Time keeps on slipping into the future - Brazil

George Orwell and Aldous Huxley exchanged letters debating which of their futuristic dystopias would eventually become reality.

Orwell's 1984 was a typically bleak British vision written in the post-WWII age of European disillusionment. Huxley's Brave New World was written after Huxley moved to Los Angeles. It isn't bleak. It's rosy. No one is tortured and persecuted. Everyone is high on soma and completely contented.

Just before Orwell died, he wrote to Huxley and conceded that Brave New World was a more accurate look into the future.

Which brings me to this: I kind of regretted dissing Sotomayor the other day - cheap shot, shooting fish in a barrel etc. Same applies to Obamugabe. He and Soto are difficult to dis. They're both products of affirmative action; protected "minorities"; unassailable "victims". We'll soon have our first affirmative action SCOTUS judge appointed by out first affirmative action POTUS. Get used to it.

I know I see things differently because I was born in South Africa and saw first hand a glimpse of the future where Western civilization will be overwhelmed by the Third World; where Mugabe is the cultural and moral equivalent of Mozart and Madison. And we did this to ourselves through affirmative action and it's politically correct cousins, moral equivalency and multi-culturalism, because we're nice kind sweet Christians.

Yes, the future will be more like Brave New World than 1984. On the surface it will be "nice" and nobody will realize that we've turned ourselves into slaves to the "state."

But the real future will be a lot messier than Huxley's Lalaland version. There's an even more accurate fictional future dystopia: Tom Stoppard's Brazil which was made into a movie by Terry Gilliam, the American member of Monty Python.

In Stoppard's vision of the future, the world is ruled by bureaucrats. Sure there are still some rich people who have an illusion of personal freedom. They can afford face-lifts and fancy gourmet dinners. Trouble is: their society is totally dysfunctional. The bureaucrats are corrupt and incompetent - and so are the workers. Peoples' face-lifts go horribly awry and their noses fall off into their fancy gourmet dinners in shabbily elegant French restaurants. The state is bankrupt and can't affiord to fix the high-tech stuff that's supposed to keep things going. The world is falling apart because standards have been lowered and narcissism, apathy, corruption and incompetency rule the day.

Welcome to a world that resembles a Third World shit heap like the current Brazil or South Africa. That's our future thanks to affirmative action and it's politically correct cousins, moral equivalency and multi-culturalism.

But I'm an optimist and believe that it will be a transitional phase during which the savages of this world will all be civilized and most people will be better off than they were before. Well, anything is better for those who have to eat their grandmothers for breakfast because there isn't enough food.

And, at the end of this "transitional phase," (which will probably only last for a few hundred years) a new educated middle-class will rediscover Locke, Jefferson and Ronald Reagan and the American Revolution will once again become a living inspiration to those who value self-reliance, individual sovereignty and liberty.

PS Blame this post on the fact that I'm drunk-blogging after having a tooth pulled.

PPS I have lots of sympatico for Tom Stoppard who is a fellow exile:

Born Tomáš Straussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, Stoppard fled to Singapore with other Jews on 15 March 1939, the day that the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. In 1941, the family was evacuated to Darjeeling, India, to escape the Japanese invasion of Singapore. His father, Eugen Straussler, remained behind as a British army volunteer, and died in a Japanese prison camp after capture.

Stoppard quote:

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

Slumdog Millionaire

We watched this movie tonight. If you haven't seen Slumdog Millionaire yet, please do so and educate yourself.

I thought it was going to be a Bollywood movie; a nice lighthearted movie at the end of another perfect day - you know: lots of singing and dancing and a fairy tale ending. Nope. It's a lot more realistic than that. In fact it's pretty disturbing, dark and heavy.

I was born in Durban, South Africa, and raised in small village near there and I lived there for 4 years before moving to the UK. Durban has the largest population of Indians outside of India (Gandhi lived there for 21 years) and I was steeped in Indian culture so I never had the illusion that Indian culture is all incense, peace and meditation. Some of the worst and most organized criminal gangs in Durban were Indians.

So it was no surprise that Slumdog Millionaire is so dark and heavy.

All through the movie I kept thinking: "Thank God I was raised Christian and live in a Christian society."

Why?

Because non-Christian societies do not abide by Jesus' rule of "love they neighbor." I grew up knowing that I could not trust half the population, the Indians. Indians are sentimental folk. If they like you, they'll treat you like royalty. If they don't, beware. The same goes for the Zulu natives of Durban who are equally sentimental and kind when they are moved by their feelings. Give me Jesus' rule of love over sentimentality any day. Christian love requires effort not sentimental feelings which are fickle and unreliable.

The streets of Durban are full of Indian beggars, blind, lame and disfigured children and their mothers. I soon discovered that many of those children had been deliberately maimed by their mothers in order to be more successful beggars. Slumdog Millionaire shows that fact in an horrific manner.

Be warned: it's not a "nice" movie. Yes, it has a fairy tale ending but that's about the only "nice" thing that happens in two hours.

Another perfect day in paradise # 1839

Not a cloud in the sky. It was hot - 61F - but there was a cool breeze which made it bearable.

I gave the dogs the bones from the T-bone steaks to chew on the lawn. It was so picture perfect that I went and got the camera to take some snaps. (Click to enlarge.) Corrie is left front but you can hardly see Digby (the black blob on the right) sitting in the shade of the Alder tree on the white English daisies in the lawn and almost obscured by Miss Piggy the Buff Plymouth hen.













Of course all the chickens had to come over and start scrounging for bits from the bones. This is one of my favorite spots in the yard: the purple and white Lilacs and white South African Calla lilies in front of the chicken coop.













The big chore of the day was digging up the salal berries and blackberries that had started choking out the Rhododendrons. This Rhodie had never bloomed before. In fact it had almost died a few years ago. It is such a dark red that it is almost black.





















Then I decided to take a stroll around the garden and take some more snaps. This is a purple Aquilegia aka Columbine (which is native to Oregon) and a pink Ixia (South African "corn lily"):























A close-up of the Ixia:

In Memory

The David Dewett Veterans Memorial Wayside is a half hour drive from our farm. It is situated on a view-point overlooking the North Slough of Coos Bay. It was built entirely by volunteers and funded by private donations and took six months to complete. It was opened to the public in October last year and dedicated at a Veteran's Day ceremony on Tuesday, November 11th at 11 a.m.

The Dedication plaque:
















The Memorial:




















The view from the Memorial facing east towards the North Bend bridge over Coos Bay:











The view from the Memorial facing west towards the Dunes National Forest:
















Have a safe and happy holiday.

Summertime and the living is easy

And the skeeters are jumpin'.

Summer starts here in the first week of May when the threat of a deep frost is over. We can have one or two light frosts but not usually enough to freeze standing water. So the dirty little blood-suckers start hatching. Yesterday they attacked my bald head when I was in the garden. Today I decided to use Listerine. It works. No skeeter bites today when we did our weekly forest planning.

Every Sunday after lunch we take a walk in the woods to plan what needs to be done with the forest. Half of our land is zoned "forest" which means that we are not allowed to develop it as farmland. The upside to that is that taxes on the forest half are one tenth of the other half which can be developed. It also means that a lot of the work we do is forestry. This land was logged about 30 years ago but, in those days, timber companies were not expected to replant the clear cut areas. That means that our forest is a hodgepodge of good trees mixed with straggly runts. The runts have to be cut down to make room for the good trees to grow.

We also have to fell all Port Orford "cedars" because they are dying of Phythoptera, a root fungus. Port Orfords (also known as "white cedars") only grow on the south coast of Oregon and it looks like they will all be wiped out soon. They are not really cedars at all. Their botanical name is Chamaecyparis meaning "fake cypress." (The Greek word chamae is also the root of chameleon which means "fake lion.")

One nice thing about summer on the coast is that, as soon as it heats up inland, we get our sea-fog which is our natural air-conditioning. The fog started coming in while we were outside. It was too hot to sit in the sun but an hour later it is cool and gray and delicious.

Making book on when Obama will crash

Remember that poll that said 21% of Americans are registered Republican, 30 something % Democrat and the majority, 38%, are independents? Well, obviously more than half of those independents voted for Obama.

I know why they did. I know how "independent" Americans think. It was like:

Let's give the colored guy a chance. He's nice; he's classy; he ain't ghetto. It's a good thing to do. It will blow the Eurotrash's and sand-niggers' minds. It will make our kids feel nice. We are nice. See, we're Americans. We're fun-loving chance-takers. And we love being nice. It may cost a lot because he's bound to be a profligate spendthrift but it will be fun and we'll all be happy and nice for - oh about a 100 days or so - and then we'll start scratching our heads and begin to wonder how soon we can get rid of him because he's a bit more stupid than we figured. Oh, sure he's got a good act but boy is he a dumb commie. Now let's see - when will it be a good time to throw him under the bus before he bankrupts us? We may just have to wait till he really effs up before we turn on him because we don't want to look mean and nasty. We're nice Americans. We want to be happy and we want everyone else to be happy too - as long as they don't really screw things up too badly. Obama's obviously not a child-molester so we're going to have to be patient and wait till he blows it big time in some other way. Obama was a really big experiment - bigger than JFK - mostly because we already knew that he's a commie. But he was a real nice classy nigger so we took our chances. We'll survive and thrive and, as soon as Obama is an ex-president, he will be canonized just like our other favorite charismatic but flawed "African-American" leader, MLK. And everyone will live happily ever after in the Emerald - oops - Green - er - Rainbow City. But at least our kids will be happy and nice - even if they're stuck with paying off trillions of dollars to pay for a bunch of useless feel-good crap. No one said it's easy being nice.

It's hard being nice all the time. But, unlike intellectual snobs like Neal Boortz et al who call Americans "sheeple," I'm glad that Americans are nice decent optimistic people who take chances because, in the end, it really will be okay. You'll see.