It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Publicly, the worst. Privately, sometimes the best. It was the time of Covid-19 and of goodness and nastiness. —– In a small dry-country town, a health club owner whose business was ordered closed for being “non-essential” during the pandemic panic checked with the sheriff: Could she conduct exercise classes outdoors, with small groups, everyone staying six feet apart? Yes. Midway through her first class, deputies of that very same sheriff arrive. A busybody has spotted the “deadly” and “illegal” activity and they’ve been dispatched to shut her down.…
Category: Mind and Spirit
Spirituality, moods, feelings, and thinking free to live free.
I began writing this post after California ‘crats shut down the Bay Area and Governor Jay Inslee of Washington state demanded that all restaurants in his state close their doors except for take-out and delivery. I also began the original version of this post with a fulmination about the insanity of specific measures (“You oldsters stay in your homes and don’t go out even to buy food.” In other words, “We don’t care if you starve for want of helpers to run errands for you; just don’t clutter up our hospitals or disrupt our attempts to make ourselves look like…
Boris Johnson’s monumental victory in Britain should remind U.S. Democrats of an important thing or two. Britain’s Labour Party “got woke and went broke” deserted en masse by working-class v*ters. Time magazine’s petulant brat of the year says up against the wall with leaders who don’t execute her climate agenda. Seeing like a finite state machine. Second amendment: Virginians stand their ground on sanctuary counties while the nation watches. Frightened, arrogant anti-gun pols threaten “consequences” — up to and including sending the National Guard in as an occupying force. The greatest political miracle? Trump has revamped the 9th circuit court.…
A few days ago a freedomista friend cried, “That’s it! I quit.” He’s going to live strictly for himself and his family from now on. So he says. Forget politics, forget organizing, forget publishing, forget “movements” and “isms” and activism, and hopeful enthusiasms. He. Has. HAD IT. Well, that’s common enough. I may have said things like that myself a time or two; perhaps you have, too. But this isn’t just a case of burnout. Burnout is part of it, yes. But there’s something more, and more ominous, to it, as we’ll see below. My friend is afraid. Then this…
This is a guest post by my friend Silver. All credit for it goes to him. — C —– In Making it Through the Next Normal Claire questioned possible roles for us old folks. One of the things we oldsters can do to help the young folks through their coming trials is to teach them that they don’t have to be high profile, high paid, high stress, famous people to have good, satisfying jobs and wonderful lives. Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame nailed this. He found that people who did those often invisible, generally dirty jobs tended to be…
The other day, a friend talking about her wildly dysfunctional childhood remarked, “But that was just ‘normal’ for me, of course.” And haven’t we all been there in one way or another? Whatever we habitually experience (however chaotic or misery-inducing) is “normal.” And that’s not just true of children who haven’t the perspective to know better. Spend long enough in a terrible job, a loveless marriage, a prison, a city you hate, or an unfree political climate and even when we recognize how bad it is, we forget what it’s like to live any other way. Finding real normal again…
I’m working on that promised blogosaurus. I really am. It’s about halfway done, but it keeps wanting to pull in a different direction than I want it to go. With luck, I’ll wrestle it into submission by early next week. In the meantime, here are some links to keep you entertained, charmed, baffled, ticked off, informed, or whatever the case may be. —– In the Land of Opportunity, the wealth of the richest 1% is about to outstrip the worth of the country’s entire middle class. Cheers. Florida gets its first Second Amendment sanctuary county. Today is the anniversary of…
Greetings, readers and friends. I’m back from four glorious days at the shore, where Mother Nature favored the land with near-summerlike weather and I enjoyed walking, snacking, and feeding seagulls on the beach. More perfect weather and a more perfect time you could not imagine. It could only have been improved had I had a doting lover peeling grapes for me as we lounged on the sand. But one can’t have everything, I suppose. —– Anyhow, I didn’t think of computers or political matters for days. It was sublime, but now reality beckons. Home, my next job is setting up…
Maggie McNeill: The concept of consent should apply to government operatives, as well as freelance molesters, snoops, and sadists. James Howard Kunstler writes an “in memoriam” for reality. Following PayPal’s departure, Mastercard, eBay, and Stripe all depart F*c*b**k’s troubled Libra cryptocurrency project. “Guns and Cannabis: The Insidious Creep of Tyranny” by John Klar. Borepatch and his comment section nail the governmental stupidity of a system that can prevent wildfires only by depriving people of electricity. … Outages the majority of Californians are stubbornly unprepared for. And (also related), Victor Davis Hanson laments, Why have we become so small? (H/T PT)…
The following was written by the son of a Living Freedom blog reader. Homeschooled, and mostly unschooled, he wrote this as part of his college application. —– The meanest dog you’ll ever meet, He ain’t the hound dog in the street. He bares some teeth and tears some skin, But brother, that’s the worst of him. No, the dog you really gotta dread, Is the one that howls inside your head, It’s him whose howling drives men mad, And a mind to its undoing. The ancient tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is a familiar one. A young man falls in…