As is becoming a pattern, I’ll start with a brief update on our burned Victorian house, called Rosewood.
I’m not trying to get ahead of myself, but we’ve met with a contractor, and had multiple talks with our insurer, and it’s looking more likely that the house is going to survive, and maybe that we’ll be able to hold on to it through the necessary, extensive renovations. I’ll write more about this soon, as I know more.
In the meantime, I’ve posted another picture to my site (Martinsimpsonwriting.com), this one of the double front doors, with stained glass inserts. We had these windows removed, repaired, and re-installed when we bought the house, and the doors are lightly damaged, but will definitely be saved. I took this pic from inside the house, and the pinkish-looking glass is actually a darker red color.
A reader mentioned that she went to my site and could see my columns, but no pictures.
First, the columns should be reason enough to go there. 😊 Second, I tried on my phone and got the same problem. The only thing I can conclude is that you need to use a computer to access my site, if you want to see the pictures. I’ll be making some upgrades to the site soon, and see if I can fix that.
Turning to the larger world, I’ve been thinking about two stories over the last 10 days, one tragic and one delightful.
The first is the grim Chicom crackdown on their own population in Shanghai over the latest covid outbreak. Reports suggest that tens of millions of people have been virtually imprisoned in their apartments on the pretext of preventing the spread of a virus – which is still spreading – that had at the beginning of these new lockdowns resulted in 3 deaths.
I see one small bright side to this horrific story, and one huge one.
The small one applies to the Biden administration, which has to be grateful that they can finally point to a government whose reaction to covid is even worse and less competent than theirs!
The huge one is the added wake-up call – as if, at this late date, we still needed one – to rational Americans everywhere about the danger of allowing a power-hungry government to exploit a public health “emergency” to increase their own control over their people.
The most chilling details I’ve seen come from video shot early this month, of high rises in which thousands of people had gone out onto their balconies and screamed, protested and sang to cope with their suffering.
Then a government drone appeared, broadcasting their communist overlords’ propaganda. I don’t speak Chinese – although if anyone who does will send me a phonetic pronunciation of “Let’s Go, Brandon” in either Mandarin or Cantonese, I will do my best to learn – the translation provided is eerie:
“Please comply with covid restrictions. Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing.”
If this isn’t a perfect encapsulation of our leftist elites’ message to the American people over the last two years, I don’t know what is!
Comply with our restrictions (even though the scientific basis for them has been disastrously overblown and/or absolutely disproven).
“Control your soul’s desire for freedom.” Wow. That’s a lot of admissions against the totalitarians’ interest in a very few words: Yes, people have souls. And yes, those souls have an innate desire for freedom.
And yes, your leftist betters are hell-bent (literally, IMHO) on suppressing and thwarting that desire for freedom.
Also, trying to engage in the outside world, and singing, are strictly forbidden.
Well done, Chicom murderers. You’ve given the American Dem elite a perfect slogan for their 2022 and 2024 campaigns!
Speaking of the lefty elite, it has been a schadenfreude-tastic experience to watch them getting progressively (HA!) more hysterical as Elon Musk has run circles around them.
I was never a fan of Jack “Boots” Dorsey. (Anybody who grows a beard like that – not because he’s been thrown into solitary confinement in Alcatraz or a Super-Max somewhere, but voluntarily – is not to be trusted!)
But his successor as Twitter CEO is a smarmy little creep whose name I refuse to learn how to spell, because life is too short. Conveniently, it’s very close to an anagram for “pagan narwhal.” So I’ve got that going for me.
Mr. Narwhal and his board of arrogant and pinch-faced censors initially panicked when Musk announced that he’d bought around 10% of the company stock. They tried a ju-jitsu counter-move by playing nice and putting him on the board, which would have kept him on a leash and without any real power to force substantive changes.
Musk turned them down, and teased the idea of offering to buy huge blocks of Twitter stock from shareholders. The board responded with a “poison pill,” deflating the value of their shareholders’ stock in a desperate move to thwart Musk.
He pointed out that this would be screwing their shareholders, and triggering a tsunami of lawsuits that would tie them up in court for years, and devastate the company. Then, while they were still reeling, he announced a financing package that allowed him to buy the company right out from under them.
You’ve heard of one person playing chess while a less intelligent person plays checkers?
Well this was Musk playing 4-D chess while the Twitter board was playing “Pull Your Dress Over Your Head and Soil Yourself While Stomping Around in a Room Full of Rakes.”
(And yes, for you history buffs, that is the very same sport which recently inducted Joey Gaffes and Que Mala into its Hall of Fame.)
The predictable Schumer-storm of hypocritical outrage, projection and tantrum-throwing has been a wonder to behold.
Hollywood celebrities, leftist pols and MSM talking heads unwittingly revealed their bone-deep dishonesty and bad faith when they raged against the prospect of transparency and free speech taking hold at Twitter.
A columnist from the Washington Post – owned by partisan leftist billionaire Jeff Bezos – warned against the dire consequences of… wait for it… allowing a partisan billionaire to control a media outlet!
Many others cluelessly panicked over the prospect that Twitter might be used to stifle the reach of people who disagreed with its owner, or even that it might affect election outcomes by suppressing negative information about opponents while covering up the scandals of its own side.
The hell you say!
I don’t think that Musk is a conservative, but in the context of, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” I am cheering him on. If he sticks to his promise to transform Twitter into a platform that fosters and welcomes the free marketplace of ideas and speech, he’ll have done a great service to our country.
Meanwhile, internal leaks and message boards are full of overwrought Twitter employees rending their garments and gnashing their teeth over their new boss’ hideous promises of freedom.
Terrible, terrible freedom!
If I were ever to feel any sympathy for those malevolent, emotionally stunted children trapped in gender-fluid adult bodies — so far, nope! – I guess I’d give them the same advice they’ve sneered to the many conservatives they’ve been censoring over the last 6 years:
Stop whining, and build your own Twitter!
Avenatti and Pagan Narwhal, 2024: Control your Soul’s Desire for Freedom!
Martin Simpson 