left the scene, and only their watered down successors are left. They are watered down because they could not possibly duplicate the intellectual rigor and psychological discipline that curated among the first wave of Americans after World War II. Americans had to do this, to outcompete their rivals, especially the British, who were the top of the pyramid of the pre-war Establishment. Americans knew they needed classical training. You couldn't just fake it until you made it. You had to be, at least partially, real. Absent that you were liable to get your head blown off by someone who knows the true consequences of failure to be real.  

So why is politics interesting again? Because the Democrats, for the first time, are at each other's throats. It's the best thing for country. They are trying with all their might to remain "one person", with a common voice of opinion about say, whether Biden should stay or go, but the constant sloshing again is creating tidal frictions that result in permanent, acrimonious fissures in the party. These fissures will save American, and civilization. Once their unity is broken, they will scatter.

WAKE UP

 What is happening to America right now is very sad. I mean what is happening to Joe Biden.  No matter what he has done, he is one of the last standing members of the cohort of Americans born in the first half of the 1940s, that is during the Second World War. That this is how that cohort exits history is very sad.

For he must go down, and he will go down hard. As hard as those of us on the "right" have been with him, the Left will be ten times worse. They need to rip him to shreds, in part to justify the coup they will stage to replace both him and Kamala.

Kamala must go down hard in order to make way for another politician from the party among the group who are now vying to replace Biden. They will take down Kamala the same way they will take down the rest of the Bidenistas---on the grounds that they lied to America about Biden in the most disgusting way, "hiding his condition" from the public in the most self-serving of ways. 

But of course this is a delusion on their parts, because to most of the rest of us, Biden's condition has been publicly obvious for several years, since before the 2020 election in fact. They just chose to ignore it for political reasons, because Trump had to be stopped at all costs, even the point of self-hynosis into believing Biden was not advancing into dementia.

Maybe in the end, all of the power hungry part bigwigs, with the backing of the elite whom they serve, will keep Biden and Harris around in order that they lose to Trump, who is limited to a single term. If Biden goes down hard, it will be easier for the party to move on with a fresh face. Kamala can be taken out of contention for 2028 if the loss is bad enough. Like Geraldine Ferraro. Nobody talked about her 1988. The stink of the 1984 blowout was too strong.

Democratic politicians are to an individual, utterly self-serving in their political motives, all of them gifted with the ability to know what issues to dangle like carrots in front of liberals. Their gift is knowing what those things are, and presenting an image of someone who can bring that to them. When they fail to bring it, at least in the way people want, they can always blamed it on the "right", which is simply a term for anyone who is standing in their way. 

Democrats like being fooled that way. It's a junkie fix to believe an election result is going to bring happiness and justice to the world. Those things are possibly only by the GRACE OF GOD. Anyone saying anything else is acting in the spirit of Anti-Christ. 

Men and women cannot bring you that world of justice. Only God can, as much as He allows, responding to our pleas.

Wake up. It's not too late. Don't be the last in the bunker. The vast majority of those of us on this side are willing to help you make it across the bridge to safety, while you still have your wits about. Many, if not most of us, were fooled a long time too.

Pine Therapy

 Tonight is our fourth and last night up here in Summerhaven, the little community up at at 8200 feet in the Catalina Mountains outside Tucson.  The location are quite remarkable. Along the twenty-five road up from Tucson, one goes from saguaros to pine forests, as if one is driving north over hundreds of miles. The change is dramatic and beautiful. 

Being up here is always a special treat, but it also reminds me of how much I hate the desert and wish we lived somewhere with more trees like this, especially pine trees. It will be poignant to leave tomorrow, and descend back down to the desert.

The relaxation has been especially nice considering the burdens of my job over the last couple months. I didn't even think I'd be be to get out of town on Wednesday. I was sure some emergency caused by too agressive pushing of new code releases to the production server would cause bugs that would be "company-threatening." In fact I was listening in on conference calls to frantically fix issues as we drove south of Phoenix. 

I would write more but the sun is beautiful on the mountain tops around me, and the air is cool.I am going to sit outside on our patio, where we watched the Fourth of July parade two days ago. The bells from the nearby Byzantine Catholic shrine of Mary Undoer of Knots just sounded.  I can see the Eastern Cross on the building out of the balcony amidst the trees. 

Tomorrow we must go down again. But tonight we have the pines and the cool air. 

I'm Here to Save Your Company

 Since returning from California, life has been filled with constant, unrelenting work, and stress over work. At the beginning of June, we were informed that investors had given thumbs down on giving any more money to the CEO to waste on the six-year experiment that the company is.  We were informed this by a notice that although the most recent paycheck had been sent to our accounts, the money was simply not in the bank to make the next payroll. Effectively it was over.

Dazed from the sundown shutdown, we prepared our resumes and promised to give each other recommendations on LinkedIn. Some of us were in positions to make the transition to unemployment gracefully. Others not so much, especially my direct boss, who has three kids. He had used up much of the family savings before finding this current job. 

I was among the few who kept coming into the office. It was actually a beautiful time because the terror-like grip that management had held over, making us always feel as if we are not doing our jobs properly, suddenly ceased. They needed to be gracious to us.

All this because the one clinic using our system had just "gone live" with our software. Keeping this tinder fire going was the only possibility to save the company. 

I took this as a challenge. I had nothing better to do during the day than go into the office and volunteer to save the company by continuing to do coding work, alongside the front end guy, all while being treated nicely and with the kind of respect of a professional I had not experienced in years.

It took giving up my slack lifestyle and re-entering the hell world of current corporate workplace to understand how bad things have gotten in the country.  The corporate workplace is the sum of dysfunctions of the social media era. LinkedIn is the kingdom of hell (and yet it's the only site where long lost friends have re-established contact by reaching out---something about the workplaceness of it makes it less threatening). 

I was not at all worried about income, because I know God will provide for my needs. It was a joyful duty, to throw my care about this onto the Lord.

Three days later the funding came back. My frontend coworker and I were informed directly the CEO coming into the huge empty backroom (it/' most huge and empty on a normal day). We looked at each other, disappointed that the great three-day adventure was over and things would be back to normal.

Except things were not back to normal. They got more intense, because the CEO was now promising the Moon to the clinic using our software. This is his style to do this, I have been told by ex-coworkers ormer employees--to scuttle a promising trial with a clinic by accelerating the new features, instead of stabilizing the current software, and making it perfect. We are dealing with medical data--of people's kids.

But we have funding "for the foreseeable future" we were told. So I will continue to do my work as if the fate of the company depends on it. I'm very good at what I do. "When they hired me, they didn't know they were hiring the guy that would save the company," I told an ex-coworker at an unoffical happy hour with company alumni.