Back from Reno; Facing Zombies; Ted Cruz Encounter; End of the World; Heading for Spain

We had a fairly uneventful few days in Reno, Nevada. It was my first time there. It's kind of a, well, not very appealing place to live--at least to me. Not a very charming city, with lots of mentally ill zombies roaming the streets at night. My son and I had an encounter with one at a McDonald's drive thru at about 4 am as we returned from a casino. Idling in line, we heard a loud metallic bang, and saw a zombie slamming a gate in the restaurant's outdoor garbage shed. He went into that shed from which we could hear loud voices, and some more bangs on the metal door from inside the enclosure; then, the zombie emerged, screaming at the top of his lungs. He, apparently, had lost his sleep-spot to another, presumably a competing zombie. He made a beeline for our car, yelling, waving his arms, and then throwing his backpack at us, just missing the rental car. My son and I decided, as did the driver behind us, to get out of line and drive away. As we drove past the zombie, he hollered some unintelligible gibberish, and shook his fists at us. I hope he wasn't one of this blog's six readers upset by something I wrote. Let me know if you were he. 

Reno has a construction boom underway which could transform it. Would that change be for the good or the bad? 

We'll have to see if all those people fleeing the woke dumpster that has become California don't make Nevada follow in San Francisco's footsteps. 

Some of the surrounding countryside, however, is spectacular. We enjoyed our half-day in Virginia City; nice, though touristy, cowboy town with an interesting past and a fun museum. Also fun was the Reno classic car museum, run by some extremely friendly people, and having some amazing cars dating back to before the 20th century. Some of those cars prove absolute works of art and engineering. It's stunning what we used to make in this country.

Forgot to mention, on the flight from Dallas to Reno, I had a brief conversation with Senator Ted Cruz. He was flying economy, by the way. He proved a very nice man, very respectful, and with a good sense of humor. We didn't discuss anything too deep or contentious, as we stood in line for the plane lavatory. We agreed the country was in terrible shape. 

While in Reno, of course, we witnessed the end of the world. 

No, not talking about my results at blackjack and poker. 

No, not talking about WWIII in Europe. 

No, not talking about the disaster on the southern border. 

Yes, indeed, I am talking about Elon Musk's apparently successful bid to buy Twitter and take it private.

Watching the wokesters on MSNBC and CNN catch fire, and either melt or explode was worth every dollar of the purported $44 billion Musk has put on the counter for the purchase. I hope that it goes through, and that Musk fulfills the expectation of turning Twitter (from which I am banned) into a true town square. 

The wokesters have made as plain as possible their fear of and hatred for freedom. If you don't agree with them; if you don't endorse all their lunacies, e.g., men can be women; if you, yourself, don't see each and every opponent of wokism as a vile racist, misogynist, homophobe, Islamophobe, science-denier, then you, yourself, are a vile racist, misogynist, homophobe, Islamophobe, science-denier, to whom the Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights do not apply. All very weird.

Back in North Carolina, just in time to prepare for our trip to Spain next week. I have not been there in years, and look forward to it. I always have had a great time in Spain, even met the wife there. We will spend most of our two weeks in Madrid with a couple of days in San Sebastian. I hope to pick up a chess set in Toledo, where they make some beautiful ones. 

Hope the mad reaction to Covid, a madness still rampant in Spain, doesn't interfere with the travel.

Sorry this post wasn't very interesting. Hope to make it up to you.

Getting Ready to Fly . . . Maskless!

The Diplowife and I will be heading out to Nevada in a couple of days to visit the granddaughter. I had been very grumpy about the flight because of the mask requirement. Thanks, however, to a freedom-loving, brave Trump-appointed Federal Judge, Kathryn Kimball Micelle, we will not have to go through the indignity of the face diaper. We think. Well, we hope. We'll see if Mr. 81 Million Votes files an appeal. 

In the meantime, of course, I can't help but be amazed by the Easter Bunny. 

I am sure you all have seen how the White House staff sent in the Easter Bunny to prevent Poor Joe from talking about, well, whatever he was mumbling about. 

I find hard to get out of my mind the image of a giant Bunny grabbing the "President" of the United States, stepping in front of him, waving his/her/its paws in his face and pointing him away from the questioners--and following him to prevent Joe from returning to the rope line. 

Can any of you imagine something similar with Trump? Hell, with Obama? Bush? Carter, of course, fought off the bunny with an oar, if you remember. Sad when Carter is more macho . . . ..

Anyhow, I will see if I get a chance to post something from Reno.

 

Once Again: The Woke War on Language

Just a quick one as we prepare our digs for the impending visit of the grandchildren. We recently added a third boy (pronouns: he/his/him) and this is his first visit to us in Raleigh. The media has been alerted!

I was struck, yet again, by how our woke masters have corrupted the language. 

This past week we saw a lunatic release a smoke bomb in a crowded NY subway car, and then open fire on his fellow strap-hangers. While he injured about ten people with his gunfire, he, fortunately, did not manage to kill anybody. The most the press and the cops could bring themselves to in the way of a description of the suspected shooter was a dark-skinned, heavy-set male. Nobody could get themselves to say a big, black guy. 

Soon, of course, even this politically correct description put out by the NYPD will be questioned. Do we KNOW that he identifies as a male? Isn't labelling somebody as "heavy set" a dog whistle for fat-shamming? You wait. This will come to pass.

It appears that the shooter, who has a long criminal record and whom I will not name, is a black supremacist with a deep hatred for whites, Asians, and Jews.  He has posted several videos online stating as much. I am certain that these unpleasant facts will soon go into the memory waste disposal, and we will hear only about our failing mental health system and, of course, guns. I don't know about yours, but mine have never jumped into a subway car and started shooting people. 

On guns, Mr. 81 Million Votes put on another of his patented clown act/press conferences by focussing--if I can use that word when writing about Biden--on something he called "ghost guns." He wants to ban them, whatever they are, by executive regulation. He held up what he called a "ghost gun," and to my untrained eye, it sure looked like any of the dozens of my guns when I have stripped them for cleaning. I saw him hold up a frame and separate slide assembly and mumble something about this being a "ghost gun" which posed an incredible threat to the public, and which justified Biden violating the second amendment and due process to save us. 

So now we have Assault Rifle and Ghost Gun in our lexicon.

One last example, and I let you go. 

"Genocide." We now accuse Russia and Putin, in particular, of committing genocide in Ukraine. Seems like a total perversion of the word. If you want to decry war crimes and atrocities, ok, but "genocide"? Makes no sense. Look up the definition and you will see.

More later.

Woke Lies & Wars

Over the years, this humble blog has railed against the flood of lies discharged by our woke masters in government, and in the media, legacy and new. It has become something of an obsession with your humble blogger; at the risk of becoming a one-note Johnny bore, I shall continue to rail. 

Sorry, but, hey, it's free of charge.

Our masters tell us so many lies that it proves difficult to pick one, or two, or three, or . . . whatever, to discuss. I will give it a try.

As you can see from my writings over the years on Putin and Russia, I have not become a Putin Puppet. In my view, however, Putin's Moscow ranks as a second- or even third-tier threat to the US and the West; it certainly comes well behind the number two threat Beijing, and WELL BEHIND, far, far behind, the number one threat to our civilization, the Wokesters within our societies busily destroying our institutions and the underpinnings of our national identity and culture.  

None of us, outside of the top-most circles of Ukraine and Russia, has any good idea of events in the Ukraine-Russia war. What we, John Q. Public, know know proves very basic, VERY basic, indeed. 

We know Russia has invaded Ukraine. We think we know that the invasion did not seem well-planned or executed. We know that this invasion, as true with any other of which I can think, has caused suffering and death to the people invaded, and, yes, by the way, I include in my list of invasions that transpiring along our own southern border. In the Ukraine case, we simply don't know how much suffering and death; we must take the media's "massacre" accounts with a fistful of salt. Look. Face it. It's Russia; it's Ukraine; it's Eastern Europe. History shows that warfare there, though, of course, not there only, does not adhere to the Marquess of Queensberry Rules, much less to the Geneva Convention. I have no trouble believing, knowing (?), that innocent civilians or surrendering soldiers can and do face harsh treatment and even death at the hands of that day's victors--and that the next day's victors will reciprocate. I have no problem knowing that Russians and Ukrainians can act in a brutal fashion. Read about the two world wars, the Russian civil war, the Soviet wars with Poland and Finland, the fate of Napoleon's army in Russia, etc., and you can easily imagine brutality on the fields of battle and in the cities of that region. The Katyn Forrest massacre comes readily to mind.

On Ukraine, my big problem, and I assume (Right? Wrong?) that of many others, arises from the lack of objective reporting; the reports, for example, on Russian atrocities in Ukraine seem much like those in British, French, and American newspapers of German atrocities in Belgium during WWI. Just a little too convenient. The narrative from Ukraine appears calculated, edited, censored, and massaged to cause maximum outrage in the audience, and, of course, heighten US and international support for involvement in this war. This narrative looks like, well, a narrative, rarely a good thing.

I don't like this manipulation, especially given the record of those doing it. We, for example, have a "leadership," illegitimately occupying the White House, which has not come clean about the corrupt Biden family's ties to Ukraine and China. We have a media, old and new, yet to apologize for its lies re Trump-Putin collusion, quid-pro-quo, Hunter's laptop, Rittenhouse, January 6, the grifters of BLM, Kavenaugh, Covid-19, climate change, the 2020 elections, and on, and on, and on. I generally don't believe what comes from these liars who wish ill on Western Civilization, and work to destroy it.

The bumbling, incoherent nature of our "leaders'" on their march to war leads to even more concern. We see them call for the world to destroy Russia, not just to promote regime change, but to destroy completely Russia's economy, and its ability to function as a modern state. We have prominent individuals, right and left, calling for direct US/NATO military action against Russia, i.e., war. They seek a potentially nuclear war in Europe. Would that war remain there?

Given the heated rhetoric coming from the West about Russia, and the measures taken to kill Russia's economy, I had to laugh when German Minister of Economy Robert Habeck complained that Russia's demanding Germany and other gas customers pay in roubles, rather than dollars or euros, amounted to "blackmail." He seemed outraged Russia would defend its currency, and seek to impose pain on those seeking to impose pain on Russia. 

What did a wise man once say? Oh, yes, "The enemy gets a vote." Words to live by.

No matter what we think of the rightness of "our cause," the other side will respond. 

We, today, suffer and will suffer more consequences at home from this rush to "destroy" Russia. Given, for example, our insistence on outsourcing critical industries, including fertilizer production to Russia, it should come as no surprise that Russia has struck at fertilizer exports, thereby, raising the cost of food production in the US and the West, evoking the likelihood not just of higher prices but of food shortages. 

Did the "bumblers in charge" not see this coming? Do we really need Nostradamus?

On the topic of wars, the wokesters not only push war with Russia. They simultaneously push a variety of interrelated wars at home. We see a war on women. The wokesters cannot even define "woman" except that a man gets to decide if he's a woman (?). Women don't exist. Sorry about that.

We also see an ever-intensifying wokester war on children. I have written about this before. The progs/wokesters hate children and families. They want to turn children over to the state, at least, those children they don't insist on killing. They want to "sexualize" children from the earliest possible age to accept LGBTQRSVPCRAP as normal. They want teachers talking about sex, in graphic terms, to children in kindergarten. They want judges to go light on child porn and pedophilia. They now have one of those on the Supreme Court.

Why trust anything these people say?

Seeing What's There

 Almost six years ago, I put up a little post that drew from George Orwell's great 1946 essay "In Front of Your Nose." It is well worth reading in this time of the Great Lie. In particular, I like this statement,

The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

When one looks at the all-prevailing schizophrenia of democratic societies, the lies that have to be told for vote-catching purposes, the silence about major issues, the distortions of the press, it is tempting to believe that in totalitarian countries there is less humbug, more facing of the facts. There, at least, the ruling groups are not dependent on popular favour and can utter the truth crudely and brutally. Goering could say ‘Guns before butter’, while his democratic opposite numbers had to wrap the same sentiment up in hundreds of hypocritical words.

Actually, however, the avoidance of reality is much the same everywhere, and has much the same consequences. The Russian people were taught for years that they were better off than everybody else, and propaganda posters showed Russian families sitting down to abundant meal while the proletariat of other countries starved in the gutter. Meanwhile the workers in the western countries were so much better off than those of the U.S.S.R. that non-contact between Soviet citizens and outsiders had to be a guiding principle of policy. Then, as a result of the war, millions of ordinary Russians penetrated far into Europe, and when they return home the original avoidance of reality will inevitably be paid for in frictions of various kinds. The Germans and the Japanese lost the war quite largely because their rulers were unable to see facts which were plain to any dispassionate eye.

Read it. It is cleanser for the soul.